Footprints in the Sand

One night, a man had a dream. He dreamt that he was walking across a beautiful, deserted beach. Seagulls wheeled overhead, waves crashed against the white sands, and the wind blew gently in his hair.

As he strolled across the damp sand, the sky began to darken. The sun faded, the clouds scudded away, and above his head, a million stars began to glitter like pinpricks in the tarpaulin of reality.

Suddenly scenes from his life began to appear, one after another in rapid succession. Each scene faded as quickly as it had come.

Soon the wind began to pick up while overhead the stars flared into supernovae and galaxies themselves burned and died. Before long, the sky was jet black and all that lit the beach was a pale sickly light, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing because nothing was the only thing to be seen.

But then, in the distance, just visible against the eery darkness of the sky, a robed figure appeared, casually strolling along the sands as if out for an evening walk.

The man hurried to catch up with him.

“Excuse me, sir,” he shouted over the howling of the wind, “would you mind waiting for me.”

The cowled figure paused, leaning on what appeared to be a wooden walking stick.

The man caught up with the stranger, then turned to look back across the sands he had been walking across for the past few hours.

“That’s odd,” he said. “I’d expected to see …”

“EXPECTED TO SEE?” said a voice like granite slabs grinding together.

“Er … well, footprints? Isn’t this the point in the dream where I look back and see two sets of footprints, except at the point in my life where things were toughest, which is when you say: ‘My son, those are the times I carried you.’”

There was an awkward silence.

“THIS MAY NOT BE THE MOTIVATIONAL POSTER YOU WERE LOOKING FOR,” said the robed figure, throwing back his cowl to reveal the smooth, white form of a grinning skull. It might have reminded you of a billiard ball, if billiard balls had perfect teeth and eye sockets with small flames in them.

“Are you … are you … Death?” asked the man timidly.

“I AM HE,” said Death. “I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THE SCYTHE WAS A CLUE.”

The man stared. It hadn’t been a walking stick after all.

“I DID TRY AN ELECTRIC STRIMMER ONCE,” remarked Death, conversationally, “IT’S GOOD TO MODERNISE. BUT THE LOOK WASN’T RIGHT.”

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“The Death? I mean, the grim reaper, the harvester of souls, the destroyer of worlds?”

“I PREFER TO THINK OF MYSELF MORE AS A SNAPPER-UP OF INCONSIDERED TRIFLES,” said Death.

“What do you mean, ‘inconsidered trifles’?”

“WELL,” said Death, scratching his head with a bony digit. It sounded like the finger of fate being dragged across the blackboard of reality. “ABOUT THOSE MISSING FOOTPRINTS …”

“So I’m … dead? Not just … asleep?”

“SLEEP? AS IN PERCHANCE TO DREAM. OR, IN YOUR CASE, PERCHANCE TO DIE OF A HEART ATTACK AT 3AM.” Death offered out a paper bag full of sweets. “JELLY BABY?”

The man shook his head and looked back across the empty sands. There was nothing to show he had ever walked that way.

“Did my life really leave no trace?” the man asked, plaintively.

“NONE. NADA. ZILCH. OTHER SYNONYMS ARE AVAILABLE IF YOU WISH.”

“But my friends, my family, surely they must have remembered me?”

“HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF THE WORD ‘AEON’?” asked Death.

“Aeon?”

“‘AEON’,” repeated Death. “FROM THE LATIN ‘AEON’. WHICH MEANS: ‘AEON’. IT’S A LONG TIME. YOU WERE REMEMBERED—BRIEFLY. BUT THEN THEY DIED. THEIR DESCENDANTS DIED. HUMANITY DIED. NOW THERE IS JUST ME. DEATH. THE LAST WORD.”

“But that seems unfair,” protested the man, “death—I mean, you—can’t be the end. What about justice?”

“THERE’S NO JUSTICE. THERE’S JUST US. AND YOU NOT FOR MUCH LONGER, YOU’RE ALREADY FADING.”

The man looked at his arm; it was indeed slightly translucent.

“I can see the sand through it!” he cried in alarm.

“WOULD IT INTEREST YOU TO KNOW THAT WHITE SAND LIKE THIS IS LARGELY THE POWDERED SHELLS AND SKELETONS OF WHAT WERE ONCE LIVING CREATURES?”

“This is no time for trivia!”

“I HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD. LITERALLY AND METAPHORICALLY,” said Death. “WHEREAS YOU HAVE ABOUT 30 SECONDS.”

“But are you saying that life—my life, human life, all life—is pointless and worthless and was just for—just for this,” the man cried, sweeping his hand across the empty beach and the void of the sky.

“YES.”

The man was scrabbling desperately for any lifeline now. “What if I said I don’t believe in you? I’ve no time for God and all that religious stuff.”

“GOD?” said Death. He tipped his head on one side, thoughtfully, as the flame in his eye sockets grew a darker red. “THERE I CAN’T HELP YOU,” he said. “FINAL OBLIVION IS MY DEPARTMENT. THAT AND TAXES.”

“Was that a joke?”

“PROBABLY. YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED I AM ALWAYS GRINNING.”

There was a long silence.

“Is it too late for a death bed conversion?” pleaded the man.

“I DON’T HAVE A BED,” said Death. “I TRIED ONE ONCE BUT I JUST LAY THERE, FULLY AWAKE, AS AGES ROSE AND FELL AROUND ME.”

“This feels all wrong,” said the man, beginning to weep. “I mean—I’d always told my friends that when it came to death, there was nothing to be afraid of.”

There was a final, even longer, silence, before Death spoke one last time:

“NOTHING IS PRECISELY THE THING TO BE AFRAID OF.”

~ + ~

Author’s Note

I owe a nod of thanks to Terry Pratchett (from whom I borrowed Death’s use of capitals). I also owe a tip of the hat to Andy Kind, who has a version of this same idea in his brilliant book of short stories A Blanket of Embers. I’d been playing around with subverting the Footprints poem for years (as I have a natural aversion to inspirational posters). When I saw what Andy did with it (and I think his version is even darker than mine) I knew I had to finally put pen to paper.

And if you’re thinking: “Wow, this story was bleak!” then here’s a thought: short stories written by Christians don’t always need to have happy endings. Sometimes a bleak or dystopian ending can be as powerful—and perhaps our natural instinct to protest “It shouldn’t be like this!” is a clue to a bigger story.

If you’d like to explore that bigger story, do check out my book, Have You Ever Wondered? More on that here …

If you found this piece helpful, thought-provoking, curiosity-sparking or in other ways useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps me keep my writing free for those who can’t afford to make a contribution. Thank you for your support!

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Many Western countries are now very pluralistic, with many of our major cities incredibly culturally and religiously diverse. That religious diversity is growing rapidly and is especially apparent when it comes to Islam: the number of Muslims in the UK is currently at 4 million (6%) and could potentially rise to around 13 million (17%) in 25 years’ time.1

To deal with that diversity, many Western cultures try to champion the idea that all the world’s religions are essentially the same. For example, when comparative religion is taught in places like schools, it’s often done in a way that implies the world’s major faiths are virtually identical, just the names are changed: e.g. Muslims go to mosque, Christians go to church; Muslims have the Qur’an, Christians have the Bible; Muslims follow Muhammad, Christians follow Jesus.

The assumption is that all religious people are talking about the same thing, just in different ways.

Enter the Elephant

There’s a 2,500-year-old Indian folk tale that’s often told to illustrate this very point. It tells how four blind men were shown into a room in which there was an elephant. The first blind man grabbed hold of the tail. “Aha! An elephant is like a rope,” he declared. The second blind man hugged the elephant’s leg. “No, you’re wrong,” he retorted, “an elephant is like a tree.” The third blind man felt the elephant’s trunk and laughed: “You two are mad! The elephant is more like a snake.” The fourth blind man stumbled into the side of the mighty beast: “You’re all wrong,” he chuckled. “An elephant is actually like a wall.”

You get the idea of the story. Each blind man was right in his own way; each had a small grasp on the truth. However, their mistake was assuming they were right and their friends wrong: instead, everybody was right. In the same way, it is sometimes suggested, religions are perhaps like this. Each religion has a small grasp on an aspect of what God is like—and if only they could recognise they only had part of the truth, then there would be peace and tolerance.

But there are several problems with the story. First, it assumes the thing it wants to prove, namely that everybody is talking about the same thing. Retell the story and have each blind man feeling his way around a different animal, and the parable collapses.

But even more tricky than that, consider this. Who is the most arrogant person in the story? It’s not any of the blind men. It’s the person telling the story. By my very telling of the story, I’m claiming that only I can see the whole picture and that everybody else in the story is blind. The irony is astonishing: a story often told to illustrate the arrogance of exclusive religious truth claims turns out to be the utter height of arrogance itself.

The Problem with Words

I think a lot of the confusion in this area that’s led people to suggest the world’s religions are similar has been caused by the fact that people use the same words in different ways. It’s thus assumed that when Muslims talk about “god” and Christians talk about “god”, we mean the same thing by that word.

I lived for six years in Canada and that taught me that words do not always mean the same thing for different people. For example, to my Canadian friends, “pants” means not underwear, but trousers—a fact that caused a lot of confusion. I remember our immigration lawyer saying to us as we entered his office, “Forgive me for not standing up to greet you, but I’m not wearing pants today”—by which we later discovered he meant he was wearing tennis shorts.

Likewise, when Muslims and Christians say they believe in “one god”, we need to stop and listen carefully, not assume “Aha! This means the same thing.” After all, if I say I believe in one British Prime Minister and it’s Keir Starmer, and my friend Sam says he believes in one Prime Minister and it’s Mickey Mouse, we clearly both believe in one Prime Minister, but we differ about their identity.

Or if we spoke to a Marxist and a Capitalist and asked them: “Do you believe in economics?” and both said “Yes”, we’d be mistaken if we said “Marxism and Capitalism are the same” on that basis.

The Bible, the Qur’an, and God

A few years ago I decided to do a piece of research to explore this more deeply and I later wrote a book based on that work. I thought it would be interesting to compare what the Bible and the Qur’an have to say about the nature of God. Sure, both the Christian scriptures and the Muslim scriptures assume there is one God. But what is that God like?

I was very surprised to discover some huge differences. There are four major characteristics of God according to the Bible and those characteristics are either ignored, or outright contradicted by the Qur’an, which has a very different understanding of God.

Let’s explore them briefly one by one.

God is Relational

The first characteristic of God in the Bible is that God is relational. This is the thrust of the whole story of the Bible, from the opening pages to the very last chapter. In the opening chapters of Genesis, we read of how God was to be found, walking and talking in the garden with Adam and Eve. God walks and talks with Abraham (Genesis 17-18), speaks to Moses face to face “as a man speaks with his friend” (Exodus 33:11), and, indeed God speaks with his people throughout the Old Testament. In the New Testament, God steps into history in the person of Jesus. And, at the close of the Bible, we are told that in heaven, the age to come:

The dwelling of God will be with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. (Revelation 21:3-4)

The Bible uses highly relational language to describe God. He is described as a father, as a friend. He is the relational God—and the Bible’s call is for people to be in relationship with him.

For the Qur’an, on the other hand, there is no such relationship to be had with Allah. Allah, the god of the Qur’an, is distant and transcendent—and nowhere does the Qur’an invite its readers to enter into a relationship with him. According to the Qur’an, Allah did not walk and talk in the garden with Adam and Eve. He is not present with his people in heaven. And he did not take on flesh in the person of Jesus. The only “relationship” that exists between humans and Allah according to the Qur’an is that of master and servant—certainly not Father.

Indeed, in the Qur’an, in Sura 112, once described by Muhammad as so significant that reciting it is equivalent to reciting a third of the Qur’an, the Qur’an strongly declares that Allah is not a father and that Allah has no son:

He (Allah) has not begotten, and has not been begotten. (Q. 112:3)

Summarising this crucial difference from the Bible, the influential Muslim philosopher, Shabbir Akhtar, wrote:

Muslims do not see God as their father … Men are servants of a just master; they cannot, in orthodox Islam, typically attain any greater degree of intimacy with their creator.2

God Can Be Known

The second major characteristic of God in the Bible is that God can be known. This flows in some way out of God’s relationality, because it’s only possible to have a relationship with somebody if they are willing to make themselves known.

If a new person moves into the house next door to yours and being a friendly person, you decide you’d like to get to know them. However, it turns out they’re incredibly shy: they work from home, order their groceries online, never come out of their house, keep their curtains drawn and never answer the door—well, any kind of relationship would be impossible because they refuse to make themselves known.

And the same is true of God. According to the Bible, God is a God who makes himself known. From beginning to end, the Bible tells the story of a God who reveals not just his commands but his character, his very self. For example, in Exodus 3, in the story of the burning bush, God speaks personally with Moses, revealing his personal name—Yahweh, “I am”. Ultimately the biblical theme of God revealing himself is seen in the person of Jesus, who tells his disciples in John 14:9 that “anyone who has seen me has seen the Father”.

Again, this is utterly different from how the Qur’an describes Allah, who does not reveal himself in this way or allow himself to be known personally—nowhere does the Qur’an ever invite its readers to know Allah.

Indeed, it’s remarkable how in qur’anic theology, even Muhammad did not have Allah reveal the Qur’an to him personally, but through an intermediary—the angel Gabriel. A huge contrast with the Bible, where time and time again, God speaks with his prophets and his people face to face, such as the powerful encounter that Moses has at the burning bush or on Mt. Sinai.

Listen to Muslim scholar Isma’il al-Furuqi unpack this:

Allah does not reveal Himself to anyone in any way. Allah reveals only his will … Allah does not reveal himself to anyone … that is the great difference between Christianity and Islam.3

God is Love

The third major characteristic of God according to the Bible is that God is a God of love. The Bible is very clear that one of God’s primary characteristics is love. The theme of God’s love is summed up in the amazing verse in 1 John 4:16—“God is love”. Love is not something the God of the Bible does, but something he is. Indeed, Christians love and serve a God who is Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and so at the heart of who God is lies a loving relationship.

When we turn to the Qur’an and its depiction of God, we see something very different. Nowhere are we told that Allah is love—indeed, because he is not triune, it would be impossible for him to be loving unless he first created something to love.

For unlike the Bible, the Qur’an is very reticent about talking of Allah and love. In fact the main Arabic word for love, aḥabba, is used with Allah as the subject of the verb just 42 times and of those occurrences, 23 are negative,4 the Qur’an describing the kind of people Allah does not love. For example:

Allah loves not the unbelievers. (Q. 3:32)

Allah loves not the prodigal. (Q. 6:141)5

The other 19 occurrences are conditional,6 the Qur’an describing the behaviour required to earn Allah’s love:

Surely God loves the doers of good. (Q. 3:148)

God loves those who fight in His way, (drawn up) in lines (for battle) as if they were a solid building. (Q. 61:4)

The Qur’an simply has no conception of Allah offering anything remotely like an unconditional love to humanity. As the Pakistani scholar, Daud Rahbar bluntly put it:

[T]here is not a single verse in the Qur’an that speaks of God’s unconditional love for mankind … [Its verses] do not say that God loves all men.7

God has Suffered

And finally to the fourth characteristic of God according to the Bible, namely that God has suffered.

One of the crucial things about love is that it cannot simply be spoken about; rather it must be demonstrated. Love needs to be shown in action, not just verbalised, not least because a major aspect of genuine love is that it is costly. If you truly love another person, you are willing to give of yourself to help them; and if they are hurting, you will grieve and suffer when they suffer.

And the love of the God of the Bible is demonstrated in what he has done to deal with the sin and shame that separate us from him. The Bible tells us that God grieves for his people, grieves over their sin, rebellion and unfaithfulness. And that ultimately, through Jesus and the cross, God paid the price to deal with our brokenness—as Isaiah 53:4 tells us, God “took up our pain and carried our sorrows”.

This is quite different from the Qur’an’s understanding of God. The god of the Qur’an is not a god who suffers—Allah feels no grief as a result of our sins or pain or suffering. Allah in the Qur’an certainly gets angry at sin; and that anger is expressed in wrath and judgment. But there is no heart response and nothing done by the qur’anic god to deal with the problem of sin. As Muslim theologian, Muhammad-al-Burkawi puts it:

Allah can annihilate the universe if it seems good to Him and recreate it in an instant. He receives neither profit nor loss from whatever happens. If all infidels became believers and all the wicked pious He would gain nothing. And if all believers became infidels it would not cause Him loss.8

Indeed, according to qur’anic theology, everybody must carry the weight of their own sin, hoping that on the day of judgement their good deeds outweigh their bad. As the Qur’an puts it in Surah 17:15:

No bearer of sin can bear the sin of another.9

… although fascinatingly, this hints at the idea that maybe a sinless one could bear another’s sins. In Christianity and in Jesus, whom both Muslims and Christians affirm as sinless, Christians believe that has happened.

The Heart of the Difference

As we have looked at the Bible, the Qur’an, and what Muslim theologians have to say, we have seen that there are some big differences between Islam and Christianity on this most important of questions: what is God like?

As the Australian linguist and qur’anic scholar, Mark Durie, writes:

Once we stray beyond what is implied straightforwardly from the idea of one all-powerful creator God, the Qur’an and the Bible diverge considerably.10

The Bible and the Qur’an have radically different views of the nature, character, and identity of God and those differences make a difference. Trying to ignore or paper over them risks grossly misrepresenting both the Qur’an and the Bible.

Living with Differences

But if there are major differences between the world’s major faiths, doesn’t that have implications for how we relate well together? I think it’s this fear that drives silly stories like the blind men and the elephant: some people assume that if we don’t all believe the same thing, we can’t build communities or societies.

But that’s clearly wrong. It’s surely possible to be friends with people and disagree over things (I’ve had many Muslim friends over the years as I’ve worked in academia). Or on a lighter note, I’ve been married to my wife for 25 years and we still disagree about many things: our marriage is all the stronger for us having strong views that don’t always align.

What we need to do—as individuals and societies—is learn to disagree well. Our schools and workplaces claim to really value diversity: so let’s lean into that and enjoy the fact we don’t all think the same. As the African theologian Lamin Sanneh, one of my favourite writers, put it:

[People are] often confused by the view that difference is threatening, fanatical, harmful, and negative while uniform agreement is sound, inclusive, and enlightened. If that were true, we would all be condemned to sameness, uniformity, and conformity.11

And let’s learn to listen well and to ask good questions. Four questions I’ve long found helpful for discussing and bringing out differences (and similarities) in beliefs are:

• Do you think there’s a God and if so, what is God like?

• What do you think human beings are?

• What’s gone wrong with the world?

• What’s the solution?

And lastly, don’t be afraid to examine the evidence—and to examine your own beliefs critically and be willing to explore those of others. Ultimately that’s why I’m a Christian, despite having studied Islam in depth for 25 years and taught academic philosophy and looked hard at atheism. It’s been a long journey wading through the evidence—but for me, I’m convinced where it points.

After all, as the great philosopher Socrates himself is reported to have said: the unexamined life is not worth living. That’s true of the religious life as much as the secular one.

If you found this piece helpful, thought-provoking, curiosity-sparking or in other ways useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps me keep my writing free for those who can’t afford to make a contribution. Thank you.

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And if you become a paid subscriber (or already are)—and would like a free ebook version of my full book on this subject, Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God? (this essay was based on one chapter), drop me a message in Substack and I’ll send you a copy as a thank you for financially supporting my work.

In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, the detective-ghost-horror-who-dunnit-time-travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic by the British comedy writer Douglas Adams, the eponymous private investigator, Dirk Gently, has had a major falling out with his secretary, Janice, who is preparing to storm out of the office in a rage:

She retrieved her last pot of nail varnish and tried to slam the drawer shut. A fat dictionary sitting upright in the drawer prevented it from closing. She tried to slam the drawer again, without success. She picked up the book, ripped out a clump of pages and replaced it. This time she was able to slam the drawer with ease.1

A few days later, faced with a client to whom some events have occurred that are, quite literally, completely and utterly impossible, Dirk happily remarks:

“Luckily, you have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as ‘impossible’ in my dictionary. In fact,” he added, brandishing the abused book, “everything between ‘herring’ and ‘marmalade’ appears to be missing.”2

If I could remove just one word from the dictionary it wouldn’t be ‘impossible’, nor ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis’ and especially not ‘marmalade’, despite having once lived for six years in Dundee where I became tired of hearing the legend about its invention.3 No, if I could remove just one word from the dictionary, it would be the word ‘tolerance’.

I dislike the word ‘tolerance’, dislike it with a vengeance. Why? Well, quite simply, tolerance has become the virtue of our age, the last virtue standing in fact, as the classical virtues have fallen more quickly than a row of dominos on a massage chair. Prudence, temperance, courage, and justice—apart from the last one, which we’ve redefined to mean using the socially approved hashtags on social media—our culture wouldn’t recognise these if it bumped into them in the street.

But tolerance. Tolerance is everywhere: we must tolerate other people, tolerate those who are different to us, never criticise, never question, never disagree, and certainly never—absolutely never—tell somebody else that we think we’re right and they’re wrong. Tolerance, all hail tolerance.

Well, I’ve had enough. I can no longer (pardon the pun) tolerate tolerance. Why? Well, my first issue with ‘tolerance’ is that it’s a deeply disrespectful word. Think about the kind of things we usually tolerate. We tolerate the cat, when it deposits half a dead mouse on the front door mat and claws the sofa for the third time in a week. When he was small, I would tolerate my son when, acting on his latent artistic tendencies, he would decide to emulate Banksy on the lounge wall using, bless him, a permanent marker he somehow found, even though my wife and I were convinced we’d locked those down with the same kind of security protocols usually reserved for nuclear warheads or goat cheese. In other words, we tolerate things that are misbehaving, things that don’t measure up, things that are a little bit beneath us: animals, young children, politicians.

On the other hand, when you encounter an adult who thinks differently to you, who sees the world in a different way, who (heaven forbid!) disagrees with you, I’d suggest ‘tolerance’ should be your Verb of Last Resort. What about instead listening, talking, or dialoguing with them? In short, treating them as an equal, rather than as your inferior.

But there’s a further problem with ‘tolerance’, in that it’s a ready made license to ignore those who are different to us. Rather than talk to people, engage people, listen to them, we just dismiss them with an offhand, “Oh, that’s just the Muslims …” And whilst we pat ourselves on the back with warm thoughts of how tolerant we are, we are all the while deeply dehumanising people. Sure, we may not have thrown a half-brick at somebody, or said angry things about them on social media: but we have ignored them, airbrushed them out of our circle of concern, and we’ve done it with a sneer of superiority.

Tolerance? None of us want to be tolerated. If you’re still not convinced, I put it to you that you don’t want other people to tolerate you. Rather you want to be listened to. You want to be taken seriously. To be heard. You want other people to consider your views, even if they disagree, to treat you like an adult, to understand you. Nobody just wants to be tolerated.

The Christian basis for treating people as truly human, as loving and listening even to those who are radically different to us, who are even disagreeable or unlikeable, lies at the heart of the gospel. For the good news about Jesus and the cross tells us that God didn’t merely tolerate us. He could have done: he could have looked at the mess we’ve made of our lives, our world—His world, given to us as a good and wonderful gift—God could have looked at what we’ve done, shrugged, tolerated us, and walked away.

But God didn’t step away. Rather, in the person of Jesus, he stepped in. In Jesus, God gave everything for us, even while we were his enemies, even whilst we deserved nothing better than condemnation, let alone toleration. God demonstrated his love for us in that we were still rebels, bullies, and oppressors, Jesus Christ died for us.4

You see, a final problem with tolerance is it’s cheap. Dirt cheap. It costs nothing to look down on people, to sigh with a sneer, or to walk on by and not give people a second glance. Tolerance is cheap. But by contrast, love is expense, love is pricy, love always costs the one who gives it.

I’m incredibly grateful that God didn’t tolerate us but instead he loved us and did so in a way that was costly. And Christians—those who’ve realised that they’ve no grounds to be superior and to look down on others, but need the forgiveness and help that God offers through Jesus—Christians are called to show the same love to others that Jesus showed to them. Especially to those who are difficult, different or disagreeable. As the New Testament, in Ephesians 5:1-2 puts it:

Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children, and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

If you found this piece helpful, thought-provoking, curiosity-sparking or in other ways useful, please consider subscribing. It helps me keep my writing free for those who can’t afford to make a contribution. Thank you.

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I hugely enjoyed filming this six-part documentary about the big questions:

• Is there a God?

• Why is there suffering and pain?

• Has science buried God?

• Which religion is true?

• Is the Bible trustworthy?

• Who was Jesus?

The film crew and I travelled to multiple countries and spoke to experts from a range of backgrounds, from atheism to Islam to Christianity. The result is a series that’s accessible, fast-moving, but also dives deeply into the questions.

Find out more about the series and buy the other episodes (or watch trailers for them) at:

https://burningquestions.ca

I have a naturally mischievous streak and one of the things I occasionally enjoy is gently poking students with the sharpened end of a question to get a reaction. This can easily be done with the aid of a whiteboard and a marker pen. I draw a large circle on the whiteboard and say to the class something like: “This circle represents the entire set of genomes of every living thing on planet Earth. Everything is here, from whales to whelks, ants to antelopes, bacteria to bats, hippopotami to humans.”

Now I ask the class a further question: “Raise your hand if you do not believe in human rights?” Rarely will a hand go up (peer pressure can be a wonderful thing, unless one is addressing the Sociopath Society). “Excellent!” say I, taking my pen and drawing a second, much smaller circle, within the bigger circle. “Now what those of you who believe in human rights are saying is that anybody who lives inside your smaller circle, whose genome is ‘human’, enjoys a special set of rights that inhabitants of the bigger circle do not. Agree?”

Again, rarely will anyone protest.

“Wonderful,” I enthuse, rubbing my hands together in anticipation of what is about to follow. “So here’s the problem. Along comes the white supremacist, armed with a marker pen of his own, and he draws a much tinier circle within your small circle and says, ‘No, only those who are white and European enjoy full rights. Any other races do not.’ See the problem? You have drawn a circle, he has drawn a circle, you have both arbitrarily drawn circles. So tell me: why is your circle acceptable (even laudable, as we give awards to people who defend human rights) but the circle drawn by the racist is not?”

Usually, there is a stunned silence at this point.

“I’m glad you see the problem,” I continue brightly, “after all, even New Atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris, who has opined widely on ethics and human rights, recognises there is a major problem here. Let me quote you what he says.” And then I read this:

The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals—intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on—will equally differentiate between human beings themselves. If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren’t more articulate people more important still? And what about those poor men and women with aphasia? It would seem that we have just excluded them from our moral community.1

Now at this point you may be fretting that I am being unfair on my poor cohort of students, that this is just some philosophical game designed to make them look foolish. Far from it. This is crucially important, because human rights are a fundamental right—upon them stands our entire framework of ethics, our legal system, and international law. If human beings have inherent dignity and inalienable rights, then that means we cannot, for instance, treat people as means rather than ends, nor subject them to mistreatment or abuse, nor discriminate against them on the basis of gender, race, ability, or religion.

If.

That simple two-letter conjunction is crucial. Throughout history, there have been many examples of occasions where attempts have been made to narrow the circle, to exclude certain groups from the community of human rights. For example, in 1857 an African-American slave named Dred Scott sued his owner for his freedom. The case made it to the US Supreme Court who ruled against Scott, the Justices stating that:

The question is simply this: can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen, one of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution?

We think … not, and that they [Africans] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.2

One reads a passage like that 170 years on and winces with embarrassment at how our ancestors behaved. Yet the problem remains: all the Justices did in that ruling was to draw a circle—simply a slightly smaller circle than the one that most of us today, when we talk about “human rights”, would draw. But they are circles nonetheless.

How do we navigate through these exceedingly choppy waters? Well, things are simpler than they seem, in that there are only three choices.

The first choice is to conclude that human rights simply do not exist. We live in a culture that is increasingly scientistic, where that which is “true” is determined by what we can test or prove in the laboratory. On such a view, there is no conceivable experiment of physics, chemistry or biology that could prove human rights—we may know which part of the human genome codes for haemoglobin, but which codes for inherent dignity?

If you cannot quite stomach that degree of reductionism, you could fudge it slightly and conclude that things like rights, ethics, and morals are merely a useful fiction, a trick played on us by evolution. Atheist philosopher Michael Ruse writes:

[C]onsidered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, it [ethics, rights, etc.] is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’, they think they are referring above and beyond themselves … Nevertheless, to a Darwinian evolutionist it can be seen that such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and has no being beyond or without this.3

A moment’s thought reveals this to be highly problematic: on this view, there is nothing actually wrong with murder, rape, or racism—rather our disquiet about them is purely a function of our desire to successfully reproduce and raise young. (There’s also the uncomfortable corollary that if rape or racism could be shown to aid survival and reproduction, presumably they become the ‘right’ thing to do).

That way madness lies. What about the second option? Well, the second route is to acknowledge that human rights exist, but they are inexplicable: they just are. We cannot explain them; one simply has to take them as a given. Perhaps the Human Rights Fairy magically appears, immediately after a baby is born, waves her sparkly wand, and poof! The new infant now has inherent dignity and inalienable rights. This may sound like a caricature, but it is effectively the position that many people in the West have adopted. They believe passionately in the idea of human rights, but have not the foggiest idea how to ground them.

If the first option leads to madness, the second leads to peril. You see, we keenly desire to affirm sentiments such as Thomas Jefferson’s, enshrined in the US Constitution—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”—but we have no basis for them whatsoever. We have become, as C. S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man, “men without chests”, unable to connect our high ideals with our passions and instincts.4

Why is this perilous? For this reason: if human rights have no foundation, then it makes it all the easier for governments (as in the Dred Scott decision), majorities, experts, or specialists to begin determining who does and who does not have rights and what those rights are. But how do they choose and what criteria do they apply? Happiness (but whose?) Preservation of the species? (But why should humanity be preserved?) Posterity? (But who knows what future generations will make of us). This route seems to lead directly to the gulag and the concentration camp.

I said there were three options. To dismiss human rights as a fiction (useful or not), to see them as real but unexplainable—so what is the third? The third option is to consider where those who first articulated the idea of human rights grounded them.

One of the earliest thinkers to speak of rights was the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest, Francisco Suarez, whose 1610 essay On the Laws argued that human beings have rights because they have been endowed with them by their Creator, as the Bible makes clear time and again. If human beings are God’s special creation, if they are not mere collections of atoms, lumbering biological robots blindly following their DNA’s instructions to reproduce, then that gives an excellent grounding for human rights. Suarez’s essay influenced John Locke, who influenced Thomas Jefferson, who built this idea right into the heart of the US Constitution.5

And so, to return to my class of students, I leave them with this thought. If you wish to have human rights, if you want to be able to say that racism, or sexism, or any other injustice is wrong, you need to bring God back into the discussion. Don’t take my word for it—read atheist Friedrich Nietzsche, who correctly observed:

If you abandon the Christian faith, at the same time you are pulling the right to Christian morality out from under your feet. This morality is very far from self-evident: this point needs highlighting time and again … Christianity is a system, a synoptic and complete view of things. If you break off one of its principal concepts, the belief in God, then you shatter the whole thing: you have nothing necessary left between your fingers.6

How then do we hold onto human rights in the face of those who would deny them, governments who would restrict them, or experts who would redefine them away, abolishing humankind in the process? Only by rooting them firmly in the image of God in which each one of us is made.7 As G. K. Chesterton once remarked, human beings are equal in the way that pennies are all alike: we may all be different (some pennies are bright, others are dull, some are old, some are new) but all are equally valuable because and only because each bears the image of the King.8

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About a year ago, our family had the incredible opportunity of a sabbatical in the USA and Canada. Our kids were born in Toronto but we had returned to the motherland when they were quite small, so they had no memory of North America. This, my wife and I felt, was a gap in their education: it was time to introduce them to the National Parks, to amazing museums, and to meals so big they have their own postal code.

Among the many cultural highlights of our ten-week sojourn was a visit to Amish Country. I’d described to my kids the wonder of queuing in a drive-thru line behind a horse and buggy, but they’d assumed that was about as factual as my telling them that Tim Horton was a famous Canadian prime minister. So we loaded up the rental car (a vehicle so big that we lost my son for an hour down the back of the rear seat) and headed for the Amish Paradise of Lancaster County.

It was a fascinating day, probably the nearest thing to a “cross-cultural” experience my kids have ever had, and the guide at the Amish House museum captured their imaginations as she described how remarkably different Amish life is. I was also intrigued by some of the statistics: such as if the Amish population continues to double every twenty years (as it has been doing for the past few decades) they are eventually going to comprise a very sizeable chunk of the USA.1

I also confess to coming away very challenged. What had begun as a fun family day trip ended up raising many questions. For whilst it is easy to poke fun at the Amish—look at their funny habits, their dress code, their language, their three-hour-long, bottom-numbing church services—what if poking fun is lazy? It’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel after having first stapled the fish to the sides of the barrel—the weird stuff is just too easy for us cool, culture-surfing contemporary evangelicals to laugh at. Don’t the Amish know that church isn’t church without a seeker-friendly wrapping, youth groups built on a foundation of pizza, and a sound system to make your ears bleed? Surely the Amish are utterly irrelevant, completely out-of-step with culture, and … well a bit cringe?

But what if that gut reaction is less considered reflection and more the result of the fact we’ve spent a good few decades in parts of the modern church accommodating ourselves a bit too neatly to the culture? After all, if we sand off our distinctives and blend in, maybe people will like us, the media won’t say nasty things about us, and it’ll all be a bit easier. Sure, Jesus said “take up your cross”, but does it matter if the cross is padded a bit, or even an inflatable one, filled with helium?

In case you think I’m throwing stones at others here, I wrote this piece partly to ask these questions of myself. I was struck by the fact that the Amish took their faith seriously, their culture seriously, discipleship seriously, and above all, they took community seriously. That last one really hit me: in my 30 years of working partly in outreach to Muslims, I have found that converts to Christianity from Islam often struggle with the cup-of-tea-after-the-service-then-goodbye-for-a-week approach to Christian community that sometimes characterises us.

I came away from Lancaster County not with a desire to buy a black hat and trade in the Volvo estate for a buggy; but I did come away wondering what it means to live my faith a bit more deeply, to swim harder against the cultural flow, to do community better, to contribute to building a church that goes deep as well as wide.

So what’s the key to the deep community that the Amish have built? In his book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth argues that humans are designed to be deeply connected to what he calls the four Ps: people, place, prayer, and the past. However, the modern world has done its best to erode those and replace them with the four Ss: science, sex, self, and the screen.2 As a result, we are a rootless, restless people.

But what links the four Ps—that sense of belonging to a community of people, to a place, to a faith, and to a story? One answer is time: those things require an investment not of money nor of our skills so much as our time. Conversely our modern world says our time and attention should be fragmented, chopped and diced and, ideally, monetised. This is why technology, especially modern digital technology and the distraction engines it has built, has been so corrosive for community.

Hence why I found the Amish so challenging, because I was deeply impressed by their approach to technology. Contrary to popular myth, the Amish don’t reject technology; rather they think very carefully about what technologies to use and, when they adopt one, about how they use it. For example, they have telephones—just not in the house. They use electricity, but have chosen not to be on the grid and instead make use of solar power. Other technologies, especially those that have pride and narcissism at their centre (hello, social media, we’re looking at you), they reject outright.

Maybe the lesson from our Amish cousins is that when it comes to any technology, what matters are the questions you ask before you unthinkingly adopt it. Christians of all people should know that tools and technologies often come with a value system built into them. As the social critic Neil Postman wrote:

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.3

So here are three questions I have been pondering, three questions I think I saw the Amish asking, that can at least cause us to slow down and reflect:

1. What does this technology add: what are the pluses, the bonuses, the wins?

2. What does this technology take away: what are the minuses, the losses, the costs?

3. How does this technology affect our relationships, our community?

That last question is the real zinger, isn’t it? Christians believe that our primary calling, what it means to be people made in the image of God, is that we are called to do two things: to love God and to love our neighbour. And we are nothing if not naïve if we are unwilling to admit that some of the technologies we have allowed into our lives may have given us lots of wins (all the world’s knowledge a click away) but the costs have also been heavy: distraction, busyness, and a permanent crick-in-the-neck from staring into the black mirror of our screens.

And mirror is the key word. Mirrors offer nothing new, but instead just reflect ourselves back at us and, like Narcissus of Greek legend, before we know it, we’re transfixed, rooted to the spot, yet at the same time root-less, because our mirrors have taken our eyes from God and from those around us.

But the underlying problem is not the technology, but rather a problem that C. S. Lewis identified years ago when he wrote:

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.4

Which is why some of the answers you hear to the challenges of technology, whether “delete all your social media accounts immediately” or “look forward to when humanity merges with AI” are too simplistic. When it comes to technology, we’re not called to become monks nor, heaven forbid, to become machines. But we are called to remember what humans were designed to be, to recall (if you want a posh word) our telos. If a technology helps us to love God and love others, then embrace it to that extent; if it doesn’t, then let it go, however costly that may be.

If the wilder predictions of the growth rate of the Amish turn out to be right, North America (and in time, the West as a whole) faces a fascinating future: two very different communities dominating the landscape, one that has become totally enthralled by technology—and remember that ‘thrall’ means to be in the power of something—and another community that has resisted the grasping claws of the Machine and laid down roots, built a thicker and deeper culture.

Perhaps the choice does not need to be quite that binary, but if the future is going to be anything other than technological tribalism, it is going to require Christians to think and think much harder about technology; to be willing to be truly counter-cultural; to build communities that aren’t just a glorified WhatsApp group; and to model, with blood, sweat, tears, and effort, what it means to be Church, not just show up at one.

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Later this year, I am teaming up with my friend and fellow author Michael Ots to write a new book together. With a working title of 60 Questions (we said ‘working title’ 😂), it will feature dozens of short chapters, each tackling a common question about faith, spirituality, God, the Bible, Jesus and more. Each chapter will also have a QR code linking to a video where we dig into the question a bit deeper, too.

But we need your help!

What questions should we tackle? What are the burning questions that you or your friends have that you think we should address?

If you’re willing to take a couple of minutes to submit a question (or more than one if you like) here:

As a thank you, we’ll enter you into a prize draw featuring £200 worth of prizes ranging from book tokens to signed copies of our previous books. Plus, everyone who submits a question will get a special discount on the book once it releases in summer 2027

Thanks for your help!

Andy and Michael

PS: While you’re here, do have a look around the blog and why not consider a free subscription so you get new essays/resources (one a week) sent to you …

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Hugely enjoyed being on Premier Unbelievable? recently to dialogue with Professor Nigel Crook on "AI and the Future of Humanity". Despite the slightly silly title on the website, it wasn’t “Andy vs. Nigel”, as we're both committed Christians. Instead, it was a wide-ranging dialogue on the questions caused as AI systems grow more capable.

Are we heading towards unprecedented flourishing or an age of deepening dependence and control? Can machines genuinely understand, create, or even “think”, and does that matter morally?

Should advanced AI ever be granted rights, and who is accountable when algorithms cause harm? What happens to work, education, relationships and truth in a world of synthetic media and accelerating automation? And where, if anywhere, do faith, meaning, and human uniqueness fit in a rapidly mechanised future?

And in all of this: are there clues to the gospel story in the way that human beings are so curious and so inventive?

Whether it’s the art and photography we put on our walls or our computer desktops, or the natural landscapes that draw us to climb hills or gaze from viewpoints, humans are fascinated by beauty. But have you ever wondered why? Is the atheist Richard Dawkins correct that experiences like beauty are “Darwinian misfirings”, a side effect of our genes that plays tricks on us? Or is beauty a clue that there is something much more than just survival and reproduction to the experience of being human?

For more on these kind of wondering questions, check out …

My essay, Fire on the Mountain.

Some of the chapters in the book I co-wrote, Have You Ever Wondered?

The path through the trees was narrow and overgrown, meandering its way through birch, oak and elm, climbing gently as it wound its way up from the valley. A few minutes walking brought me to the ancient moss-laden wall that surrounded the forest, from which a wooden gate led out on the hillside. From there the track quickly steepened as it wound sinuously up toward the mountaintop. I paused every so often to catch my breath, turning to watch the cloud shadows chase one another across the flanks of the hills on the far side of the valley.

Onwards and upwards I climbed, as the first hints of dusk began to take hold and the shadows grew longer. I gained the summit ridge just as the westering sun was beginning to sink behind a bank of clouds hanging over the distant Langdale Pikes, among the most well known of Lakeland’s hills and loved by the poets, by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.1

Suddenly, as the sun dropped completely behind the cloudbank, the whole sky turned the colour of burnished gold and the clouds themselves lit up as if on fire, a maelstrom of red, orange and ochre, with the occasional flash of silver. At that moment, through a gap in the clouds poured a great ray of sunshine, streaming into the valley below like a searchlight and throwing into stark relief the lines of fields, lanes and hedgerows.

All of this took place in utter silence: not a breath of wind, nor the cry of a bird, nor the plaintive bleat of a sheep. For a moment, it seemed as if the whole of creation had paused and taken a deep breath. I watched, transfixed, hearing just my heartbeat in my own ears from the exertion of the climb. The lightshow continued as colours mixed and mingled and shifted. I was awestruck with wonder, unsure what the right reaction was before such beauty; one wanted to cry, to dance, to shout for joy. I was reminded of Mark Twain’s line:

The summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips.2

For many of us, our instinctive reaction when faced with such beauty is to try to capture it on camera: perhaps we can somehow bottle the experience, pin it down, capture it in megapixels. But digital renderings are flat, lifeless things, capturing the colour, but not the sounds, smells, textures, emotions — the being-there-ness, what philosophers call qualia.

Reflecting on our reaction to beauty, two philosophies present themselves. The first is naturalism, the worldview of many of my atheist friends, which says that only material things exist: atoms, particles, stuff. There is no soul, no spirit, no transcendent reality and certainly no God. However, for those of us truly love the outdoors, especially the wild places, naturalism patently fails; for it would claim that all I saw from the mountaintop that evening were atoms and photons whilst my experience — well, that was only the motion of chemicals in my brain. Anthony Esolen playfully parodies this philosophy:

[For the philosophical naturalist] it is best to keep the word “only” ready in the arsenal at all times. The flame of the sky at sunset is “only” the part of spectrum that penetrates the atmosphere at that angle … it is “only” something or other material that scientists know about … or at least somebody knows all them in some Important Places. Beauty is “only” a neurological tic, or a personal opinion.3

Yet this does not come close, not even remotely, to my actual experience on the mountain that evening. Reminiscent of the “flat” digital photograph, naturalism represents a fumbling attempt to simplify and reduce an experience that is rich, deep, and three-dimensional, to a caricature. It is not that the naturalistic explanation is entirely false, it is simply that it falls considerably short, just as describing Paradise Lost as just “some words”, Chartres Cathedral as “a building”, or love an “emotion” equally does not do justice to their entire reality.

Beauty is one of many such experiences that strips away our pretensions, exposes the frailties of our philosophy and points us beyond ourselves. The instinctive reaction to natural beauty is that it causes us to yearn, to desire, to sing with joy. As Wordsworth, who loved the English Lake District with a passion wrote:

“My heart leaps up when I behold … the sky”.4

But there’s more. I sensed that evening as I watched the fiery sunset a feeling almost akin to homesickness, to a desire for something or somewhere more beautiful, more radiant, more real. Whereas naturalism struggles to begin to even to describe such emotions and the experience of seeing real beauty, a second philosophy, the Christian worldview, offers a more compelling explanation. Consider these words of the Bible:

The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Psalm 19:1

Why do we respond the way we do to beauty? Maybe because it points beyond itself to something else, to the God who is the very source of all wonder, all goodness, all beauty, the God who is creator and artist and has painted and sculpted in creation a myriad masterpieces. This understanding of beauty also helps explain that sense of “homesickness” I described; beauty reminds us, tells us, shouts at us that we are made for something more than just this world. Indeed as the Bible put it elsewhere:

God has made everything beautiful in its time; He has also set eternity in the hearts of humankind.
Ecclesiastes 3:11

Atheist and existentialist Albert Camus, wrestling with these ideas, wrote: “Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”5 Tragically, I think that on naturalism this holds true, because beauty points beyond itself and sets the heart yearning for something that molecules, atoms and particles alone can never ultimately satisfy.

Plato famously once said that “wonder is the beginning of philosophy” and whilst that is true, it begs a question: where is its end? The answer, if we are to live authentically, is only in the fulfilment of wonder in the God who is the source of all beauty. Once again, I think it is often the poets who see this most clearly. As Dante wrote, in the third and final canticle of his epic poem, The Divine Comedy:

The glory of the One who moves all things
penetrates the universe with light,
more radiant in one part and elsewhere less:
I have been in that heaven He makes most bright
and seen things neither mind can hold nor tongue
utter, when one descends from such great height;
But as we near the One for whom we long,
our intellects so plunge into the deep,
memory cannot follow where we go.
Nevertheless what small part I can keep
of that holy kingdom treasured in my heart
will now become the matter of my song.6

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There are a growing number of public intellectuals who hold a curious position: that Christianity is good for society even though they don’t believe it’s actually true.

Scarcely a week goes by without some celebrity, politician, or influencer explaining how important Christianity is as a foundation for all the things we care most about as society. For example, Douglas Murray — a well-known journalist and committed atheist — now describes himself as a “Christian atheist.” Douglas doesn’t believe in God, but he thinks Christianity has been phenomenally important in shaping the things we hold dear in the West, particularly human rights. He’s not alone in this: for amazingly even the enfant terrible of the New Atheism movement, Richard Dawkins himself, in an Easter interview with LBC radio admitted:

I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos … I would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So I count myself a cultural Christian.1

In all of this what you won’t find is anything much about Jesus, the Bible, or faith in God. But here’s the question lurking below the surface like a piranha in a jacuzzi: is it possible to enjoy the public goods that Christianity offers without actually believing its core claims to be true?

All this reminds me of a dream …

I once dreamt that I was strolling along a beach on a palm-fringed desert island. Suddenly my attention was drawn to a strange sound and looking up, I spied a large dodo, perched on a branch some 50 feet above the ground. It appeared to be wearing a hard hat and holding a chainsaw, which it was industriously applying to its branch.

“What are you doing?” I shouted up.

“Don’t mind me,” called back the dodo, stopping its work for a moment, “I’m just doing a spot of light pruning”. It scratched itself with a clawed foot, then began to try to restart the chainsaw — not an easy task when you don’t have opposable thumbs. Or indeed hands.

“I couldn’t help but notice,” I remarked, doing my best to project nonchalance, “that you appear to be — how can I put this — at risk of sawing through the branch you’re sitting on.”

“Kākāpō!” swore the dodo, “What is it with you humans, always thinking you know best. Look, I’m a bird. I’ve got wings, mate.”

“You’re a dodo,” I pointed out patiently. “Famous for being flightless. And also for being extinct, although apparently still alive and well in dreams.”

“I’ve got a hard hat,” the dodo huffed. “There’s nothing you can teach me about health and safety.”

“It’s a 50 foot drop!”

“Oh you’re so negative,” the dodo spluttered and, before I could say another word, it started up the chainsaw again and neatly sawed through its branch. There was a brief flurry of feathers, a minor explosion of avian curses, and then silence.

~+~

Whilst that may just have been a dream, it’s not a million miles removed from this whole cultural Christianity business. There really is something quite genuinely weird — but more than that, something almost philosophically self-destructive — about claiming that you enjoy the outcomes of Christianity while simultaneously insisting that the story behind it is nonsense. No wonder that the New Atheism has largely gone the way of the dodo.

This is not just theoretical; there’s a personal cost to it too: for trying to appreciate everything that comes from Christianity while insisting its fundamental claims are false is a painful and contradictory way to live. Indeed, the writer George Orwell had a word for this kind of thing in his classic novel 1984: doublethink, which describes the attempt to hold two entirely contradictory ideas in your mind whilst doing your best not to notice the tension between them.

But finally and most importantly, those goods that my atheist friends are rediscovering in Christianity aren’t accidental. Human rights and human dignity don’t randomly emerge from Christian culture. Rather they flow directly and deliberately from the Christian conviction that human beings are not mere accidents of chemistry and biology, but are made in the image of God and created with a value that God demonstrated when he stepped into history in the person of Jesus and gave his life for us. Take away that foundation and however uncomfortable it may make you, you’re left with the conclusion that human beings have no intrinsic value at all — that we really are just accidents of time, chance, and natural selection. You can’t have the goods without the fundamental beliefs on which they rest.

Christianity is not simply a personal moral code; or some nice hymns and carols; or a way of keeping the cultural barbarians from storming the gates; or the political equivalent of an IKEA manual, offering some illustrated steps enabling you to self-assemble a friendly liberal society from some pre-cut pieces. In fact Christianity is not good advice at all but good news — indeed, the very word ‘gospel’, chosen by the first Christians two thousand years ago to describe the life, death and resurrection of Jesus means just that: ‘good news’. And you cannot separate the ‘good’ part from the ‘news’ part.

So if you’re someone who values human rights, dignity, and justice but you’ve not seriously engaged with the Christian claims behind them then I’d encourage you to do so. Read someone like C.S. Lewis, particularly his classic The Abolition of Man. Engage with thinkers who have wrestled seriously with these questions. Because the wonderful thing about Christianity is that Jesus doesn’t ask you to leave your brain at the door. He said to love the Lord your God with your heart, your mind, and your soul. You don’t have to live in dissonance. You can have those wonderful public goods and embrace, with intellectual coherence and rational confidence, the person of Jesus who stands behind them.

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Like millions of people, I spent much of the first ten days of April glued to a screen, watching the various NASA live streams of the Artemis II mission. As a science nerd who was born in 1972—the year human beings last walked on the Moon—watching humanity’s latest push for the stars streamed in HD was almost too exciting for words.

But not everybody was impressed. I don’t just mean the Flat Earth Society (whose horizons are naturally somewhat limited) but also journalist Zoe Williams, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper, who grumbled:

We’re wasting all this energy, time, technology and thought going somewhere where there’s nothing alive.1

Aside from the fact that, taken to extremes, Zoe’s reductionism would rule out investing in art galleries and libraries, studying archaeology, or visiting Bognor Regis in February, it also ignores the fact that exploring extreme places sfeems to be a crucial part of being human.

I’ve long been fascinated by the epic periods of polar and Himalayan adventure and I have metres of shelves of books detailing the exploits of Scott and Amundsen as they sought to conquer the poles (my wife’s great-great-grandfather certified Amundsen’s ship, The Fram), or the incredibly exciting attempts to climb Everest in the 1920s, a struggle in which the mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine lost their lives. It was Mallory who, in an interview with The New York Times, when asked “Why climb Everest?”, famously replied:

Because it’s there.2

I think Mallory was onto something. As human beings we have this drive, this urge to explore that we simply cannot ignore. Be it the top of the highest mountain, the bottom of the deepest ocean trench, or the dark side of the Moon—or even further beyond, whether it’s colonising Mars or sending probes beyond the solar system—there is something unique to our species that is wired to explore.

It seems that the Bible may have been onto something when the writer of Ecclesiastes penned these words:

God has set eternity in the human heart.3

This urge to explore is tough to explain in purely materialist terms. If humanity’s sole purpose is simply the same as every other species, mere survival and reproduction, then it’s hard to see what dying on Everest, or risking one’s life going to the Moon does for the overall fitness of the human race. On a Zoe Williams view of the world, far better to cancel NASA’s budget and use the money to solve the population crash: perhaps incentivise things by offering a free Lego model rocket as a gift for any family who pop out three or more kids.

But aside from what drives our need to explore, to enquire, to boldly go where nobody has gone before,4 as I watched the live feeds of the Artemis II mission this all raised another question: the sheer size of the universe. To quote science-fiction comedy writer Douglas Adams:

Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.5

When astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen splashed down into the Pacific Ocean on 10 April, they had flown 694,481 miles and set a new record for the furthest distance from Earth any human had ever been—some 252,757 miles away from home. That is indeed a very long way (considerably further than a trip to the chemist’s) but even that distance is a mere packet of mixed nuts compared to space. The Artemis II astronauts had travelled just 0.18% of the distance from the Earth to Mars and at the speed they flew, if they’d decided to take in a visit to Alpha Centauri (our nearest neighbouring star system) whilst they were at it, that would have taken them 120,000 years.

Space is really big. And by contrast, the Earth is really, really small, just a “tiny pea” as Neil Armstrong described it when he saw it from the Moon on the Apollo 11 mission. So what does that say about humanity and our place in the universe? After all, in purely physical terms, we are just a rounding error.

Consider some geeky maths for a moment. It is generally accepted that the known universe contains 1 × 10⁸⁰ atoms. Meanwhile, the average human being contains 7 × 10²⁷ atoms and there are approximately 8 billion humans alive today (8 × 10⁹). Multiply those two numbers together and we get the total number of atoms in all humans: roughly 5.6 × 10³⁷. That means that the percentage of all atoms that are currently busying themselves forming part of a human being is 5.6 × 10⁻⁴¹%. That makes us (in material terms) laughably insignificant.

So is humanity utterly and entirely cosmically pointless? On a purely material view of the universe, it’s hard to answer anything other than “yes” to that question. We can orbit around the Moon until we’re dizzy, we can stand on Everest on our heads, write a million novels, compose a myriad symphonies, discover the cure for cancer, the common cold, and folk music appreciation, but we still can’t avoid the resounding thud of the words as they spell out our doom: Humans. Don’t. Matter.

There’s no escape.

If we are only matter we don’t matter.

But what if we’re not just matter?

If the Christian story is true, then not merely does that explain where our urge to explore comes from, but it also tells us that we are not just an infinitesimal bit of cosmic dust in a cosmos that hasn’t even noticed we exist, but we are fashioned by the same creator God who flung the stars into space. A God who, when he made us, didn’t merely create us as one more life form, but breathed his Spirit into us and made us in his image.6 And from that image of God in us comes the unique human desire to learn, to create, and to explore.

If there is a designer behind the universe, then its sheer size isn’t a problem, because our value doesn’t come from our size relative to the cosmos, but from the purpose behind that cosmos.

A few years ago I had the thrill of doing a tour of Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. I was staying with a friend whose wife was, literally, a rocket scientist and was working on the flight control software for the Orion spacecraft that flew atop the Artemis rocket. So I got to see not just the public areas at JSC, but some really neat behind-the-scenes stuff too.

By far the coolest thing I saw was a Saturn V rocket. This was the machine that carried the Apollo space vehicles, most famously Apollo 11, in which Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins flew to the Moon in July 1969. To describe the rocket as huge would be an understatement; a bit like saying “a blue whale is larger than a duck”. It’s technically correct, but lacks a certain something.

The Saturn V was a gigantic machine. Laid out on its side in a huge shed it stretched 363 feet from end to end, each exhaust nozzle alone stood 12 feet high (that’s over twice my height). All that engineering, all that technology, all the billions of dollars and years of human brilliance that had gone into making it were plain to see. And all for what? For three tiny little people, sitting in the Command Module at the top of the rocket.

A sceptic might look at all this and say, “Nah, that can’t be right; humans can’t be important in this mission. After all, the Saturn V weighed 6.2 million pounds and the three humans were just 0.01% of that mass. No, I’m not buying it”. But of course, the sceptic would have missed something crucial: the importance of the human beings in a Saturn V launch wasn’t the fraction they made up of the whole—by that measure, they were indeed tiny. But that smallness didn’t stop Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins being the whole point of the adventure: the “one giant step for humanity” the whole endeavour represented.

Human beings are indeed, compared to the immensity of the universe, infinitesimally small. And we do indeed live on a pale blue dot. If atheism is true, then that’s the beginning, middle, and end of the story. We matter not one bit and one day, that pale blue dot will be swallowed by our Sun when it eventually dies, expands into a red giant, and engulfs the entire solar system in a fiery maelstrom of destruction.

If that’s what you believe we are destined for, then it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the only way to live here and now is either sheer nihilism or utter denial: putting our fingers in our ears and refusing to listen to the raging silence of the void.

But if Christianity is true … well then, God has set eternity in the hearts of men and women, not just for now, but forever, as he has destined us not just for the Moon, not for Mars, not even for the galaxy, but for something even greater still.

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Well, this is a little awkward. For years I said “I’ll never end up on Substack”, looked down my nose (not easy when you’re 5’8”) at those who jumped to the platform whilst muttering: “They’ll never drag WordPress out of my cold, dead hands”. And now here I am. On Substack. Hands empty and WordPress disappearing in the rear view mirror, flattened like so much digital roadkill on the super-information highway.

Here’s the thing: I loved WordPress. I really did. But then that love affair turned out to be a bit like the way I loved our elderly Volvo Estate. Sure, it had lots of memories, was fun to tinker with, and had 300,000 miles on the clock … but suddenly you realise you’re spending all your time tinkering and not actually getting anywhere.

Likewise with WordPress. Too often I’d sit down to write, then the Ghosts of Procrastination Present and Future would turn up and whisper “Hey, there’s a plugin or script that could save you a whole 10 seconds of time” and seven hours (and as many coffees) later, I’d realise I hadn’t written a single word.

After one epic late night “let’s change the template again” session, I finally realised that WordPress had become less a blogging platform and more a very sophisticated displacement mechanism. It was time for it to follow MySpace (that ages me, doesn’t it?) to the digital breaker’s yard.

So this is the new home for andybannister.net and all my writing that doesn’t fit into the work I do at Solas (do check them out by the way). Here you’ll find essays, ideas, reflections on faith and culture, writing and thought experiments, and maybe even early versions of material that will make it into a book in due course.

So, have a look around — I hope you’ll find things that will make you think and laugh, that will inspire your curiosity, make you want to read more, discuss, or argue back. If you enjoy reading the stuff here half as much as I enjoy writing it, I’ll have had twice as much fun as you :-)

Oh, and there’s some more good news.

Everything I write here is free and always will be. I want people to discover the wonder of Jesus and the Christian faith and to grow deeper in that faith. So insisting on fees or putting up a paywall seems wrong.

However, writers do need to eat. (Or at least we need coffee1). And my children occasionally say things like: “Dad, I’ve outgrown my shoes again”.2 So I do ask that if you value my writing and if you can afford to do, would you possibly consider taking out a paid subscription? This helps enable me to keep on writing, supports those who can’t afford to pay, and keeps everything on the site accessible to all.

Subscribe now

Subscribe for free and you’ll get every new piece straight to your inbox. But paid subscribers also get access to the comments and conversation with other readers, plus the warm, glowing feeling of knowing you’re keeping a writer fed and his children in shoes, Lego, and Tim Tams.3 So if all this sounds like something you’d enjoy, hit subscribe and pull up a chair.

Once again, a warm welcome to the new Substack version of andybannister.net. I hope I’ll see you here often.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has made huge leaps forward, not just in understanding human language, but also in recognising images. One of the ways it does this is by learning patterns. For example, when an AI reads billions of sentences, it starts to notice which words often appear together, which ones behave similarly, and how they tend to relate. Over time, it builds an internal “map” of language—almost like a mental dictionary—where similar words cluster near each other. Words like cat and dog, or London and Paris, naturally group together because they appear in similar contexts. This all happens beneath the surface, using complex maths, but the result is a surprisingly accurate sense of meaning.1

What no one expected was what happened next: and it turns out the implications go far beyond artificial intelligence.

For once an AI language model is trained, this vector space isn’t random noise but has remarkable geometry. For example, researchers have found that this space has linear subspaces corresponding to grammar (e.g. verb tense, gender, number); curved manifolds representing broader semantic fields like animals, colours, and emotions; and clusters and gradients that can be navigated smoothly; you can interpolate between happy and sad and get meaningful intermediate points.

Now here’s where things get strange, and deeply intriguing.

If you take a different AI—one that hasn’t read a single word, but has only been trained to look at millions of untagged pictures—it also builds an internal map. It learns to recognise patterns in images: shapes, colours, textures, and eventually objects. Without being told what anything is, it notices that certain kinds of images are similar: for example, all the different pictures of trees, or bicycles, or faces. That part isn’t too surprising either. But what happens next is surprising: when researchers compare the language map (built from words) and the image map (built from pictures), they find something remarkable. The two maps (trained completely separately) often line up. The “idea” of a dog in the image-trained AI ends up in roughly the same part of the conceptual map as “dog” in the language-trained AI.2

This matters because it’s unexpected and it’s potentially pointing to something deeper than just clever programming. For if language were just a human invention, a set of made-up labels we slap onto the world, then there’s no reason to think that an image-trained AI would carve up reality in the same way. The two systems could have ended up with very different mental maps. But instead, they agree. Even systems with no human-style consciousness, no biology, and no shared training, seem to be converging on the same structures. That suggests that meaning isn’t just something we impose, but rather it’s something that’s already there, waiting to be discovered—whether by people, or by machines.

Even more surprising is how this meaning is structured. These AI maps use mathematics, specifically vector spaces, which are like huge coordinate systems. Every word or image becomes a point in this multi-dimensional space,3 and the AI can measure how close they are, or even do maths on the concepts. To take one famous example: take an AI’s vector concept of king, subtract man, then add woman and it lands astonishingly close to queen. That’s not just a gimmick but reveals that words and ideas behave like objects in space, and that meaning has a kind of geometry to it. It’s a bit like discovering you can solve a riddle using Pythagoras’ Theorem: it shouldn’t work, but it does. It’s as if meaning somehow follows invisible mathematical laws.

So here is the question. Why should meaning—something so human, so slippery and abstract—be something we can map with maths? Why should analogies, concepts, and categories follow the rules of geometry? This is the kind of thing that should make us pause. The universe, it seems, is not just material but it’s intelligible. It’s not just stuff, it’s structured. And even machines, deep learning algorithms with no soul and no self-awareness, can discover that structure.

So What’s Going On?

How do we explain this? Well, there are a few options on the table.

Constructivism says that meaning is just something humans made up. But if that were true, then different cultures and especially different modalities (language vs. images) and different architectures (e.g. modern transformer based LLMs vs. older embedding systems) should organise meaning in totally different ways. Yet we find remarkable convergence between text-trained and image-trained systems. That undermines the idea that meaning is purely invented. Furthermore, even when trained on entirely different human languages, these systems’ semantic maps can be aligned with a simple mathematical rotation, which would suggest that meaning’s geometry transcends culture.

Another option could be evolutionary naturalism, which might suggest that our brains evolved to carve up reality in useful ways, and that language reflects those categories. But that doesn’t explain why machines, with no evolutionary history, trained in totally different ways, also arrive at the same categories. Evolution can’t explain the shared geometry of entirely non-biological systems. If evolution explains why humans carve up reality this way, it does not explain why machines (with no ancestors and no instincts) do likewise. It seems that meaning is something external to us.

At this point, some secular thinkers leap for emergence as their last redoubt. This is the idea that meaning just “emerges” when you have enough complexity. To be fair, emergence is a serious idea: complexity does sometimes produce genuinely novel properties that couldn’t be predicted from the parts alone. But in this case, it’s a conjuring trick with semantics, not an explanation. Why should complex systems just happen to discover shared conceptual structure? That just raises the deeper question: why does meaning emerge at all? And why is it mathematical?

If all materialistic options have failed at this point, what about Platonism? This ancient philosophy might say these concepts are eternal abstract truths, that “dog-ness” or “table-ness” or “beauty” live in some transcendent realm of forms. But Platonism doesn’t explain where those forms come from, or why we (or machines!) should be able to access them. Perhaps the best place to locate such universals forms is in some kind of universal Mind. This was the very move that Augustine made when he located the Platonic forms in the mind of God.

Which leads us nicely to Theism. If there is a Creator who designed both the universe and human minds, then it makes sense that the world is filled w[ith discoverable structure and that our minds (and even our machines) can tap into it. Christians believe that the universe was made through the Logos, the eternal Word of God (see John 1:1). In Greek philosophy, Logos meant not just ‘word’ but rational principle: the intelligible structure woven into the fabric of reality. This is why Augustine located the Platonic forms in the mind of God: universal meaning needs a universal Mind to ground it. If that is true, then the convergence we see in these AI systems isn’t a coincidence or a curiosity. It is exactly what we should expect in a universe created by a rational, personal God: a universe where meaning isn’t invented but discovered, whether by a poet, a philosopher, or a deep learning algorithm.

THE MIND BEHIND THE MEANING

It has long been observed that there is a mathematical structure underpinning physics, as the Hungarian theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner pointed out in a famous essay.4 And many have argued that this is a powerful argument for God. For if numbers and maths are just human inventions, why should reality pay any heed to them? But now AIs and deep learning algorithms are discovering a similar mathematical structure underpinning language and meaning, epistemology and truth, the very conceptual way that nature is to be understood.

Either we are witnessing a cosmic coincidence of impossible precision—or mathematics is, once again, revealing that the universe has a Mind behind it. There’s something ironic, or perhaps beautiful, in all this: for as we have tried to teach machines to understand the written word, they have accidentally stumbled across the Divine Word.

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I can still remember the palpable sense of excitement as we sat in the packed cinema, the house lights dimmed, and the title card for The Fellowship of the Ring appeared on the screen. A cheer arose from the wildly enthusiastic audience (who had queued for several hours to get into this first screening) as the words of Galadriel (played by Cate Blanchett) solemnly intoned: “The world has changed. I see it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air.”1 This year is the 25th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring movie first appearing on our screens and with Amazon’s ongoing Rings of Power series, Middle Earth has lost none of its appeal.

I am a massive Tolkien fan and have been ever since my teens and the day I first picked up a copy of The Lord of the Rings in a London bookshop. I still have that battered paperback on my shelf and I love the cover image by the artist John Howe, showing the wizard Gandalf striding across a hillside somewhere in Middle Earth. Since my teens I have continued to re-read The Lord of the Rings most years and I now have the pleasure of introducing it to my children. To further reinforce my fan credentials, I should let you know that I am writing this in a little wooden garden office we have affectionately named Bag End.2

Whether or not you’re a Tolkien fan, it’s hard to deny the huge influence upon literature and culture of his books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, Tolkien has been described as the most influential writer of the twentieth century—whether you measure that by sales (over 600 million copies and showing no sign of slowing), or by the way that Tolkien almost singlehandedly invented the popular fantasy genre.

For a book that is over 70 years old, its continuing impact is impressive. The six films based on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have grossed over $6 billion whilst the first series of The Rings of Power cost Amazon $750 million, making it the most expensive TV series in history. All of this for a book written with almost no sense of commercial awareness—in the case of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s publisher had asked him to write another children’s book as a follow-up to The Hobbit. Tolkien went away and wrote for the next 12 years before finally delivering a thousand-page manuscript entirely unlike anything that had ever been written before. No wonder the publisher’s initial reaction was panic!

Given how utterly uncommercial The Lord of the Rings was, what explains its incredible success and cultural influence? It must be something more than just good storytelling, good writing, good luck, or a sufficient supply of nerds to sustain an industry. Professor Tom Shippey, a world expert on Tolkien, catches something significant when he observes:

“The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit, have said something important, and meant something important, to a high proportion of their millions of readers. All but the professionally incurious might well ask, what? Is it something timeless? Is it something contemporary? Is it (and it is) both at once?”3

So what was it? I want to suggest that Tolkien said some incredibly important things about two of the most important questions that we face: namely the question of evil and the question of hope. What Tolkien discovered was that fantasy, far from being escapist, was a brilliant way to get us thinking about these themes without realising that we are thinking about them.

THE QUESTION OF EVIL

J.R. R. Tolkien was one of a generation of “traumatized writers” who lived through the horrors of the First World War, an experience that was utterly psychological devastating. In his first year of service as a soldier he fought in the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and Tolkien would later observe:

“By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead”.4

The first World War (and later, the Second World War) shattered the naïve belief that many people had nurtured that the world was getting progressively better and that humans were (on the whole) pretty good and decent. Yet in both world wars, monstrosities were carried out by both sides, often by people who believed that the ends justified the means.

We need little reminding of the dreadful reality of human wickedness today. Whether it’s Putin waging war in Europe, the Chinese ethnically cleansing the Uighurs and Tibetans, human trafficking on an imaginable scale, civil wars ripping many countries apart, and, closer to home, Western societies increasingly vicious and tribalized, with new technologies like social media offering us new ways to be mean and beastly, it is clear that something is sick at the heart of humanity.

Tolkien certainly thought so and he considered most of the “answers” he heard about evil to be weak and unhelpful. And so he chose to explore the nature of evil and its effect on us through the medium of one of his most famous creations, the Ring.

The first thing to note are the temptations that the Ring offers to the characters in the story. It offers the power to overcome death (think of Sauron himself, or Gollum, or Bilbo to whom the Ring had given unnaturally long life). This temptation is ever present today, especially in a secular age where for many people staying alive is the only thing that matters. We’re terrified of death, hiding it away behind hospital doors or attempting to “solve” it with technological solutions such as euthanasia.

The Ring also tempts with the power of invisibility—the ability to do whatever one wishes with no fear of being seen. Again, there are echoes in our contemporary age with the tendency for many of us to behave more viciously on social media where we can hide behind the veil of anonymity.

Lastly, perhaps the greatest temptation of the Ring is the power to coerce the will of others, bending them to serve your ambitions, schemes, and designs. The contemporary examples of that temptation are too many to list—whether it’s manipulative politicians, vast media empires spinning their fabrics of half-truths, or closer to home, the tendency we all have in this identity driven age to make everything about me and my desires. As the famous nineteenth-century atheist Friedrich Nietzsche remarked, when you reject God, all that is left is the “will to power”.5

Yet Tolkien didn’t merely illustrate the temptations that are whispered in all our ears, but through the Ring explored the idea of creeping corruption, the insidious way that most humans do not become monstrous overnight, but through a repeated series of poor choices, risk becoming ever more twisted. Think of characters like Bilbo (who asks Frodo to let him have a “little peep” at the Ring and then in Frodo’s eyes becomes “a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands”;6 or Isildur (who refuses to destroy the Ring when he has the chance); or Boromir (who tries to take the Ring from Frodo by force because he thinks it can be used as a weapon against the enemy); or Gollum, or even Frodo himself.Tolkien repeatedly shows us that evil has an addictive quality—that though we think a little dabbling with it is harmless, each time we do so, it becomes easier to give in the next time, until ultimately evil overwhelms us, like the Ringwraiths in The Lord of the Rings, who freely chose the gifts of Sauron but ended up utterly consumed.

In J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey points out that historically there have been two major views of evil.7 The first view is that evil does not “exist”, but is simply the absence of good; for example those bits of my psychology that are perhaps a bit deficient. The problem with this view is it can lead to naivety (“All I need is a bit of positive thinking or some self-help”). The other ancient view is that evil is a thing, it actually exists, and is deadly serious. The problem here is that it can easily lead to a sense of superiority over others (“I’m okay because I’m a good person; not like those people.”).

Throughout The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien plays with the idea that there are elements of truth in both those views; for example, consider the scene in Bag End where Gandalf asks Frodo to give him the Ring for a moment. Frodo goes to hand it to the wizard and we’re told that:

“It suddenly felt very heavy, as if either it or Frodo himself was in some way reluctant for Gandalf to touch it.”8

But which is it? Is evil an actual thing—in which case the Ring is heavy because it is evil, imbued with the spirit of its master, Sauron, and it does not want Gandalf to handle it. Or is evil a mere absence, a shadow, an inner psychological weakness—in which case it is Frodo who does not really wish to hand it over.

Tolkien plays with these two aspects of evil throughout the book and not because he was sitting on the fence, but because he believed that both views of evil had something going for them, yet neither is sufficient. And he believed this because he was a committed Christian and his Christian faith was deeply embedded into the structures of The Lord of the Rings. As Tolkien wrote to a friend:

“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously at first, but consciously in the revision … the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”9

As a Christian, one of the things with which Tolkien would have been very familiar was the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer that Jesus taught his followers and which is prayed regularly by billions of Christians around the world in church services and private devotions. Two of the lines of that prayer run like this:

Lead us not into temptation;
But deliver us from evil;10

That prayer seems to recognise that we need help with two things when it comes to evil—first, we need protecting from ourselves; second, we need help from the evil outside. Tolkien wove both those ideas into The Lord of the Rings and indeed in the key scene of the final book, they come to a climax. For on the very brink of the Cracks of Doom, when Frodo makes the decision not to destroy the Ring, the age-old question arises—is this Frodo’s own internal decision, or has the evil force of the Ring overpowered him? Tom Shippey came across a letter from Tolkien in which he comments that the scene at the Cracks of Doom was deliberately designed to unpack the Lord’s Prayer as a “fairy-story exemplum”.11

Is evil internal or external? The Lord of the Rings would remind us that the answer is both—and that we are wholly naïve if we think we are not affected by evil, nor that we need help in overcoming both the evil out there as well as the evil within. Indeed, as another “traumatized writer”, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, reminds us:

“The line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through the middle of every human heart and through all human hearts.”12

THE QUESTION OF HOPE

Given a world in which real evil exists—an insidious, creeping evil that can tempt and overpower even the very good, what should our response be? This question leads to the second major theme of The Lord of the Rings, the question of hope.

There is a strong contrast running throughout Tolkien’s book concerning those who have given up all hope and those who, no matter the odds, still choose hope over despair when confronted by evil. On the side of those who have given up, one thinks of the wizard Saruman, who explains his choice to side with Sauron because:

“A new power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all … This then is the one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power … Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it.”13

Or consider the tragic figure of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, who because of the death of his son, the lies that Sauron has been feeding him, and the fear of the battle that lies ahead, has wholly given into despair—a downward spiral that in the end costs him his life.

However, by way of contrast, we have King Théoden (who has also lost a son) who declares that even though they will probably be defeated, he will still lead his calvary in a final charge against the massed ranks of Mordor. Similarly there is Aragorn, at the Black Gates, leading the remains of his army into what appears to be a suicide mission but doing it “for Frodo”. Or Boromir, giving his life in a last stand against the Orcs despite the overwhelming odds. Or the Elves, for over a thousand years fighting what Galadriel calls “the long defeat”,14 knowing that their time is ending, but nevertheless still opting to choose hope over despair. Repeatedly throughout The Lord of the Rings, the heroes make choices with catastrophic personal consequences because they believe that it is the right thing to do.

You will recall that Tolkien had lived through two world wars and had experienced leaders who had chosen to capitulate in the face of evil; think of Neville Chamberlain and his naive attempts to negotiate “peace in our time” with Hitler. Or so-called “neutral” countries during WWII, like Sweden, which turned a blind eye to evil in return for which the Nazis would leave them alone. Tolkien had little time for the idea that faced with overwhelming evil, the best thing to do was keep your head down, or surrender to despair.

Yet this is all very well, you may ask, but what if the odds are truly overwhelming? If the Swedes had resisted Hitler, wouldn’t they have been conquered? What if a Putin-like mad man really did hover his finger over the red button saying, “Allow me to do what I want, or I flick the switch?” Since he was a young man, Tolkien had loved the tales of Norse mythology which are fascinating because like so many mythologies and religious beliefs, end with a climactic battle between good and evil. But in that mythology, the forces of evil won and history ended with Ragnarök, the destruction of the gods.

Tolkien thought a lot about the issues this idea raised: if you knew that evil was going to win, should you just pick the winning side? Should you align with Mordor, switch over to Putin, side with the Nazis? Or was the right thing to do to fight for good, even if you knew that you were going to lose? Tolkien believed that courage meant that it was: as Sam Gamgee puts it powerfully in the movie version of The Two Towers:

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? … [But] there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

NO NAÏVE ANSWERS

Although Tolkien was a deeply committed Christian, this did not lead him to write naïve answers to life’s toughest questions into The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes Christians are caricatured as being tempted to simplistic “it’ll all be right in the end” answers, but Tolkien refused to go that route in his epic novel. However, as he wrote in a letter to a friend:

“I am a Christian … so I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’—though it contains some samples or glimpses of final victory.”15

And such glimpses of final victory can likewise be seen within The Lord of the Rings. For example, there are numerous hints of the idea of resurrection (for example Tom Bombadil’s command to the barrow-wight to go ‘where the gates are ever shut, till the world is mended’).16 Even more powerfully, there is the concept of eucatastrophe, a word coined by Tolkien as the antithesis to ‘catastrophe’ to describe the way that just when things seem their very bleakest, sometimes it turns out that Providence is working something very different behind the scenes. Think of the moment where the armies of Gondor are about to be defeated at the Gates of Mordor whilst simultaneously at the Cracks of Doom all equally seems lost (Frodo has failed and Gollum has recaptured the Ring, only at that very moment to fall over the cliff, plummeting to his and the Ring’s destruction, thus bringing about the end of Sauron’s power). As Tolkien wrote in his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’:

“[Eucatastrophe] denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium [=good news], giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”17

Tolkien was not willing to merely repeat the Christian story, nor to construct a simple allegory (a medium he said he was not fond of) but he scatters hints and pointers to the Christian story throughout The Lord of the Rings—from themes such as evil and courage, or self-sacrifice and self-denial, or joy and hope.18 Indeed, it is surely no accident that Aragorn, the “king” in The Return of the King also bears an Elvish name, Estel,19 which means “hope”—a pointer to the return of the true and greater king whose return is our only hope in the face of evil.

Why has The Lord of the Rings had such enduring power? Because Tolkien understood not merely that great stories can be truly captivating, but that the most captivating stories derive their power from the extent to which they foreshadow, hint at, and point to the greatest story of all—the story of the Jesus and his ultimate defeat of evil that has all the greater power because it is true.20

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“This is not your typical book on atheism … combines humour, knowledge, and wit.” — Wes Huff

“With a storyteller’s flair, Bannister presents complex ideas in an engaging and accessible way” — Kristi Mair

“A delight to read, ponder, and pass on.” — Glen Scrivener

“There has never been a better time to invite people to consider the case for Christianity, and Andy Bannister shows how to do it with wisdom, grace and plenty of humour too.” — Justin Brierley

Order it in the UK from 10ofThose or direct from IVP

In North America, get it from 10ofThose Canada or 10ofThose USA

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is transforming our world in the way that other general-purpose technologies (such as electricity or the internet) have in the past. But at the same time, AI is generating lots of philosophical and theological debate, with some even arguing that humanity’s creation of digital intelligence somehow calls God’s existence into question.

But what if the reverse is actually the case: could it be that AI actually reinforces the case for God rather than undermining it? Let’s explore that idea by showing how AI actually gives fresh energy to one of the oldest arguments for God’s existence and, at the same time, illuminates a more recent one.

The First Cause of Intelligence

One of the classical arguments for God’s existence is the First Cause Argument—the idea that everything that began to exist must have a cause. Why does the laptop I am typing this on exist? Because there was a factory, a designer, an engineer, and so on. Whether it’s something simple like a computer or complex, like a creature or even a universe, everything that came into existence must have a cause.

However, this chain of causation cannot progress infinitely backwards: at some point, there must be a first cause—something that exists outside of everything else and initiated it all. Many philosophers have historically identified this first cause with God.

Now, consider AI, especially the intelligence part. Did artificial intelligence arise by accident? Did programmers randomly throw lines of code together, shake a computer, and out popped ChatGPTor Anthropic’s latest model? Of course not. The development of AI required intelligent agents—human minds—to design, train, and refine it. AI exists because thousands of brilliant scientists— backed by billions of dollars in investment—worked to bring it into being. In other words, artificialintelligence required a pre-existing intelligence to bootstrap it, to start it, to bring it into existence.

If artificial intelligence required intelligence to create it, then surely the same logic applies to human intelligence. Just as AI did not emerge randomly from a pile of code, human intelligence did not emerge randomly from the cosmic soup. Instead, it points to an ultimate intelligence—a first cause behind our existence—that gave rise to our intelligence.

This very modern AI-focussed argument mirrors the classical First Cause Argument. Far from disproving God, AI actually provides fresh evidence for an intelligent Creator!

Humans, Creativity, and the Image of God

Another fascinating aspect of AI is that it highlights just how creative and curious human beings are. We are not content to simply exist—we seek to invent, discover, and push the boundaries of what is possible. AI itself is a testament to this: a machine designed to think, created by a species that refuses to stop innovating.

Human creativity is unique in the natural world. Take beavers, for example. They have been building dams for thousands of years, yet no beaver has ever turned to another and said: “Frank, I think we can make this dam 30% more efficient if we redesign it this way.” Beavers follow instinct, but humans constantly innovate, create, refine, and improve.

Where does this drive to create come from? The Bible suggests an answer: we are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Just as God is a Creator, He has placed within us the desire to create. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, described humanity as “sub-creators”, designed by the ultimate Creator to reflect His creativity. Whether it’s in art, architecture, or even AI, our drive to create is a clue that we ourselves were created in the image of a Creator, an artist, a designer.

Conclusion

Rather than disproving God, artificial intelligence highlights profound deeper truths about human beings. Just as AI required intelligence to exist, so human intelligence points to an ultimate intelligence. Our insatiable creativity and curiosity mirror the nature of a Creator who designed us in His image. As AI advances, it does not render God irrelevant—it simply provides another lens through which we can glimpse His handiwork.

Beauty. Justice. Identity. Love. Stories. Nature. Hope. These things intrigue us, move us and prompt us to ask big questions. Could there be clues in our deepest desires that point to life’s meaning?

Have You Ever Wondered? Finding the Everyday Clues to Meaning, Purpose and Spirituality is a fun, readable, and accessible book designed to gently start spiritual conversations. It’s one of the most exciting books it’s been my privilege to be involved with!

Have You Ever Wondered? invites you on an immersive tour through the issues that matter. This book is for anyone who has looked at a landscape and contemplated why we are drawn to beauty; or wondered why we are so insatiably curious about our universe, or even for those who have simply looked up at a million stars in the vast night’s sky and just wondered.

Whether you’re seeking and exploring spirituality and faith yourself; or if you’re a Christian looking for a gentle book to give to a friend to help them think about Jesus in an engaging way, Have You Ever Wondered? is the ideal book for you.

Starting from the things that already matter to us and showing how these are clues to life’s bigger story, Have You Ever Wondered? really is a book for anyone, no matter where they are on their spiritual journey.

With chapters written by ten different authors from a wide range of backgrounds, there’s truly something in here for everybody!

How do I get a copy?

• If you’re in the UK, you can order it direct from 10ofThose — there are some amazing deals for bulk orders for churches, too!

• It’s at Amazon.

• Live in Canada? You can get it via our friends at 10ofThose Canada.

• If you are in the USA, it can be ordered via 10ofThose in the USA.

• Buy it from your favourite (ideally independent!) bookstore.

Order it in the UK from 10ofThose or direct from IVP

In North America, get it from 10ofThose Canada or 10ofThose USA