Miracles, maths and mystery…
I can still remember the sneer from one of the panelists at an evangelistic atheist site. Desperate to convert others to her newly found atheism she declared: ‘Christians are really, really bad at maths. When doctors say your cancer is incurable, what they mean is that there is only a 1 in a 1000 chance that it won’t prove terminal. When it doesn’t, religious nutters happily proclaim, “a miracle”. No it’s not. It is the 1 in a 1000 cases which comes around, on average, once every thousand cases. Low odds come off in the ratio they are meant to. It’s...
Read MoreEaster Cancelled. They’ve found the body…
Graffiti was an art form during my university days. It adorned three of the walls of every toilet cubicle. One wall was devoted to political comment, another to the smutty, the third to the witty and clever. By and large contributors conformed to this unwritten guideline, and a few days before a now long past Easter the headline ‘Easter has been cancelled. They’ve found the body!’ appeared on the third wall. It has stuck with me through the years. In its own way, it is deeply insightful. Produce the body of Jesus, and whilst the impact of Christianity would not disappear...
Read MoreA world minus Jesus…
Ever imagined a world minus Jesus? There would be some obvious differences. The date for example. I’m writing in 2015 – 2015 since what? And though we might not have got the year of Jesus’ birth completely right, there is no doubt that our calendar has been structured to convey the conviction that the date of his arrival marked the turning point of all history. That’s to be more than a little famous. So what earned Jesus such accolades. The most striking is the claim that he conquered death and that his resurrection indicates to us something of what we can hope to...
Read MoreThe Church: Hazard or Witness
Hear the word ‘church’ and are you more inclined to think, ‘Now that’s why I can’t believe’ or ‘yup, it sure is another of those niggling little signs that belief in God is warranted’? Given the bad press the church has experienced in recent decades, I imagine that many will select the first option. Some would boldly say that the church is hazardous and exposure to it is likely to leave you less inclined to believe in the existence of a good God. But I’d like to suggest that such thinking is blinkered and biased, and that deeper...
Read MoreThe Bible: Bloodthirsty Text or Solid Witness?
In this ‘Why Believe?’ series we’ve been engaged in a little exercise of cumulative case apologetics – not trying to demonstrate that everything that Christianity stands for is proved with one knockout blow, but cumulatively building a case for belief, one piece at a time. The role of the Bible in building or detracting from this case is important. While arguments for theism establish that belief in a god or gods is reasonable, at some point we have to give content to the character and nature of the god believed in. While a certain amount can be ascertained from...
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