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.

Our 5th birthday – Happy Birthday

Posted on 27/02/2016 by Jon Garvey

It’s actually five years ago today that I started this blog, The Hump of the Camel. That’s quite a decent lifespan for a blog, and it’s time to reflect on what, if anything, we’ve achieved.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 57 Comments

A metaphor for an abstraction

Posted on 26/02/2016 by Jon Garvey

Mike Flynn (aka The O’Floinn) links to a short piece from last year by James Chastek pointing out how even Richard Dawkins, championing materialism in the “selfish gene” concept, cannot avoid the hated idea of final causation. Food for thought, indeed.

Posted in Philosophy, Science | Leave a comment

The right time isn’t always now

Posted on 23/02/2016 by Jon Garvey

“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” Romans 5.6. Doing a teaching series currently overviewing the narrative thrust of the whole Bible, one thing that struck me was the issue of God’s timing. It’s always slower than we might wish, though again Peter says “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness.”

Posted in History, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

Reclaiming origins science for Christianity

Posted on 16/02/2016 by Jon Garvey

I apologise that posts are a bit thin on the ground at the moment, but that’s partly because I am forming a new band, with a mountain of arrangements and recording to do, and also because our granddaughter is staying with us this week. Today we took a trip to Lyme Regis, which although a seaside holiday resort was also the place where palaeontology became a serious occupation in the early nineteenth century. Accordingly it has both a dinosaur museum (where one could get quite a serious education in palaeontological concerns) and a town museum with an entire room devoted to Mary Anning, the first professional fossil hunter.

Posted in Creation, History, Science | 2 Comments

Paradigm shifts and long spoons

Posted on 11/02/2016 by Jon Garvey

I’ve nearly finished Suzan Mazur’s book, The Paradigm Shifters, which consists of a number of interviews with new thinkers in evolutionary science, mainly members of the Third Way group, about which I’ve written here and here.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 12 Comments

God would not violate his own laws

Posted on 04/02/2016 by Jon Garvey

It is still a remarkably common objection to miracles, or to other than excessively-rare miracles, that God would not violate the laws of nature that he himself commanded. Not uncommonly, to allow for miracles arguments are made that show that God need not actually break the laws to do them.

Posted in Philosophy, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Sufficient means

Posted on 02/02/2016 by Jon Garvey

A while ago biologist Francisco Ayala, in discussion with William Lane Craig, made a rather fatuous argument against ID proponent William Dembski’s “Universal Probability Bound.”

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 6 Comments

Denton, Falk and theodicy

Posted on 30/01/2016 by Jon Garvey

  Eddie Robinson drew attention, on BioLogos, to ex-BioLogian Darrel Falk’s favourable review of Michael Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. Eddie praises Darrel’s generosity, and I’d add that he shows considerable courage, given the flak he took for his previous generally favourable review of another Intelligent Design text, Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt, a year or two ago even from his own Theistic Evolution constituency. I see even the first reply to his Amazon review is warning him off supping with the devil, and on past form expect some of the same response at BioLogos (or at least claims that Falk didn’t write what he wrote!)

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 4 Comments

Soft scientism in western Christianity…

Posted on 28/01/2016 by Jon Garvey

…or “at least you can rely on science.” Materialism is the belief that only material entities and processes exist, and virtually all Evangelicals reject it, in principle. Nevertheless it’s now pretty well recognised, if only by readers of The Hump, that living in a materialist society makes it easy to take on board materialism’s assumptions even when opposing it.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 9 Comments

That’s another story

Posted on 25/01/2016 by Jon Garvey

Maybe you picked up on the recent story about the ancient origin of folk tales: a typical headline was this from CNN: Some fairy tales go back thousands of years, study says. Now, most of us aren’t that familiar with the science of folklorology, so we’d perhaps be inclined (as most of the press were) to assume that if the experts in a field come up with a conclusion, the rest of us should just take the results at face value – especially since this particular study was published by the Royal Society.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments