thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
April 28th, 2013
Craig Keener is a New Testament scholar who decided to test whether the accounts of miraculous healings in the Bible had parallels in reports today. He read hundreds of written accounts, interviewed hundreds of eye witnesses (including some of his in-laws in Africa) and obtained written documentation where he could, and wrote his findings up […]
April 25th, 2013
A few days ago I looked at the number of christian denominations with different beliefs, as a first step to examining the argument that 40,000 denominations (as some said) showed that God couldn’t exist, or couldn’t get his act together. I concluded that there were not nearly so many differences in beliefs as that figure […]
April 22nd, 2013
It’s another common statistic and argument by critics of christianity: there are 30,000 to 40,000 christian denominations in the world, which shows that the christian God doesn’t exist, because he would communicate better. How good is the argument, and the statistics?
April 17th, 2013
Atheists and christians alike often feel that not only is their belief true, but it is “nicer”. One argument, which has been made to me several times by atheists recently, is over who is more generous in giving to charity. It has little to do with the truth of belief, but are there any facts […]
April 15th, 2013
When I was at school, we were taught about how slavery was abolished in Britain and the USA. This was obviously a good thing. It came as a shock to find out, some years ago now, that there are more slaves in the world than ever before.
April 7th, 2013
Phil Hemsley has a blog, Thoughts from a Minimalist Christian. Since I have discovered it, I have enjoyed reading Phil’s thoughts, but I wondered how a 40 year old atheist (as he once was) came to convert to christian belief. So I asked him.
April 4th, 2013
Indonesia has, at various times over the years, been both the victim of oppression and colonial rule and the oppressor. For two centuries the Dutch East India Company virtually ruled the islands that comprise Indonesia as they profited from the spice trade. Later, the Dutch East Indies was a part of the Dutch colonial empire, […]
April 2nd, 2013
I have had an interest in the question of free will ever since a long and friendly email discussion with an atheist and determinist almost a decade ago. He was a researcher in artificial intelligence, and strongly believed that human beings had no free will, and that the only way we could have it was […]
March 28th, 2013
I am a bit of a statistics nerd, so when I came across some stats on the world’s major religions in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, I couldn’t resist playing around with them. Note (2023): For updated statistics, see World’s biggest religion?
March 26th, 2013
I have recently read two very different books about Jesus and history. One was long, one short; one was by a retired academic, the other by a rising star; one was a detailed analysis of all the things we can objectively know about Jesus’ life, the other a postmodern explanation of why our knowledge is […]
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.