Category Archives: Theology

“Just Nature” – clarify “Nature,” please.

Posted on 20/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

Chasing up, for interest, references to the 1908 “Tunguska Event” (now most commonly thought to be a meteroric or cometary air-burst), I came across this recent piece in Physorg.

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God’s Good Earth not so controversial after all?

Posted on 14/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

I wrote my book God’s Good Earth to counter the assumptions amongst both “conservative” Christians on the one hand, and secular and theistic evolutionists on the other, that the natural world is full of a morally problematic thing called “natural evil.”

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Sorry – not even a Pope can do that

Posted on 09/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

Pope Francis has reportedly endorsed the opinion of “Vatican experts” in revising the Italian wording of the Lord’s Prayer so that it reads (in English translation, of course!) “Do not let us fall/be abandoned into temptation.”

Posted in Theology | 4 Comments

Transgression after Eden

Posted on 08/04/2019 by Jon Garvey

We have a knife-crime epidemic over here in the UK currently. Of course, media reporting-crazes often appear more significant than the underlying events actually are, and can even escalate the problems they are so keen to highlight. But for whatever reason, there appears to be a significant spate of knife murders currently, by young people involved in street gangs.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

Lest you be overwhelmed with excessive sorrow

Posted on 30/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

Where do we start today? The film-makers have just stashed away the bonnets and top-hats, packed up their Victorian facades and swept the mud off the roads at Lyme Regis, 20 minutes from here, after taking over the town to film Mary Anning the Lesbian Fossil Hunter, aka Kate Winslet. My wife can take her morning coffee uninterrupted again.

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In the footsteps of Judah’s spiritual collapse

Posted on 25/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just read another very interesting book. In the Footsteps of King David describes the excavation of Khirbet Qeiyafa in Israel, just up the valley from the ancient Philistine city of Gath.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

…and the modern virtues don’t work either

Posted on 22/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

A precious little snippet in the news yesterday, which is a quote from a press release by my alma mater, Cambridge University. They have just revoked a visiting fellowship they offered to the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson, apparently because the Students Union, as “representative” as it was in my own day no doubt, threw some of the meaningless vice-words discussed in my previous post at Peterson, or more likely at the University to imply guilt by association.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 6 Comments

Nowadays, even the sins don’t work properly

Posted on 18/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

The abominable crime perpetrated in New Zealand by, we are told, a lone white-supremacist extremist, led to immediate calls in the mainstream press for a clampdown on rampant Islamophobia everywhere in society. When a thing (“Islamophobia”) is named as if it were a psychiatric disorder, but treated as a deadly sin, it is a little difficult to understand exactly what the neologism means. But the word appears at least, to include any negative opinion of any aspect of Islam, Arab nationalism, or Islamist terrorism shaken together, such negativity being interpreted as the inevitable precursor of crimes such as we saw last week.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 3 Comments

The tree in Berkeley’s square (no nightingale)

Posted on 13/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

George Berkeley is most famous for his immaterialist view of reality, which is nicely, if incompletely, summed up in Monsignor Ronald Knox’s limerick:

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Predictability, reproducibility and determinism in chaos

Posted on 09/03/2019 by Jon Garvey

On a Peaceful Science thread I promised Chris Falter that I’d respond to his argument that chaotic systems are instrinsically indeterminate. The context, of course, as the thread title shows (Every Birth is a Statistical Impossibilty) has to do with the possibility of determination of events by God, as well as by us.

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