thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
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 […]
This page in brief …. Christians believe that Jesus showed us what God is like. If that claim is true, we have a strong reason to believe God really exists. So in this page we look at three criteria that we might use to evaluate this claim – the historical evidence for Jesus’ life and […]
We have looked at how the universe gives us strong clues that God exists. Now it is time to come closer to home, and examine how humanity offers clues to God. We know everything else in the universe from the outside, but we know ourselves from the inside. That inside knowledge raises some perplexing questions. […]
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 […]
Human beings are curious creatures, and most of us think about ‘big’ questions, such as “What is life all about?”, or “How did everything get here?” or “Could there be a God?”. How can a human being possibly answer these questions with any assurance? But how can we ignore these questions either? So what is […]
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 …..
It is Chinese New Year, and last Saturday we visited the celebrations at Hurstville, the suburb where we both grew up and now home to a large Chinese community. We watched the parade and checked out the stalls, and found plenty to interest us.
This scene from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (c 1275 BCE), shows the dead scribe Hunefer’s heart being weighed by the canine-headed Anubis on the scale of Maat. The ibis-headed Thoth, scribe of the gods, records the result. If his heart is lighter than the feather of truth, Hunefer is allowed to pass into […]
Stereoscopic vision is a useful and subtle aspect of how we, and some animals, see. Because our two eyes both face the front (unlike some animals and insects whose eyes face more left and right), they both see similar but subtly different views. For example, if two objects are in line, one behind the other, […]
In Mark 3, it is recorded that when Jesus’ family heard how he was attracting a great following, they thought he was “out of his mind”. These days a similar charge is sometimes made – that Jesus exhibited behaviour that suggests he suffered from a mental disorder. I’ve come across it several times, most recently […]