Category Archives: Creation

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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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A little science is a dangerous thing

Posted on 30/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

Using an electronic copy kindly sent my new Hump commenter MartinV, I’ve been looking at a recent book by John Schneider, The Darwinian Problem of Evil (it’s not released in UK until the end of the month). I won’t do a review, but from the comprehensive Introduction I found it to be a summary of the kind of theodical problems and novel theological solutions against which I reacted at BioLogos several years ago. Although the new book postdates my own God’s Good Earth, I’d see mine as a response to his, rather than the reverse (and indeed, Schneider does not interact with my work).

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

The banks of sweet primroses

Posted on 28/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

Well, I guess that a large proportion of my readers around the world will be locked in against the Coronavirus pandemic, in one way or another. A friend in Sri Lanka is facing enforced curfews, and there are massive queues for food when they are lifted, which rather defeats the object.

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Hump retrospective 7: the natural evolution of mankind

Posted on 09/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

…with consciousness, spirit and eternal life Sy Garte, in his excellent new book The Works of His Hands, mentions three intractable problems in science (because there seems no way they can arise through “materialistic natural causes”); and all three are origins questions.

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