Extraterrestrial theology

Posted on 12/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

Sy Garte’s comment on the last post, mentioning panspermia, and GD’s subsequent admission of a liking for science fiction, renewed an intention I formed a while ago to draw together thoughts on the relationship of possible extraterrestrial life to theology. Overall there seems to be a mainstream skeptical generalisation that the existence of ETs would be a threat to Christianity, which echoes a perception that Fundamentalists “don’t hold with Space” (as some Luddite told my father shortly before Sputnik 1 showed that Space didn’t hold with him). Continue reading →

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Nobel Prize time

Posted on 08/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

Well-earned prizes have just been awarded for milestone research on DNA Repair. To quote from the Independent as usual (only because it’s cheap) the contributions of the three winners was as follows: Continue reading →

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More on divine inscrutibility

Posted on 07/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

In G K Chesterton’s enigmatic tale, The Man Who Was Thursday, a central theme is the sinister spymaster who turns out, in the end, to be not only a metaphor for Christ, but within the mythos of the book Christ himself. But before this denouement there is a piece of dialogue, in which characters discuss the spymaster, which Chesterton clearly intends to carry great weight:

When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.

Continue reading →

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The Wright stuff

Posted on 05/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just been re-reading Tom Wright’s excellent book on eschatology, Surprised by Hope, for the first time since 2009, a couple of years before I began to think more intensely about the doctrine of creation in relation to science and all things modern, culminating in this blog. I’d quite forgotten how much the book focuses on the goodness of the current creation, and the stress of the gospel on ushering in a whole new creation, which burst into the world for the first time at the Resurrection and begins to transform it, in preparation for the parousia, by the Spirit’s work through the Church. Continue reading →

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Redundancy and teleology

Posted on 02/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

The Independent reports some research from the “1000 Genome Project”, under the headline “Human genome study reveals certain genes are less essential than previously thought”. The gist is that in 2,500 individual genomes studied (a supererogatory number in terms of the project’s name):

“…we were surprised to see over 200 genes that are missing entirely in some people,” said Jan Korbel of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, who led one of the genome project’s studies.

Continue reading →

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Inscrutability

Posted on 30/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

One of the things that has struck me in preparing the house-group course on Revelation that I’ve been running is just how distant and indistinct the figure of God remains throughout this final book of the New Testament. That’s odd for a book intended to reveal God’s coming to dwell with men. His heavenly throne in ch4 (albeit the representation is itself apocalyptic and based on temple imagery) tells us a lot about the worshippers and what they say, but regarding God himself there are only metaphors. To my recollection, apart from 21.5-9, he does not himself speak, but is represented by voices from angels, the throne, the altar and so on throughout the book. Continue reading →

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The role of eclipses in the culture wars

Posted on 28/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

Last night we had a total eclipse of the moon across Europe, which since it coincided with the recently popular category of a “supermoon” event got lots of press coverage. Continue reading →

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

Moral certitude on shifting sand

Posted on 25/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

There’s been much discussion here recently about inculcating “British values”, especially into those communities that might, being recent immigrants, be in danger of missing out on them and becoming radicalised into jihadist ways of exploiting the weak, wanting foreign cars and so on. Maybe there’s a similar effort in America, although perhaps it’s less necessary as Superman has been promulgating Truth, Justice and the American Way (as separable items?) since the 1930s. Britain has, until now, always been more reticent about brandishing its values, celebrating instead generalities like fairness, decency and Christian piety. Oddly none of these are on the new lists of established British values. Continue reading →

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The Copernican Principle revisited

Posted on 22/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

I’m far from the first person to point out that when Copernicus turned the Universe inside out it wasn’t in order to knock the earth off its perch of geocentric pre-eminence in human thought (as the modern so-called “Copernican Principle” implies), but if anything to make it, for the first time, one of the heavenly bodies. Continue reading →

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Revelationary politics

Posted on 19/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

Teaching the Book of Revelation, as I am at the moment to a home group, always raises interesting questions of the type “Things I always wondered about, but was afraid to ask”. In the context of Revelation it’s not surprising, because being cryptic and aimed at providing insights to 1st century persecuted Christians with a Jewish background, rather than to twenty-first century Gentiles, it tends to get left on the shelf, and the questions it raises in people’s minds left unaddressed too. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Theology | 15 Comments