I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair review. The latest in the Questions Christians Ask series, Mark Meynell sketches out a solid introduction to basic Christian beliefs about humanity. Its brevity is both it’s biggest strength and weakness. It is accessible and easily digested in an […]
At the moment, Evangelical Alliance Wales are consulting Christians on a wide number of issues to put together a “Manifesto for Wales”, a positive Christian vision for society. This is a great idea – Christian political engagement is often very reactive, simply trying to stem the tide on the secularisation of our society, rather than […]
Some late night musings on a classic philosophical question, given a new spin by quantum physics… Can something come from nothing? In a vacuum, quantum fluctuations mean that energetic particles appear and disappear from nothing. Some atheists argue that this means we don’t need God to explain why the universe exists. But even a vacuum […]
American philosopher, debater and Christian apologist William Lane Craig has been getting attention for Richard Dawkins‘ refusal to debate him. Craig’s Oxford debate has been publicised with a bus campaign stating ‘There’s probably no Dawkins‘. It’s a funny and clever riff on the atheist bus campaign, and good publicity for William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith debate tour. Dawkins is […]
In October, I was on a weekend writing course. In one of the sessions, we looked at a script for a short film, and how it changed in redrafting. Racist bullies kill a young boy in it. In earlier drafts the bullies were just a generic mob, but in rewriting, the character of the leader […]
Is there such thing as a Biblical epistemology (theory of knowledge)? Well, there’s no one definitive Biblical theory of knowledge that Christians would all agree on – but getting Christians to all agree on anything is very difficult, to put it mildly! But I think that what the Bible teaches about God, the world, reality […]
Charlie Brooker, favourite misanthrope of Guardian readers everywhere (after David Simon, of course) yesterday claimed that Contemplating the scale of the universe makes a mockery of household chores. Funnily enough, the relationship between cosmos and chores was one of the topics I mentioned in my wedding speech, but I came to a rather different conclusion: […]
Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, wrote a fragmentary set of thoughts that he planned to develop into a defence of the Christian faith, but never finished called Pensées. He has many interesting observations and ideas on all sorts of subjects – it’s almost as if he’d written a blog! Part of Pascal’s brilliance […]
I recently read a discussion on an internet forum of astrology. Someone asked if astrology is internally consistent. Astrology can make sense within certain worldviews and models of the universe. In medieval times, it was generally accepted that the stars exerted some level of influence. C S Lewis’s The Discarded Image gives a good presentation […]
Or, Is materialism an optical illusion? (Apologies for the delay in my blog posts on Creation and Evolution – my netbook was stolen when thieves broke into my house recently, which has set back some of my writing and blogging.) In this post, I’m going to compare a Christian worldview and a materialistic worldview, and […]
