Category Archives: Creation

Local Orchidaceae

Posted on 08/06/2021 by Jon Garvey

It’s now the seventh year of managing my hillside former paddock as a wild flower meadow, and one of the most interesting things is seeing how plant species gradually colonise and replace what was mainly grass and buttercups when ponies occupied it. Before grazing it had been covered in bracken for years.

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Evolutionary theology

Posted on 02/05/2021 by Jon Garvey

An essay of mine has just been published at Sapientia as part of a symposium in response to John Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil, overseen by Kevin Vanhoozer.

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Nature small, medium and large

Posted on 21/03/2021 by Jon Garvey

A BBC nature programme a couple of weeks ago showed the remarkable nest of Britain’s smallest bird (if you don’t count the tail) – the long-tailed tit. It’s a beautifully made globular structure (though still heavily predated) of lichen and feathers, designed to expand as the brood grows because it’s woven from spider’s silk.

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Good Creation revisited

Posted on 21/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

A couple of new reviews have appeared on my book Good’s Good Earth, in Studies in Christian Ethics and Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, the latter of which rolls it together with a review of Generations of Heaven and Earth. You can find them by linking to the respective book tabs on the menu above, and clicking on the “Endorsements and Reviews” links.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 7 Comments

Considering an ancient Adam

Posted on 06/12/2020 by Jon Garvey

The Genealogical Adam and Eve paradigm, as described in my book and that of Joshua Swamidass, makes a recent Adam plausible in the context of the mainstream sciences. Some objectors to this “recent Adam” interpretation wants to put Adam and Eve much further back in the past (which is equally compatible with GAE), and their main reason is the status of the “people outside the garden” in our scenario.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology | 15 Comments

Suffering and anguish

Posted on 30/10/2020 by Jon Garvey

David Snoke’s presentation at last week’s Christian Scientific Society webinar added a useful thought to my treatment of animal suffering in God’s Good Earth. This question plays a large part in the kind of theodicy tangles that Evolutionary theologies tend to get into, deep time being held to build up an immense “debt” of suffering for God to requite, and evolution itself (apparently) being grounded on senseless and wasteful suffering.

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God’s Good Earth Webinar

Posted on 29/09/2020 by Jon Garvey

Readers may be interested that I’m giving a presentation on my first book, God’s Good Earth Earth: the case for an unfallen creation at a Christian Scientific Society Webinar on 20th October, on natural evil. There’s a cast of thousands (or to be exact Stuart Burgess, Fuz Rana, Scott Minnich and David Snoke), and the general tone of the others’ abstracts seems to be on “design” good or bad. My own aim is to reiterate my book’s arguments from Scripture, historical theology and nature itself to argue that Christianity teaches a still-good natural creation, but to propose what that means for a theology of nature that affects the worldview we … Continue reading →

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

When humanity makes you cry, nature still makes you smile

Posted on 24/09/2020 by Jon Garvey

I’m finding the contrast between God’s bit of the world and man’s bit of the world essential contemplation in this time of lunacy. Fortunately, writing God’s Good Earth permanently opened my eyes to the goodness of nature in a new way, and I’ve been reminded of this by preparing to speak on the book’s subject online at the Christian Scientific Society next month. Yesterday I felt the contrast particularly keenly.

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

Music – more supernatural than mathematical

Posted on 07/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

One for you music-lovers. Back in 2014 I did a couple of pieces on the musical concept of “swing,” to demonstrate how central human subjectivity is to important things, and in this instance, to the beauty of music. The links are here and here, though unfortunately most of the YouTube links are broken now. Great music is something generated by the human spirit, and is not simply tapping into mathematical concepts of rhythm, harmony and so on (though it builds on those).

Posted in Creation, Music, Science, Theology, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Environmental Fascism

Posted on 27/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

In the current civil unrest, which has been blamed on an “institutional white racism” that led to a slavery which somehow persists nearly two centuries after its abolition, a number of people from Thomas Sowell to Baroness Caroline Cox have drawn attention both to a more complete history of slavery, and to the widespread existence of black slavery in Africa today.

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