Monthly Archives: March 2019

Lest you be overwhelmed with excessive sorrow

Posted on 30/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

Where do we start today? The film-makers have just stashed away the bonnets and top-hats, packed up their Victorian facades and swept the mud off the roads at Lyme Regis, 20 minutes from here, after taking over the town to film Mary Anning the Lesbian Fossil Hunter, aka Kate Winslet. My wife can take her morning coffee uninterrupted again.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Theology, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

Just because you’re paranoid…

Posted on 28/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

… doesn’t mean they aren’t after you Regular readers will have noticed something of a political slant to the last three posts. What immediately triggered it was the realisation of a sudden shift in the position of the UK Baptist Union – representing probably the largest of the mainly Evangelical denominations in Britain. Only three years ago it issued a statement reaffirming the biblical view of marriage, and urging those dissenting ministers who were inclined to perform SSM to desist “for the peace of the body.” Now one of the two candidates for President is a gender-queer pansexual activist, pushing a theological position that gender itself is unchristian.

Posted in Creation, History, Politics and sociology | 3 Comments

In the footsteps of Judah’s spiritual collapse

Posted on 25/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just read another very interesting book. In the Footsteps of King David describes the excavation of Khirbet Qeiyafa in Israel, just up the valley from the ancient Philistine city of Gath.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

…and the modern virtues don’t work either

Posted on 22/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

A precious little snippet in the news yesterday, which is a quote from a press release by my alma mater, Cambridge University. They have just revoked a visiting fellowship they offered to the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson, apparently because the Students Union, as “representative” as it was in my own day no doubt, threw some of the meaningless vice-words discussed in my previous post at Peterson, or more likely at the University to imply guilt by association.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 6 Comments

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.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 3 Comments

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 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:

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.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

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.

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.

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