Category Archives: Creation

Extinction Miscalculation

Posted on 31/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

The recent press story of mass global warming extinctions came from a policy summary published well in advance of the scientific survey on which it is said to be based (so that governments get their policies in place before being distracted by  complicated science?). But the core of it was based on the IUCN Red List of endangered and recently extinct (vertebrate) species, of which a graph was included on a century by century scale, indeed showing a dramatic escalation from the 16th century.

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

Here comes the sun – and fuel poverty

Posted on 27/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

So the EU election results show, more or less as predicted, an increasing polarisation between broadly globalist and broadly nationalist people. As in the USA, this trend is worrying for long-term civil peace, but is probably inevitable because their respective visions for society are, truly, incompatible.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology | 3 Comments

Nobel Prize pseudoscience v Classics orthodoxy

Posted on 21/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

Returning to my long thread on science in the media over at Peaceful Science, at one stage the accusations of irrational climate denialism were expressed, by a classics graduate, no less, thus: This is the language of the science denialist. Which anti-science cause will you champion next, chiropractic and homeopathy?

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | 9 Comments

Short memory and easy distraction

Posted on 06/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

As I mentioned in a previous post, in a Radio Times article puffing the recent David Attenborough Doom Documentary on climate, he drew attention to the deforestation of the Philippines and Borneo. These are indeed serious problems, though not upon consideration any result whatsoever of climate change. Rather they result from various economic and social factors, including the high premium placed on timber for biomass as a result of misguided measures taken to prevent climate change .

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Transgression after Eden

Posted on 08/04/2019 by Jon Garvey

We have a knife-crime epidemic over here in the UK currently. Of course, media reporting-crazes often appear more significant than the underlying events actually are, and can even escalate the problems they are so keen to highlight. But for whatever reason, there appears to be a significant spate of knife murders currently, by young people involved in street gangs.

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

Lest you be overwhelmed with excessive sorrow

Posted on 30/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

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…

Posted on 28/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

… 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

The tree in Berkeley’s square (no nightingale)

Posted on 13/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

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

Posted on 09/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

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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Abstraction and improbability

Posted on 04/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been dipping into George Berkeley’s philosophy recently, mainly because his mind-only view of reality resonates with some other thinkers whose ideas on the matter of matter have impressed me over the years, such as Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg and William Dembski.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 1 Comment