Category Archives: Creation

One of my occasional posts on occasionalism

Posted on 27/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

How God works in the world is often regarded (and is indeed) a deep philosophical question. But it actually matters in real life, which is why the Bible says a lot about it. Because it doesn’t do so in a systematic analytical way, but through narrative, poetry, historiography and so on, its importance is often missed by those academics who like systematics.

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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.

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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.

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Providence, raindrops and horsehoe-nails

Posted on 25/09/2023 by Jon Garvey

One throw-away line in a video for the excellent Christian course Discipleship Exploredcaught my attention. The narrator, speaking of God’s care for us, said that “each drop of rain has its intended target.”

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 2 Comments

More on soul as the sole reality

Posted on 09/09/2023 by Jon Garvey

I eventually worked through Joshua Farris’s The Creation of Self, as mentioned recently, and have to say I felt it improved towards the end.

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The sole soul

Posted on 23/08/2023 by Jon Garvey

the Apologies for sparsity of posts just now, but it’s both the B&B season for visiting grandchildren, and the labour-intensive mowing period for our hillside wild-flower meadow. Nevertheless I’ve had reason, whilst raking a hill-full of grass, to ponder the matter of the human soul.

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (3)

Posted on 31/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

We left the last blog post with a simple “toolkit” from Genesis 1 which, whilst it may not “define” man in the way Aquinas sought to do, certainly describes him theologically in a way that enables us to interrogate the archaeological record for biblically human origins.

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (2)

Posted on 29/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

Let’s start our exploration by considering the scant information Genesis contains on what it took to be a human being “in the beginning.”

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (1)

Posted on 28/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

When I wrote The Generations of Heaven and Earth, whose central theme is the Genealogical Adam and Eve paradigm, I spent some pages discussing the status of those people “outside the garden,” on the assumption that an Adam and Eve around the Chalcolithic period, as suggested by the text, would have had many contemporaries. By that time, after all, and indeed very much earlier, human traces are known from all around the world.

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Refugee crisis hits Springwatch

Posted on 22/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

I’ve remarked from time to time how the BBC series Springwatch (and its other seasonal offshoots) has learned to treat bad-anthropogenic-climate-change as the default explanation for every apparent change in Britain’s natural world, being obligatorily appended to any more scientific explanation that may be to hand. Hence the recurrent phrase, “Apart from the usual causes, like loss of habitat and climate change…”

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