Unite the Kingdom May 16

Posted on 17/05/2026 by Jon Garvey

I suppose many of my UK readers will be up to speed on the rally in London yesterday, organised by the infamous Tommy Yaxley-Robinson, originally known as Stephen Real-Name. But I attach a few remarks, partly for overseas readers wondering what England has become.

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

Paul in Athens

Posted on 15/05/2026 by Jon Garvey

When our Pastor reached the last part of Acts 17 in our serial exposition of Acts last week, I realised that Paul’s address to the Areopagus Society was even cleverer than I’ve always assumed.

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

Does matter matter?

Posted on 06/05/2026 by Jon Garvey

A stimulating four-way discussion between mathematicians David Berlinski, Sergiu Klainerman, and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, mediated by Peter Robinson, proposes that the existence of mathematics is a likely defeater for naturalist materialism, and a strong argument for theism.

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Posted in Philosophy, Theology | 4 Comments

We meet the Word in the word, not in the world

Posted on 02/05/2026 by Jon Garvey

When I was writing The Generations of Heaven and Earth I made extensive use of John H. Sailhamer’s The Meaning of the Pentateuch. It was somewhere in that large tome, if memory serves, that he wrote something to the effect that theology should not be concerned with historical events, as such, but with the Bible’s record of historical events.

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Posted in Creation, Theology | 5 Comments

The triumph of the cross

Posted on 29/04/2026 by Jon Garvey

The ever-helpful YouTube offered me a video which, a little research showed, drew on a 1995 paper by W. E. Schmidt entitled The Crucifixion Narrative and the Roman Triumphal Procession. It was a revelation to me. The article demonstrates the remarkable, and clearly deliberate, similarity between Mark’s account of the humiliation of Jesus as he goes to the Cross and the Imperial Triumph tradition. Mark has shaped his account to show how the Romans (at the instigation of the Jewish authorities) have actually given Jesus an Imperial Triumph, culminating in the Cross as his final victory.

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Posted in History, Theology | 1 Comment

What I think I know about life in the deep past

Posted on 26/04/2026 by Jon Garvey

Colin Patterson, FRS, was a palaeontologist and proponent of “transformed cladistics” based at London’s Natural History Museum, who raised a controversy in 1981 by rhetorically asking his colleagues at a conference, “Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true?”

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

How Darwinian evolution became plausible (for a time)

Posted on 24/04/2026 by Jon Garvey

Here are some thoughts on what factors provided the fertile ground for Darwinian evolutionary theory to appear plausible when it was published in 1859. This is followed by some of the problems raised at the time the theory was published, showing that they have all become more acute, rather than being resolved, since 1859. The net result is that “variation and natural selection” as the origin of species is now thoroughly implausible, and remains a consensus only by academic inertia.

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Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology of nature | 6 Comments

To Ur is human, to dig divine.

Posted on 18/04/2026 by Jon Garvey

When I wrote The Generations of Heaven and Earth I was concerned with the setting of the biblical Adam and Eve in history, which overlapped with their role in the ancestry of the present human race. This involved discussion of possible geographical settings for Eden, and for the Table of Nations in Genesis 10. This in turn raised the question of possible sites for a regional flood involving Noah.

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Posted in Genealogical Adam, History, Theology | Leave a comment

Prayers for peace

Posted on 13/04/2026 by Jon Garvey

Christianity has always had an ambivalent attitude towards war, unlike Islam which is unambiguously a religion of peace… once all that is non-Islamic has been obliterated or subjugated by brute force, including the wrong kind of Muslims like the peace-loving Ahmadiyya and any daring to apostasize.

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

Temporal resonances

Posted on 11/04/2026 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just given my Stratocaster guitar to my granddaughter, having decided I’m unlikely ever to join another rock band. And in any case, I still have a Telecaster. It’s not a Fender Stratocaster, you understand, but a Japanese Tokai, though when it was made, in 1984, their quality was arguably better than the the CBS Fenders of the time, and certainly superior to Fender’s Japanese Squiers, one of which I bought in 1983, but was never entirely happy with.

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Posted in History, Music, Theology | 2 Comments