I know this is split off from Patrick’s thread, but the issues are similar. It’s difficult to talk about the “BioLogos position” on science with certainty, because many with whom one interacts there, including scientists, are not officially BioLogos, yet reflect its zeitgeist. It takes an “insider” like Joshua, interacting with the “insiders” who makes decisions, to clarify where the boundaries lie.
On the other, despite the stress on being scientifically orthodox, many of the key staff are not scientists, and of those that are few are in the biological sciences… and those that are may reflect the biases within their particular specialties.
But I noticed very quickly when I came to BioLogos in 2010, both under the original regime and the subsequent ones, a desire to see the science as “cut and dried”, and the theology as negotiable (to be polite - or mere opinion, less charitably). As much as anything else, the job spec was to get Creationists to accept “the science” by adjusting their theology. “The science” being some settled body of indisputable facts known to be incompatible with classical theology.
This has its roots partly in the “divine action” programme behind theistic evolution thought, in which there was a very heirarchical idea of knowledge: theology depends on psychology, which depends on biology, which depends on chemistry, which depends on physics, which is primary. You’ll see that biology is up there almost among the hard sciences, biochemistry (= genetics) even more so. So theology, well downstream, is as arguable as politics, but the firm base is science.
The fault in that reasoning goes back to our “limitations of science” discussions - in particular, science is messy because the people who do it are the same messy people who unreasonably vote for the other party or support the wrong football team. And theology, conversely, has its more fixed points and its outliers. Science has its heretics, its conservatives, its factions, together with its original and logical thinkers - just as theology has its bigots and its geniuses.
But it seem psychologically hard for BioLogos to accept both theology AND science as moveable feasts. Consequently, one notes a complete failure to engage with interesting alternative things in biology. Not only is ID flat wrong simply for not following some “consensus”, but it’s not worth discussing Third Way, or forgotten historical paths (not least the very different shape of theistoic evolution in Darwin’s time), or really anything that’s Non-Darwinian (despite the claim not to be “Darwinist”). There’s even a tendency to revert to simplistic adaptationist models after paying lip service to neutral theory - it’s hard to see how Deb Haarsma’s highly law-driven model that delivers mankind on time and to order can play out when due weight is given to neutral evolution.
So, wanting to avoid arguments on the science seems to mean that, having decided on what “science” has authoritatively decided on, say, Adam, anything else must be pseudoscience, and therefore probably ID, or Creationism, or Southern Fundamentalism trying to re-establish the colour bar.
I guess I might summarise my extension of Patrick’s thesis by saying that the BioLogos problem needs to be seen as the messiness (or otherwise) of science in relationship to the messiness (or otherwise) of theology - and of course, in the individuals who reach certain positions on that.