thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
June 26th, 2018
Science has been one of the success stories of the past few hundred years Through science we know more about the world. We can predict outcomes like weather, the paths of space rockets and the prognosis for cancers. And we can treat many sicknesses, travel all over the world, communicate to virtually anyone anywhere and […]
June 19th, 2018
Is there a conflict between science and religion? Do religious people and scientists think in different ways? In the next few posts I’m going examine the perceived conflict between science and religion. First, a quick look at some statistics of who believes and who doesn’t.
June 4th, 2018
I remember being concerned about it more than 40 years ago. How could God command his people to murder everyone living in each Canaanite city that they captured? And I am not the only one to feel revolted by these commands in the book of Deuteronomy and the accounts in the book of Joshua. Critics […]
May 14th, 2018
A few months back I responded to a discussion I was having about Jesus’ miracles by writing a post on the historical evidence. I have since turned that post into a permanent page, Did Jesus really perform miracles?, so I thought I would summarise the main conclusions here. Some of them may be surprising to […]
May 2nd, 2018
A friend and I have been discussing the Kalam Cosmological argument recently, so I thought it might be worth posting about it. The Kalam argument has been used many times by philosopher William Lane Craig in public debates, with some success. His use of the argument is itself much debated on the internet. I have […]
April 9th, 2018
Many people claim to have experienced God directly in some way. They claim to have seen a vision, or received divine healing, or they have had some deep spiritual experience, or God has turned their lives around in some way. They come from different religions, even from no religion and atheism. Sometimes the experience changes […]
April 1st, 2018
It’s Easter again, which evokes different responses in different people. Some people think about the claim that, after he was executed, Jesus was raised to life by God. Of all the critical comments I have received on this blog, criticism of christian belief about the resurrection of Jesus is one of the most common and […]
March 20th, 2018
One of the pleasures in having an old vinyl record collection is getting an old album out of the storeroom and playing it after years, maybe decades. Some albums stand up, some sound outdated. And some songs still hit you with all the old force. Here’s one.
March 10th, 2018
People move into and out of faith. Probably most of us stay with the religious beliefs we form in our late teens, but a fair number change their basic belief somewhat later. These changes in belief can be difficult to make and to carry through. But probably nothing is more difficult than when one partner […]
February 18th, 2018
Recently I came across two articles that came from very different viewpoints, but raised some similar issues. It certainly made me think about how religious and anti-religious movements and ideas can have a lot more in common than you might think.
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.