Category Archives: Science

Lockdowns, stable-doors, etc

Posted on 10/05/2020 by Jon Garvey

This is really just recycling the work of others, but since such stuff gets little consistent press coverage, it’s worth pondering on the day when Boris Johnson is set to announce Lockdown v1.02. By all accounts this is more or less the same except for asking the airlines to function under a two-week visitor quarantine rule, and public transport to cover its costs with only 10% of its usual passenger numbers. The new normal, it seems, will have everybody walking and cycling to their old folk’s lunches. Who needs to leave the villages anyway, when the roads are in such disrepair because Road-tax dries up?

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | Leave a comment

The curse of care homes

Posted on 30/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Internationally much has been said in the last week about a wave of COVID-19 in care homes. My Canadian cousin said it showed how dangerous they are, though of course it just shows that they are full of the elderly, the main target group of SARS-CoV-2.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Fie on your experiments!

Posted on 25/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

The title is a (mis)quote I used back in 2011, here. I’m reminded of it by a typical headline in the Telegraph today: “Watch: Will Sweden’s coronavirus gamble pay off?”. But as a spokesman from Sweden said not too long ago, the real gamble – or unevidenced experiment, to be more precise – is being conducted by the other nations, including America and Britain. Sweden has just based its response on universal precedent.

Posted in History, Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Exit strategies

Posted on 13/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, COVID-19… we seem to have developed a penchant for embedding ourselves deeply into situations without fully considering how to get out of them.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 6 Comments

It’s the same the ‘ole world over…

Posted on 03/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

It’s the poor wot gets the blame. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the “precautionary principle” that’s so prevalent in the current crisis, and in many other recent public applications of science, is a highly dangerous one.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

A little science is a dangerous thing

Posted on 30/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

Using an electronic copy kindly sent my new Hump commenter MartinV, I’ve been looking at a recent book by John Schneider, The Darwinian Problem of Evil (it’s not released in UK until the end of the month). I won’t do a review, but from the comprehensive Introduction I found it to be a summary of the kind of theodical problems and novel theological solutions against which I reacted at BioLogos several years ago. Although the new book postdates my own God’s Good Earth, I’d see mine as a response to his, rather than the reverse (and indeed, Schneider does not interact with my work).

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology of nature | 2 Comments

Lying for Jesus = lying to Jesus

Posted on 24/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

In my former life as a doctor, I was a GP, but ended up specialising in back pain, for a variety of contingent reasons.

Posted in Medicine, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

Cancelling society to save lives

Posted on 18/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

A wise retired surgeon said on a radio phone-in yesterday that, just a few years ago, we wouldn’t even have known about COVID-19 until the pandemic was past its peak, and we would probably have concluded that it was just a particularly bad winter for elderly deaths from respiratory disease. Maybe ignorance is bliss.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Hump retrospective 7: the natural evolution of mankind

Posted on 09/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

…with consciousness, spirit and eternal life Sy Garte, in his excellent new book The Works of His Hands, mentions three intractable problems in science (because there seems no way they can arise through “materialistic natural causes”); and all three are origins questions.

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

Hump retrospective 6: worldwide flood

Posted on 02/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

In my “quest” to sort out origins questions, this “old chestnut” problem was really a question of filling in details, rather than finding entirely new solutions, because I was already aware of work by exegetes arguing that Scripture allows for a regional Flood.

Posted in History, Hump Retrospective, Science, Theology | 1 Comment