Author Archives: Jon Garvey

Avatar photo

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.

More on Howard van Till, Billy Bean and Jolly Gene

I’m sorry to bang on about the BioLogos concept of “freedom” in nature, but I feel it requires banging on about until more people take notice. This concept is, I am convinced, the crux of the lack of rapprochement between Intelligent Design and Theistic Evolution and one reason why mainstream Christianity fails to mount a united and robust critique of atheistic materialistic naturalism.

Posted in Creation, Science | 12 Comments

When you have eliminated the impossible…

…whatever remains, however improbable, must be an unmanageable number of possibilities. I relaxed over an episode of Sherlock Holmes on the TV yesterday evening. Not that recent BBC pastiche, but the Jeremy Brett series, which for me is the definitive Holmes. I found, like most of them, that I’d seen it before, but the production and acting are so good it didn’t really matter. Sherlock Holmes is a classical creation, and so in one sense above criticism – it is what it is (as Paul McCartney said when someone was critiquing the double album: “Hey, it’s the Beatles White Album…”). But looked at dispassionately, the character actually embodies a popularisation … Continue reading

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 5 Comments

Easter changed everything

Didn’t it?

Posted in Creation, Medicine, Music, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

BioLogos and design – disagreement, incommunication or evasiveness?

The two BioLogos threads I mentioned here attracted some attention at Uncommon Descent. There seemed some consensus amongst even those who disagree on detail that Darrel Falk and other BioLogos people are somewhat less than forthcoming on just how they relate God’s creative input to outcomes in the “natural” order.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 11 Comments

Underwater dinosaurs

Something about this story tickled my fancy. It made me think of this Monty Python sketch, but I’ve posted a link to that before on this blog, so it would be shortchanging you to repeat it. Instead here’ a less obvious memory of another elderly scientist with aquatic interests: Perhaps a more realistic representation:

Posted in Creation, Science | 3 Comments

Torah – as sure as gravity

Christians nowadays don’t like “law” much, and I think it has less to do with interpreting Paul’s ideas on law and grace than our general societal attitudes. I’ve been in private e-mail correspondence about the differences between Eastern and Western Christianity, one of which is said to be a historic tendency of the Latin church to look at biblical terms forensically, which the Greeks don’t. Meanwhile, over on BioLogos frequent and indefatigable contributor Roger Sawtelle, in his characteristically generalising way, says that a defining characteristic of our “Fundamentalist brethren” is their legalism, whereas Christ does away with law: a rather inaccurate oversimplification it seems to me, but showing a prevalent … Continue reading

Posted in Theology | 5 Comments

Miracles and the ordinary wonders of the Universe

Penman has replied to my last post  on Simon Conway Morris’s positive take on Biblical miracles. I think a post-length reply might be more helpful, not least because it gives me the opportunity to move away from Morris the individual. I mainly wanted in that post to show that childhood reading was what started him “ticking” – I’d not want to be responsible for a discussion about him behind his back that made him sick, rather than tick…

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 9 Comments

What makes Simon Conway Morris tick

I’ve just received my copy of the Cambridge University alumni magazine Cam. I graduated nearly 40 years ago, but have only been receiving this journal for a couple of years. No doubt it’s angled at those of us with sufficient age and resources to make bequests in favour of our alma mater. Be that as it may it has an interesting article about Simon Conway Morris which, as one would expect from him, is mainly about evolutionary convergence.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 18 Comments

How the human got his hands

A new piece of research tries to help answer the question of how humans became bipedal. The researchers “tested” the hypothesis that carrying became easier with a bipedal gait by observing chimps in the field under conditions where resources were depleted, and found they adopted bipedalism in order to carry things better. QED.

Posted in Creation, Science | 1 Comment

Song of the .. new year

Part of the reason for paucity of new posts over the last week or so is writing and recording a new (and rather odd) song, now called Miserere. I’ve stuck it up on the website in case you’re interested. That now completes the album, so at some stage I’ll put the whole thing up on the site, but I need to get a CD sleeve etc sorted out for “the UK market” (ie both my friends) first.

Posted in Music | Leave a comment