Category Archives: Theology

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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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (3)

Posted on 31/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

We left the last blog post with a simple “toolkit” from Genesis 1 which, whilst it may not “define” man in the way Aquinas sought to do, certainly describes him theologically in a way that enables us to interrogate the archaeological record for biblically human origins.

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (2)

Posted on 29/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

Let’s start our exploration by considering the scant information Genesis contains on what it took to be a human being “in the beginning.”

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (1)

Posted on 28/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

When I wrote The Generations of Heaven and Earth, whose central theme is the Genealogical Adam and Eve paradigm, I spent some pages discussing the status of those people “outside the garden,” on the assumption that an Adam and Eve around the Chalcolithic period, as suggested by the text, would have had many contemporaries. By that time, after all, and indeed very much earlier, human traces are known from all around the world.

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Humpism, not ID, is the real enemy of Science™

Posted on 21/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

What’s the connection between Nigel Farage and the the Intelligent Design Movement? Well none, directly, or else it would certainly have appeared in his Coutts Bank Dossier and been used as further evidence of his unsuitability to be their customer. But conceptually there is a connection, in that what first made me aware of the prevalence of propaganda, disinformation and cancellation in our society was the way that ID was treated by mainstream scientists, their progressive Evangelical acolytes in the form of BioLogos, and broader societal organs like the press and judiciary.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology of nature | 4 Comments

A theology of glow-worms

Posted on 14/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

Around ten years ago I realised that I have glow-worms in my garden. To be more exact, in most years I have a glow-worm, because from year to year I’ve never seen more than two at a time, coyly spaced at opposite ends of the terrace of railway sleepers that holds up the ground outside our bathroom window. Most years I see just one, and assume a successful mating the night it goes dark.

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When the judges are unjust, God removes the judges

Posted on 24/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just found the Puritan quote I half-remembered in a recent comment, courtesy of Doug Wilson’s Blog and Mablog: “When sin grows ripe, and abounds in a land or nation, at such a time as this a man may know there is some fearful judgment approaching. But when is sin ripe? When it is impudent, when men grow bold in sin, making it their whole course and trade of life. When men’s wicked courses are their common lifestyle, and they don’t even know how to do otherwise . . . The more sin, the more danger. When men are secure in their sinning, it is as if they are daring … Continue reading →

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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

All made up and nowhere to go (2)

Posted on 15/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

The old critical scholars, back in the days when there was a liberal source-critical consensus, used to say that Genesis contains two incompatible creation stories, the first from the “E” source and the second, the Eden narrative, from “J.” Or at least that was the gist, as many scholars seemed to assign odd verses to a different source at a whim. But they had a point: if Moses wrote Genesis, or the bulk of it, and Genesis 2 is a re-focused view of the creation, then he left in some inconsistencies at a rather fundamental level, beyond merely a shift of imagery.

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All made up and nowhere to go (1)

Posted on 14/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

In a recent post, I critiqued “Old Adam” views of Genesis 2, mainly on biblical grounds. Rejecting such views either means embracing “No Adam” theories (including, of course, “Metaphorical Adam” theories), requiring a complete heterodox re-working of Jewish and Christian theology, which I won’t discuss here, or accepting a “Young Adam” within the last few thousand years.

Posted in Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology | 4 Comments