Category Archives: Creation

Suffering and anguish

Posted on 30/10/2020 by Jon Garvey

David Snoke’s presentation at last week’s Christian Scientific Society webinar added a useful thought to my treatment of animal suffering in God’s Good Earth. This question plays a large part in the kind of theodicy tangles that Evolutionary theologies tend to get into, deep time being held to build up an immense “debt” of suffering for God to requite, and evolution itself (apparently) being grounded on senseless and wasteful suffering.

Posted in Creation, Medicine, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

God’s Good Earth Webinar

Posted on 29/09/2020 by Jon Garvey

Readers may be interested that I’m giving a presentation on my first book, God’s Good Earth Earth: the case for an unfallen creation at a Christian Scientific Society Webinar on 20th October, on natural evil. There’s a cast of thousands (or to be exact Stuart Burgess, Fuz Rana, Scott Minnich and David Snoke), and the general tone of the others’ abstracts seems to be on “design” good or bad. My own aim is to reiterate my book’s arguments from Scripture, historical theology and nature itself to argue that Christianity teaches a still-good natural creation, but to propose what that means for a theology of nature that affects the worldview we … Continue reading →

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

When humanity makes you cry, nature still makes you smile

Posted on 24/09/2020 by Jon Garvey

I’m finding the contrast between God’s bit of the world and man’s bit of the world essential contemplation in this time of lunacy. Fortunately, writing God’s Good Earth permanently opened my eyes to the goodness of nature in a new way, and I’ve been reminded of this by preparing to speak on the book’s subject online at the Christian Scientific Society next month. Yesterday I felt the contrast particularly keenly.

Posted in Creation, Medicine, Politics and sociology | 4 Comments

Music – more supernatural than mathematical

Posted on 07/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

One for you music-lovers. Back in 2014 I did a couple of pieces on the musical concept of “swing,” to demonstrate how central human subjectivity is to important things, and in this instance, to the beauty of music. The links are here and here, though unfortunately most of the YouTube links are broken now. Great music is something generated by the human spirit, and is not simply tapping into mathematical concepts of rhythm, harmony and so on (though it builds on those).

Posted in Creation, Music, Science, Theology, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Environmental Fascism

Posted on 27/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

In the current civil unrest, which has been blamed on an “institutional white racism” that led to a slavery which somehow persists nearly two centuries after its abolition, a number of people from Thomas Sowell to Baroness Caroline Cox have drawn attention both to a more complete history of slavery, and to the widespread existence of black slavery in Africa today.

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

Industrial estates and the human condition

Posted on 15/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

I suppose industrial estates are similar across the civilised world, though I’ve never spent enough time in them to know for sure. Take a large field, give it a grid of roads and and a bunch of featureless low-rise buildings, and let them out to the busy folks keeping the world running.

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

Aposematism again

Posted on 14/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

I just like the word, actually, but over the years the local caterpillars have given me several opportunities to take pretty pictures and think about their presumably defensive, or maybe just creative, colouration.

Posted in Creation, Science, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

A necessary weevil

Posted on 08/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

I noticed one of these little chaps outside our house last week:

Posted in Creation, Science | Leave a comment

Implicit divine sovereignty in Genesis

Posted on 04/05/2020 by Jon Garvey

I entitled my recent book, The Generations of Heaven and Earth, from the words of Genesis 2:4, which is the first “toledot” passage in the book.

Posted in Creation, Theology | Leave a comment

Hedging and ditching

Posted on 09/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Here in rural Devon, most of the field boundaries are traditional “Devon banks,” which are banks of earth and stone originally capped with hedges, in order to contain livestock. Down in our valley, many of the banks are mediaeval. The parish boundary just down the lane, dated by counting the number of tree species that have colonized what was originally holly, probably dates right back to Saxon times. But up here on the hill most of them, including the boundaries of my own property, probably date to around 1820, when the common-land “turbary” was enclosed: a mere two hundred years.

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