Category Archives: Creation

True myths

Posted on 24/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

Tomorrow (in case you forgot to organize a party) is the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, when King Henry V and his small band of proletarian archers defeated the aristocracy of France, and the media has not failed to remember it. Significantly it’s had its English pronunciation, with a sounded final “t”, restored after decades of hearing it said the French way. That’s relevant to my post, which is about providing a clearer understanding of the word “myth.”

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Theology | 49 Comments

Prothero, Eldredge, Gould – Eek!

Posted on 16/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

I continue to be intrigued by the ubiquity of evolutionary stasis as described by Donald Prothero, for example in this piece. It is the breadth and depth of his evidence that makes his case so striking, but the strapline would be: In four of the biggest climatic-vegetational events of the last 50 million years, the mammals and birds show no noticeable change in response to changing climates.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science | 8 Comments

Extraterrestrial theology

Posted on 12/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

Sy Garte’s comment on the last post, mentioning panspermia, and GD’s subsequent admission of a liking for science fiction, renewed an intention I formed a while ago to draw together thoughts on the relationship of possible extraterrestrial life to theology. Overall there seems to be a mainstream skeptical generalisation that the existence of ETs would be a threat to Christianity, which echoes a perception that Fundamentalists “don’t hold with Space” (as some Luddite told my father shortly before Sputnik 1 showed that Space didn’t hold with him).

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Nobel Prize time

Posted on 08/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

Well-earned prizes have just been awarded for milestone research on DNA Repair. To quote from the Independent as usual (only because it’s cheap) the contributions of the three winners was as follows:

Posted in Creation, Science | 11 Comments

More on divine inscrutibility

Posted on 07/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

In G K Chesterton’s enigmatic tale, The Man Who Was Thursday, a central theme is the sinister spymaster who turns out, in the end, to be not only a metaphor for Christ, but within the mythos of the book Christ himself. But before this denouement there is a piece of dialogue, in which characters discuss the spymaster, which Chesterton clearly intends to carry great weight: When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; … Continue reading →

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The Wright stuff

Posted on 05/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just been re-reading Tom Wright’s excellent book on eschatology, Surprised by Hope, for the first time since 2009, a couple of years before I began to think more intensely about the doctrine of creation in relation to science and all things modern, culminating in this blog. I’d quite forgotten how much the book focuses on the goodness of the current creation, and the stress of the gospel on ushering in a whole new creation, which burst into the world for the first time at the Resurrection and begins to transform it, in preparation for the parousia, by the Spirit’s work through the Church.

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Redundancy and teleology

Posted on 02/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

The Independent reports some research from the “1000 Genome Project”, under the headline “Human genome study reveals certain genes are less essential than previously thought”. The gist is that in 2,500 individual genomes studied (a supererogatory number in terms of the project’s name): “…we were surprised to see over 200 genes that are missing entirely in some people,” said Jan Korbel of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, who led one of the genome project’s studies.

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Inscrutability

Posted on 30/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

One of the things that has struck me in preparing the house-group course on Revelation that I’ve been running is just how distant and indistinct the figure of God remains throughout this final book of the New Testament. That’s odd for a book intended to reveal God’s coming to dwell with men. His heavenly throne in ch4 (albeit the representation is itself apocalyptic and based on temple imagery) tells us a lot about the worshippers and what they say, but regarding God himself there are only metaphors. To my recollection, apart from 21.5-9, he does not himself speak, but is represented by voices from angels, the throne, the altar and … Continue reading →

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The role of eclipses in the culture wars

Posted on 28/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

Last night we had a total eclipse of the moon across Europe, which since it coincided with the recently popular category of a “supermoon” event got lots of press coverage.

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

The Copernican Principle revisited

Posted on 22/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

I’m far from the first person to point out that when Copernicus turned the Universe inside out it wasn’t in order to knock the earth off its perch of geocentric pre-eminence in human thought (as the modern so-called “Copernican Principle” implies), but if anything to make it, for the first time, one of the heavenly bodies.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 7 Comments