Author Archives: Jon Garvey

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.

The clarity of mud

Posted on 14/11/2016 by Jon Garvey

Last week’s Royal Society symposium – on whether the Evolutionary Synthesis should be extended, or whether (as some appeared to imply) all the dramatic new mechanisms found recently were successfully and silently subsumed into standard population genetics several centuries ago -had a slide that caught my attention. It caught the attention of ID people in the audience as well, which is how I came to be aware of it. It was in Andy Gardner’s talk expounding the virtues of “weak adaptationism”. Here’s the pic:

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 8 Comments

A History of Providence – Part 3

Posted on 11/11/2016 by Jon Garvey

In the last post I sketched in a few gaps in James Penman’s account of the doctrine of providence in the biblical and Patristic periods. In the past I’ve done some work on the mediaeval view, in the shape of Thomas Aquinas, and in perhaps drawn some more surprising conclusions from the writings of Jacobus Arminius (given the not infrequent assertion that universal providence is incompatible with libertarian freedom of the Arminian type).

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A History of Providence – Part 1A

Posted on 09/11/2016 by Jon Garvey

These next two posts are a reply to the claim that the extent to which God is involved providentially in the world has always been a matter of uncertainty within Christianity, and that we can’t decide from the faith whether, for example, God actively governs which species arise by evolution or largely leaves it to nature. This is not uncommonly expressed in terms of an age-old “freedom v determinism” debate in theology. Several years ago now a conversation with erstwile fellow Humpist James Penman (the pseudonym of a professional church historian) led us to conclude that the common doctrine that the natural creation is fallen together with mankind is of … Continue reading →

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Looking for autonomy in the Bible

Posted on 05/11/2016 by Jon Garvey

I was gratified by the comment made by Jay Johnson recently, apparently concurring with me that some commonly voiced positions in “Evolutionary Creation” present a significantly different view of God from that historically associated with Christianity: Many so-called Christian understandings of evolution are based more on philosophical reasoning than on anything resembling a biblical concept of God.

Posted in Creation, Theology | 19 Comments

His own received him not

Posted on 02/11/2016 by Jon Garvey

Back in March I did a piece arguing against the univocity of God’s being and ours (as the root of many current theological evils), and used the metaphor of those authors who have appeared as characters in their own fiction, but can never truly be seen as occupying the same world as their creations. It’s a useful analogy, I think. I was reminded of it again last weekend when, waiting around for news of our daughter’s new baby (It’s a girl! It’s a girl!), I was re-reading G K Chesterton’s excellent introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer. Chesterton writes how Chaucer, in Canterbury Tales, is another of that select band of authors … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Theology | 6 Comments

A brief history of chance

Posted on 30/10/2016 by Jon Garvey

Somebody at BioLogos, following a common line, recently expressed hesitation about whether God intended the particular life forms that we have, and based this on what he said was the long-argued question of free-will versus determinism. The idea was that God, by allowing true (ontological) randomness in evolution, was in some way casting his vote for free-will rather than determinism.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 14 Comments

Higgs Bison

Posted on 26/10/2016 by Jon Garvey

It was my brother who pointed out to me this month’s most amusing evolution story, in the form of the discovery that the European bison (or wisent) is actually a hybrid of the extinct pleistocene steppe bison (closely related to the American plains bison) and the aurochs, the ancestor of domestic cattle.

Posted in Creation, Science | 4 Comments

A theological lens on “random with respect to fitness”

Posted on 21/10/2016 by Jon Garvey

In the last few posts, I’ve been trying to point out the epistemological limits of science (and how they are routinely transgressed). In particular, I’ve tried to show how “contingency” and “randomness” are, in effect, epistemological black boxes in science. To say something is random, in science, should mean nothing more than “we do not fully understand the causes, and cannot predict the effects.”

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 12 Comments

The folly of defining randomness randomly

Posted on 19/10/2016 by Jon Garvey

After 190 or so posts  in the BioLogos thread to which I refer in the last two columns, I’m still not convinced that my central point has been answered in the to-and-fro about the definition or modelling of natural selection.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

A short afterthought on extinction events

Posted on 12/10/2016 by Jon Garvey

The last post was about the importance of contingent extinction events in the trajectory of evolution. It occurs to me since that, in the context of Evolutionary Creation, the “creative catastrophism” of these undermines one of the commonest arguments used by TEs for the sufficiency of “natural causes”, usually against ID and any form of Creationism.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 22 Comments