Category Archives: Creation

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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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.

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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.

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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…”.

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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