Nowadays, even the sins don’t work properly

Posted on 18/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

The abominable crime perpetrated in New Zealand by, we are told, a lone white-supremacist extremist, led to immediate calls in the mainstream press for a clampdown on rampant Islamophobia everywhere in society. When a thing (“Islamophobia”) is named as if it were a psychiatric disorder, but treated as a deadly sin, it is a little difficult to understand exactly what the neologism means. But the word appears at least, to include any negative opinion of any aspect of Islam, Arab nationalism, or Islamist terrorism shaken together, such negativity being interpreted as the inevitable precursor of crimes such as we saw last week. Continue reading →

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

Bonjour, France

Posted on 16/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

A slight landmark for The Hump yesterday – for the first time we hit over 20,000 hits for the previous month. That’s a cool quarter of a million a year. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The tree in Berkeley’s square (no nightingale)

Posted on 13/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

George Berkeley is most famous for his immaterialist view of reality, which is nicely, if incompletely, summed up in Monsignor Ronald Knox’s limerick: Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 6 Comments

Predictability, reproducibility and determinism in chaos

Posted on 09/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

On a Peaceful Science thread I promised Chris Falter that I’d respond to his argument that chaotic systems are instrinsically indeterminate. The context, of course, as the thread title shows (Every Birth is a Statistical Impossibilty) has to do with the possibility of determination of events by God, as well as by us. Continue reading →

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Abstraction and the cover of God’s Good Earth

Posted on 05/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

In my last post I drew on George Berkeley in the context of probability theory, to show how western thought’s tendency to make abstractions from reality actually leads to a misleading view of the world. The generalisations of science are particularly prone to the reification of abstract notions. Continue reading →

Posted in History, Philosophy, Science | Leave a comment

Abstraction and improbability

Posted on 04/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been dipping into George Berkeley’s philosophy recently, mainly because his mind-only view of reality resonates with some other thinkers whose ideas on the matter of matter have impressed me over the years, such as Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg and William Dembski. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 1 Comment

The Road to Hell is paved with good inventions

Posted on 27/02/2019 by Jon Garvey

N.T. Wright comments, in this clip, on the Postmodern Movement. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology, Prometheus, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

Editing history

Posted on 25/02/2019 by Jon Garvey

Back in early September 2017 I was writing a Hump piece  on Aquinas and the special creation of humanity. Providentially I stumbled on a YouTube video posted just the week before in which Tim Keller, Russell Moore and Ligon Duncan discuss their “non-negotiables” on creation. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology of nature | 12 Comments

Divine action – smoke, mirrors, or sublety?

Posted on 22/02/2019 by Jon Garvey

1 Kings 11-12 tell the story of one of the most significant events in the history of the kingdom of Israel – that is, the defection of all the northern tribes from King David’s dynasty thus breaking up the chosen people into two kingdoms. Northern Israel quickly lapsed into apostasy and was destroyed by the Assyrians, essentially disappearing from history. Continue reading →

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Molinism again

Posted on 18/02/2019 by Jon Garvey

A quick thought here, based on a heads-up to me on Peaceful Science on a thread that, for some reason, doesn’t give me the ability to reply. No matter, because I have more space to reply here. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature | 4 Comments