thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
May 2nd, 2013
I am a bit of a maths nerd – I enjoy using spreadsheets and graphs to analyse and illustrate. But I can’t claim much expertise – I did once obtain a Distinction in Statistics at Uni, but I’ve forgotten all of that now. So while writing up some material on healing miracles (see Healing miracles […]
July 6th, 2019
It’s not uncommon to come across stories of people being miraculously healed. They are some of the most popular pages on this site, and there’s no shortage of them on the internet. I’m not sure why, but I’m guessing that some people want to feel re-assured God is really there, and some are perhaps looking […]
June 11th, 2017
Which side are you on? The idea of divine healing is a polarising one. Non-believers are generally fairly suspicious, feeling healing is against medical science. Many christians are highly supportive of the idea that God heals today, and quite possibly have a personal story of healing to tell. But other christians are made of sterner […]
March 25th, 2015
Let’s say at the start that this isn’t the most important question in the world! But I think it is interesting. The background is this. The New Testament (Acts 1:15) records there were 120 disciples in Jerusalem a few weeks after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Three centuries later, historians estimate that there were somewhere between […]
August 9th, 2014
Sceptics sometimes say they would need more tangible evidence to believe – there’s insufficient evidence in the Bible and in the philosophical arguments for God, they say, so they need something incontrovertible. Yet at the same time, many say that no matter how much evidence there is for an action of God in the world, […]
January 8th, 2014
My friend Gordon is an atheist and a reader of this blog. Recently in a comment on a previous post, he made the above comment. It is still holiday time, I’m a nerd, and I enjoy a challenge, so I wondered whether I could analyse the science, and the belief. People with dedicated serious minds […]
November 21st, 2013
“Confirmation bias …. is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way …. [or] interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position.” (Wikipedia) Atheists often accuse christians of confirmation bias, […]
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?
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.