Category Archives: Philosophy

From Athens to Bedlam

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

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

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

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.

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Legacy

Last week I drove 200 miles to the Essex town where I practised as a doctor for thirty years, my first return visit since I retired in 2008. The reason was the funeral of my then junior partner, who sadly died recently.

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Nickel-plating gold

Bret Weinstein, as many readers know, is an evolutionary biologist who has come on a long, and now familiar, journey from trusting Western institutions to seeing them as thoroughly, and even maliciously, corrupted. Most of you are probably acquainted with his departure from the woke Evergreen University over diversity, his realisation that the COVID response defied science and logic, and his coming round to perceiving that the overwhelming degree of error points to a deep-seated conspiracy of lies rather than to incompetence.

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Plugging more gaps in the God of the gaps

Last Thursday I was interviewed for a podcast on God’s Good Earth by geologist Gregg Davidson, co-author with Ken Turner of the excellent Manifold Beauty of Genesis One, as well as writing an excellent sci-fi trilogy. The podcast should be online in about five weeks, Gregg says, so I’ll let you know about it when it happens.

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The deep roots of Englishness

I’ve recently re-read Beowulf, which has been described as the foundation of English literature. And that’s partly true, but partly also it’s a record of what the English abandoned in order to become a nation worth celebrating.

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Mind the gap

I’ve written a bit on the “God of the Gaps” fallacy (ie that the accusation is itself a fallacy!) in the past. This post still covers most of the bases. But hearing a recent interview with Denis Alexander, of the Faraday Institute, in which he repeated the fallacy with pejorative reference (as one would expect) to the Intelligent Design Movement, made me think about it again after nine years.

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She don’t lie, she don’t lie, Cochrane

What started me investigating propaganda and related topics, around nine years ago now, was the strange phenomenon of how public attitudes on sexuality had (ostensibly) been dramatically reversed in just a decade or so, as if by magic. Another decade has shown up many of the mechanisms, such as institutional capture, mass formation and so on. But it still remains strange how it is far easier to sell lies than truth to ordinary people.

Posted in Medicine, Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 6 Comments