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.

Sciense educashun

My eleven year old granddaughter is visiting this week, and is just at the stage of discovering that the i-Phone is a good substitute for looking at the world, thinking etc. Discovering a sat-nav app she was able to confirm that the short-cut we took to avoid the Exeter rush-hour was in fact correct, and to spend the rest of the journey reading off how long it would be before we got home. A shame she missed the views.

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Pay attention

You may or may not have seen the following sports awareness test on YouTube. If not you can check your skills:

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Lest you be overwhelmed with excessive sorrow

Where do we start today? The film-makers have just stashed away the bonnets and top-hats, packed up their Victorian facades and swept the mud off the roads at Lyme Regis, 20 minutes from here, after taking over the town to film Mary Anning the Lesbian Fossil Hunter, aka Kate Winslet. My wife can take her morning coffee uninterrupted again.

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Just because you’re paranoid…

… doesn’t mean they aren’t after you Regular readers will have noticed something of a political slant to the last three posts. What immediately triggered it was the realisation of a sudden shift in the position of the UK Baptist Union – representing probably the largest of the mainly Evangelical denominations in Britain. Only three years ago it issued a statement reaffirming the biblical view of marriage, and urging those dissenting ministers who were inclined to perform SSM to desist “for the peace of the body.” Now one of the two candidates for President is a gender-queer pansexual activist, pushing a theological position that gender itself is unchristian.

Posted in Creation, History, Politics and sociology | 3 Comments

In the footsteps of Judah’s spiritual collapse

I’ve just read another very interesting book. In the Footsteps of King David describes the excavation of Khirbet Qeiyafa in Israel, just up the valley from the ancient Philistine city of Gath.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

…and the modern virtues don’t work either

A precious little snippet in the news yesterday, which is a quote from a press release by my alma mater, Cambridge University. They have just revoked a visiting fellowship they offered to the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson, apparently because the Students Union, as “representative” as it was in my own day no doubt, threw some of the meaningless vice-words discussed in my previous post at Peterson, or more likely at the University to imply guilt by association.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 6 Comments

Nowadays, even the sins don’t work properly

The abominable crime perpetrated in New Zealand by, we are told, a lone white-supremacist extremist, led to immediate calls in the mainstream press for a clampdown on rampant Islamophobia everywhere in society. When a thing (“Islamophobia”) is named as if it were a psychiatric disorder, but treated as a deadly sin, it is a little difficult to understand exactly what the neologism means. But the word appears at least, to include any negative opinion of any aspect of Islam, Arab nationalism, or Islamist terrorism shaken together, such negativity being interpreted as the inevitable precursor of crimes such as we saw last week.

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

Bonjour, France

A slight landmark for The Hump yesterday – for the first time we hit over 20,000 hits for the previous month. That’s a cool quarter of a million a year.

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The tree in Berkeley’s square (no nightingale)

George Berkeley is most famous for his immaterialist view of reality, which is nicely, if incompletely, summed up in Monsignor Ronald Knox’s limerick:

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 6 Comments

Predictability, reproducibility and determinism in chaos

On a Peaceful Science thread I promised Chris Falter that I’d respond to his argument that chaotic systems are instrinsically indeterminate. The context, of course, as the thread title shows (Every Birth is a Statistical Impossibilty) has to do with the possibility of determination of events by God, as well as by us.

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