thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
December 1st, 2019
This page in brief …. In the previous eleven posts in this series, we have seen that many different aspects of life (the universe, human life, the history of Jesus and human experience) all seem to make more sense if there is a creator God, than if there is not. In this final post, we […]
November 13th, 2019
What this page is about We have seen that some people appear to have experienced God through a healing, a vision or other “peak” experience. But what of the rest of us, who haven’t had such an experience? Does God communicate in more “ordinary” ways? Does this make a difference in people’s lives? In this […]
October 30th, 2019
What this page is about I don’t know about you, but when I hear a story of someone seeing a vision – of God, or Jesus or angels, or whatever – my first thought is to think hallucination, imagination or even invention. Likely as fake as the above graphic. We live in a day when […]
September 23rd, 2019
The plot thickens! So far in this series, I have presented 6 reasons to believe that a theistic explanation of the universe and humanity makes more sense than a naturalistic explanation. Each reason increases the probability that there is a God. But is that God a personal being, as most of the world’s monotheistic religions […]
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 […]
May 8th, 2019
I sometimes get asked for the reasons why I believe. Sometimes it is curiosity, sometimes people are desperate to know why they should believe. Occasionally people ask what sort of reasons are good, with the implication that some reasons are somehow inappropriate. So here’s the results of many years of thought and reading …..
September 9th, 2018
A reader commenting on this blog asked me some questions about Jesus and history and I thought that they were good questions worthy of a decent response. Part of John’s comment was: “So I was curious as to what your specific Christian beliefs were …. where you stand on Christ’s divinity. It’s one thing to […]
July 9th, 2018
Last post I looked at the differences between scientific thinking and religious thinking, at least as one social scientist sees it. But where does religious thinking come from? Religious belief has been an important component in virtually every culture in human history. Why is this so? Social scientists have studied this question extensively. Whether you […]
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 […]
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 […]
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.