thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
February 19th, 2013
Readers will know that courtesy in discussions between believers and unbelievers is something dear to my heart (see, for example, Atheists vs christians: does it have to be war? So when Matt, who has a blog titled Confessions Of A (former) Young Earth Creationist, asked me to write a post on Conversing with atheists and […]
February 14th, 2013
For many people it is virtually an unquestioned assumption – science and christian belief are incompatible. But this book by eminent philosopher Alvin Plantinga turns that on its head – he argues that science and theism are very compatible while it is science and atheism/naturalism that are incompatible. Does he succeed?
February 12th, 2013
This website has been online, in one form or another, for almost 7 years. In that time it has mostly been about evidence and reasons for believing in the God of christianity. My idea was to offer readers food for thought from a reasonably fair-minded viewpoint. But I haven’t indicated what people might do with […]
February 8th, 2013
It has been long established by research that religious observance provides a number of health and wellbeing benefits, including a higher level of happiness. But why is this so?
February 3rd, 2013
We all know that the number of committed religious people is dropping in most western countries (see, e.g. Who believes in God?). And it’s not too hard to find stories on the internet of people who were brought up religious, but now disbelieve. It may be less well known that, at the same time, a […]
January 22nd, 2013
Regular readers will know that one of my ’causes’ is ethical chocolate – chocolate that is grown by free farmers who are paid a fair wage, and not by trafficked children working more or less as slaves. (For background, see Ethical chocolate update.) So it was with great delight that I received a weighty package […]
January 10th, 2013
This blog and the website are just over 18 months old, though they continue on from previous versions that go back years. I thought it might be appropriate, as 2013 begins, to review what I am aiming to do and what this site offers.
January 6th, 2013
I have commented before on philosopher and atheist Michael Ruse (Michael Ruse on why is there something rather than nothing?). Ruse specialises in the philosophy of science and religion, and a recent interview in Science on Religion is worth a read.
January 3rd, 2013
The late Christopher Hitchens famously wrote that religion poisons everything. One aspect of this sort of conclusion is the claim that religious people do more harm than good. As Stephen Weinberg once said: With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that […]
December 30th, 2012
You don’t have to read the gospels for long to find things that don’t seem to fit together. Sceptics argue that these prove that the gospel stories can’t be trusted, and probably aren’t true. Is this a reasonable conclusion? Is it the only reasonable conclusion? How do historians deal with these apparent discrepancies?
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.