Category Archives: Philosophy

One of my occasional posts on occasionalism

Posted on 27/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

How God works in the world is often regarded (and is indeed) a deep philosophical question. But it actually matters in real life, which is why the Bible says a lot about it. Because it doesn’t do so in a systematic analytical way, but through narrative, poetry, historiography and so on, its importance is often missed by those academics who like systematics.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 4 Comments

The religious apologetics of naturalistic materialism

Posted on 09/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

James Tour, as many of you will know, is a noted chemist who wears his Christian faith on his sleeve, unashamedly engaging in apologetics alongside his groundbreaking research, particularly that involving nano-particles.

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Cambridge U.L. scuppers Jorge Luis Borges

Posted on 31/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

Back in 2015 I wrote about Jorge Luis Borge’s fantastical “Infinite Library.” Read my post to see how Borges envisaged it, and why it proved useless to imaginary readers free to browse its galleries, but unable to gain any wisdom from it. I guess the nearest real-world equivalents are legal-deposit libraries like the Cambridge University Library, housing every book published in Britain since 1662.

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 1 Comment

More on soul as the sole reality

Posted on 09/09/2023 by Jon Garvey

I eventually worked through Joshua Farris’s The Creation of Self, as mentioned recently, and have to say I felt it improved towards the end.

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The sole soul

Posted on 23/08/2023 by Jon Garvey

the Apologies for sparsity of posts just now, but it’s both the B&B season for visiting grandchildren, and the labour-intensive mowing period for our hillside wild-flower meadow. Nevertheless I’ve had reason, whilst raking a hill-full of grass, to ponder the matter of the human soul.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Theology | 1 Comment

Satan’s end game?

Posted on 02/08/2023 by Jon Garvey

Our friend Levi introduced me to Rene Girard, whose writings on the way that crowds become mad, set in the context of the Christian message, certainly have something to say about the present experience of cancellation, censorship, and a lot more.

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Discontinuities all the way down

Posted on 18/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

Laplace’s 1814 Demon sums up the mechanistic universe of the Enlightenment well. An all-seeing being, knowing the position and velocity of every atom in the Universe, could infallibly describe any moment in the past and predict every event in the future. The implication is that a half-decent scientist could go at least a fair way along that path to omniscience.

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

How Peppa Pig lost her faith

Posted on 17/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

Peppa Pig says, “Everyone likes jumping in muddy puddles! (Snort!)” And all her friends laugh and agree.

Posted in Philosophy, Science | 4 Comments

The danger of (post)modern syncretism

Posted on 28/04/2023 by Jon Garvey

The Puritans are (and always were) misunderstood as believing that they were morally or spiritually purer than their fellows. But in fact their basic tenet was rather that there is such a thing as “pure religion,” in the sense of the original gospel of Christ and the apostles untrammeled by syncretistic additions from other religions. This, of course, was the basis for the Protestant Reformation. It is (as the first of Martin Luther’s Wittenberg theses stressed) a religion of repeated repentance leading to constant assurance of salvation.

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Gobbledegook from hobbledehoys

Posted on 01/02/2023 by Jon Garvey

I found this article at the Daily Sceptic intriguing. The author, unimpressed with a university (UCL) “vision statement” that looked as if it had been cobbled together from buzzwords by AI, decided to use a commercially available AI program to construct his own.

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