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 the God of heaven to do his worst.”

Richard Sibbes, Refreshment for the Soul, p. 76.
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Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

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.

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

How Peppa Pig lost her faith

Posted on 17/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

Peppa Pig says, “Everyone likes jumping in muddy puddles! (Snort!)” And all her friends laugh and agree.

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Posted in Philosophy, Science | 4 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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Posted in Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology | Leave a comment

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.

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Posted in Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology | 4 Comments

Genesis birds disprove solid raqia

Posted on 10/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

In our recent YouTube livestream, Rob Rowe drew my attention to something I’d missed in the debate about whether Genesis teaches “obsolete science” that there is a solid dome over the world separating it from a celestial ocean. I’ve dealt with this topic in my book, and in a good few old posts here (search on “raqia”). Rob pointed out that in The Lost World of Adam and Eve, on page 37, John H. Walton states that he has now become convinced that the word traditionally translated “firmament,” which he long believed to mean a solid sheet, actually means “the space created by the separating of the waters…”.

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In the land of Magna Carta

Posted on 06/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

You may have heard that Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg was detained by security police at Luton aiport last week on his return from a period in Serbia. The Grayzone is a somewhat left-wing outfit, but does good, independent journalism on the secret wrongdoings of Western governments. As the cases of Julian Assange or Edward Snowden show, our governments don’t like their wrongdoings being reported.

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Unexpected livestream on my book

Posted on 04/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

Months ago I was put in touch with Rob Rowe, who has a YouTube apologetics channel based in Australia. I heard nothing until yesterday, when on a couple of hours notice he set up a livestream to discuss The Generations of Heaven and Earth, which together with Q&A lasted over two hours. Fortunately I hadn’t forgotten too much of what I’d written.

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Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, History, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

A common tale?

Posted on 03/06/2023 by Jon Garvey

A guest post by Karl Shenanighan, age 18.

I was brought up in a household with no TV, and no newspapers. To my parents, the world was a very complicated place.

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Posted in Politics and sociology | 1 Comment

Nature or denature?

Posted on 26/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

There are some lessons to be learned, I think, from a couple of remarkable statistics gleaned from recent surveys. One, from last November, found that only 49.7% of Cambridge students identified as heterosexual, with 11.9% as homosexual and 29% as bisexual. Another, more recently, finds that 10% of British 16-18 year olds would like to change their gender.

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Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 3 Comments