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.

Can’t get no worse

Posted on 05/10/2021 by Jon Garvey

This week has seen the Conservative Party Conference here, and there has been surprisingly little comment about the slogan on the wall that is intended, I suppose, to inspire farmers in the shires and the newly-won working class in the north to support Boris Johnson in these difficult times.

Posted in Politics and sociology | 4 Comments

The social psychology of oppression

Posted on 04/10/2021 by Jon Garvey

Olaudah Equiano, the 18th century African slave whose autobiography became an important part of the anti-slavery movement, is in the news again. This is in part because of a “woke” introduction to a new edition of this book, and also because he was mentioned in the press as heavily featured in the National Maritime Museum’s Slavery gallery, which is to be “de-colonised,” initially in the form of notices in the gallery by the management saying how white supremacist the exhibit is.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

More reflections on Sodom

Posted on 01/10/2021 by Jon Garvey

In online discussions of the recent Nature paper on Sodom a prominent strand was the disdain of survivors of the New Atheist cause for the Genesis account. In some cases this extended to dismissing the scientific article because it might seem to give credence to the fairy tale Genesis. A bit like those scientists who suppress discoveries in biology so as not to give ammunition to the creationists.

Posted in History, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

Spy v spy v spy

Posted on 29/09/2021 by Jon Garvey

Tom Lehrer used to introduce his song about nuclear tests by informing audiences he had once worked at the Los Alamos testing site. “I had a job there as a spy.” When the people laughed, he added they ought to know that everyone working there had been a spy of one persuasion or another. The whole COVID thing is rapidly beginning to look rather like that, so here’s an update on the current evidence, as a kind of DIY conspiracy construction kit. In all seriousness, looking at the various established motives might help, in Sherlock Holmes fashion, to “exclude the impossible” and come closer to the truth. Or it might … Continue reading →

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

The facts behind the stats

Posted on 28/09/2021 by Jon Garvey

A very short post today, simply giving this link to an important report on the admission data for a large UK NHS hospital trust. “John Dee,” a retired NHS statistician, does an in-depth analysis of the data on admissions, morbidity and deaths relating to COVID-19, and finds that what the publicly available statistics describe bears little relationship to reality. Given the “lockstep” phenomenon see across the world regarding COVID, I have little doubt simnilar things are true for non-British readers.

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

Sodom goes mainstream (and Gomorrah we die?)

Posted on 21/09/2021 by Jon Garvey

I’ve mentioned the excavations at Tall el-Hammam before, for example here and here, in connection with the increasingly plausible theory that this site is the biblical Sodom, with a highly unusual destruction layer from the 17th century BCE. Now, in case you’ve not noticed, a major article in Nature by a specialist group explores the destruction evidence in detail, and concludes that the most likely explanation is a Tunguska-type airburst around the year 1650 BCE.

Posted in History, Science, Theology | 6 Comments

Policy dictates science, actually

Posted on 19/09/2021 by Jon Garvey

We’ve got used to governments and their political scientific appointees claiming to be the sole custodians of The Science which they are so assiduously following in all kinds of strange directions. Dr Fauci infamously said that to disagree with him is to disagree with Science. And we’ve also come to understand that there is widespread opposition to this official views from highly accredited scientists and doctors, who have been comprehensively censored, ridiculed and penalised in ways that do no credit to the “mainstream view.” The intellectual basis of this polarisation is largely explained in this article. But the last week has taken a more remarkable turn, in the sidelining of … Continue reading →

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

Anomalies rule, OK?

Posted on 18/09/2021 by Jon Garvey

We have a scattering of a pretty little plant called Centaury in our meadow – or we did have, until I mowed it at the end of last month.

Posted in Creation, Science | 2 Comments

The shape of things to come

Posted on 17/09/2021 by Jon Garvey

47 years ago, I started my house jobs in Poole General Hospital, and discovered one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world in the Isle of Purbeck, to me previously only the subject of maps on coastal erosion in physical geography at school.

Posted in Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

Unsinkable models and the icebergs of data

Posted on 15/09/2021 by Jon Garvey

There’s an interesting new paper here. It’s by four Irish authors (which has to be a good thing), two of whom declare their “conflicting interests” as signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration and (in one case) as a member of HART. However, in their declaration they note that the purpose of their involvement in the study was to understand the position of their opponents better.

Posted in Medicine, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | Leave a comment