Did Jesus catch colds?

Posted on 31/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

Here’s an exploration of a theological conundrum that will have occurred to some people (after all, it occurred to me) and perhaps troubled them. If Jesus is truly human, having taken on the “very nature” [morphe] of man (Philippians 2:7), is “like his brothers in every way” (Hebrews 2:17), and was “tempted in every way, just as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15), did he not inherit original sin, and hence incur the penalty of death?

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Are we in a simulation? Materialist and theist approaches

Posted on 29/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

The idea that the world is nothing but a “simulation,” akin to that in the Matrix films, has cropped up over the last few years in serious academic papers, in many YouTube videos, and even in comments by Elon Musk. And now it has reached the popular press in the form of this Daily Mail article.

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

Factors in foresight

Posted on 28/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

Clare Craig’s book, Expired, contains the interesting statistic that only 2% of people in the UK opposed lockdown at the time it started. Having been one of that tiny minority, I am greatly surprised that I was quite such an outlier to the norm, and thought it might be worth trying to understand, in retrospect, why it was. I was not, after all, a leading expert in anything apart, perhaps, from the irrelevant content of my published books. Perhaps such an analysis might help others – and even me – to be better prepared when the next catastrophic mistake is advocated by government.

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

From an evolutionary perspective… you don’t see much of interest

Posted on 26/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

Clare Craig’s book on the COVID experience, Expired, whilst perhaps not the best-written book on the subject (she herself acknowledges her literary limitations) is nevertheless important because she herself has had such an important role in challenging the official narratives from mid-2020 onwards. It is full of good information, and therefore I recommend it highly.

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Posted in Philosophy, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Skin in the game

Posted on 23/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that the bloke who wins a Nobel Prize for, say, the No-threshold linear mutagenesis model of radiation is not the most susceptible to research debunking it. Nor is a renowned race activist immersed in intersectional theory the most amenable to evidence that racism has decreased. For they both have “skin in the game.”

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Posted in Philosophy, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

Don’t all panic at once

Posted on 20/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

There is a scene in Band of Brothers where, after a long period of arduous training under a sadistic strongly disciplinarian instructor, the guys are finally plunged into an intense action in Europe. To their horror the former instructor, now commanding officer, completely falls apart and starts issuing contradictory orders. Fortunately our hero takes over and saves both the situation and the back of the instructor.

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

The subtle art of distinguishing conspiracy theories from truth

Posted on 17/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

Another week, and another young sportsman has had an on-field cardiac arrest. In this case it was the 29 year old captain of Luton Town F.C., who apparently has a previous collapse on the pitch with atrial fibrillation, had it surgically ablated, and was passed fit for all activities again.

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Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 7 Comments

More on “Civilisational Christianity.”

Posted on 12/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

The two pieces I recently did, inspired by Bret Weinstein, were not intended to do him down, since the piece I quoted from him was essentially apologising to Christians that the New Atheism movement, by denigrating them, had sidelined important allies against the same enemies of truth and morality. My main point was that he has failed to recognise that faith in God is the foundation of that morality and truth, not an unfortunate superstitious add-on.

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

Christ and Creation in three prepositions

Posted on 11/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

Here’s a little hermeneutic gem from Richard Bauckham’s excellent book Jesus and the God of Israel.

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More on Bret Weinstein’s evolutionary distorting mirror

Posted on 08/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

Yesterday I critiqued Bret Weinstein’s proposed rapprochement of “science” with Christian morality, pointing out that he misunderstood the foundations of Christianity, and merely tried to replace them with an inferior, naturalistic evolutionary, narrative. In fact the problem is worse than that, because it’s not simply that his proposal hides the shaky metaphysical foundations of naturalism, but that even in materialist terms it is pseudoscientific. And that is because societal morals are demonstrably non-evolutionary. As I will now demonstrate.

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