Category Archives: Creation

Humpism, not ID, is the real enemy of Science™

Posted on 21/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

What’s the connection between Nigel Farage and the the Intelligent Design Movement? Well none, directly, or else it would certainly have appeared in his Coutts Bank Dossier and been used as further evidence of his unsuitability to be their customer. But conceptually there is a connection, in that what first made me aware of the prevalence of propaganda, disinformation and cancellation in our society was the way that ID was treated by mainstream scientists, their progressive Evangelical acolytes in the form of BioLogos, and broader societal organs like the press and judiciary.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology of nature | 4 Comments

A theology of glow-worms

Posted on 14/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

Around ten years ago I realised that I have glow-worms in my garden. To be more exact, in most years I have a glow-worm, because from year to year I’ve never seen more than two at a time, coyly spaced at opposite ends of the terrace of railway sleepers that holds up the ground outside our bathroom window. Most years I see just one, and assume a successful mating the night it goes dark.

Posted in Creation, Theology | Leave a comment

Discontinuities all the way down

Posted on 18/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

Laplace’s 1814 Demon sums up the mechanistic universe of the Enlightenment well. An all-seeing being, knowing the position and velocity of every atom in the Universe, could infallibly describe any moment in the past and predict every event in the future. The implication is that a half-decent scientist could go at least a fair way along that path to omniscience.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 5 Comments

All made up and nowhere to go (2)

Posted on 15/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

The old critical scholars, back in the days when there was a liberal source-critical consensus, used to say that Genesis contains two incompatible creation stories, the first from the “E” source and the second, the Eden narrative, from “J.” Or at least that was the gist, as many scholars seemed to assign odd verses to a different source at a whim. But they had a point: if Moses wrote Genesis, or the bulk of it, and Genesis 2 is a re-focused view of the creation, then he left in some inconsistencies at a rather fundamental level, beyond merely a shift of imagery.

Posted in Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology | Leave a comment

Genesis birds disprove solid raqia

Posted on 10/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

In our recent YouTube livestream, Rob Rowe drew my attention to something I’d missed in the debate about whether Genesis teaches “obsolete science” that there is a solid dome over the world separating it from a celestial ocean. I’ve dealt with this topic in my book, and in a good few old posts here (search on “raqia”). Rob pointed out that in The Lost World of Adam and Eve, on page 37, John H. Walton states that he has now become convinced that the word traditionally translated “firmament,” which he long believed to mean a solid sheet, actually means “the space created by the separating of the waters…”.

Posted in Creation, Theology | Leave a comment

Unexpected livestream on my book

Posted on 04/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

Months ago I was put in touch with Rob Rowe, who has a YouTube apologetics channel based in Australia. I heard nothing until yesterday, when on a couple of hours notice he set up a livestream to discuss The Generations of Heaven and Earth, which together with Q&A lasted over two hours. Fortunately I hadn’t forgotten too much of what I’d written.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, History, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

Would you Adam and Eve it?

Posted on 19/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

For Christians (and Jews and others) seeking to maintain the historicity of a first human couple, Adam and Eve, there are really three broad ways to proceed. My aim here is to cast doubt on one of them, from a biblical standpoint, and so I’ll break the usual pattern of such discussions by stating my own position first, and then leaving it to one side!

Posted in Creation, Genealogical Adam, History, Science, Theology | 8 Comments

The heavens declare the crisis in mental health…

Posted on 18/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

Before the age of atheism, the natural human response to the beauties of nature was to see in them the power and wisdom of God, just as Romans 1:20 reminds us. The perennial danger was to worship the creature, rather than the Creator. But the pagan hunter feeling the wind on his skin as he looked across the veldt, the Saxon poet weaving birds and beasts into his measures, Francis Bacon attesting that the closer one studies nature the more God’s hand is perceived, or the peasant woman toiling to collect water from the stream, and pausing at the bejewelled kingfisher passing by… the common heritage of all these was … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Theology of nature | 1 Comment

God’s purposes in creation – inscrutable or logical?

Posted on 16/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just bought the new book God’s Grandeur – The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. It’s edited by Ann Gauger, whom I befriended over at Peaceful Science a few years ago, before she was hounded off by the constant sneering of the resident militant anti-theists there. Having brought back to mind my longstanding interest in biological origins, I thought before getting into it to do a blog on the surprisingly uncertain support for Darwinian evolution in the fossil record. Indeed, the more I’ve looked at the evidence over the last decade, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that the evidence itself, freed from materialist metaphysical preferences, points more to … Continue reading →

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

The danger of (post)modern syncretism

Posted on 28/04/2023 by Jon Garvey

The Puritans are (and always were) misunderstood as believing that they were morally or spiritually purer than their fellows. But in fact their basic tenet was rather that there is such a thing as “pure religion,” in the sense of the original gospel of Christ and the apostles untrammeled by syncretistic additions from other religions. This, of course, was the basis for the Protestant Reformation. It is (as the first of Martin Luther’s Wittenberg theses stressed) a religion of repeated repentance leading to constant assurance of salvation.

Posted in Creation, History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment