An essay of mine has just been published at Sapientia as part of a symposium in response to John Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil, overseen by Kevin Vanhoozer.
Continue readingOne of Evangelicalism’s “distinctives” is its stress on a “personal relationship” with God, which properly implies various theological ideas of particular election, individual grace, and personal commitment, combined with a belief in the active ministry of the Holy Spirit and special providence in the believer’s life. In other words, it contrasts with purely formal, intellectual or ritual concepts of membership of the Church.
Continue readingNow, my problem is that if somebody talks about a sure-fire and simple way of saving the environment, I’ll immediately ask how it works (in detail), what the down-sides are and, of course, the rather obvious one of whether it even works behind the green hype. For some reason, that seems to be an uncommon thing to do, even for governments.
Continue readingLast month the now mandatory alumni magazine arrived from my wife’s old college. The usual requests for money were inside, but the cover sported a photo of an athletic-looking black chap in rugby strip standing in front of the familiar architecture.
Continue readingThe current “false positive” discussion that’s reached the MSM is about the lateral flow tests prodigally doled out at supermarkets for the worried public to bodge at home, and how many people will be quarantined unnecessarily for every true positive case. It goes along with the statistic that routine and invasive testing of school children, not at any risk from COVID, costs £120,000 to find one case (and that is probably a false positive too). That many were warning the government of this last year does their policymaking no credit at all.
Continue readingJust a short piece with a second-hand chart, which is instructive if you haven’t seen it. It shows the COVID death rates across the US states:
Continue readingThere’s a rather nice little piece in Watts Up With That today. It contrasts real science, based on accumulating evidence, with”Woke Science”:
Continue readingIn woke “science” there is no falsifiable hypothesis. In place of that, we have the official orthodox consensus view. The official orthodox consensus view has been arrived at by all the smartest people, because it just seems like it must be right. The official orthodox consensus view must not be contradicted, particularly by the little people like you. Based on the official orthodox consensus view, those in power can take away all your freedom (Covid) and/or transform the entire economy (climate). After all, it’s the “science.”
A truly remarkable, and largely unremarked, phenomenon is emerging in the European excess death data, as recorded for all to see in EuroMOMO. It is especially marked in the UK ONS data (which is, I think, the same as EuroMOMO uses). Now that there is effectively no COVID in Britain, following the ONS stats has become a sporadic exercise for me. But once my attention was drawn to this new trend, my interest has returned.
Continue readingI only realized today what celandines are for. Now, primroses I get. They’re the traditional harbingers of spring, their soft lemon yellow in a bed of pale green velvet leaves announcing fresh growth in the watery March sunlight. They cover banks in the woods and in numerous folk-songs, and contrast with the spectrally complementary dog-violets that are scattered amongst them. But celandines, glossy and chrome yellow, always seem just a bit too yellow, like the paint on warning signs rather than a dose of spring.
Continue readingThere is a tiny bit of good news on COVID in the last few days, in the advice given by the MHRA to avoid the Astra-Zeneca vaccine in younger patients because of the possible risk of blood clots. The good news is not that the vaccine has taken a hit, but that the decision shows there is still someone in authority, at least, with the nous and courage to buck the party-line propaganda narrative and do their job on principles of reason.
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