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.

Book review: Busting Anti-Vax Myths

Posted on 19/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

I had higher than usual expectations whilst I was awaiting my free review copy of this 2022 book by Prof. Oisín MacAmadáin (Expert), not least because the author’s Dublin agent turns out to be related to me by a marriage in Queen Elizabeth I’s time. How unlikely is that? (Well, not that unlikely, since 20 generations ago both of us have 1 million ancestors, around the total population of Ireland at that time, though the fact that both ancestors were Archbishops of Armagh might change the odds a little). Still, that human connection with the author certainly warmed me to the book in advance.

Posted in Medicine, Science | Leave a comment

Congregational singing is not karaoke

Posted on 16/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

One of our guys at church has just come off the sound team, and after a break of a decade is getting back into playing flute for our church band. “As I get deeper into practising,” he said, “I’m finding that a lot of the new songs aren’t written for worship, but performance.”

Posted in Music, Theology | 2 Comments

The religious apologetics of naturalistic materialism

Posted on 09/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

James Tour, as many of you will know, is a noted chemist who wears his Christian faith on his sleeve, unashamedly engaging in apologetics alongside his groundbreaking research, particularly that involving nano-particles.

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

Not all hornets are US spy drones

Posted on 02/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

This one is just a “nature diary” piece, so don’t expect any geopolitical insights – or even conclusions about nature, come to that. Most years we find a wasp-nest somewhere on our two and a half acre spread, but this year it was hornets.

Posted in Creation | Leave a comment

Cambridge U.L. scuppers Jorge Luis Borges

Posted on 31/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

Back in 2015 I wrote about Jorge Luis Borge’s fantastical “Infinite Library.” Read my post to see how Borges envisaged it, and why it proved useless to imaginary readers free to browse its galleries, but unable to gain any wisdom from it. I guess the nearest real-world equivalents are legal-deposit libraries like the Cambridge University Library, housing every book published in Britain since 1662.

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 1 Comment

Divine geopolitics is individual

Posted on 27/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

I was walking Charlie the dog, and idly wondering about a common Evangelical saying I’d recently heard again somewhere, which runs: “If I’d been the only sinner in the world, Jesus would still have died for me.“

Posted in Theology | Leave a comment

More on climate

Posted on 21/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

I’m about three quarters of the way through a book, the reading of which was prompted by a brief exchange here, and a slightly longer one by e-mail, with GD, whose professional expertise is as a fuel chemist. The book, The Frozen Climate Views of the IPPC (Clintel Foundation, Amsterdam, 2023), is an analysis of the IPCC’s latest report, AR6, by a range of “questioning” scientists including those who have been expert reviewers and contributors to IPCC reports. Such analysis is essential because – sobering thought – almost nobody in the world has read AR6, or any of the other IPCC reports, in their entirety.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 7 Comments

The strange ethics of propaganda

Posted on 14/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

YouTube is becoming all tough and militant (terroristic?) about the use of Ad-blockers. If I open a copy of YouTube in a fresh window now, in the time it has taken me to type these two sentences, twenty five ads have been blocked by Firefox. No, twenty six, as I did the full stop. If I actually open a video, pretty soon some threatening message will now flash up tell me it’s evil not to watch them all.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

The pivot of history

Posted on 09/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

At the purely geopolitical level, war in Israel is a highly significant and concerning matter. But if biblical prophecy is more than the fairy-tales the New Atheists loved to claim, without investigation, before their own demise as a movement, then war in Israel may be of cosmic significance. I have no intention here of going down the rabbit hole of placing the current situation of Israel in 2023 into the prophetic matrix of the Bible. Instead I want to take a look at the wider question of whether there is a basis for taking that matrix seriously, rather than airily dismissing it like the Gnus’ talk of “your imaginary friend,” … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 6 Comments

It’s always ther cloimate wot gets the blame

Posted on 30/09/2023 by Jon Garvey

As I anticipated, our Harvest Festival had a significant section on failure of harvests in poor countries and how we need to help, in this case focusing on Uganda – a country where, but for providential circumstances, I might have worked. I voiced my reservations about the anthropocentrism of harvest thanksgiving nowadays in my previous blog, and I won’t labour the point. What I will mention, though, is another near-universal theme in the kind of video we were shown – that it is the poor who are already feeling the brunt of climate change, witness the increasing droughts being experienced by farmers in Uganda.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science | 11 Comments