Category Archives: Creation

Flat earth conspiracy

Posted on 05/11/2015 by Jon Garvey

I’ve spent the last five years or more, essentially full-time, researching matters centred on the Christian doctrine of creation. That’s actually as long as I spent getting a Cambridge degree to practise medicine, and just as intense, only without the vacations. The social life is rubbish, too. It’s a huge subject once you consider the ramifciations in science, theology, philosophy, sociology, ecology, etc, etc. Unlike a medical qualification, a blog doesn’t lead to a career, but I persist because the doctrine of creation is central to Christian faith, and according to the Bible (Gen3.1ff, Rom 1.18ff) is one of the main areas where error leads to perdition.

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

The classical Hebrew God and the classical Scholastic God

Posted on 03/11/2015 by Jon Garvey

One of the minor ongoing spats in the origins debate is the objection of some analytical Neo-Aristotelians like Ed Feser to the idea that one can perceive divine design in nature, or anywhere else, come to that. My own reaction to this is here, and I’ve also referred to another dissenting Aquinas scholar, Logan Paul Gage, an essay by whom is here. There are, in other words, objections to such ideas within the writings of Aquinas himself.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

If the raqia is solid, why isn’t heaven wet?

Posted on 02/11/2015 by Jon Garvey

It’s foolishness, I know, but let me dwell a little more on the “solid raqia” idea that I deliberately and sensibly avoided in the last post . The issue is, essentially, that the wise and good say that the Hebrews definitely believed in a solid raqia (or firmament) over the sky, that they definitely taught it in Genesis 1 and that there definitely isn’t such a thing surrounding the earth. Therefore their science was wrong and one must either say that Scripture is just untrustworthy, or that it doesn’t matter because the true message is not scientific (though that often turns out to mean “vaguely mythical and equally wrong”).

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 3 Comments

Fallen or flawed? Form and finality

Posted on 28/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

Had a spat over at BioLogos with a guy named George (who makes rejection of the Fall his strapline, it seems), who was replying to GJDS to say that the biblical creation story is flawed because of Hebrew lack of scientific knowledge, and in particular because there was no Fall, and humans were actually created flawed. He hasn’t replied to the question of just how he knows what happened so long ago, and the details aren’t important here. I just want to use the opportunity to look at what has been a pretty constant motif in “evolutionary theology” since Victorian times – that evolution is entirely incompatible with a fall … Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Philosophy, Theology | 6 Comments

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).

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 8 Comments

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 →

Posted in Creation, Theology | Leave a comment

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.

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