Category Archives: Philosophy

Immanence narratives for the post-secular age

Posted on 03/01/2026 by Jon Garvey

A nice academic-sounding title for a blog inspired by my post-Christmas reading, by dint of an inspired present from my wife’s academic cousin. It is Planet Narnia, by Michael Ward. Ward’s 2008 book proposes that C. S. Lewis built his seven Narnia stories around a secret scheme that based both their distinctive “atmospheres,” and the varying aspects of the Christ-figure, Aslan the lion, on the astrological features of the seven Ptolemaic planets.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology, Theology of nature | 3 Comments

Was Einstein wrong?

Posted on 30/11/2025 by Jon Garvey

Every once in a while, some sciencey YouTuber posts a video about a new scientific discovery that casts doubt on Einstein’s theory of relativity. I’ve no idea whether any of these have validity, but instead I want to ask whether scientific progress has refuted his view of God – that is to say his theology rather than his relativity.

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Ideology is reliably replicable

Posted on 07/11/2025 by Jon Garvey

I had an interesting short conversation with a couple of musician friends recently. A bright young chap doing psychology A-level was talking very sensibly about non-replicability in psychology studies. He mentioned Freudian psychoanalysis as untestable because if you disagree with its findings in your own case, it must be because you have repressed them, not because they are wrong. Astute of him, or his teacher.

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A bit more on NDEs

Posted on 11/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

I closed my previous post with a quotation from Jesus in which he states that Scripture is sufficient for salvation if people are willing to believe God, and that even someone returning from the dead (he clearly means primarily himself, but it applies equally to the rich man or any NDE experiencer) will not convince evil men.

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Near death experiences

Posted on 09/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

I laid myself open when I preached on the Ascension last Sunday. I majored on one of the things I find most wondrous – that there is an embodied Man in heaven, ruling all things on the throne of God. I unpacked scriptures around that. In passing, I warned people against the hundreds of YouTube videos along the lines, “God took me to heaven, and gave me this message for the world…” Even the apostle Paul was told to keep quiet about what he heard and saw, whether in or out of the body he knew not, in his one view of the third heaven.

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Old churches and the numinous

Posted on 14/06/2025 by Jon Garvey

My pastor took an excellent line for his teaching on Pentecost Sunday last week. His main thrust was how the glory of God filled the completed Tabernacle in Exodus, and likewise the completed Solomonic temple, in 1 Kings, but after its judgemental departure (“Ichabod”) before the temple’s destruction by the Babylonians, it is not mentioned as filling the second temple built after the return from captivity. Instead, in fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, at Pentecost God’s glory (later termed the shekinah) came to dwell within every believer born again in Christ. God is no longer represented in a sacred place, but in his sacred people.

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From Athens to Bedlam

Posted on 21/05/2025 by Jon Garvey

Realising late in the day that I needed some holiday reading to supplement an Agatha Christrie novel, I hurriedly ordered the book that had been on my Amazon wish-list the longest, Prof. Stephen R. L. Clark’s From Athens to Jerusalem. To my surprise it went on the list as far back as July 2012, when I heard him speak at an Intelligent Design conference in Cambridge, hosted by the Philosophy of Religion branch of the Tyndale Fellowship. Time flies when you’re geriatric, doesn’t it?

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Societal revival

Posted on 22/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

My last blog picked up on the widespread talk of Christian revival in this country, and discussed how true revival is far broader than the usually-held idea, recalling the Great Awakening, of big meetings accompanied by spectacular spiritual and/or psychological phenomena. As was actually true in the eighteenth century too, the key thing was a general realisation that the current religion was failing, and a God-given hunger directed at biblical salvation in Jesus. The rest was contingent detail.

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The tradition of magical thinking in Darwinism

Posted on 15/03/2025 by Jon Garvey

One way of detecting an ideological, as opposed to scientific commitment to a theory is when very obvious shortcomings are simply glossed over for long periods of time.

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Free speech on Queer Street

Posted on 24/11/2024 by Jon Garvey

There’s a good article by Steven Tucker at Daily Sceptic on the sinister connotations of Queer Theory, which I first wrote about here in 2018. In this piece I want to add how, whether or not “queering” is intended to destroy society, nevertheless it will inevitably do so if permitted to continue. I add a few thoughts on how freedom of speech relates to that.

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology | 3 Comments