Category Archives: Philosophy

Evolutionary theology

Posted on 02/05/2021 by Jon Garvey

An essay of mine has just been published at Sapientia as part of a symposium in response to John Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil, overseen by Kevin Vanhoozer.

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Virtue, virtue everywhere…

Posted on 24/04/2021 by Jon Garvey

Last month the now mandatory alumni magazine arrived from my wife’s old college. The usual requests for money were inside, but the cover sported a photo of an athletic-looking black chap in rugby strip standing in front of the familiar architecture.

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A sense of place

Posted on 16/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just read two books to lift the heart above the media’s COVID monomania, albeit it in a bittersweet way. The second was Meadowland: the Private Life of an English Field, by John Lewis-Strempel, a birthday gift from my daughter. It traces the year in the life of a hay-meadow in Herefordshire as observed by its owner, which resonates with me because I own a hay-meadow in Devon.

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When public truth becomes subjective

Posted on 09/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

In my last post I wrote about the subjectivisation of truth in the progressive programme. But it would be a mistake to think this is restricted to specific examples like race and gender, because the postmodern element of progressivism extends it to the whole of life. It is all truth that becomes subjectivised to a preferred narrative, not just particular instances. Needless to say, this has profound implications.

Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

Paranoia and Patriarchy

Posted on 08/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

Paranoia is a pretty distressing symptom in its common setting of schizophrenia. My in-laws once went for a house viewing, only to find the place full of scrap metal structures intended to prevent US satellites spying on the owner. But it can occasionally be potentially lethal as well.

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Those best placed to know

Posted on 06/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

Bret Weinstein, in discussion with Heather Heying, makes some interesting observations on why “scientific consensus” is not always the virtuous thing it seems. His topical example is the increasing evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from the virology laboratory in Wuhan, as the evidence for the “wet market” hypothesis becomes less and less persuasive.

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Why lockdown kills everybody

Posted on 31/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

I’m pretty sure a new word is soon going to become part of the English language: “zoomed-out.” I keep hearing the concept, if not always the phrase, used by people who are, ostensibly, doing reasonably well under lockdown. Whether it’s our own student pastor, doing all his church and college work on a screen, or historian Neil Oliver comparing dreary lockdown life with the buzz he felt from a live audience on a book tour before all this, or even my old school-fellow J. J. Burnel commenting ruefully on trying to compose a new Stranglers album via Zoom (having sadly lost his friend and keyboard player, Dave Greenfield, to COVID … Continue reading →

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How Christ released Prometheus (but not like Adam did)

Posted on 18/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

I’m reading a recent book by Carl Trueman, recommended by a Cambridge contemporary who read my e-book, Seeing Through Smoke (and generally liked it). It’s entitled The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Trueman is a Christian historian who seeks to explain the origin of our contemporary moral confusion. To capture his theme, how did a sentence like “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” come to make sense?

Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Prometheus, Theology | 1 Comment

Delegitimation: a force for anarchy and liberation

Posted on 15/12/2020 by Jon Garvey

Peter Boghossian is a US philosopher who has recently drawn attention to the post-modern phenomenon of “delegitimation.” Boghossian is a militant atheist, and no friend of Christianity, having worked on rather crass ways to “deprogram” believers in casual conversations, on the mistaken belief that we are captive to irrationality imposed by authority. But in these strange times, the champions of Enlightenment rationalism can sometimes be co-belligerents, simply because the Enlightenment grew out of Christianity’s commitment to truth, and we are now, without hyperbole, rushing into a post-truth society.

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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.

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