Category Archives: Politics and sociology

Laudato Si’ and CPN

Posted on 22/06/2015 by Jon Garvey

As a non-Catholic I heard about Pope Francis’s new encyclical only through the jaded words of the mind-controlling secular press: “Pope accepts global warming.” Not living in North America, where climate change skepticism seems to be part of the Faith for many Evangelicals (though still a minority of them, according to surveys), my first thought was a fairly indifferent “Good.”

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Reasons to disbelieve

Posted on 05/06/2015 by Jon Garvey

A skeptic on one of the recent BioLogos threads about the origin of sin made a valid observation. One of the common motivations for re-formulating the theology of sin and evil is not so much that genetics suggests there was no single original couple, but that evolutionary theory places evil in the world, in the form of “natural evil”, before there were any people to corrupt creation through sin.

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God, unbelief and universal morality

Posted on 07/04/2015 by Jon Garvey

A recent thread on disputes about the nature of information quickly degenerated into the kind of denegration of religious faith usually (though just as unproductively) seen on apologetics sites, which was why I asked for it to stop. Debating such matters is really outside The Hump’s remit – we are here to discuss the implications of holding Christian faith for science; other sites exist to argue about the validity of Christianity itself with anti-theists. I’m not sure why anyone would prefer to debate with apologetics amateurs rather than with the full-timers, other than lack of confidence in ones arguments. But that said, since Christians see morality as a fundamental part … Continue reading →

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Kuhn’s predictions make prediction harder

Posted on 30/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

Several decades ago I had a patient with complex needs that boiled down to what’s called “personality disorder”, combined with a low IQ. The problems presented as a great dependency on a weekly fix of doctor, on whom she could offload her many nebulous problems and vaguely uncomfortable feelings. She actually managed reasonably well on that.

Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | 6 Comments

Magic in an age of incredulity

Posted on 27/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

Have you ever noticed how many serious academic bloggers are addicted to science fiction? Hardnosed researchers of evolutionary biology, or analytic philosophy or even critical theology will throw in regular posts about the latest Dr Who or Star Wars story. That got me wondering why magic remains so popular in fiction, in an age when nobody believes in magic. For science fiction, after all, is only really the supernatural set within pseudo-science rather than demonology (if you don’t count Phillip Pulman or Terry Pratchett, where it is set in demonology). As the introduction to one of the sci-fi anthologies on my shelf says, a story beginning “The last man in … Continue reading →

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Blues is truth, and so is Science

Posted on 25/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

There are probably not many readers here who would fully endorse Brownie McGhee’s dictum that “Blues is Truth”. Whilst you might well agree with me that the blues is a music very expressive of the human condition, you’d probably consider that its truth lies in a fairly restricted sphere. You might even wonder if its practitioners always bare their souls honestly, rather than playing what they know their audiences will pay for. Then again, though Leadbelly said “There never was a white man had the blues” it owes its continued popularity, and even existence, to the efforts of a generation of white, British Grammar School kids like Eric Clapton and … Continue reading →

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Eager beavers and missing lynx

Posted on 14/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

Exciting times ecologically close to home. Just a dozen miles from here, the first wild beavers to be seen in Britain since they were hunted to extinction in the eighteenth century have been granted UK citizenship. Presumably introduced deliberately (as none have been known to escape from captivity) the fate of the half-dozen or so living on the River Otter has been in the balance, as the risk of their carrying infection was discussed.

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It’s an old trick…

Posted on 27/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

So, one death-affirming jihadist has been “outed”, with the resulting danger that by demonizing him our mainstream press will, once again, fail to notice they are increasing his propaganda value.

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How order develops spontaneously in news

Posted on 26/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

This Independent headline caught my eye: New theory could prove how life began and disprove God. As you’ll see, that’s the sub-editor’s sense of priority: the article itself just says the new theory “throws out the need for God”. The Indie’s source, with its stress on the punch-drunkness of God and the terror of Christians, is actually a piece by Paul Rosenberg at the Richard Dawkins Foundation, rather than the original review in Quanta Magazine. The latter was obviously un-newsworthy when it appeared over a year ago as it just mentioned the science, not the demise of God. Quanta was itself a secondary source for the work of physicist Jeremy … Continue reading →

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Why I am not a postmodernist

Posted on 23/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

Well, I’ve finally struggled through Michel Foucault’s The Order of things, much in the manner of someone destroying his health trying to cross the Sahara on foot, but too stubborn to give up. The enterprise started well – his preface laid out the bones of a thesis that there have been fundamental changes in the very patterns of thought, especially scientific thought, of which he proposes three since the sixteenth century. These changes are far deeper than the changing science itself, and he describes them as being at an “archaeological” level, and the result of rather mysterious forces rather than any new discoveries or increase in rationality.

Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments