PLEASE READ: Clarifying ‘Faith and Science’ Conversations

Faith & Science Conversation
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Hi everyone,

As you might have noticed there have been some changes to the site over the last few months.

We’ve taken out the old categories, merging everything except the homeschool threads into the new ‘science and faith conversation’. And we’ve brought in tags to help organise topics and make it easier to find the conversations you are most interested in.

Now we want to take a moment to help explain how these feed into the direction of the forum moving forward.

As you know, the forum exists as a place to help foster gracious dialogue about the harmony between science and the Christian faith. So our intent is that forum conversations should all have this focus.

However, we feel we’ve not always consistently enforced this request, nor have we been clear and unified in what ‘conversations about science and faith’ means. So we wanted to take a moment to clarify that.

  1. We welcome any conversation about mainstream science (ie. not pseudoscience) here on the BioLogos forum.
  2. We welcome conversations about the relationship between science and Christian beliefs, ethics, or practice.
  3. We welcome conversations about the relationship between science and Bible interpretation.

However, we do not want to host threads and topics that are simply theological in nature or generally related to the Bible or church. There are a number of reasons for this, but principally, theology is a broad subject and not all of it is relevant to the mission of BioLogos.

Moving forward we will start to do a bit of spring cleaning: We will be closing topics that do not meet the criteria above or moving them to private messages. Remember, even if a thread is moved to a private message, it doesn’t mean the conversation isn’t worth having. It’s just that it doesn’t fit within the scope of the public boards.

For the purposes of clarity, here are a couple of examples of topics that would not fit into the above criteria and how they could be improved.

Example 1: Is the Bible the Word of God?

This topic would not meet the above criteria because, whilst an important topic related to Christian belief and practice, it does not explore any relationship to science. A better topic would be “How do we understand Biblical authority in light of scientific advancements?”

Example 2: How should we interpret Revelation?

This topic is about general Bible interpretation, not science and Bible interpretation. A better topic would be “Does a person’s interpretation of Revelation affect their attitude toward climate change?”

If you want to have a conversation about a theology or Bible interpretation topic that is not related to science, or if you enjoy using the forum to socialize with friends you have met here, we would ask you to start a Private Message thread instead and invite people you think would be interested.

We hope that this post will help clarify the kind of conversations BioLogos is looking to host on the public forum. The moderators will continue to strive for more consistency in how we enforce all this and will also continue to make good use of observations shared with us by you, our faithful forum participants.

You may also wish to use this as an opportunity to refresh yourself on the forum guidelines.

Thanks for all of the thoughts, insights, and ideas you share here.

Every blessing,
The BioLogos Forum Moderators.

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Good luck with the distinction! To understand your joint post, I would have to ask you to define science, and define theology. By science, do you just mean the “hard” sciences, or do you also include the social sciences? And when it comes to theology, do you distinguish between someone’s statement of belief compared to historical theology? I studied divinity as a post-graduate degree in a secular university, where it was a specialist area within the history department. I am not sure if you forum moderators would regard that study as unscientific. If so, I would suspect that your definition of both science and theology is too narrow.

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You can use the suggested tags as a guide.

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I think the soft sciences are definitely included, Remember that discussions about how science and technology impacts our lives in terms of relationships and community are welcomed. I think part of the problem is that the forum has tended to morph into sort of a general discussion forum which is not really its purpose.

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Still plenty of room for fun, too. We will try to make some “megathreads” where people can post links and stuff about certain topics/news that may have some relevance or may not. ie for Valentine’s Day funny memes or something :slight_smile:

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I read through this today worried since I would not be happy if the forum became only about convincing Christians of the truth of evolution. I am not opposed to a little of that but I am far more interested in the discussion of Christian theology AFTER accepting evolution as fact.

From what I read above I see nothing to be unhappy about. The impact of modern science on Christian theology is the focus of my interest, and perhaps the above restrictions will cut down on some of the old unresolvable disagreements which never go anywhere. In fact… making people look for connections to science in order to bring up such old disagreements might be kind of interesting. LOL

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I’m still concerned.

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I think the main point is that they don’t want us arguing about doctrines such as is baptism required, or can women preach and so on. They want to avoid debates about doctrine and focus more on discussing issues that intersects with science and faith. They said you can still have the other discussions, they just need to be private. Like how discussing LGB issues is not for the main forum, but there has been many private discussions on it. I’m thinking that it comes down to how science and faith for many is already contentious. They don’t want someone struggling with understanding how evolution can be accepted by a Christian being pushed off because of a Baptist vs Methodist vs Catholic style doctrine argument. Biologos
Is not here to teach us doctrine. It’s here to help discussion the overlap of science and faith, including things like understanding genre.

So I can discuss the genre of a book like job without trying to force a specific doctrinal stance from it type of stuff.

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The core information in this thread was recently moved into the forum guidelines section: FAQ. If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to the moderation team.