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.

Information on misinformation (or vice-versa)

Posted on 02/09/2020 by Jon Garvey

How do you decide which sources from two fairly well-demarcated sides in a disputed situation are more likely to be truthful? You go on the basis of what can be tested, don’t you?

Posted in Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

Children, young and old

Posted on 30/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

When the NHS was, in effect, closed down in March to make it a dedicated COVID-19 Health Service, it could be predicted (and was, even by me) to result in many excess deaths from other under-treated illnesses. There have already been official and academic reports on excess coronary disease and cancer deaths, as well as articles on the enormous waiting times in what, even before COVID, was an under-performing service.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

False positives unpacked

Posted on 28/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

Here’s an interesting extract from the official UK government website:

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 3 Comments

Equality

Posted on 27/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

The ongoing process of subverting our culture partly involves inventing a wholly new set of deadly sins in which the old culture (including all of us) is implicated. Some are exaggerations of old sins (“racism” being the uniquely Christian “Love your neighbour as yourself” restricted to the realm of skin colour and then deprived of its moral content by making it institutional), and others are new-minted to outlaw any criticism of what were formerly considered evils (such as “homophobia,” “cis-normalism” etc) or of alien ideologies (such as “islamophobia,” or in its current usage “fascist” (meaning non-Marxist).

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

Stop Press: how the models worked out in data

Posted on 24/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

There has been surprisingly little mention in the news (ie none that I have seen) of the first major analysis of the world data from the COVID-19 pandemic, published in The Lancet on July 21st, before H.M. Government started to panic over increased positive PCR tests, executed local lockdowns, and threatened national ones if the “R-number” virtual canary begins to look green around the gills.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

I believe in the Gospel + state science

Posted on 22/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

I had a circular e-mail from BioLogos recently, asking me to sign a statement about Christians supporting Science during the COVID epidemic. Yesterday I got a personalised mailing from Jim Stump noting that I hadn’t yet signed it.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 3 Comments

Getting wet in the dry

Posted on 20/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

When Mrs G. and I were on our honeymoon in the West Country, a whole sapphire ago last month, we took a trip to the remote Doone Valley on Exmoor.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 1 Comment

No apocalypse, but monopolies aplenty

Posted on 16/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

I gave a heads-up to Michael Shellenberger’s book Apocalypse Never a little while ago. On Amazon.com it is still #1 in climatology, environmental policy, and environmental science, though I understand it was removed from the New York Times bestsellers list for much the same reasons that works by Blaise Pascal, Francis Bacon or John Calvin were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. I’ve not heard of its being burned by Extinction Rebellion yet, possibly because the woke activists are too busy burning Bibles for BLM.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Divination science

Posted on 14/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

The furore in the UK over the “virtual” grades awarded to school students prevented from taking their A-levels, or their Scottish equivalents, because of lockdown is in full swing over here. Arguably, kids unjustly excluded from universities thereby are the lucky ones, given the way academia has become an indoctrination machine for identity politics and postmodernist superstition.

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

Anything by any other name is… nothing at all

Posted on 12/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

The word “black,” as in “Black Lives Matter”, is simultaneously both strictly defined, and as slippery as an eel. That’s a bad omen.

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 4 Comments