I have long enjoyed collecting the stories of lesser-known and unusual heroes, men and women whose endeavours set them apart in some way from the rest of us. Among the myriad biographies I have lining my shelves, the person who, for me, stands out from them all is Maximilian Kolbe.1

Born in Poland in 1894 into a devout Catholic family, Maximilian grew up to become a Franciscan friar, devoting his life to teaching, writing, and missionary work. When Poland fell to the Nazis at the start of World War II, Maximilian began first passively and then more actively resisting the Nazi regime—publishing articles against them and helping to shelter Jews in his monastery at Niepokalanów. Finally the Nazis grew tired of the troublesome friar and on 17 February 1941 Maximilian was arrested by the Gestapo and thrown into the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, where his name was stripped from him and he was known merely as prisoner number 16670.

A few months later, a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz and when this was discovered at the evening roll call, the authorities were furious. Determined to deter future escape attempts, the deputy camp commandant, Karl Fritzsch, announced that he would choose ten men at random: they would then be locked up in an underground bunker and left to starve to death. This would send a message: if you escape from Auschwitz, this is what we will do to your fellow prisoners.

Guards began to pace up and down the lines of prisoners, pulling out men at random, and when one man, Franciszek Gajowniczek (who had been jailed for aiding the Polish Resistance) was chosen, he began sobbing hysterically. ‘Please,’ Gajowniczek wept, ‘Have pity! I have a wife and two children! Whatever will become of them?’

On hearing Gajowniczek’s cries, Maximilian stepped out of the crowd of prisoners and addressed the commandant: ‘May I make a request?’ Nobody had ever dared speak to the commandant like that before and taken aback, Karl Fritzsch barked back: ‘What do you want?’ Maximilian pointed at the sobbing Gajowniczek and calmly replied: ‘I wish to take the place of this man.’

The commandant stared in sheer disbelief at Maximilian before finally replying: ‘I grant your request’. At those words, Gajowniczek was released back into the crowd of prisoners whilst Maximilian was dragged away with the other nine condemned men and herded into a death cell in the basement of Auschwitz Building 13, where the group were locked up in the dark, without food or water. Over the next few days, Maximilian led the prisoners in hymn singing and prayer, as one by one each succumbed to their fate. Finally, two weeks later, only Maximilian was left alive and needing the cell for other victims, the Nazis executed him by lethal injection.

How do we know the details of Maximilian’s story? Because Franciszek Gajowniczek survived the war, freed in 1945 when the camp he’d been moved to was liberated by the Russian army. He spent the rest of his life spreading the story of Maximilian’s incredible act of sacrifice. On one occasion, asked how he felt about what Maximilian had done, Gajowniczek replied: ‘The immensity of Friar Kolbe’s death regularly overwhelms me. I, the condemned, lived because someone willingly offered his own life for me.’

Why did Maximilian do this? What drove him to offer his life, self-sacrificially, for another? The answer is that, as a deeply committed Christian, Maximilian was doing his best to live out the words of Jesus, who said:

‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’
(John 15:13)

LOVE IS NOT CHEAP

Love is a word that is heard a lot these days. It’s a word thrown around all too casually in our culture, so much so that it is in danger of losing its meaning entirely. We talk about loving our jobs and smartphones, our pets and our hobbies, our houses and cars, even—for those who don’t have the misfortune to follow Neasden Football Club2—loving our sports teams. Even when the word ‘love’ is applied to human relationships, it can all too often be used casually or even cynically. Maybe some of you reading this have heard someone declare ‘I love you’, only to then have them let you down badly.

Thus when somebody says that they think that ‘God is love’, as so many people instinctively believe that God must be, it’s important to ask: what do you mean by ‘love’? After all, if love is just a synonym for ‘like’; or a feeling; or a ‘second hand emotion’ (to quote Tina Turner); or just a warm gooey feeling we get when staring into another person’s eyes over dinner at the local Italian trattoria,3 then what does it mean to say that ‘God is love’?

This is why Jesus’s words, defining the greatest, the highest, the purest form of love as self-sacrifice are so powerful and so helpful. They give us a standard, a model, of what real love looks like: namely the willingness to so put the other person first, you would be willing to lay down your life for them.

I find it fascinating that everybody instinctively knows that Jesus was right. From the most pious religious person (of whatever faith) to the most dogmatic secularist, we all know, deep down, that there is something very special going on when one person gives their life for another. Whether it’s in literature, such as Charles Dickens’s story, A Tale of Two Cities, where Sydney Carton bravely substitutes himself for Charles Darnay and is killed in his place so that Charles can go free. Or if we hear a news report of a parent giving their life for a child. Or in the military, when we read the account of somebody like Billy McFadzean, the twenty-year-old soldier who, during the Battle of the Somme in World War I, threw himself on top of some live grenades that had fallen into a trench. They exploded, killing Billy, but his rapid action saved the lives of dozens of his comrades—an action for which he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.4 Or Maximilian Kolbe, who was willing to be condemned to death in the place of another. Stories like these move us deeply, because we know in the very fibre of our being that self-sacrificial love is incredibly impressive. Real love is not cheap, true love is costly, and the highest form of love is self-sacrifice, love that is willing to expend itself for another, even at the price of one’s own life.

So how does that help us begin to tease out what we mean when we say ‘God is love’? Well, think about the famous cry of devout Muslims: ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘God is greater!’) My Muslim friends are absolutely right, God is great, but I also think they are being too modest and we can say more: God is not merely greater, he is the very greatest. And thus by definition, anything that God does must be the greatest example: God is the greatest creator, the greatest judge, the greatest ruler, and so on. Which means that if God is a god of love, then the love that he displays must be the greatest, the highest form of love that there is. And as we instinctively know (and as Jesus clearly explained) that means self-sacrificial, costly love. Only if God has demonstrated self-sacrificial love can he truly be said to be loving. Anything else is just words and when it comes to love, we need more than words.

COMPASSION MEANS MORE THAN MORALISING

Something very similar is going on when we look at a word that is closely related to ‘love’, namely ‘compassion’. As I have written elsewhere, the Qur’an is somewhat reticent to describe Allah as loving, tiptoeing around the term like somebody feeling their way barefoot and blindfolded through a room full of mousetraps. But for all of its nervousness about love, the Qur’an is very happy to describe Allah as compassionate. For example, the very first verse of the Qur’an announces:

In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
(Q. 1:1)

That little sentence is known in Islam as the bismillah and when Muslims recite the Qur’an, it is recited before each chapter (with the exception of the ninth), whilst the formulaic phrase ‘Allah is forgiving and compassionate’ is found in the Qur’an some 47 times. The Qur’an is thus insistent that Allah is a God who is compassionate.

The same is true when it comes to the Bible, which is also clear that Yahweh is a God of compassion. The Bible often pairs the word ‘compassion’ with ‘love’, stating things like:

Yahweh is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.
(Psalm 103:8)

But as with the word ‘love’, we need to ask what the word ‘compassion’ means. How, for example, does it differ from words like ‘empathy’, or ‘kindness’, or terms like ‘not-bouncing-my-son-upside-down-by-the-ankles-when-he-has-left-his-room-in-a-mess-for-the-seventh-day-running’?5

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘compassion’ is what linguists call a compound word—a word that was made by gluing two other words together. In the case of ‘compassion’, it was formed originally by sticking together two Latin words: com, meaning ‘with’, and pati, meaning ‘to suffer’. The word ‘compassion’ literally means to suffer alongside.

Although these roots of the word ‘compassion’ are centuries old, we still instinctively understand them if you think about how we use the word. For example, imagine you are walking down the street when you see a person being racially abused. You shout out to the other passers-by: ‘Racism is wrong!’ And then for good measure, you pull out your smartphone and tweet hashtags like #racismisawful a few times along with a concerned emoticon or two.

Or imagine that on the walk home from work, you pass a homeless person, sleeping rough in a shop doorway. Stunned by such a scene of deprivation in a modern city, you cry out to your fellow pedestrians, ‘Poverty is wrong!’ And then you rush on home and buy a t-shirt with some anti-poverty slogans on it from Amazon.6

In either case, you have not been compassionate. Sure you have been angered by the injustice and poverty. You may have even wept tears as you tweeted. But if all you did was shout and protest, then you haven’t been compassionate. You have just moralised. (And worse, virtue-signalled). Calling out injustice without actually doing anything is not compassion.

But now, re-run the thought experiments. Next time you see a person being racially abused, you rush across the street to defend them from the bullies—even though they are bigger and more numerous than you. Maybe you even get beaten up yourself as you try to defend the victim. But that’s true compassion: you did something, it cost you, and you suffered alongside. Or next time you see a homeless person sleeping rough, you actually stop to help; maybe you buy them a meal or even offer them a bed for the night. Now that’s compassion, because you got involved and it cost you personally.

Compassion means more than just moralising. More than just pointing out that something is wrong. More than just judging the situation. Compassion means getting involved, sometimes at great cost, possibly even with a risk to yourself, and maybe even if it will cause suffering to you personally.

So what, then, does it mean to speak of god as ‘compassionate’? Unless we are simply playing word games, then it is only meaningful to call god compassionate if the god we are talking about hasn’t merely told us what he thinks about injustice and suffering, poverty and pain, but has done something—and done something which has cost him, an action through which he has suffered alongside us.

When we look at the Qur’an, it is clear that Allah has not acted in this way. For sure, the Qur’an tells us what Allah thinks about injustice and our part in it. What he thinks is that it is wrong and that human beings need to wise up, or judgement will follow. But Allah has done nothing about our predicament: he has not become involved, nor has he suffered with us to tackle the problem. In short, Allah is a moraliser, but he is not compassionate.

By contrast, Yahweh is very different. The Bible tells us time and again not simply that Yahweh disapproves of and is angry at injustice and suffering, but that Yahweh cares so deeply for his people that he is moved to action, stepping into history in the person of Jesus in order to do something about suffering and evil, demonstrating far more than words but showing true compassion—suffering alongside us and displaying in the equivalent of letters written miles high across the sky, how great his love is for us. As the Bible unpacks what Yahweh’s compassion and love in action look like, it holds nothing back:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(Romans 8:38-39)

Think about who Jesus claimed to be: God come in the flesh, stepping into space and time, God getting his feet dirty with the dust of the world and his hands bloody with the nails of the world. If that claim of Jesus stands up, then what we see in his willingness to go to the cross to deal with our brokenness, sinfulness, and shame is not just the greatest act of self-sacrificial love by the greatest being who exists, but a powerful, beautiful, and practical demonstration of what compassion really looks like. In Jesus, we see displayed a God who loved us so much that even whilst we were his enemies, he was willing to do all that for us. As former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi writes in his autobiography, describing the love of Yahweh that was so attractive to him as he came to the end of his four-year journey from Islam to Christianity:

The good news is that God Himself loves us enough to enter into the world and suffer for us, that despite humanity’s inability to save itself, God saved us. He did not send someone else to do His dirty work. He rescued us Himself. No one else could do it. That is the beauty of the gospel; it is all about God and what He has done out of His love for us.7

THE ATTRACTION OF JESUS

The attractiveness of Jesus that first intrigued Nabeel Qureshi is something that many people have been drawn to, whether they are Christians, Muslims, seekers, or sceptics. It is no accident that leading atheists sometimes speak movingly of Jesus’s character, or why in the centuries after Muhammad, thousands of stories and traditions about Jesus circulated in early Islam,8 and why the Qur’an itself tries to co-opt Jesus. People see in him something unique, attractive, and compelling, even if they don’t know quite what to do with him after they have borrowed him.

Some years ago I was speaking at an interfaith panel at the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa. After the event there was a reception and as I grazed the pluralistic buffet—wholesome foodstuffs like non-alcoholic cheese, vegan wine, and meat-based vegetable substitutes—I was introduced to a distinguished looking lady who was a senior leader of the Baha’i community. If you are unfamiliar with the Baha’i, they are a newer religious movement, founded by the Persian mystic Baha’u’llah in 1863. They are also classic pluralists and have co-opted everyone from Buddha to Muhammad to Jesus into their attempt to teach the essential oneness of all religions.

As we chatted, the lady asked about my PhD and I explained how I had used computer analysis to study how the Qur’an was first composed and put together. She began to look very nervous and eventually asked: ‘So does all this evidence lead you to conclude that Muhammad wasn’t a prophet?’ I politely replied that this was something of an understatement and that this is the kind of problem you have if, like the Baha’i, you grab hold of every religious idea you can lay hands on without understanding it, like a starving student in an all-you-can-gobble-for-a-dollar fast-food joint. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘my other concern is how the Baha’i faith has tried to shoehorn Jesus into the just-another-prophet box, failing to understand that Jesus never saw himself as one option among many, but as uniquely the way to encounter God.’

The lady almost choked on her gluten-and-dairy-free-low-fat scone and spluttered: ‘What … what … what on earth gives you the impression that Jesus thought anything even remotely like that?’

‘Oh I don’t know, perhaps something like chapter 14, verse 6, of the gospel of John, where Jesus famously said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody comes to God the Father except through me.”’

There was a brief silence, as she chewed in that determined way that gluten-free-flour products always require to be swallowable, before she replied: ‘Do you know, that verse has always given me considerable trouble.’

She is not alone. Lots of people have trouble with John 14:6 and Jesus’s claim not merely to be just a way to God, nor to be teaching some truth, or to have some thoughts about life, the universe, and so forth, but rather to be the way, the truth, and the life. Once again, we’re forced to make a choice here: either Jesus was breathtakingly arrogant, making even the most self-obsessed celebrity look like a paragon of humility; or else Jesus could say this kind of stuff calmly and rationally because it was true.

But of course the real reason why many people balk at ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ is because it looks terribly exclusivist. If Jesus is all of those things, what about those who think differently, or who are followers of other faiths? Isn’t this terribly narrow?

Not really.

It would be incredibly narrow if Jesus was saying and Christians are repeating words to the effect of ‘Jesus is the only way to God; Christians are therefore better than anybody else because they’ve worked it out and are going to heaven; and the rest of you are a bunch of unlucky fools for not following him.’ It would also be equally narrow if Jesus were suggesting that only the very best, the very smartest, cleverest, or holiest could qualify to follow him. ‘Those of you who make the grade, come on in! The rest of you, there’s the exit, and please don’t leave any sticky fingerprints on your way out.’

But neither of those things are what Jesus is saying.

Rather what Jesus is offering is an open exclusivism. Yes, he is the only way—the only way to really see, in action far more than words, God’s love and compassion, mercy and forgiveness, generosity and kindness. The only way by which our sinfulness and brokenness can be dealt with and the only way by which we are able to call God ‘Father’. But that way is open to anybody: no matter what your background, race, gender, age, or religious heritage—and certainly no matter if your life up to this point hasn’t exactly measured up and you’re dragging more baggage with you than an airport luggage carousel.

Jesus may be the only way: but he is a way open to all who are eager to seek, desperate to find, and prepared to lay down their lives and follow. As Jesus said:

‘So I say to you: ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."‘
(Luke 11:9-10)

This essay was taken from a chapter in my book, Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God? Find out more about that here.

It has been remarked that if you were to make two lists: on one, write the ten most influential people in history, on the other, write people who have claimed to be God, only one name would appear on both those lists: Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, it would be hard to overstate Jesus’s influence: much of art, politics, ethics, literature, music, and culture—in the West but also in large swathes of the East—has been influenced by his life.

And, of course, Jesus is the central figure of Christianity—making Christianity, uniquely, a historically grounded religion. Consider this: you could remove the founder of any other religion from history and that religion could still stand. Somebody else could have taught the system of thought that became Buddhism. The Qur’an could have been brought by somebody other than Muhammad. But Christianity? Well, it isn’t a system of teaching taught by Jesus. No, in a very real sense, Christianity is Jesus Christ. Jesus’s personality, his character, his identity, are the heart of the Christian faith. Christianity stands or falls on Jesus.

Not least, Christianity claims that “God” is not some mere abstract idea, some vague higher power, something “out there” like the Force in Star Wars, or a distant, remote deity, like the God of Islam, but a God who is very, very real. A God who took on human nature and, in Jesus Christ, walked and talked in history.

Now for some that can be quite unnerving. It’s one thing to believe in a distant, remote God, but Christianity says God is much more real than that—closer, more personal. A God who is deeply interested in who we are. A God who loves us too much to abandon us, but also a God who asks much of us.

That cuts so much against the grain of radical individualism that runs through human nature, that our natural temptation can be to try to dismiss Christianity and the only way to do that is to do away with Jesus. Whilst we may not go so far as Jesus’s first-century enemies, who did away with him by crucifying him, we’re still tempted to relativize Jesus, to cut him down to size so that we can ignore him.

Fiction?

One way to do that is to claim that he never existed. Now that idea isn’t taken seriously among academic historians, but among popular atheism, it’s found a hearing. Thus well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, writes:

The only difference between [Dan Brown’s novel] The Da Vinci Code and the [New Testament] gospels is that the gospels are ancient fiction while The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction.1

Dawkins goes on to compare the writing of the gospels to The Telephone Game, that children’s party game where a message is passed by whispering from one child to the next and gets utterly corrupted in the process. This, for some sceptics, is how ancient history was done and thus we can’t trust it. Of course, the problem with this is it would mean not merely can we not trust the gospels, but that we can’t trust any ancient history. If we can’t know anything about Jesus, we can’t know anything about the Caesars, or Plato, or Alexander the Great, or anything before the Modern Age.

No credentialed historian takes this kind of thing seriously. Listen to these words from atheist historian Bart Ehrman:

Virtually every scholar of antiquity, of biblical studies, of classics, and of Christian origins in this country and, in fact, the Western world agrees. Many of these scholars have no vested interest in the matter. As it turns out, I myself do not either. I am not a Christian, and I have no interest in promoting a Christian cause or a Christian agenda. I am an agnostic with atheist leanings, and my life and views of the world would be approximately the same whether or not Jesus existed … But as a historian, I think evidence matters. And the past matters. And for anyone to whom both evidence and the past matter, a dispassionate consideration of the case makes it quite plain: Jesus did exist.2

So when it comes to history, what can we say about the gospels, the four short biographies from which we derive most of our information about Jesus of Nazareth? Well, most scholars are comfortable with the fact that their authors (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were writing history. In terms of genre, the gospels look like other ancient Greco-Roman biographies.

Furthermore, as you read them, you’re immediately struck that these are documents concerned with dates, times and locations. For example, the gospels refer to dozens of place names, along with geographic detail—which is a strong clue to their eyewitness nature. If I asked you to name the capital of France, you would probably get that right, but if I asked you to name and accurately describe minor villages, hundreds of miles from Paris, you’d probably struggle, unless you’d visited the region. Yet the gospels get that level of detail right—they also get lots of local information correct, everything from politics to agriculture, weather patterns, economics—vast amounts of detail. In short, the New Testament gospels have the flavour of eye-witness testimony.

Good Man?

But even if he existed, maybe Jesus was merely a good man, a wise moral teacher, an ethical example. Years ago, I used to frequent a place in London called Speakers’ Corner. Speakers’ Corner is part of Hyde Park and is known as the world centre of free speech—anybody can stand on a ladder or box there and speak about anything (politics, religion, sport) and draw a crowd. One of my favourite characters at Speakers’ Corner was a man called Barry, who billed himself “The Christian Atheist”. He would stand in the rain, holding a placard that read “To follow Jesus, reject God”, and explain to people that Jesus’s moral teaching was wonderful but that you didn’t need to believe in God to follow it.

Now on the one hand, you can see Barry’s point. If more people lived by principles like “Do to others what you’d have them do to you” the world would no doubt be a happier place, with considerably cheaper insurance premiums. But what about some of Jesus’s other teaching: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Now hang on a minute, maybe that’s a bit too far. Have you seen my enemies? Come to think of it, have you seen some of my friends? Or what about: If somebody takes your coat, offer them your shirt, too. Okay, Jesus, now you’re just being ridiculous. That’s just not practical. Look, I’m basically a good person, I vote Labour, give to Oxfam when they shake a tin outside Tescos, so cut me a little slack, eh? Oh, but then Jesus goes further: Be perfect, as God is perfect. Perfect? Okay, that’s just nuts.

See the problem? Jesus’s “moral teaching” goes beyond a mere code of ethics in much the same way as a Saturn V rocket goes beyond a bottle rocket. Normal ethics, normal moral teaching, says things like “Keep your nose clean, toe the line, be nice, and you’ll be okay”. Manageable, bearable, doable, and other words ending in “—able”. Not too onerous. Instead, though, Jesus was as much concerned with attitudes, motives, and our thought life as actions— “If anyone even looks lustfully at another person, it’s as bad as cheating on your partner with them”. What the heck do we do with that? In our appearance-obsessed, desire-fuelling, sex-saturated culture, it seems wildly impractical. Jesus’s teaching, in other words, is so bold, so outrageous, so far beyond a mere moral checklist that you’re forced to make a choice: either Jesus was mad for teaching this kind of stuff, or else something very different is going on, way beyond the Jesus The Moral Teacher stuff.

Prophet?

So what other options are there—could my Muslim friends have it right, could Jesus be some kind of prophet, a special messenger from God? Well, that idea doesn’t work much better, largely because of the staggering personal claims Jesus made about himself. Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins (something that in first-century Judaism only God could do); he put his words on the same level as the words of God in the Jewish scriptures; he told stories that portrayed God as a king and him as the king’s son; he borrowed language and imagery from the Old Testament and retold it in such a way that suggested Jesus believed the Old Testament was all about him.

Jesus did this so boldly and consistently it got him killed, as finally the religious leaders of the day cried “blasphemy” and had Jesus arrested and executed by the Romans. The first Christians, too, reflecting on Jesus’s claims worked out what it meant. Jesus loved to ask people the question “Who do you say I am?” and we need to answer that question too.

As Oxford scholar and former atheist, C. S. Lewis, famously put it:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.3

One Solitary Life

That we’re even having this discussion, two thousand years after the events of Jesus’s short public ministry is itself startling, when you stop and think about it. The point is well made by the famous meditation written a century ago:

He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter’s shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book, never held an office, never went to college, never visited a big city. He never travelled more than two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend … All the armies that have ever marched, all the navies that have ever sailed, all the parliaments that have ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned put together, have not affected the life of mankind on earth, as powerfully as that one solitary life.4

So what does account for the influence of this One Solitary Life? One answer, of course, is: the resurrection. Had Jesus’s followers not claimed he had risen from the dead, it would all have ended there. But that doesn’t go quite far enough, does it? Imagine, for a moment, that on the first Easter morning, in AD33, Jesus’s followers had encountered some other random person risen from the dead—perhaps one of the thieves who had been crucified next to Jesus. Would such a miracle have been enough to start a whole new religion? Arguably not, because the power of the stories of Jesus’s resurrection in the gospels is not because they describe a random miracle, but because of who the resurrection happened to. In short, the resurrection of Jesus vindicates all of his teaching that had gone before.

The gospels are not claiming “Hey, people pop back from the dead all the time.” I think the average first-century person knew more about death than we do, given the brutishness of life. No, the more radical claim of the gospels is that this one specific life, this one, solitary, remarkable, incredible life—this Jesus, uniquely, was raised from the dead. Dismiss this as an invention if you wish: but then you’re still left with the huge question of Jesus’s identity, character, and teaching.

And remember, too, that the question of Jesus brings the whole “God Question” into sharp focus. Too many debates about whether God exists are, for me, glorified exercises in missing the point. The question at the heart of Christianity is not “Does God exist?” but what kind of God? And the life and resurrection of Jesus answer that question profoundly. A God who created us and loves us, but a God from whom we are separated by our self-centredness and brokenness. But a God who wasn’t prepared to leave it at that, but who stepped into history in the person of Jesus, who went to the cross, offering his life to deal with the consequences of all our wrong choices, stupidity and foolishness. “For God so loved the world,” said Jesus, “that he sent his beloved son, that whoever puts their trust in him might not die, but have eternal life.” A Jesus who also said: “I have come that you might have life and have it in all its fullness.”

Deep down, I think most of us have a hunch that all is not right with the world and that all is not right with us. Sure, we can try to distract ourselves with busyness, or pursue our identity in work, or in causes, or in abstract arguments about God that distract from the real thing. And if Jesus isn’t who he claimed to be, that’s the best we have.

But if Jesus is who he claimed to be, then there’s much more on offer. Because the life, teaching, cross, death and resurrection of Jesus shout from the rooftops that all is not acidic scepticism, or unyielding despair, or the utter blackness of the void, or a life of weary hedonism. Jesus’s life and death and resurrection proclaim that there is hope, there is forgiveness, and that everything that is broken, including us, can be mended. If Jesus is who he claimed to be, then because of history and what God did in the middle of it, we can have a future.

I hope you found this piece thought-provoking—do please considering sharing it with friends, especially friends who are thinking about or exploring Christian faith. And why not invite them to a Christmas service (just a few weeks away)? This is a time of year when people are often more open to spiritual things!

During the Covid pandemic a few years back, my daughter Caitriona fell in love with archaeology. More specifically with fieldwalking, the archaeological method which consists of simply pacing across a ploughed field and seeing what you find. Stuck in lockdown as we were, the field behind our house in Scotland became a regular stamping ground and every time we went for a walk, Caitriona would find bits of old pot, broken clay pipes, the occasional Victorian coin and so on.

Before long, Caitriona had amassed vast amounts of the stuff and, alas, despite our offers to deliver it in person, the British Museum haven’t yet offered to name a gallery after her. (Although I’m also tempted to write to NASA and say if they’re still worried about the missing dark matter in the universe, I think most of it is in plastic tubs in my daughter’s wardrobe).

On one occasion a friend of my daughter’s, Alice, was visiting and Caitriona showed her some of her favourite finds from her extensive collection. “What’s so exciting?” asked Alice, sniffily, “it’s just rotten stuff from dead people. Here, have you seen this cool new game on my phone?”

Thankfully we’ve raised a teenager who thinks phones are really boring and is more interested in clay tablets than digital ones. So my daughter was a bit put out that her friend had the historical consciousness of a whelk.

To be fair, Alice isn’t alone, for as a culture we have a very strange relationship with history, not least because our obsession with our smartphones means we spend most of our time living in a continually rolling window of ‘now’, with most of us less aware of the story that’s come before us than many other cultures, or indeed people in our own culture would once have been.

In the modern west, our approach to history seems to consist of monetizing it (Hollywood, I’m looking at you); gawping at it in museums (and getting embarrassed when we get old enough for bits of our own childhood to show up in glass cases); atomizing it (I love the British Museum, but get really frustrated there’s no attempt to explain how the different eras fit together); or cancelling bits of it.

The last one is a particularly peculiar obsession of our age not least because we are wildly inconsistent—pulling down the statues of people (like Edward Colston, chucked into Bristol harbour in 2020) whilst naming airports after people like John Lennon, who admitted he hit women.1 I’m also struck that other cultures seem entirely unashamed of their own mixed pasts. A friend of mine recently went to a Mongolian Throat Singing concert (yes, really) where he said that 90% of the songs were about the glories of Genghis Khan’s battles!

And if we’re not doing those things, others of us are tempted to romanticize the past—conjuring up how wonderful it was before (insert whatever you don’t like, whether technology, our current vacuous political class, general ignorance, the collapse of public morality, or the invention of fidget spinners).

There has to be a better way to think about history. Because all of those modern approaches to history suffer from the same basic flaw: they don’t ever stop and properly listen to history. If we slow down and do that then maybe, just maybe, we might learn something from history. (And by the way, if you’re tempted, like Alice, to say “Bah! Dead people!” well that’s just chronological snobbery. And just as you wouldn’t say of another culture “What can we possibly learn from them?” it’s as bad to dismissively sneer “What can we possibly learn from the seventeenth century?”)

And that the past might offer us something, might be a source to learn from, a different perspective from outside of our bubble, brings me by a long and winding road to why I love reading old books and the author I read more than any other is F. W. Boreham.

Born in 1874 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Boreham emigrated to New Zealand after training at Spurgeon’s College and proceeded to pastor in New Zealand, then Tasmania, then Melbourne in mainland Australia, before launching into a more itinerant preaching career in his 50s. In each pastorate, he showed not just a gift for preaching but also for evangelism, engaging those who had turned their backs on Christianity. He took their questions seriously, crafted messages that engaged them, and saw each church he led grow tremendously.

But Boreham also had a growing gift for writing. On occasion, after missing a train connection and finding himself with some time to kill, he noticed the lights on late in the local newspaper office. He wandered in, introduced himself to the editor, and asked whether the paper had considered a Christian column. The editor pointed at a typewriter and challenged Boreham to have a go.2 The piece he hammered out was in the next day’s paper and was the first of thousands of columns Boreham would write throughout his life.

As Boreham’s writing skills matured, he was soon writing three or four devotional and evangelistic essays a week—these ended up being collected and published as a series of over fifty books which found a worldwide audience. It’s hard to calculate the numbers as some records have been lost—and Boreham was famously modest—but a friend of mine who is a Boreham scholar estimates several million copies of Boreham’s books have been sold.

I’ve been collecting and reading Boreham for ten years now and I love the way he builds illustrations in each essay. He will take an everyday item—whether something grand (a mountain view) or mundane (a used envelope)—and build a story around it that points to some deeper, Christian truth.

One of my favourite Boreham essays is ‘A Slice of Infinity’, found in his book Mushrooms on the Moor.3 In it, Boreham comments on how easy it is to get stuck in a rut of reading very narrowly—telling the story of how, whenever he stepped through the door of his local bookshop, the bookseller would recommend books on topics very similar to those Boreham had bought before. (In today’s age, Amazon’s algorithms can send us into similar cul-de-sacs). But, says Boreham, we should resist such temptations at all costs—instead we should aim to sample ‘a slice of infinity’ in our reading.

But why? Because reading widely not merely helps broaden our thinking, it also helps us connect. If you find yourself seated on a plane next to somebody who says their hobby is angling, you’ll be glad you picked up a second-hand copy of Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley. At the time I read ‘A Slice of Infinity’, I had slipped into a bit of a rut in my reading, so Boreham helped kick me out of it—not just in the authors I read, but in what I read of those authors. He encouraged me, for example, to read C. S. Lewis more widely, not just Lewis’s fiction, but also his essays.

And in one of Lewis’s essays, he also says something about reading widely—not just across subjects but also across centuries:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny …

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it ... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.4

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But there’s a final reason to take history seriously and that’s because one day we will be history. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but one day we will be as done-and-dusted, dead-and-gone as the ancient Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, the Victorians, you name it. And if this life is all there is, that raises the question: why should anyone care about us and our story? Indeed, why should we care about the past—why treat some ancient bones dug up by an archaeologist with respect, if it’s just rotten stuff from dead people?

It’s sobering, too, to realise we will be forgotten and sooner than we realise. Think about this: do you know the names of your great grandparents? Or your great-great grandparents? Probably not. I was reminded of this recently when I noticed an old photo from the late 1800s my mother had framed and put on her wall. It showed a group of ten people, wearing their best clothes—perhaps a wedding party. I asked my mother who the people were and she said “I know the names of two of them, but not the others”.

That’s likely to be our fate, too. Gone and forgotten. Which raises a problem because I think a good principle is that we should treat the past as we hope the future will treat us. I suspect we hope the future will be kind to us, remembering our successes, treating us gently where we judged things wrong. But if we ourselves haven’t done this to the past, why should the future do it to us—or indeed bother to remember us at all?

Well, “do unto the past as we would like the future to do unto us” sounds similar to something Jesus once said about how we should treat other people. And mention of Jesus is interesting because when it comes to history, Christianity has a unique relationship with the past, especially in the way it is grounded in history. For example, if Buddha or Muhammad had never been born, if they’d never existed, their teaching could (hypothetically) still be true as it’s largely timeless and rootless. But if Jesus didn’t die and rise sometime around AD 33, then the whole thing falls, for Christianity isn’t a set of teachings brought by Jesus, Christianity is Jesus. As the apostle Paul writes:

If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. ... For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.5

And if what Jesus did in history is true, that means we have a future. Because we won’t be forgotten: we are remembered by the one who matters, the one who calls us into his eternal future. The names of those faces in the photo on my mother’s wall may have been all but forgotten by us—but all ten of them are known to Jesus.

We live in a highly pluralistic context here in the UK, with many of our major cities incredibly multicultural. Where I grew up in South London, we were surrounded by every religion imaginable: you could choose from Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Atheism, Islamism, Judaism, Jainism, Secularism—you could even support the local football team, Crystal Palace; we called that masochism.

Those religious changes are accelerating rapidly and are especially apparent when it comes to Islam. With the number of Muslims in the UK projected to rise to 13 million in 30 years time, according to numbers from the Pew Research Centre, it’s vital that Christians think missionally, evangelistically, and apologetically about Islam.

We don’t always do this well. On the one hand, the reaction of many Christians when they think about Islam is one of fear. Fear of extremism, fear in the face of another religion that is evangelistically active and confident, fear of how different Muslims often seem. But then on the other hand, I get equally worried by some parts of the church that think the way to deal with Islam is to ignore it, to turn our back on and say nothing to our Muslim neighbours about Jesus.

The good news is that God is at work among Muslims in amazing ways. For example, I have a good friend who grew up in a strict Muslim family and was a committed, devout Muslim. One day at university, he was studying at home when there came a knock on his door. He opened it, to see two Christians doing door-to-door evangelism. My friend loved arguing with Christians and he thought this was great—“You guys deliver!” He invited them in, tore them to pieces, and sent them on their way.

The next week, they were back. And the next and the next. My friend said he was hugely impressed that all of his arguing and being difficult didn’t deter them, but they kept coming, they worked to answer his questions, and they kept pointing him to Christ. Their persistence was the beginning of a journey of some years that led to him becoming a Christian.

So, how can we reach more Muslims: whether bold, confident ones like my friend, or the quieter ones, who are our fellow students or colleagues, our neighbours, and so on. Let me offer you five suggestions that will help get you started.

1. Love

The first step is to love our Muslim neighbours. For some of us this may be hard, because of the fear thing—or, almost as bad, the apathy thing. But God can change hearts, so we can pray that God gives us a love for the Muslims in our midst.

Then we need to take the time to get to know them. I have a friend who had a new colleague join his company. The new colleague was a Muslim, so my friend invited his new colleague out for lunch and then said, “Forgive me for asking, but you’re a Muslim, right?” “Yes,” his new colleague replied. “I’ve never really talked to a Muslim before,” my friend Nick said. “Tell me, what do you guys believe?” Nick then asked lots of follow-up questions and then, after 20 minutes, was able to say: “This has been fascinating. I’m a Christian, so some of the things you believe I believe too. But there are also many differences.” “Such as what?” his colleague asked—which of course gave Nick an amazing opportunity to talk about Jesus!

So love our Muslim neighbours, pray that God brings them across our path, then boldly and winsomely seize every opportunity.

2. Be clear about the differences

When engaging with Muslims, it is crucial that early on we are clear about the differences between Christianity and Islam. Whilst it can be tempting to ‘play it safe’ and focus on things in common, often that will just cause confusion. And remember, commonalities are often so vague as to be useless. (For example, a chicken has legs and a table has legs!)

If we just focus on what Muslims and Christians have in common, this can cause huge distortions because we fail to appreciate that people use words in very different ways. Just because a Muslim says “I believe in God” does not mean they mean by ‘God’ the same thing that you do.

Scholarship increasingly recognises, by the way, that Islam is not a sister religion to Christianity and Judaism; rather Muhammad took Arabian religious ideas, borrowed Christian and Jewish terminology, and messily bolted the two together.

And finally on this, it’s worth noting that Muslims who come to Christ tend to come not because they thought “Oh, look, this is just like what we believe”; rather they saw something very different and wanted it. Read Nabeel Qureshi’s powerful testimony, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, to see an example of this.

Exploring the differences

A really helpful framework for exploring differences (in this case between Christianity and Islam, but also between worldviews more generally) is this set of four questions; they’re fascinating to ask friends:

• Do you believe in a God and if so, what is God like?

• What are human beings?

• What’s gone wrong?

• What’s the solution?

Is there a God? Christians would say yes, and that he is relational, knowable, love, and has suffered for our redemption. The Qur’an would disagree and say, no, Allah cannot be known, is not relational, is not love, and suffering is beneath him; he is not a saviour, he is supreme will.

What are humans? Christians would say we are made in God’s image, designed to be his sons and daughters, and we can call him Father. The Qur’an would disagree: humans have an elevated status over animals, yes, but we are slaves, God is our master, and it is blasphemous to suggest anything more.

What’s gone wrong? Christians would say sin, which has fundamentally damaged our nature, our world, and our relationship with God. Islam would say sin, yes, but there’s no fundamental problem; we are simply forgetful of God’s commands.

What’s the solution? Christianity would say we need rescue, redemption; we need a saviour. Islam offers no saviour; the Qur’an never says such a thing. Rather we can earn our way back through keeping more commandments and hope, if there’s a gap between performance and prize, that Allah will be merciful—but any mercy, any forgiveness, is earnt.

Oh, and if you succeed in Islam, what do you get? Paradise: a place with rivers of wine, crystal-clear fountains of water, fruit trees, and (for the men) women to enjoy. But Allah does not dwell with his people in Paradise; the Qur’an simply does not offer that. By contrast, in Christianity, the future vision is New Heavens, New Earth, an eternity walking and talking with God again.

The differences are massive. Even though the same words are used (God, sin, heaven etc) the ideas are radically different. If we don’t factor that in when we talk to Muslims, we’ll end up in a huge mess, because all of those questions are foundational to the gospel.

3. The questions Muslims ask and how to answer them

Next step: as you talk to Muslims, as you talk about the differences in what we believe, our Muslim friends will have questions. By far the two most common are:

• Can you trust the Bible? (or more directly: hasn’t the Bible been corrupted?)

• Why do Christians believe in the Trinity?

Why do Muslims ask the questions they do? I’d suggest at least two reasons:

(a) They’re generated by the Qur’an (e.g. the Qur’an attacks the Trinity, therefore Muslims accept this as a given).

(b) They’re generated by necessity: for example this applies to Muslim questions about the Bible. The Qur’an does not claim the Bible has been corrupted, but rather the belief evolved later, in the early centuries of Islam. Early Muslim scholars had a problem: Muhammad claimed he was preaching the same message as the Bible, but the Bible was not available in Arabic at this point. When the Islamic conquests began and Muslims conquered former Christian territory, they then finally got to examine it. Horror of horrors! They discovered the Bible was wildly different to the Qur’an. What to do? Either they had to say Muhammad got it wrong—or they could claim the Bible had been changed.

So how do we respond to the questions of Muslims? I suggest five steps; let me outline them, then demonstrate them in action.

(i) Begin by asking good questions (think of Jesus, who asked questions all the time: he asked 307 questions in the gospels.) I often like to use questions like what do you mean by that? and why do you think that?.

(ii) Take the time to know a bit of their own scriptures and tradition; yes, it takes time, but if you’ve read a little it will be immensely helpful.

(iii) Help your friend think through the theological implications of their question or assumption.

(iv) Make sure you understand the biblical story and where your friend’s question fits into it.

(v) Point every question towards Jesus.

So, for example, take the question Muslims often ask about the reliability of scripture. Well, we might begin with questions: What do think scripture is? What do you mean by ‘corrupted’ or ‘unreliable’? And why do you think it was changed—could you give me some evidence?

Next, you might draw on their own scriptures and point out how positive the Qur’an is about the Bible:

He hath revealed unto thee (Muhammad) the Scripture with truth, confirming that which was (revealed) before it, even as He revealed the Torah and the Gospel. (Qur’an 3:3)

To thee We sent the Scripture in truth, confirming the scripture that came before it, and guarding it in safety. (Qur’an 5:48)

Next, the theological problem: ask your Muslim friend if they think the Bible is corrupted because Allah couldn’t protect it (he was too weak) or he wouldn’t protect it (he couldn’t care less that humans had no guidance).

Fourth, the wider biblical story: take the time to help your Muslim friend understand what Christians believe about the Bible—namely that the job of the scriptures is not just to reveal God’s commands, but also God’s character and God’s plan of salvation.

Finally, point to Jesus: maybe by gently suggesting that Muslims believe the final revelation is a book while Christians believe the final revelation is a person. So maybe, rather than compare the Bible and the Qur’an, we should compare the Qur’an and Jesus. As Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr puts it:

The Word of God in Islam is the Qur’an; in Christianity it is Christ … The form of the Qur’an is the Arabic language which religiously speaking is as inseparable from the Qur’an as the body of Christ is from Christ Himself.1

4. Pray!

So in terms of reaching Muslims we have thought about the importance of friendship; of being clear about the differences; of answering the questions of our friends; fourth—and penultimately—pray! Pray for Muslims to cross your path, pray for divine encounters, pray for God to help you befriend and love Muslims, pray for God to engage them. And pray for the supernatural!

I’ve been struck over the years by how many times God intervenes dramatically—often through dreams—but sometimes in other ways with Muslims. One of my favourite stories comes via a friend who runs a network of apologists in Pakistan. Dangerous work. One of his team, Asif, was travelling on a train going to Lahore. Sitting opposite him in the train compartment was a very orthodox-looking Muslim gentleman. Asif felt that God wanted him to give his Punjabi New Testament to the man. He resisted, an internal struggle raged, finally he gave in. He started a conversation, worked it around to an appropriate place, and offered the man the book as a gift. Instantly, the Muslim flew into a rage and began getting violent, insulting Christians, cursing and then, finally, tore the New Testament in two and threw it out of the window. Asif backed out of the train compartment, concluding that you can get these things wrong.

A year later, he was preaching in Lahore. At the end of the service they had a time of testimony. A man stood up and shared how, a year or so before, he’d become a Christian, listening to satellite TV broadcasts. But he had no Bible in his language. So he began to pray. He prayed and prayed and prayed. One day, he was praying as he walked alongside the railway tracks. “Lord, please give me a Bible that I can read and understand.” A train roared past and he was hit on the head by first one half, then the other of a New Testament. He produced it in the meeting, bound together by sticky tape.

God is at work. Sometimes dramatically. Sometimes quietly. But when we pray, who knows what God may do.

5. Jesus

Finally, my last piece of advice is to find ways to bring Jesus into the conversation. One way to do this is to start from Jesus in the Qur’an. Many Christians are not aware that the Qur’an has about 90 verses about Jesus. You can use this as a bridge; for example you might say to a Muslim friend:

“The Qur’an mentions Jesus in about 90 verses—what do you know about Jesus?”

A follow-up question to feed into any subsequent discussion might be: “Did you know that Jesus taught through stories? Have you read any of his stories?” And then open up the gospels and introduce your friend to some of the parables of Jesus. I often find that the Good Samaritan is a great place to start (Muslims are drawn to the themes of justice and compassion there). Then you might move on to, say, Luke 15 and the story of the father and the two sons. One son is lost by running away; one is lost through trying to please his father through keeping the law. The story opens up lots of windows into the gospel and the question of how we really please God.

6. Conclusion

God loves Muslims and he is at work amongst them and calls us to be his co-labourers in that work.

And God has revealed his love, his character, his forgiveness, his suffering so clearly and so powerfully, most especially in Jesus Christ. Jesus said: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). In the twenty-first century, multicultural UK, the nations have come here. Let’s ensure that as well as welcoming them to our land, we introduce them to our Lord.

A while ago myself and two colleagues were speaking at a university mission and we started the week with an open forum where my colleague spoke on “Why Jesus?” Over two hundred students came to the evening and the Q&A was very lively.

A week later, I heard from a man who had come to the evening and had brought a Muslim friend along. For some months, his friend had been questioning Islam and asking questions about Jesus. Something his Muslim friend heard that evening struck home, the final objections fell away, and a few days later he gave his life to Christ.

God is at work—sometimes slowly, sometimes dramatically—amongst Muslims. Let’s pray that he might work through each of us to reach the Muslims he brings across our path.

I hope you enjoyed this piece and found it helpful. Paid subscribers will find a link below to download a free copy of my book Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?

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Is the Qur’an truly the perfectly preserved word of God—or is its history more complicated than many believe?

In this episode of the All Rise podcast, I join my friend (and former Muslim) Abdu Murray to talk about the turbulent early history of the Qur’an: from its oral roots to the compilation controversies that many Muslims have never been told about. Was there really just one Qur’an from the beginning? Did early Muslim leaders know what the Qur’an was? And what can the evidence of oral storytelling, variant versions, and missing passages tell us about how the Qur’an came to be?

With wit, respect, and deep scholarship, Abdu and I try to cut through the myths to explore what Islamic, historical, and scholarly sources actually say about the formation of Islam’s central text.

Whether you’re a Muslim, a Christian, or just curious about the Qur’an’s origins, this conversation offers thoughtful insights that challenge assumptions and invite further investigation.

Until the mid 1990s I hadn’t thought much myself about the question of how to navigate the maze of different religions. I’d been raised a Christian and had never talked much to those of different religions, so probably assumed, like many people, that most of the world’s religions were broadly similar. Then in 1997 I went along to a place in London, England, called “Speakers’ Corner”.

Known as the free speech capital of the world, on a Sunday afternoon at Speakers’ Corner anyone can stand on a ladder or a soapbox and talk about what they believe. They argue, they debate. And at Speakers’ Corner I found plenty of people of other religions—but especially Muslims—willing to attack what I believed and challenge my beliefs. And those early conversations with Muslims fascinated me so much I went on to do a PhD in Qur’anic Studies. That makes me an unusual Christian I guess.

Over the last almost 30 years, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with Muslims about my faith and I’ve probably spent as much time thinking about Islam as I have about Christianity. I’ve deeply appreciated Muslim friends and academic colleagues over the years.

So given all that: why am I a Christian and not a Muslim?

I want to offer you three reasons why: first, Muhammad. Second, the Qur’an. And third—and we’ll spend most our time here—Jesus.

Those first two are the pillars that Islam stands or falls on: Muhammad and the Qur’an—but those pillars stand on nothing, they support each other. The validity of the Qur’an is based on the testimony of just one man (Muhammad), yet Muhammad’s prophethood is based on the Qur’an. And so the whole thing is viciously circular. But let’s say a bit more.

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Most of the toughest questions about the Christian faith are not abstract or philosophical but are deeply personal. Whether it’s the problem of suffering and evil, or doubts about whether God could love somebody like us, or the questions and doubts that arise when we feel our prayers go unanswered.

You don’t need to have been a Christian for very long to run into the challenge of prayers feeling as if they are bouncing off the ceiling. So if you’re wrestling with this question, you’re not alone. The famous Christian writer C. S. Lewis said that unanswered prayer, especially as he prayed for his sick and dying mother as a boy, was one reason he abandoned faith until his 30s. Lewis wrote:

The trouble with God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong.1

At this point it’s easy for atheists to scoff and say “I told you so!” but the challenge is there’s no solace in secularism. If atheism is true, there is no God to be silent, but worse than that, the universe is utterly impassive and entirely doesn’t care. And when suffering comes, or you see injustice, or when life feels unfair, well suck it up: if atheism is true, we live in a world where evil prospers, the strong flourish at the expense of the weak, and one day everything ends in the heat death of the universe.

If prayer isn’t real, if God doesn’t exist, that wouldn’t be some kind of triumphal win for atheism, but rather the bleak and depressing recognition that humans are, as atheist cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss put it, “a 1% bit of pollution in the universe”.2 Maybe the very fact that we recoil at that suggestion is itself a clue that we are more than just cosmic debris, and that the spiritual instinct most humans find within themselves is a clue to a bigger story.

For Christians, that bigger story is centred around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—the Bible repeatedly proclaiming that if you want to know what God is like, then look at Jesus. And in the one and only prayer that he taught his followers to pray, the words we know today as The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus emphasised that God is relational. “Want to know how to pray?” said Jesus.“Well, start like this: ‘Our Father in heaven’”. No other religion makes the bold claim that you can pray to the very Lord and Creator of the universe using such relational language as this.

But it’s that deeply relational quality to Christian prayer that can make it feel very tough if it seems that our prayers are going unanswered. If God were simply a distant, remote PO box number to whom we sent our missives with no expectation of any response, we might be able to shrug our shoulders and say “Well, what did you expect?” But that’s not the God of the Christian faith, the God who revealed himself in Jesus, and thus we can feel abandoned, or forgotten, or just plain baffled when we think our prayers have been ignored.

But if that’s the place you find yourself in, there are some questions that it can be helpful to ask. The first is this: “if God feels distant, who has moved?” Whilst it is not always the case, the reality is that sometimes it is we who have walked away, we who have allowed our relationship with God to grow distant and cold. Perhaps we’ve allowed other priorities to take the place of God in our lives in which case maybe the place to begin is with seeking a reset in our relationship.

In Luke 15 Jesus tells a famous story of a son who through his own stupidity had become alienated from his father. When the son finally hits rock bottom he trudges sorrowfully back home, with a carefully prepared speech begging to be taken in as a servant. But his father sees him on the road, runs to embrace him, and welcomes him back as a son. God is like that, Jesus said, ever ready to welcome us back into his household, always ready to forgive. Perhaps if we’ve allowed ourselves to become distant from God, the place to start is by asking for forgiveness and experiencing the mercy and reconciliation of our heavenly Father.

Second, if we are wrestling with unanswered prayer, it’s worth pausing and asking ourselves whether we’ve unconsciously begun treating prayer as a kind of magical slot machine. Yet whilst there’s nothing wrong with asking God for our needs, it’s important to remember that God is our heavenly Father and his primary desire for us is that we would grow to love and trust him and see our character refined so it’s more like Christ.

This is why prayer is good for us, even when we don’t receive the answer we would like. Those times remind us that God is not a cosmic Santa Claus but our Father, whose desire is not to grant our wishes but to draw us into deeper communion with him. When we pray, we should not simply be chasing outcomes but seeking God himself. The deeper we come to know God, the more we will find peace in his presence, regardless of whether we receive the answers we wanted.

Third, because God is primarily concerned with our hearts and our character, that sometimes requires learning tough lessons; so it could be that the reason we haven’t seen an answer to a particular prayer is that God wants us to learn persistence. In Luke 18, Jesus told a story about a widow who needed a judge to help her obtain justice. He kept rebuffing her, so she repeatedly asked until finally the judge gave in and met her request. Jesus wasn’t suggesting that we need to pester God enough so he’ll grant our wish to get some peace, but rather Jesus was saying if an unjust judge acts like this, how much more can we expect from the truly just Judge of the universe. So don’t give up: ask, seek, knock, and be patient.

Fourth, it can be helpful to ask whether you are leaning too much on your feelings. The wonder and joy of the Christian faith is that you don’t get to decide how much God loves you based on whether a particular prayer has been answered, or whether you’re feeling happy or sad, but the Bible explains that if you have any doubt what God thinks of us, then look at Jesus:

God demonstrates his love for us in this; while we were still sinners, Jesus died for us. (Romans 5:8)

Speaking of Jesus, it’s helpful to remember that Jesus himself, God’s own son, experienced the silence of heaven when on the cross he cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In Jesus, we have one who understands our pain when heaven feels silent. But the silence of heaven when it came to Jesus was for a reason—in his case, bearing the sins of the world, mine and yours, so we could enjoy God’s friendship.

We live in a broken world and are broken ourselves; and in that context prayer can sometimes feel tough. But God’s love is our unshakeable foundation and when the deep, personal questions about faith come, make sure that you’re standing on the rock of God’s love for you shown in Jesus; because that way, the storms may still batter, but you can stand firm.

Finally, if you’re wrestling with unanswered prayer, some practical wisdom: don’t wrestle alone. Find Christian friends to pray with, who can carry you and comfort you when the valley seems dark. One friend of mine, after her husband’s untimely death, struggled with prayer for a year; but she said what made all the difference was friends who came, sat with her, and prayed with her.

Speaking of dark valleys, that language comes from a famous chapter in the Bible, Psalm 23. If you’re struggling with prayer because heaven seems silent right now, try taking words like that psalm and using them as your own prayer; praying with the words of the Bible can be very powerful.

Ultimately we may never know why a particular prayer goes unanswered; I’ve offered some thoughts above, but everybody’s story is different. There will be times when we simply need to acknowledge that we don’t know why God doesn’t intervene: we know that he is good (Jesus and the cross prove this), we know that we live in a fallen world and we can also know with certainty that one day everything that is sad and bad will become untrue when Jesus returns. Sometimes we need to hold onto that hope and trust God with our questions.

But in all of this, remember: God loves you. No matter what you’ve done, what you’re going through, what you’re wrestling with, nobody is too far from God to be encompassed by his love and offered his forgiveness in Jesus. As Deuteronomy 33:27 puts it: “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms”. Our sense of God’s presence may ebb and flow as our emotions ebb and flow, as life’s circumstances toss and batter us; but God’s love and care for us is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

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This article is a modified version of the chapter in
Have You Ever Wondered?

During my schooldays I hated maths with a vengeance. Maths was hard, maths was difficult, but above all it seemed to me to be mind-numbingly boring. I particularly hated negative numbers and would stop at nothing to avoid them. Terrible jokes aside, my dislike of maths wasn’t unusual, for many of us struggle when it comes to anything to do with numbers; indeed it’s been remarked that there are three types of people in the world: those who can count and those who can’t.

What finally got me excited about maths in my late teens was when I discovered computers and in particular computer programming. Rather than numbers that described things (“six curries”, “three trips to the loo”, “one bad night’s sleep” etc.) with computers came numbers that did things. Give a computer the right numbers and it could play a game, draw a picture, or solve a problem.

Maths is Everywhere

That was the 1980s and now, of course, computers are everywhere and so is maths. Even if (like most of us) the phrase “let’s do some maths” seems about as exciting as “let’s take up stamp collecting” or “how about a wet weekend in Bognor Regis?” you can’t actually escape the fact that all of us use maths, dozens of times a day. Every time you drive a car, make a budget, bake or cook, kick a ball into a net, or watch a weather forecast you’re using maths, usually without realising it.

We can’t get through life without numbers and this is especially true when it comes to the sciences. Whether it’s launching a space probe, or modelling the curvature of space-time, or calculating orbital trajectories, scientists are utterly reliant on mathematics.

Not least this is because nature is inherently mathematical. Numbers are written into the laws of physics whilst mathematical patterns turn up everywhere. For example, in AD1202 the Italian mathematician Leonardo Bonacci, more popularly known as Fibonacci, published an essay in which he described a series of numbers like this:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34

Each number in that series is the sum of the two numbers before it. “So what?” I hear you cry. Well, what’s fascinating is that pattern turns up frequently in nature: the Fibonacci Sequence describes the growth of animal populations, the number of petals on flowers, the spirals on a shell and so forth. It also turns up in aesthetics, with the Fibonacci Spiral, based on those numbers, popping up all over art and architecture. This connection led the famous atheist philosopher, Bertrand Russell, to remark that “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty.”1

A Mathematical Mystery

But there’s an intriguing mystery here that cries out for an explanation—namely why does mathematics work so well? Because numbers are all around us in everyday life, we don’t tend to stop and think about them—but have you ever wondered why life, the universe, and everything seems to align so well with maths?

Here’s the problem. If we live in a purely material universe, where the ultimate reality is atoms and particles then what actually is a number? What is “2”? I mean you can’t sit on it, climb it, lick it, or whack it with a hammer. Instead, numbers are just a human invention—a mere concept probably first invented by Mesopotamian goat herders sometime around 3400BC as a way to keep track of their flocks. So how is it that numbers also seem to describe the very fundamental building blocks of the universe? As Professor Jim Al-Khalili, former president of the British Humanist Association put it:

It’s a huge philosophical question: Why does nature speak the language of mathematics?2

Either those goat herders got very, very lucky—or else there is something bigger going on. And remember, by the way, that maths isn’t just about counting things, it’s also full of purely conceptual ideas, like imaginary numbers. (I remember when this concept was first introduced to me as a teenager I complained to the teacher: “Real numbers are awful enough, why would anybody want to make up more of the things?”) But these mathematical constructions, these concepts, turn up all over nature. What is going on?

Numbers are Really Real

Some time ago I was having a beer with a friend who is a professor of mathematics at a leading British university and I made a throwaway remark about what an exciting job he must have, inventing new concepts all day long. Alex looked at me very seriously and said that this was a common misunderstanding. “We don’t invent maths,” he said. “Maths is about discovery. Mathematicians are explorers—we head out into the unknown to find what’s there; that’s why maths transcends culture, time, and place”.

I think Alex was right—there isn’t “Chinese maths”, “British maths”, or “Indian maths”—there’s just maths. Mathematical concepts don’t change depending on who discovers them, they’re universal. But when you discover something: a new type of frog, a previously unknown mountain, the sharp corner of a Lego brick under the foot in the darkness of the midnight hallway, you’re finding a real thing, in the real world, something that has a concrete existence. But what about numbers? Where precisely is this mathematical realm that Alex and his colleagues spend their days exploring, mapping, and charting?

The Miracle of Numbers

In 1960, the Hungarian Eugene Wigner published what is now a very famous essay, ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’, in which he explored this conundrum. Wigner begins with the story of two friends, one of whom was a statistician working on population trends. The statistician showed his friend an essay he was writing on the first page of which was a mathematical equation concerned with population growth. “What’s this little π symbol here?” the friend asks. “Oh, that’s pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter?” “You’re having a laugh,” his friend retorts, “what on earth has the population to do with the circumferences of circles!”3

Wigner goes on to show how time after time, mathematics and science—whether it’s demographics or physics—fit together like a hand in a glove. Wigner admits that scientists cannot explain why this is the case, but that nevertheless we should be extremely grateful that it is. He concludes:

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.4

Maths and the Meaning of Life

Numbers are everywhere and they can do a lot for us. But there are some things that numbers can’t do—they can’t, for example, solve bigger questions like telling us the value of a person, the purpose of existence, or the meaning of life. Hence why attempts by some atheists to reduce the whole of life to that which can be indexed, measured, or numerated remind me of an episode from Douglas Adams’ famous novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A group of scientists have built a super-computer, Deep Thought, tasked with answering the question of the meaning of life once and for all. Despite major protests from the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons (“I mean what’s the use of us sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning”5) the computer is switched on and allowed to ponder the question. After seven and a half million years of contemplation, Deep Thought is finally ready to announce the answer: the final answer, the objective answer, the definitive answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything:

“I don’t think,” said Deep Thought, “that you’re going to like it.”

“Doesn’t matter!” said Phouchg. “We must know it! Now!”

“Now?” inquired Deep Thought.

“Yes! Now...”

“Alright,” said the computer and settled into silence again. The two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable.

“You’re really not going to like it,” observed Deep Thought.

“Tell us!”

“Alright,” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to the Great Question...”

“Yes...!”

“Of Life, the Universe and Everything...” said Deep Thought.

“Yes...!”

“Is.” said Deep Thought, and paused.

“Yes...!”

“Is …”

“Yes … !!! …?”

“Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

It was a long time before anyone spoke. Out of the corner of his eye Phouchg could see the sea of tense expectant faces down in the square outside.

“We’re going to get lynched aren’t we?” he whispered.6

When it is later suggested to Deep Thought that the answer is somewhat anti-climactic, the computer retorts that the problem is possibly that nobody knew what the question actually was with any precision.

Numbers are not going to answer the question of the meaning of life for you. But I do want to suggest that numbers might be a clue as to where that meaning might be located. For if nature really is fundamentally mathematical; if numbers are as real as apples, aardvarks, and anticyclones, then it seems that whatever the deepest level of reality is, we’re looking at something more like a mind, rather than mere atoms and particles. Which is, fascinatingly, precisely what the Bible has always claimed—for in the beginning, it says, was not a molecule, nor an atom, nor a field of quantum particles—but God himself, the ultimate mind, in which numbers and mathematics have their source.

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The English village of Hayle is typically picturesque, a small cluster of cottages set around a harbour, looking out to the tranquil waters of St. Ives bay. But like so much of England, layers of darker history lie beneath the pretty-as-a-postcard facade. Hidden behind the undergrowth in the garden of what was once the local youth hostel, yawns the mouth of a tunnel. Stoop to step inside its cool darkness and one can walk for hundreds of yards, eventually emerging beneath the cliffs on a nearby cove. Although dank and musty now, local legend identifies this as an ancient “Smuggler’s Tunnel”, once used for bringing illegal contraband ashore under cover of darkness.

The coastal towns and villages of England are full of tales of such tunnels, many dating back centuries to when smuggling was at its height. On moonless nights, sailing ships would pull quietly into bays like that at Hayle, offload their illicit cargo into smaller boats and bring it ashore. There the contraband would be hauled across the sands, carried through tunnels, or even manhandled up sheer cliff faces to a waiting line of locals who would spirit it away. Whole communities benefited from the smuggling trade and the customs men, whose job it was to thwart the black market trade, were often foiled by a stone wall of silence. As Rudyard Kipling, who grew up on the English coast and knew these stories well, wrote in his poem “A Smuggler’s Song”:

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.
Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!
Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark—
Brandy for the Parson,
‘Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!1

When you heard the sound of horses, or the whispers of voices late at night, you were supposed to look the other way, ask no questions, ‘watch the wall’, as the contraband was smuggled past.

Today, the smuggling business is alive and well, only it is not tobacco or brandy that are secreted past, but value judgements. You see, whenever a writer tells you that something is good and laudable, or that something is bad and condemnable, there is an important question you must ask before you consider whether or not to believe them. What worldview do they subscribe to and does that worldview support the value judgement they are making, or are they having to smuggle it in from outside, hoping that everybody will look the other way?

Let me illustrate by means of the humble sport of cricket. Back in 2013, at the height of the Ashes test series against Australia, English cricketer Stuart Broad allegedly engaged in some unsportsmanlike behaviour by not admitting the ball had caught the edge of his bat before it was caught. Whilst a cricket match may move, at least to American eyes, with slow glacial majesty, it is a game high on chivalry and so Broad’s actions caused huge controversy. One cricket fan, the well-known English atheist, Richard Dawkins, took to Twitter to protest:

Stuart Broad obviously knew perfectly well he was caught. Refused to walk. What a revolting cheat. I now want Australia to win the Ashes.2

Dawkins followed this up with:

I am well aware that it is a fact that professional cricketers care about winning more than about morality. But they bloody well shouldn’t.3

When I first read this flurry of tweets,4 I must confess that I found them exceedingly curious. This is, after all, the same Richard Dawkins who has argued that when it comes to explaining all of life, evolution is the “only game in town”. Indeed, in his book River Out of Eden, Dawkins penned this oft-quoted passage:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A. E. Housman put it:
For Nature, heartless, witless Nature
Will neither know nor care.
DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.5

But if this is true, it raises a question. If nature really is neither good nor evil, if we are all simply dancing to the music of our DNA, from where is Dawkins deriving the value judgement which he is waving around and bashing hapless cricketers over the head with? The answer is that it is a smuggled value judgement. If Dawkins were consistent the best he could offer would be to grumble that Stuart Broad’s DNA is clearly playing a different tune to his, but hey, some enjoy waltzing whilst others prefer to tango. What his worldview certainly does not allow him to do is pronounce Broad as immoral, instead he must smuggle that value judgement in from somewhere else, hoping we don’t notice. Watch the wall, my darling, while the value judgements go by …

That was fun. Let’s try another.

This next example comes from Alom Shaha, former Muslim and author of The Young Atheist’s Handbook. After an introductory chapter extolling the wonders of bacon, Shaha switches from pork to beef, specifically his beef with organised religion. Among the many aspects of religion that irk Shaha is the belief in the afterlife:

It’s an insidious idea, this notion that there is life after death … It depresses me to think that so many people on the planet live their lives with this notion. Can we truly fulfil our potential as a species as long as we hold on to, and encourage, the perpetuation of the lie of life after death?6

Like the writings of many other atheists, Shaha’s book is not so much an argument as a moral tract. Just look at his words above—do you not sense the energy, the passion, his beatific vision of a species fulfilling its potential? But hold on one moment, though. Shaha is, like Dawkins, committed to naturalistic materialism—the belief that all that exists are atoms and particles. Human beings are just the result of time plus chance plus natural selection, there’s no reason we’re here. And that means there is no potential we have to fulfil. Study science if you wish, feed the poor if you’re so moved, or simply park yourself on the couch, eat pizza, and watch endless re-runs of Game of Thrones. DNA neither knows nor cares.

In his satirical poem, ‘Evolutionary Hymn’, C. S. Lewis illustrated the dilemma for the atheist well:

Lead us, evolution, lead us,
Up the future’s endless stair,
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us,
For stagnation is despair!
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us, nobody knows where.7

If the evolutionary story is all that there is, then there is nothing that human beings are supposed to be. We are simply one point on the graph of the endless march of evolution and we have no way of knowing where the ever-winding road takes us. Behind us, lies a trail of ancestors all the way back to the primordial soup, ahead of us lies—well, we have no way of knowing. So where, pray, is Shaha getting the language of “potential” from? Certainly not from his atheism. Like Dawkins, he is smuggling it in from outside, distracting us with stories of illicit bacon in the hope we won’t notice anything suspicious. Watch the wall, my darling, while the value judgements go by …

One last example, this time from Sam Harris, atheist and neuroscientist. In his book The Moral Landscape, Harris excitedly tells us that religion is no longer needed as the compass of morality, nor to determine the content of ethics, but instead that science can answer moral questions. Here’s how the trick is done:

[Q]uestions about values—about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose—are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc. … If there are objective truths to be known about human well-being—if kindness, for instance, is generally more conducive to happiness than cruelty is—then science should one day be able to make very precise claims about which of our behaviors and uses of attention are morally good, which are neutral, and which are worth abandoning.8

In other words, morality is all about well-being, about happiness, and science can tell us how to maximise that. By the careful application of science, we can ensure that the greatest possible number of people can live happy, healthy, productive lives. No God needed.

What’s the problem? Well, to answer that it helps to realise that Harris’s argument is nothing really new, but is basically a modernised version of an old ethical theory called Utilitarianism, one which traces its roots to two English philosophers, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Their approach said that morality is about maximising “utility”—which is usually defined as happiness. When you’re faced with a moral choice, you must pick that action which will produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. And many atheists today, like Harris, think science can answer those kinds of questions very well.

But here’s the problem. Why maximise happiness? Why is happiness a good thing? Even if we decide that it is, why should I decide that your happiness is worth the same as my happiness? (Perhaps mine is more important than yours.) From where is Harris deriving the value judgement that maximising happiness (and doing so with a careful eye to equality and fair play) is a good thing? Watch the wall, my darling, while the value judgements go by …

With practice, you can learn to spot smuggled value judgements everywhere. Whenever somebody tells you that something is good or bad, noble or evil, ask yourself whether their worldview sustains the value judgement they are making.

A few years ago, I had lunch with a young atheist from the University of Toronto, who wished to ask some questions about the Christian faith. Over the space of a couple of hours, he fired dozens of questions at me and I did my best to respond. As soon as I had answered one question or objection, he’d fire another at me—bang, bang, bang! At the end of our time together, as I walked him to his car, I was racking my brains, trying to think of something I could leave him with to make him think more deeply. As he opened the door of his car, I said to him: “I’ve enjoyed our lunch and I hope some of my answers helped you. But more than that, I hope you felt that I treated you with respect and dignity, despite our profound disagreements?”

“Yes,” he replied, “you have been very kind”.

“Good,” I said, “and I have to say, you have also been very courteous, despite your clear difficulties with the Christian faith.” He thanked me and I continued: “But I’d like to leave you with a thought. The reason I have treated you with respect is I believe that as a human being, you are made in the image of a God who created you and loves you, and who showed how much he values you by sending his Son, Jesus, to die for you. That’s why I treated you the way I did. Now, I know that you do not believe this. In fact, you have told me three times in the last two hours that you believe humans are nothing more than atoms and particles, that we are just an accident of biology. But you have not treated me as an accident. You have treated me as a person of value and significance. In other words, you have treated me on the basis of my worldview, not of yours. For this I am grateful, but it raises some questions, wouldn’t you say?” For the first time in two hours, he had nothing to say in reply.

If the Christian worldview is true, if the arc of the biblical story tells the truth of who we are, then it gives the only basis I know for the use of words like ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘ought’ and ‘must’, ‘purpose’ and ‘potential’. If you wish to wipe God from the picture, then God, in his mercy, has given you that freedom. But with God goes the source of all value judgements, leaving the atheist alone in a purposeless universe and thus left with just two choices: either to be consistent and admit they can no longer speak of things like morality, or to start smuggling in value judgements from the Christian worldview, under cover of darkness. Altogether now: Watch the wall, my darling, while the value judgements go by …

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This is an extract from the best-selling book,
Have You Ever Wondered? … get the ebook from free at this link!

I grew up in a very diverse part of London; where I lived as a teenager, you could choose from a thousand different belief systems: Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Humanism, and a multitude of other isms. Within a mile ori two of home, there were churches, mosques, temples, a gurdwara, and a myriad other places of worship.

Religion was everywhere as I grew up and today, a few decades on, it’s still everywhere and it’s growing. According to the statistics, we are becoming a more religious society here in the West. People don’t believe less, but they do believe more diversely.

One reason for the growth in religion and spirituality is that people are increasingly dissatisfied with shallow secular answers, the idea that all you need is money and pleasure, and that’s enough. As psychiatrist and author Viktor Frankl famously put it: “Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”1

How do we answer that meaning question? Winifred Gallagher is a journalist who has written for magazines including Rolling Stone, Harper’s and The Atlantic. In an interview about her book, Working on God, she describes this growing unease in our culture, this sense that there must be more to life than this:

The only way to describe the new phenomenon I am observing is to coin a new phrase: spiritual agnostics. We have regarded religion as belief in unbelievable things. Our trusted tools of intellect and learning have deconstructed religious belief. But we’re finding that we have inexplicable feelings. We wonder: Is this true? Is this all there is? I have tried to muffle this question in all the accustomed ways all my life: love, achievement, stuff, and therapy. I tried to muffle it by writing two books on science. By middle age, I have wearily recognized that religion is the only road I have not taken in pursuit of the answer … We’re haunted by faith.2

If as Winifred discovered we are spiritual beings who need more than the endless treadmill of career to satisfy us, that raises a deeper question: which religion? Many people when they first begin to realise that there’s a spiritual side to life then quickly panic when they see the incredible range of religious options on offer. Paralysed by choice, the temptation is to reach for easy platitudes, such as “Well, I wonder if all religions teach basically the same thing?” That’s a warm, comfortable answer, not least because it allows us to approach spirituality in a slightly consumerist way, picking the beliefs, ideas, or practices that “work for us”: a little bit of yoga, a dash of meditation, the odd prayer, a couple of candles, and a lemon-scented journal.

But the uncomfortable, nagging fact remains that the only way to maintain this idea is by not actually going and looking. It’s a bit like when I frequently misplace my car keys: “Have you looked in the lounge where you normally lose them?” my wife will ask. “Yes, dear,” I reply, by which I mean I glanced briefly through the door but didn’t bother searching properly.

And it doesn’t take much looking or searching before you stumble across some fairly stark differences between the teachings of the world’s major religions, faiths, and spiritual traditions. Take just the two biggest religions, Christianity and Islam—often sloppily lumped together under the label “Abrahamic Faiths”. To give just one major example, if you look at the character of God in the Bible, you discover the Bible’s claims that God is relational, knowable and is not just loving, but is love. Turn to the Qur’an, and you discover its claims about God are almost entirely opposite.

“Ah, but that’s just theology,” you say. Alright, well what about some history. The central event of the Christian faith is the death and resurrection of Jesus—and secular historians will tell you that the former is one of the best attested facts of first-century history. If we can’t be sure that Jesus was crucified, under the Roman governor Pilate, sometime round about AD33, then we can’t be sure of anything in first-century history, as the evidence is so overwhelming. But along comes the Qur’an, some 600 years after these events, and claims that Jesus was not killed by crucifixion, but that this was just a wild claim made by the Jews. Those two historical claims (crucified and not-crucified) are impossible to reconcile, as execution by crucifixion is a rather binary affair: you can’t be partly crucified or only-mostly-dead.

And the more you study Christianity and Islam, or indeed the more you compare any of the world’s faith traditions, the more the contradictions mount up. Short of closing your eyes, covering your ears, and muttering “What car keys?”, you can’t escape the differences.

So how to navigate the maze of diversity and difference? Well, first, don’t be worried by it—it’s just one more sign that human beings are inherently religious, that we’re wired for faith, designed to be spiritual. That a desire for connection with God bubbles up everywhere in human culture, across time and space and history, is itself a massive clue. But that aside, how do we work through all the options and choices? Do we just pick randomly and hope for the best—or is there a better way?

I think there is. And so my first suggestion is this: try praying. Radical idea, right? But if there is a God behind this universe and there is religious truth to be discovered, then rather than take on our shoulders the full load of finding it, maybe we might ask for help? After all, Jesus famously said: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” So why not try praying, perhaps something like this: “God, I don’t know what to believe about you, but I want to know the truth and I want to encounter you. Would you please guide my steps as I seek?”

Second, take a long, hard, careful look at Jesus—perhaps by reading one of the four first-century eyewitness accounts of his life, death, and resurrection found in the gospels in the New Testament. Lots of religions claim to offer wisdom, advice, or high-minded thoughts about God and spirituality—but Christianity teaches that God stepped into space and history in the person of Jesus, in order to show us what he was like. If Jesus’s claims not to just have ideas about God, but to be God-with-us stand up, then that answers both the “Which religion?” question as well as the “What is God like?” question, in one go.

It’s easy to forget just how startling the impact of Jesus’s life has been, until you stop and actually think about it. The paradox is captured powerfully in this famous meditation written a century ago:

He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter’s shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book, never held an office, never went to college, never visited a big city. He never travelled more than two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend … All the armies that have ever marched, all the navies that have ever sailed, all the parliaments that have ever sat, all the rulers that ever reigned put together, have not affected the life of humankind on earth, as powerfully as that one solitary life.3

And, third, try reading the stories of those who have trodden the path of spiritual inquiry before you, especially those who have had the courage to follow it out of the religious tradition where they began. One of the most powerful books I have ever read in this vein is Nabeel Qureshi’s autobiography, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus. It tells the story of how, as a young and highly devout Muslim, he set out on a quest to know God better—and discovered that the journey led him not deeper into Islam, but to an encounter with Jesus.

When it comes to the most important questions of life, ultimately what matters are not our feelings or our hunches, but what is true. When we go to the doctor with a worrying pain we don’t want her to say: “What medicine do you feel would help?” but we want a diagnosis, and a correct prescription. When we board a plane, we don’t want the captain to come over the PA system and invite anyone who feels like it to come up to the cockpit and have a go at flying. What matters in these situations are not feelings or preferences, but truth. And it’s the same when it comes to questions of spirituality and religion—tempting as it is to settle for easy answers that make us feel good, I want to suggest that we need to find answers that measure up to reality, given that much is at stake.

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Based on a talk first given at Canford School in Dorset

I was recently stunned when I logged onto the BBC News website to read the following story:

In a stunning historical revelation, researchers at the German Federal Archives have uncovered a handwritten letter, allegedly dictated by Adolf Hitler on April 29, 1945—just one day before his death. The letter, addressed to an unnamed clergyman, contains statements of remorse, with Hitler reportedly confessing his “immeasurable guilt” and pleading for God’s mercy. “I was blind,” one passage reads. “If there is a God, may He have mercy on my soul.” Historians are divided on the letter’s authenticity, but if genuine, it could rewrite everything we thought we knew about one of history’s most infamous figures.

How does that story make you feel? Shocked? Relieved? Outraged? Baffled? Stunned? Why is that? I confess I made that story up. (And when I gave a talk at a school based on this essay, I even photoshopped the BBC News website and had half the students in the room convinced).

But suppose the story were true. Could God forgive Hitler?

Evil incarnate?

One of the grim realities of human nature is that we are very conflicted creatures. All of us have the ability to be angelic and all of us have the ability to be monstrous. If only one could easily divide the world into “totally good” and “totally evil” people, life would be so much easier, right?

But Hitler does seem easy to categorise. He is one of a small group of people (Stalin might be another) whose actions represent the utter extremes of human wickedness. Hitler was responsible for the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust, along with millions of others—prisoners of war, Roma gypsies, civilians, the list goes on.

No wonder that if historians did discover that on 29 April 1945, as Allied troops were closing in on the Führerbunker in Berlin, Hitler had somehow prayed, repented and come to Christ, we’d be asking: could God forgive Hitler? Would Hitler be in heaven?

Some thoughts about forgiveness

What amazing questions. But to tackle them honestly and properly, we first need to explore a little bit of background, starting with asking what we mean by forgiveness and why we need it in the first place.

At the heart of the Christian faith stands the incredible claim that Jesus died on a cross to forgive our wrongdoing, our brokenness, our screw ups, our evil. As Jesus himself put it:

For even the Son of Man [Jesus’s preferred title for himself] did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)

But maybe your reaction to that is “Well, I don’t need forgiveness. There’s nothing wrong with me.” Well, nice try: but the reality is we all go wrong in all kinds of ways.

Imagine that you died and arrived in heaven. An angel meets you at the gates of heaven and says, “Welcome, so glad you could make it, we’ve arranged a special surprise for you”. And he escorts you to what appears to be a cinema. He guides you to screen 1, sits you down alone, and gives you a large bucket of popcorn. “Welcome to the Theatre of Judgement” says the angel, smiles, then disappears as a movie begins to play.

Lo and behold, it’s the movie of your life—everything you’ve ever thought, said, or done is up there on the screen. Some bits are great, other bits make you cringe with embarrassment—all the stupid decisions, all the rude hurtful things you said about others, all those secret thoughts and selfish ambitions. All the things you did—but also the things you didn’t do.

Finally the movie ends and as the credits roll, the angel reappears. “Hope you enjoyed that,” he says cheerfully. “Now we’re going to have a second screening, and everybody else featured in the movie is going to come and watch it—all your family, your friends, your enemies, your neighbours, colleagues—everybody is going to get to watch every little detail of your life”.

Who would want that? Who would want to show that movie to their friends, family, to their dear old granny? Most of us who are really honest with ourselves know there are things deep within us that we don’t want anyone to know about—and the Bible has a word for that stuff, for that inner brokenness we try to hide from others, even ourselves. The Bible calls it “sin”.

Imagine that you commit 5 sins a day, every day, between the age of 16 and the age of 60. Nothing necessarily major, just petty cruelties. That’s a total of 80,355. And that’s before we get to things you should have done, but didn’t. Friends you could have helped. That mobile phone you bought despite knowing it was made by slave labour in China. And so on. That life movie is looking more like a multi-part series now and granny is in for a massive shock.

No wonder that the Bible says:

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23)

Every one of us needs forgiveness. No exceptions.

But suppose you say, grudgingly, okay, maybe I might need forgiveness. Well why can’t God justforgive me; why did Jesus have to die?

Well, notice something for a moment. Real forgiveness, genuine forgiveness is always costly. Imagine that you were to accidentally reverse your car into mine and dent it, causing £1,000 of damage. You look in the glove compartment for your paperwork and horrified, you discover your insurance has expired—and there’s no way you can afford to pay for this yourself. But I take pity on you, forgive you your debt and let you off—you have been forgiven but your forgiveness came at a cost. I paid the price so you could be forgiven. Your forgiveness was not free.

Or imagine a friend betrays you and damages your reputation. Then they come to you, genuinely ask for your forgiveness and you forgive them. But forgiveness carries a price. If you choose to forgive them, you have to carry within you the cost of forgiving them and turning away from vengeance.

Forgiveness is always costly for the forgiver and always free for the one being forgiven. And thus it’s no surprise that this even more the case when it comes to God. Because the reality is that each one of us is so bad that Jesus had to die for us, yet so loved that he was glad to die for us. As the Bible puts it:

God demonstrates his own love for us in this—while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

But here’s the thing—if forgiveness is free, where is justice? If you’re feeling that tension, good—because it shows you understand something crucial: forgiveness isn’t the absence of justice. True forgiveness is costly. Someone has to bear the weight of the wrongs done. That’s exactly why God didn’t just wave sin away, but Jesus paid for it with his own life.” Grace isn’t cheap. It’s incredibly expensive. God doesn’t just shrug his shoulders at sin. Every sin (yours, mine, Hitler’s) is accounted for. Either we bear it ourselves, or Jesus bears it for us. There is no third option.

So … what about Hitler?

And that we all need forgiveness and that forgiveness is costly is the key to thinking about Hitler. Because here is the thing: if you discovered that Hitler really had repented and would enjoy an eternity with God, your response reveals nothing about God, nor about Hitler, but it reveals a lot about you.

You see here’s the question: what grounds or basis do you have for getting into eternity that Hitler didn’t have? Why should God allow you into heaven? Maybe you might say:

· “I’ve done more good works than Hitler!”. But good works are not the basis of God’s forgiveness.

· “I’ve lived a better life!”. But that’s not the basis of God forgiving you.

· “I didn’t do the evil that Hitler did!”. But if you’re a Christian, this is not why God forgave you. God does not owe you, or me, or any of us forgiveness. Forgiveness by its very nature is always free to the one receiving it.

So why would God forgive you? Because you genuinely asked. And genuinely repented. And genuinely threw yourself on God’s mercy. And when God forgives you, you did not deserve it. Not in the slightest. It was totally God’s gift.

Apart from God’s grace, we would end up separated from him for eternity. And we would entirely deserve it. But if you ask God’s forgiveness and receive it and get to spend eternity with him, there will never—not for one single second in eternity—be a moment where you deserve to be there.

And so ends our thought experiment.

Let’s be clear, I don’t think there is the slightest piece of evidence that Hitler repented because forgiveness needs true repentance. But God could have forgiven him. But let’s forget Hitler for a moment. Let’s talk instead about you. You see, if God’s grace is big enough for Hitler, it’s big enough for you and your mess ups. But have you accepted it?

Practical Forgiveness

And all of this isn’t just theoretical, but it is also very practical. Because God’s forgiveness also has an impact in the real world, bringing peace between those who were once enemies.

One of my heroes is Corrie ten Boom. In 1939, Corrie lived with her father and sister in the Netherlands, where her father ran a watchmaker’s shop. Holland fell to the Nazis in 1940 and soon attacks on Jews became commonplace. Committed Christians, Corrie and her family began helping to smuggle Jews out of the country, hiding many in their home. But in 1944, disaster struck. They were discovered and the family were arrested by the Germans. Her father died very quickly, but Corrie and her sister, Betsie, were shipped to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. There they suffered terrible abuse and atrocities and Betsie eventually died an agonising death.

Corrie, however, survived and was eventually released and began a post-war career as an evangelist, speaking about God’s love. But one day, something shocking happened. Let me quote Corrie’s own words:

“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former SS man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing centre at Ravensbrück. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there—the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face.

He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message, Fräulein”, he said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!”

His hand was thrust out to shake mine. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your Forgiveness.

As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.

And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on Christ’s.”1

I think Corrie was right. And if that is true, that God’s forgiveness does not hang on us but on Jesus, then yes, God could forgive even the most monstrous of us. He has forgiven me (and I know what I can be like and how much I needed it). So what about you?

“This clearly isn’t a path,” my wife shouted, struggling to make her voice heard above the roar of the gale. We were on the side of a hill in the Lake District, enjoying what was supposed to be a summer afternoon stroll. But this being England, the weather wasn’t playing ball, or indeed any sport other than possibly water polo.

“But there’s a path marked on the map,” I protested, as the rain (which was blowing sideways) began to leak down my neck. Thankfully I was wearing one of those modern outdoor jackets optimistically marketed as ‘breathable’, which I think translates into “it lets the water in, but doesn’t let it out again”.

“What precise map are you using?” my wife yelled, as a raven blew past us, backwards.

“The OS one.”

“That explains everything.”

For those not familiar with British cartography, OS stands for ‘Ordnance Survey’, the UK national mapping agency. Its curious name reflects its roots, which lie in military history and defence of the realm. In the past, military surveyors would pace the land, mapping every peak and dale, every road and every village.

These days, things have changed. Much of the work of map making happens behind a desk, because using satellite photos and aerial photography is much cheaper. Unfortunately, it’s also less accurate, as cartographers can misread a photograph or simply come over all creative and say ‘Hey, let’s draw just a path here on the side of Mungrisdale Common and hope for the best’.

So I was fascinated recently to meet a lady out in the wild and lonely back country behind Skiddaw in the Lake District’s northern fells. What stood out was that she was carrying a backpack with a huge aerial sticking out of the top as well as some kind of electronic pole that she was tapping on the ground every 30 seconds or so. We fell into conversation and I asked her what she was doing.

“Ground-truthing,” she replied.

My experience of the terminology of modern surveying being on a par with my terminology of Latvian Spoon Dancing, I asked: “What’s ground-truthing?”

She explained her job was to walk all the major paths on the OS maps in the area, checking that what was on the map corresponded to reality.

“Sometimes I think somebody at a desk in Southampton makes a lot of stuff up,” she whispered conspiratorially. Then with a smile, she did something technical with her survey pole, and strode off purposefully northward.

But her word stuck with me. Ground-truthing. What a wonderful term. And what a crucial idea, that a hunch (drawn from an aerial photo, say) must be verified in person, on the ground. Cartographical theory needs testing against geographical reality.

WHEN PHILOSOPHY WANDERS OFF THE MAP

It also occurred to me that ground-truthing applies in lots of areas of life, for example when it comes to our deepest beliefs about the world. It’s very easy to come up with all kinds of clever ideas about life, the universe, and everything which sound great on paper or in your head, but then fail in the real world. I would suggest that atheism can be particularly prone to this.

Consider these words from atheist philosopher Alex Rosenberg, whose book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is refreshingly direct about what atheism entails:

Is there a God? No.

What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is.

What is the purpose of the universe? There is none.

What is the meaning of life? Ditto.

Why am I here? Just dumb luck.

Is there free will? Not a chance!

What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them.

Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes.

Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.1

Putting aside the fact that paragraphs like this make it clear why Alex is a philosopher and not a motivational speaker, my problem is that this deeply materialistic let’s-chuck-out-God-but-also-much-of-what-it-means-to-be-human-too kind of atheism fails when you try to ground-truth it. What happens when you try to live out “anything goes” in the real world? What happens if we treat other people as if they’re just deterministically driven lumps of matter? At best, you’re going to be friendless; at worst, the strong trample all over the weak.

It really is vital that we ask how our beliefs work when we try to live them out in the real world. Do my beliefs pass any kind of basic liveability test? If you’re an atheist, you’re free to reject Christianity’s teaching that human beings are valuable and precious because they were made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27). Reject that by all means and replace it with “genetic robots dancing to our DNA”. But unless you’re willing to ground-truth that and see what it looks like lived out in the real world, perhaps you need to ask yourself whether you really believe it.

I remember on one occasion having lunch with a student who had asked if we could meet up so he could ask me “A few questions about Christianity”. I hadn’t realised that he was using ‘few’ in the same sense of the word as ‘Amazon stock a few items’ and for two hours over burgers he peppered me with question after question after question. I occasionally tried ineffectually to turn the conversation around to what he, as an atheist, believed, but got precisely nowhere. Finally, as we walked from the restaurant to the car park and got to our vehicles, an idea popped into my head.

“I hope you found our conversation useful?” I asked.

“Yes, thanks for taking the time.”

“And I hope, as I tried to answer all 54 of your questions, I treated you with respect, even though we disagreed.”

“Oh yes, thank you, you’ve been very kind and patient.”

“Great,” I added, “and I must say, even though your ability to ask tough questions would make a hardened political journalist on Red Bull look like a mere amateur in comparison, you were also polite and generous in how you asked them.”

“Thank you.”

“But just one thought for you to consider. The reason I treated you with kindness was because I believe you are, as the Bible teaches, a person with value and dignity because you are made in the image of God. On the other hand, you said over lunch—three times if I recall—that you think we are just atoms and particles. Yet you didn’t treat me as just a bunch of atoms; you treated me as a person with value and dignity. In other words, you treated me on the basis of my beliefs, not on the basis of your beliefs. Don’t you find that fascinating?”

For the first time in over two hours, he didn’t have a quick-fire remark in reply and as he thought about what I’d asked, finally admitted that there were perhaps a few issues with his atheism that he perhaps hadn’t considered before.

This is, I think, one of the biggest challenges for atheism. Proclamations like “we’re just particles”, “we don’t have free will”, “science explains everything”, “music is just a neurological tic” (to quote a few New Atheist soundbites) may sound impressive sitting at a desk, or after a few beers down The Slug and Skeptic, but try and live by them and, like relying upon an imaginary path on a Lakeland fellside in a rainstorm, you’re likely to get badly lost.

LONG-TERM GROUND-TRUTHING

Ground-truthing can be a rapid, one-off exercise, like the Ordnance Survey lady I met out in the back country with her surveying gear. But it can also be a longer-term project.

Ronald Blythe was one of England’s greatest nature writers. For almost 50 years until his death, aged 100, in 2023, Ronnie lived at Bottengoms Farm deep in the Essex countryside, from where he built a writing career around observing, long-term and in detail, the nature around him. One of his friends was another nature writer, Robert Macfarlane, who wrote of Ronnie:

I’ve long thought of Ronnie Blythe as a ground-truther, in many senses. For decades, he has been fathoming place as deep rather than wide, and doing so by walking, talking, listening, and watching … ‘Everywhere,’ writes Ronnie, ‘it is all so perfectly interesting that one might never go to bed.’ That is his sensibility in a sentence: inquisitive, wandering, democratic, giving us the truth on the ground.2

Ronnie was so respected as an authority on nature and the English countryside because he had lived in it, observed it, tested it, walked in it—ground-truthed it—for decade upon decade. And, again, there are parallels when it comes to our beliefs about the bigger story, when it comes to God, faith, and Jesus. I have a lot of respect for Christians who have thought their faith through. But I have even greater respect for those who have not just done that in a vacuum, but whose faith has been tested over decades, who have put Christianity to the long-term ground-truth test.

People like my father-in-law, David, for example. It’s just over a year since we lost David to cancer, at the age of 89. He had followed Jesus for over 70 years and throughout the quarter of a century I knew him, I’d been impressed by the depth of his faith. Being a Christian for that length of time often means your faith has been lived in, tested, refined, and ground-truthed. Through good times, bad times, and everything in between, David had put Christianity to the test through living it.

When David was first diagnosed with cancer back in 2024, I remember him quietly saying to me: “I’ve followed Jesus for seven decades. Never in all that time has he let me down. That gives me every confidence that, no matter what this final stage of the journey looks like, I can trust him.”

For David, what sustained him at the end wasn’t primarily an argument or a creed. Rather it was experience, 70 years of walking the road with Jesus, knowing the road—but more importantly, the guide—was trustworthy.

Which is how the Bible describes faith. Time and time again, it uses the imagery of walking to describe what following Jesus looks like. In the hyper-rationalistic world of the West, we can be too quick to try to reduce Christianity to factoids: “Give me the claims, just the facts, then I’ll decide whether I believe your list of propositions.”

That’s a start; it gets you to the garden gate. But a good walk doesn’t stop at the garden gate but heads out into the lane, across the field, up the foothills, and into the mountains. And then you’d better be sure your map is reliable.

Christianity is similar. Yes, its claims matter. Truth is important. But I have followed Jesus these last 45 years not purely because I’ve signed off on a list of beliefs, but because as I have walked with Jesus into the real world (where life, in all of its messiness happens), I have found, again and again, that it works, that it is ground-truthed.

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.

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

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

I was recently planning a trip to visit a colleague who lives in Perth in Scotland. Being a typical man and therefore proud of my navigational skills, my ability to fend for myself, and my intricate knowledge of the British motorway network, I reached manfully for my phone and typed ‘Perth’ into Google Maps.

Despite the fact that I live just outside Swindon in the south-west of England, that my phone has navigated me to Scotland many times, and that one would have assumed a computer would pick the nearer destination than one many thousands of miles away, Google Maps decided I must mean Perth, Australia.

It’s not easy to confuse Perth, Scotland with Perth, Australia. One is hot, has great beaches, and exotic wildlife; the other is wet, windy, and is more famous for its midges than for its marsupials. Thus I’ve yet to encounter a tourist stumbling out of arrivals at Perth Airport in Scotland wearing sandals and shorts and muttering “what the heck?”

But somehow, Google Maps confused the two and threw up an error: “No route possible”.1 My eleven-year-old son, who was looking over my shoulder at this point, asked: “Dad, why would Google think you meant Perth in Australia—if you wanted to get there, you wouldn’t start from here”.

If you wanted to get there, you wouldn’t start from here.

Those words of wisdom reminded me of another experience I’d had on my phone the very same day. I’d been checking the comments on a video I’d posted on social media and come across something an atheist had written. The video had been addressing the question of whether life can have meaning and purpose without God and I had argued that it could not. The commentator had protested and replied: “I have a whole set of values I live by”. He’d then shared a graphic that laid out some of those values, including ‘love’, ‘peace’, ‘kindness’, and ‘justice’.

But just as in my Google Maps experience, we can say: “That’s a great destination! Who wouldn’t want to arrive at love, peace, kindness, and justice? But here’s my question: can you get to those things from your starting point?”

The problem is that, at least if you want to be a consistent atheist (and let’s be fair, all of us as humans can be terribly inconsistent) then you’re committed to a number of things. In short: that there is no God, no supernatural, no soul, that humans are just another animal, that we’re merely the stuff we’re made of, and that the basic bottom-level reality of the universe is just the laws of physics.

Now you’re welcome to start from there. But trying to start from there and navigate your way to love, peace, kindness, and justice does look a bit like trying to drive to Perth, Australia from the south-west of England. At some point, you’re going to end up at the bottom of the ocean wondering if you should rethink your life choices.

In case you think I’m being unfair or misrepresenting atheism, here is what popular atheist philosopher, Alex Rosenberg, has to say about ‘love’:

Let’s start with love and the design problem it solves for males. A male won’t get sexual access to a female unless the male can convince her that he’ll be around to share some of his resources with her and the kids he is going to produce. Since females have been selected for not being fooled by mere expressions of fidelity, they demand stronger assurances before they will allow males to have their way with them … What will reliably guarantee unenforceable promises about the future when it would be irrational for any male to keep them? One thing that would do it is a sign of irrational commitment to the female and to her interests that could not be faked … love is irrational and unfakable, by males at any rate. In nature’s search through design space for a strategy that will ensure males’ sexual access, the emotion of love looks like it will just do the trick.2

All I can say is that life must be an absolute barrel of laughs in the Rosenberg household, especially around Valentine’s Day or wedding anniversaries. But I respect what Alex is trying to do here. He’s committed to his atheism, he’s smart enough to know that ‘love’ must therefore be explicable purely in terms of the nuts-and-bolts of biology, and so he ended up with that joyous little paragraph.

It gets similarly tricky with the other things on my commentator’s list. Justice? Again, on atheism it’s hard to see how you can do more than recognise that we each have preferences for how we’d like others to behave and if we’re lucky, we get to gang up with others (call it ‘society’ or ‘civilisation’ if you’re feeling flashy) and enforce those preferences on others. Kindness? Well, again, nature doesn’t seem particularly bothered about that one—not for nothing is it called ‘survival of the fittest’ not ‘survival of the nicest’. And peace? Well, good luck with that one.

Don’t mishear me on this. I think that love, peace, kindness, and justice are wonderful—that they are things to aspire to, virtues to aim at developing in us and in society. But we need to answer the question: what’s the basis of these things? What’s the starting point, the foundation on which we can build them? Because just as you can’t drive to Australia from England, bicycle to the moon from the Earth, or build a house without foundations, you can’t pick your values at random. Your starting point matters.

The historian Tom Holland puts it well when he writes:

People in the West, even those who may imagine that they have emancipated themselves from Christian belief, in fact, are shot through with Christian assumptions about almost everything. All of us in the West are a goldfish, and the water that we swim in is Christianity, by which I don’t necessarily mean the confessional form of the faith, but, rather, considered as an entire civilisation.3

That’s true in so far as it goes. Only it doesn’t go quite far enough, as the reason Christianity has survived (and thrived) for two thousand years, despite the best efforts of tyrants or sceptics to destroy it, isn’t because it’s a great foundation for a nice set of values. That’s to put things entirely on their head. Christianity didn’t spread, didn’t turn the values of the ancient world upside down, didn’t change hearts and minds because people liked its ethics. Rather it spread because people were convinced it was true, that Jesus really was God, really did die, and really had risen from the dead. And then, emboldened and empowered by Jesus, they transformed how they lived. The values we hold so dear are the fruit of Christianity, not its root. Indeed, as former atheist Louise Perry put it:

One of the reasons that I ended up becoming a Christian is because I realised if it were supernaturally true, you would expect it to be sociologically true.4

At the heart of the Christian faith stands not a set of values but a person, Jesus Christ. And if his claims hold water, if not just his teaching but his entire life stands up, then that doesn’t just give us a foundation for the values we yearn for, but it has some personal implications too. For Jesus didn’t just come to sort society out; he came to sort us out, and as he promised: “I have come that you might have life and have it to the full”.

We’re told that we should care for the environment, but why should we care? Can we do better than selfish reasons that make it all about us? In this webinar from a few years ago, I talk about two of my favourite topics—God and the natural world—and show how I believe that it’s only a robust Christian faith that can truly give us a firm foundation to care for nature.

I was recently speaking at a university where I’d been asked to address the topic “Does Religion Poison Everything?” During the lecture, one student at the back of the lecture room gesticulated wildly every time I made a point with which he disagreed. At the end of the talk, there was a time of Q&A and this student was among the first to raise his hand. He began by self-identifying as an atheist and then proceeded to ask a series of increasingly complex questions about moral philosophy. After the event was over, the student found his way to the front and continued his questions and we went to and fro for about half an hour across a range of issues: Can you be good without God? Do you need God for moral values? What does the good life look like? Finally the student shook my hand and said, “I’ve disagreed with almost everything you’ve said in the last 90 minutes. But this has been the most fascinating conversation I can remember and you’ve given me much to think about. Thank you.”

That comment made my day because it was a refreshing break from the norm. For too often when those who hold to wildly different worldviews—atheism and Christianity, for instance—engage with each other, the result can be more heat than light. Atheists can fall into “argument by soundbite” (or by meme!) whilst religious believers sometimes write off those who disbelieve in God as immoral pagans, and thus neither side actually takes the time to listen to the other. As Harry Lewis, the former Dean of Harvard College, once wrote, lamenting the fact that intelligent conversation about the deepest questions is now increasingly hard in universities (and his point might apply to the media, too):

What used to be the big question of humanistic learning—what does it mean to be human?—now has little place in the academy because there is no way to tell whether the question has been answered correctly or not.

It might encourage Harry to learn that one of the things I have discovered in years of travelling and speaking in a wide variety of settings, including many universities, is that I think many people are open to talking about some of these issues in a way that is intelligent and respectful.

A few years ago a colleague and I were speaking at a Canadian university for a pair of events entitled “Does Spirituality Matter?” We had been told by the organisers that we might, if we were lucky, get 100 students per evening. In the end, 900 per night attended, and the overflow room had an overflow. People of all faiths and none wanted to engage with the topic and the questions and conversations flowed long into the night.

I believe we stand at a cultural moment where the need to answer some of life’s biggest questions gets ever more pressing, as science, technology, and politics raise them all the louder. What kind of “questions” do I have in mind? The old ones: What does it mean to be human? Does life have any kind of purpose? What does the ‘good life’ look like, and who gets to decide? Is death the end and how does your answer to that question, negative or affirmative, affect the here and now? Was the famous atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell right when, after reflecting on where his worldview predicted the universe to be heading, he concluded that “only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built”?

Whatever position one takes on these matters, we can at least agree, I hope, that these are not unimportant questions. They are also questions on which people disagree and thus we need to find a way—through dialogue, conversation, questioning and listening—to explore what others think.

When I lived in London, one of my favourite habits on a weekend was to visit Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park. Speakers’ Corner is affectionately known as the world centre of free speech, for there anybody can stand on a ladder or a soapbox and speak about their beliefs—religious, political or otherwise. I learnt public speaking at Speakers’ Corner but also found it a wonderful place to debate and dialogue with people who radically disagreed with my Christian faith, especially Muslims and atheists. (I so enjoyed those conversations that they led me to do a degree in theology and philosophy, and then a PhD in Islam.)

What I learnt at Speakers’ Corner and what I’ve continued to discover, as I’ve had the privilege of speaking to diverse audiences around the world, is that human beings are not going to agree on everything. The major worldviews disagree profoundly on almost all of the important questions (for example: are human beings merely atoms and particles, or do words like ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’ or even ‘soul’ refer to something?) But it is through dialogue and debate that we can be encouraged to think more deeply, stretched to consider the potential pushbacks against our own worldview, and perhaps be challenged to think through the reasons for our convictions more carefully.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and political activist who survived the gulags and wrote with such insight into the human condition, was fond of this old Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world”.

Much of the modern world is deeply pluralistic. Some people look at that pluralism and think the way to deal with difference is to rudely squash all challenging worldviews. Others think we should collapse the distinctives and say that “truth is relative”, that we should pretend that everybody believes essentially the same. But I think the way to a peaceful society lies down neither path, not least because truth is too important to reduce to power plays or to relativism. Perhaps if instead we can listen, discuss, dialogue, and debate well, we can find ways to live together with our differences.

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It is never a good idea to try to set fire to your shorts whilst wearing them, I thought to myself, as Darren departed the football field shrieking, white smoke trailing behind him. During my high school years, Darren was the class idiot. (I think he’d been aiming at class joker but had missed, badly: as somebody once remarked, many people who attempt to be a wit only make it halfway). Darren was always ready to interrupt a class with a stupid remark or snide heckle, was often in trouble because of pranks or stupid stunts gone wrong, and was the first person I ever saw carried off a sports field with scorch marks.

Every community has its brilliant members, its leading lights and all have their single-watt flickering light bulbs, their village idiots. This goes for every community, not least the atheist and secular community.

Over the years it has been my pleasure to read, learn from, and sometimes debate with a wide range of brilliant atheist thinkers and writers. From Michael Ruse to Mary Midgley, Julian Baggini to Luc Ferry, there are many secular thinkers whose work is thoughtful and engaging. Both offline and online I’ve also met thousands of atheists of all ages and backgrounds (some of whom I have had the privilege to call friends) who whilst disagreeing with what I believe have been intelligent, articulate, and thoughtful.

But there are exceptions. The atheist and secular community also has its fruity and nuttier varieties and that led some writers, a few generations ago, to coin the term ‘Village Atheist’ to describe those who let the rest of the secular tribe down by their antics.

Whilst the Village Atheist has always been around, their presence has been amplified by the Internet for to misquote the proverb, a fool and his opinion are soon tweeted. Before the advent of social media, Village Atheists lurked in the dark corners of pubs muttering incoherently, whilst a few of the more gregarious ones clubbed together and formed sad little societies on university campuses. But once the Internet took off, suddenly Village Atheists discovered a currency for badly Photoshopped memes or sarcastic soundbites.

This has proved frustrating to the wider secular community, who have in recent years been working hard to brand themselves as rational and reasonable. The atheist enfant terrible, Richard Dawkins, himself not immune from the metaphorical equivalent of striking matches near his nether regions, contributed to this rebranding exercise, at one point suggesting that atheists should use the term ‘Bright’ to describe themselves. But it’s hard to sustain that image when there’s a local Village Atheist in the corner, muttering and mumbling pearls of wisdom like ‘religion is for idiots’ whilst flossing his teeth with a live electricity cable.

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Hallmarks of Village Atheism

So if you’re an atheist or secular type, how do you know if you’re a Village Atheist, or in danger of heading that way? Here to help you out are thirteen hallmarks of Village Atheism:

1. The tendency to mindlessly parrot soundbites

Village Atheists have a habit of lobbing tired old atheist catchphrases into the conversation and then chickening out when asked to defend them. I see this regularly on my social media feeds. A passing Village Atheist sees a link to, say, a book review by a Christian philosopher and, wiping the flecks of foam from his mouth, rapidly types: ‘Belief in God is irrational’. When you politely ask: ‘Really? Tell me why you think that?’ there is usually silence or, if I’m really lucky, another entirely random secular soundbite.

2. A binary view of the world

Village Atheists tend to divide the world into polar opposites: rational sceptics versus irrational dyed-in-the-wool-faith-heads (that’s one of Dawkins’ more charming aphorisms, probably coined on a day he’d misplaced his Ritalin). Somehow Village Atheists missed the part of growing up where you discover that people can hold a different view to you and that doesn’t make them stupid. Over the years I’ve met incredibly smart religious people and incredibly smart secular people; I’ve also met religious people and secular people who are as dumb as rocks. What makes the difference is not a person’s belief (or the lack thereof) in God, but their willingness to explain their reasons and listen to and engage with those who disagree.

3. A lack of awareness of the foundations of your own beliefs

A classic hallmark of Village Atheism is the inability to think about your own dearly held views and what supports them. I remember a Twitter exchange with an enthusiastic young secularist (so passionate, he’d adorned his social media profile with a weird mash-up of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Christopher Hitchens, which had the unfortunate side effect of making Hitchens look like Medusa on a bad hair day). During our discussion, the atheist kept insisting that ‘Any fool knows human beings are just matter and molecules’ and yet, five minutes later, was accusing Christianity of being ‘bad for human rights’. When I politely asked how he thought human beings had ‘rights’ if we were ‘just matter’ he admitted he’d never thought about that question.

Similarly, if you’re an atheist keen to use your Reason (capital ‘R’, of course) to beat up on those superstitious religious types, perhaps you might want to think about tough questions like why you can trust your reason and thinking in the first place if atheism is true. As the secular scientist, J. B. S. Haldane famously put it:

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically.1

4. Ignorance of your own intellectual tradition

When one reads more widely in atheist literature, you quickly find secular writers very willing to raise tough questions that require real thought to grapple with. For example, Bertrand Russell, one of the most influential atheist intellectuals of the twentieth century, wrote about the conclusions that flow if atheism is true and how, logically, they lead to despair:

Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins ... Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.2

Unfortunately Village Atheists tend to be completely unaware of any of this. I remember a debate I did at Hull University with Andrew Copson, then head of the British Humanist Association on the topic of ‘Can Life Have Meaning Without God?’. Toward the end of the evening, Andrew grumbled words to the effect of ‘I don’t know why Christians think that if there is no God, there are major implications for hope or meaning’. I replied: ‘Andrew, I haven’t quoted a single Christian thinker all evening; all the quotes about meaninglessness I have used have been from atheist writers. This is your own team!’

5. Cutting off the branch you’re sitting on

Another classic sign that you may be a Village Atheist is that you merrily make sweeping statements that actually destroy your own position in the process. For example, one conversation on social media recently went like this:

Atheist: ‘You’re only a Christian because you were raised in a Christian family.’

Andy: ‘Were your parents religious, by any chance?’

Atheist: ‘No, they were freethinking sceptics!’

Andy: ‘Aha, so you’re only an atheist because you were raised in an atheist family, then?’

And with a sickening thud, the flightless bird of atheism crashed to the forest floor, after having chain-sawed through the branch it was sulkily squatting on.

6. Laziness

Life can be busy if you’re a Village Atheist: so many memes to share, tweets to misspell, and people to shout at. That leaves little time for actually bothering to read or watch things that might challenge your position. (I once met an excitable sceptic who told me ‘I’ve read Christopher Hitchens’s book God is Not Great fifty times’. ‘Fascinating,’ I replied, ‘how many rebuttals to it have you read?’ Answer came there none.)

But there’s an even greater laziness that Village Atheists sometimes exhibit and that consists of posting a snarky remark underneath, say, a Facebook link to a video or essay without reading or watching it. I’ve sadly lost count of how many times a Village Atheist has popped up on our Solas Facebook feed, typed ‘But what about …?’ only to have me point out that this very thing was addressed in the video or blog post.

7. Lack of emotional intelligence

Most normal people figure out pretty early on in life that it’s good manners (and a recipe for not getting blunt objects thrown at you) to listen, be thoughtful, take your turn in conversations, and generally avoid behaving like a twerp. And, again, most atheists do a great job—I have had thousands of fantastic conversations online and offline with committed sceptics and we’ve managed to do that without walloping each other. But Village Atheists often lack an ability to read emotional cues, show empathy, or give even a nod to the kind of social graces that the typical five-year-old has already mastered.

8. Caricaturing the beliefs of others

The Village Atheist has no time for trying to understand what somebody actually believes and respond to that; far better to accuse Christians of worshipping a ‘Dead Zombie Jewish Carpenter’ as a Village Atheist charmingly tweeted at me on one occasion. Not merely is this childish, it reduces the whole conversation to the level of the mud pit, as Christians can equally caricature atheism with stupid soundbites: ‘Atheism: The belief that in the beginning there was nothing, and then the nothing did something and now we have a universe.’ Does this get us anywhere? Not really. (And, yes, there are Village Christians as well as Village Atheists, both throwing their memes around like monkeys tossing poop at each other).

9. Childishness

Another classic sign of Village Atheism is to take the most simplistic, low-level version of an argument that you can possibly find and respond to that, rather than bother to think about the strongest form of what Christians are saying. (Sometimes this tips over into a full-blown straw-man fallacy, attacking something that no Christian actually believes). I’m in two minds as to whether this Village Atheist tendency is cowardice (I’m too scared to read a big book by a grown-up Christian thinker, they might convince me!) or immaturity. As C. S. Lewis, the Oxford professor and Christian philosopher, once remarked:

Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack. When you try to explain the Christian doctrine as it is really held by an instructed adult, they then complain that you are making their heads turn round and that it is all too complicated and that if there really were a God they are sure He would have made ‘religion’ simple, because simplicity is so beautiful, etc.3

10. Overly focussed on the West

There’s a tendency for Village Atheists to ignore the rest of the world outside of the West when they think about Christianity. Thus they make comments about the Church shrinking without being aware of the rapid growth of Christianity in places like China or South America. I even caught one Village Atheist mouthing off about how Christianity was a ‘European faith’ and I had to gently point out that Christianity began in the Middle East and that the majority of Christians now live in the southern hemisphere. A cautionary note to atheists: when making a sweeping statement about Christians, perhaps think how your words might sound to somebody who is from Asia, or who is being persecuted, or who is poor, or who isn’t as privileged as you are.

11. Confusing science with scientism

This, sadly, is a common trait marking Village Atheists and it manifests itself as a temptation to think that science and only science can give us any access to knowledge. Who could think anything so daft, I hear you cry? Well, here’s a typical example:

Science is the only philosophical construct we have to determine truth with any degree of reliability.4

That pronouncement was made by Harry Kroto, a man who is no dribbling halfwit but rather a Nobel Prize winning chemist. Here’s another example from another leading atheist, Peter Atkins of the University of Oxford:

Humanity should be proud that he [sic] has actually stumbled into this way of understanding the world and that it really can attack every problem that concerns humanity with the prospect of an outcome. Science also gives you the promise of understanding while you are alive, whilst religion offers the prospect of understanding when you are dead.5

On many levels, I can understand why science has been elevated to religion-like status: it has graphs, statistics, flashing lights, and Professor Brian Cox. It also attracts huge amounts of funding, and, of course, even a gibbon looks intelligent if you stick him in a lab coat and give him a pair of spectacles. But for all that, science is only one way of knowing and there are a myriad other ways: everything from economics to geography, art history to philosophy, and a thousand other disciplines beside. That science can’t answer everything is also shown by simply asking the question: ‘What experiment would you perform to prove it can answer everything?’ When Village Atheists wave ‘science’ around like a monkey brandishing a bone, it does science a terrible disservice as well as making themselves look silly.

12. Tribalism

A sure sign that you have been infected with Village Atheism is that you don’t just hate religious people, you go totally nuclear on anybody who disagrees with your favourite writer. (‘Dawkins is never wrong!’ one Village Atheist once shrieked hysterically across the room at another student at a university event I was at. Their poor target wasn’t a Christian, just an agnostic who had dared to say they had read Dawkins and didn’t agree with everything). This tribal fury is directed with particular ire onto those who dare to leave the atheist camp. Thus when Anthony Flew, one of the most celebrated atheist philosophers of his era, moved from atheism to theism,6 Richard Dawkins let rip with both barrels, implying that Flew was going senile,7 unable to comprehend that somebody might consider the arguments carefully and change their position. Flew wrote a very witty response, which concluded:

This whole business makes all too clear that Dawkins is not interested in the truth as such. He is primarily concerned to discredit an ideological opponent by any available means. That would itself constitute sufficient reason for suspecting that the whole enterprise of The God Delusion was not, as it at least pretended to be, an attempt to discover and spread knowledge of the existence or nonexistence of God but rather an attempt to spread the author’s own convictions in this area.8

13. Magical and naïve thinking

Village Atheists have a tendency to uncritically swallow any number of beliefs, but one of the most common is their insistence on the idea that if one removed religion, the world would magically be a peaceful harmonious place, with kittens dancing with unicorns, and rainbows and tinsel bedecking the clouds. For many Village Atheists, John Lennon’s song Imagine has been adopted as something of an anthem, especially that bit about imagining a world without any religion and all the people living in peace. (Imagine also asks us to picture a world without possessions and greed, a bit, er, rich coming from a man who died with a net worth of 200 million dollars).

But to anybody a little more critical, some questions arise: haven’t there been (and still are) secular states that are pretty violent, everything from Stalin’s Russia to Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Mao’s China? The secular historian Tom Holland also points that Village Atheists frequently fail to realise that much of what they enjoy in the west (freedom of thought and speech; human rights and dignity etc.) is actually the legacy of Christianity.9

Fascinated by God

For all of the annoying traits that characterise Village Atheists, I still find them a fascinating sub-species of secularism. I’m particularly fascinated by how they’re drawn to talking so much about God (as one comedian once quipped: ‘Nobody seems to talk as much about God as those who claim they don’t believe in him’). What is it that draws angry Village Atheists to hang out on religious pages on social media, for example, furiously typing snarky comments like a monkey trying to turn out a page of Hamlet? What motivates them? I don’t spend hundreds of hours trolling atheist social media accounts—why do Village Atheist types spend so much of their time doing so to Christians? I do wonder if the fact is that they can’t help themselves, indeed it’s almost as if they were wired to be drawn toward God and thus to slightly paraphrase Shakespeare: ‘Methinks some of them doth protest too greatly.’

The Gravitational Pull of Fundamentalism

But what’s the attraction of Village Atheism? Why would you spend your time flinging soundbites, shouting at people, searching out things you disagree with just so you can sound off? In some ways it reminds me of the famous cartoon:

But then I also think it’s more than that: namely that Village Atheism is at its root a form of fundamentalism and fundamentalism can be deeply attractive to a certain narrow kind of mind. For starters, it’s safe (you can shut the doors and windows of your mind and not let anything in that disturbs you). Furthermore, if you’re unsure of your identity and place in the world, fundamentalism can help build it: in that sense, Village Atheism is a bit like a cat spraying around the house. You mark your territory, your viewpoint, and woe betide anybody who seeks to question you.

And then Village Atheism is also very modern, a low calorie atheism-lite for the social media age. Social media tends to flatten everything to the banal, shallow, and ridiculous and it’s done that for some forms of atheism. What philosopher David Bentley Hart said of New Atheism holds for Village Atheism too (and the New and Village varieties of atheism are close cousins):

In a sense, the triviality of the movement is its chief virtue. It is a diverting alternative to thinking deeply. It is a narcotic. In our time, to strike a lapidary phrase, irreligion is the opiate of the bourgeoisie, the sigh of the oppressed ego, the heart of a world filled with tantalizing toys.10

Sidelining the Idiots

Thankfully the vast majority of atheists are not Village Atheists. I remember a wonderful radio debate with the atheist philosopher, Michael Ruse, who is incredibly smart, very funny, and a delight to dialogue with. During that debate Michael said:

Christianity is a very serious answer to a very serious question. I have no time for anybody who thinks they can dismiss it with soundbites. It is, I say again, a very serious answer to a very serious question. I don’t believe that is the right answer, but nevertheless, as an atheist I need to consider it and weigh it carefully.

Many atheists are also as much disturbed by the Darrens in their midst as I am. On one occasion, after describing to an atheist friend in Toronto (who was at that point the leader of a secular organisation) some very rude messages I’d been sent online by an atheist, he looked at me with a pained expression and said: ‘Please, please don’t judge the secular community by that behaviour. Every community has its lunatics.’

He’s absolutely right. Every community does have its lunatics, the atheist community and the Christian community. Christians have their Fred Phelps types, merrily picketing funerals; atheists have their crazy equivalents too. Both our communities have our Village Idiots attempting to wreck the conversation for everybody.

What Michael Ruse said about Christianity, I would equally say about atheism. Atheism deserves to be taken seriously, its arguments listened to, its advocates engaged with, and those who identify as atheists taken seriously. Let’s leave the Village Atheists in the corner to set fire to their shorts whilst those of us who are capable of a grown up discussion can get on with the real conversation about the big questions that really matter.

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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For Further Reading

Whilst I was first working on this essay, I came across two other writers (one Christian, one secular) who had similar concerns to me and had also written critiques of Village Atheism. Do check out their work:

• Sincere Kirabo, ‘Three Warning Signs That Village Atheism is Your New Religion’, The Humanist, 3 May 2016 (https://thehumanist.com/commentary/three-warning-signs-village-atheism-new-religion)

• Randall Rauser, ‘The Problem of Village Atheism’, The Christian Post, 27 August 2018 (https://www.christianpost.com/voices/the-problem-of-village-atheism.html)

This is a sample chapter from Have You Ever Wondered?, the best-selling evangelistic give-away book I’ve co-written and edited with my Solas colleague, Gavin Matthews and others.

We are a happiness-obsessed culture. Every day, a million Westerners type “happiness” into Google. There are hundreds of books telling you how to find happiness, podcasts discussing it, movies and songs all about it. Coming of age in the 1990s, I can still remember the cheerful bubble-gum flavoured lyrics of R.E.M.’s classic Shiny Happy People. More seriously, among the most popular programmes ever run at Harvard University were Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar’s lectures on positive psychology, nicknamed “The Happiness Course”.

But have you ever wondered why we humans pursue happiness? After all, the rest of the animal kingdom usually seems pretty content with just the biological basics: survival and reproduction. But humans? We need so much more than merely the bare necessities of life: so what is going on here?

Let’s explore this by thinking a bit more about happiness. Perhaps the first question is what exactly we mean by the word “happiness”. Ask most people “Do you want to be happy?” and of course they’ll say “Yes!” But inquire: “What do you mean by happy?” and that’s a bit tougher.

I love reading old books, for it gives one a different perspective, rather like talking to somebody from another culture. And reading one day I stumbled across something that Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, observed—that there are actually four levels of happiness and to be truly happy, truly satisfied, we need to ensure that we are living at all four levels.

Happiness level 1 is basically animal happiness and is all about fulfilling your appetites. So, for example, I see the chocolate doughnut. I eat the doughnut. I am happy. I feel good—and I can, of course, if it’s a box of six and my wife isn’t watching, repeat this exercise. Eventually though, the happiness will be over (and pretty quickly if I indulge too much, if I misuse this appetite).

The same is true of that other appetite, sex. In the context of committed love, sex can be amazing. But abuse it, for example treating the other person involved as a means rather than an end, then a great deal of unhappiness can result. Furthermore, if you misuse your appetites—eating to cope with anxiety, or having transient one-night stands to cope with loneliness or boredom—you will soon end up deeply unhappy. And if you’re unhappy at level 1, the only way is up, to level 2.

Happiness level 2 is all about comparison, about having more or being better than the next person. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, with developing a skill and using it well. Excelling in sport, succeeding at work, coming top of the class, all that can bring happiness. But be warned: you won’t be at the top forever. Indeed, trying to live at happiness level 2 can be deeply stressful, as you worry what happens when you are no longer the fastest, smartest, or whatever. And even when you do win, sometimes that can be a hollow victory. In the movie Cool Runnings, about the Jamaican bobsleigh team’s debut at the 1988 Winter Olympics, there’s a moment where the coach, played by John Candy, says to the team: “A gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.”

When happiness level 2 lets you down, you need to move up to level 3. Happiness level 3 is all about living for somebody other than yourself. One example would be parenting; pouring your time and energy into caring for children. If you’re not a parent, you can still find other ways to serve others, giving of yourself to others less fortunate. But the problem is that these things also come to an end: those you care for will one day no longer need you. And if you’re not careful, this approach to life can also become profoundly selfish: the real reason you’re helping others is only because it makes you feel good.

So where now? If happiness levels 1 through 3 don’t ultimately satisfy us, presumably the only way is up? So what lies at the top of this ladder, what precisely is happiness level 4? Well, to build on our old friend Aristotle, level 4 comes when you get connected to an ultimate source of happiness outside of yourself.

Which reminds me of something that Jesus of Nazareth once said. Jesus had much to say about happiness, often highlighting our tendency to look for it in all the wrong places, which wearies and drains us; and so Jesus said:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest”.

The basic problem with happiness levels 1 through 3 is that the weight of the effort rests on us—so we exhaust ourselves running, trying to reach that ever elusive goal of happiness, only to watch it constantly recede into the distance, like the end of the rainbow. Trying to find happiness this way will drive you to craziness, cynicism, or both.

But Jesus offers us something refreshingly different. For Jesus claimed to be God himself, stepping into space and time and history, and as the very one who made us, he is also the one who knows what we really need, what we were truly designed for.

There is nothing inherently wrong with food and sex, sport and success, generosity and self-giving. But they can never ultimately satisfy us. And for a very good reason: we were made for so much more. But if we make it our goal in life not merely to be happy but to know Jesus, the one who also said “I have come that you might have life!”, then we can discover something infinitely more than a happiness whose shine quickly fades; but we can discover a joy that nothing or nobody can ever take away from us.

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 recall with clarity a night a few years ago when my wife and I were on vacation in southern California. We’d spent the day hiking in the mountains and, in the afternoon, had descended to explore the mysterious and ancient landscape of Mono Lake—one of the oldest lakes in North America.

Pinned to the information board by the parking lot was a sign advertising a talk by a Park Ranger that evening: “Stars over Mono Lake”. And so it was, at 9pm, we found ourselves lying on the ancient sands, looking up at a night sky in which a million points of light glowed with an intensity I’d never seen before. The air was cold and clear, the hauntingly beautiful desert silence broken only by the occasional howl of a lonely coyote, cry of an insomniac gull, or scream for help of a distant and woefully lost tourist.

But it was the sky that really struck me. I’d never seen it so beautiful before: in many of our towns and cities, light pollution drowns out the splendour of the heavens and the lights that do punctuate the night tend to be of the red-amber-green-red variety. But what I was seeing, lying on those freezing sands at Mono Lake, was the spectacular sight of the night sky in all its glory—God’s handiwork writ large as a myriad of stars twinkled above me. I was awestruck and listened with fascination as a Park Ranger talked us through the various constellations that slowly wheeled above: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion, Aquarius.

And as I looked up, I was reminded of a Bible passage, of Philippians 2:12-16, which reads:

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life—in order that I may boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labour for nothing.

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That passage got me thinking, in particular about this question: what does it mean to “shine like stars”? What does it mean to burn brightly against the inky blackness? As I pondered this, it occurred to me that there are different types of star. For instance, there are shooting stars. Stars that burn brightly, roaring across the night sky leaving a trail of fiery dust behind them; burning brightly, lighting the way, but then falling to earth as no more than glowing embers. There are Christians like this: who want to go it alone, blaze their own trail, and draw attention to themselves.

Then there are supernovae, stars that have exploded. One almighty bang, a flash of intense brightness that lights up the night sky, and then they’re gone, fading into obscurity. Again, there are Christians like this: who burn themselves out, who make a brief impact, and then they’re forgotten.

And then we have constellations. Stars which, on their own, would be but one small, glowing dot in the darkness, but together form a bigger picture—together, they tell a more powerful story. On their own, they’re much less; together, they’re something very special. Nobody has heard of the star “Merak”, for instance; but most people have heard of the constellation it forms part of—the “Big Dipper” or the “Plough”, one of the most famous formations in the northern hemisphere.

On that same trip to southern California, we also visited the Griffith Observatory, set on the slopes of Mount Hollywood. Attached to the observatory is a planetarium and we sat in this incredible building and watched amazing images of planets, galaxies, and stars projected onto the giant dome. The show’s narrator explained how human beings are designed to think in stories: modern science is one attempt to tell a story about reality, but so too did the ancients tell stories, as they looked at the heavens and named the stars. And thus each of the major constellations bear names—usually from myth and legend or history.

Stars burning together in constellations whose names tell a story. And that’s part of what Christians are called to do: to stand together, to form a constellation, and to tell a story—a story whose significance is also painted in the beauty of the night sky, the wonder of the atom, the fire of the equations that animate it all, and the depths of the human heart.

But there’s one last aspect to stars and to constellations I learnt that night at Mono Lake. Constellations don’t stand still. They move. In particular they rotate, slowly wheeling around a singular fixed point in the northern night sky—the “North” or “Pole” Star. And that, too, is our task and calling and challenge as we aim to “shine like stars”—our axis needs to be God himself—the very centre of our purpose, our calling, our universe, our beings. He is our fixed point, our north star, our pole star, he who determines how we move and turn. The temptation is always to make ourselves the axis and have God spin about our personalities, aims and ambitions—but that way lies idolatry, the worship of oneself. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find Him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands.1

Long before the invention of GPS, sailors, and navigators far out in the oceans or the deserts were reliant upon the pole star, the north star—the fixed point. By orientating yourself to it, you could find your way home through the wildest of seas or the remotest of trackless deserts. But in a sky filled with a billion points of light, how do you find the pole star? Well, the easiest way is to take a look at the most well-known constellation—the “Big Dipper” or “Plough”—for this constellation actually points directly at the Pole Star. And as we shine like stars, in a constellation, not alone but standing together, telling our story, His story, this is what we’re ultimately about. Shining brightly amidst the darkness, we point at Him around which everything turns—Christ Jesus himself, heaven’s bright sun, whose radiance glows brighter than the brightest star, so much so that the new heavens and the new earth need neither sun nor moon. May He and He alone be your fixed point and lead you home.

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When I was thirteen years old, one of my favourite hobbies was conjuring. Every Saturday morning, I would faithfully trek across London to attend classes at Davenports Magic Shop, an Aladdin’s cave of a place which was all the more wondrous for being located in an underground mall deep below Charing Cross. There I learnt how to baffle people with card tricks, make money disappear, and pull rabbits from hats.1

Of all the tricks I mastered, my favourite was the shell game. One of the oldest tricks known to magicians, its premise is simple: behold, three small wooden cups. Beneath one is placed a small ball. The cups are shuffled and some innocent bystander asked to guess where the ball is. No matter where they guess, their answer turns out to be wrong: the magician always wins.

For all of its audience-entertaining potential, the shell game is just a trick, merely an illusion. The ball was always somewhere, namely wherever the magician put it. Try as you might, you couldn’t actually entirely dispose of it: however cunningly you palmed it up a sleeve, stuffed it under a rabbit, or hid it in an assistant’s nose, you were always stuck with it: the ball still existed. Some things you simply cannot get rid of—the best you can do is to distract people and hope they don’t notice the bulge in your sleeve.

The same problem applies to metaphysical versions of the shell game. I was reminded of this when a contemporary magician, Penn Jillette, one half of the popular comedy double act, Penn and Teller, said this during an interview:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.2

Jillette is a well known atheist and his statement is an attempt to claim that it is the non-religious who have the moral high ground, atheists who are better people. Why? Because they’re good for the sake of goodness, unlike those terrible theists who are basically sexually rapacious psychopaths, only refraining from rape or murder because they believe that God is constantly watching them like a heavenly policeman. So, who would you rather trust: the friendly atheist magician with the lovely smile, or the theist who is longing to start a land war in Asia and go pillaging and raping, only holding back because they’re afraid their Sky Daddy is watching them?

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To give Jillette his credit, this is a clever piece of rhetoric. It’s punchy, it’s witty, it’s memorable, it’s tweetable, but it’s also a trick. Just like the shell game, Jillette has misdirected us with some clever shuffles of the cups and then, whilst we’re distracted, snuck out the ball and stuffed it up a sleeve. “Nothing to see here, mister,” he winks, turning over each cup. Now in this case, the ball is a question—a question that screams the moment you give Jillette’s statement a second read. And it’s this: who gets to define what good is?

Built into Jillette’s pronouncement is the assumption that rape and murder are bad, whilst helping old ladies across the road, giving money to charity, and rehoming kittens is good. But hang on a moment: who gets to decide? If atheism is true, then nothing is inherently good or bad—things just are. Rather, what we have are a set of labels (“Good”, “Bad” and “Neutral”) and a list of human actions. Who gets to decide which sticker gets stuck on what action?

There are really only two choices: either every individual gets to decide for themselves what is “good”, or we have to defer to something like the state. But in either case, all we have are personal preferences: yours, mine, or the majority’s.3 Thus Jillette’s bumper sticker of an idea (“Atheists Can Do Good Without God”) simply collapses into “Atheists Can Do Whatever They Want Without God”. All he’s done is a classic piece of misdirection, distracting us from the most important question of all: what does the good life actually look like?

Well, then, how do we decide what counts as “good” in the first place? In most contexts, we answer that question by addressing the issue of purpose. Consider a watch, for instance. How do I decide whether my watch is a good one or a bad one?4 Suppose I take my watch and try to hammer in nails with it, breaking it in the process? Does this make it a bad watch? No, because I have misunderstood its purpose, which is not to hammer nails but to tell the time. We determine whether a watch is a good watch by how well it tells the time, by whether it does what it was designed to do, by how successfully it aligns to its purpose.

So what about human beings? Is there something we were designed to be, do we have a purpose? The message of Christianity is that yes, there is: our purpose is to know God, to be in relationship with him. As God transforms us, as we live out what it means to be a “new creation”, as the Bible puts it, then our lives and our character reflect that relationship. We become who we were intended to be: not good because we hope that God may then love us, but good because he loves us and has forgiven us. On the other hand, if the atheism to which Jillette adheres so passionately is true, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion of another well-known atheist, Lawrence Krauss, who remarked:

We are a 1 percent bit of pollution within the universe. We are completely insignificant.5

If Krauss is correct, it would seem to follow that rape, murder and pillage are perfectly okay: after all, what one piece of pollutant does to another hardly matters, does it?

Most people’s natural reaction when they see a good magic trick is to ask: “How was it done?” And the problem is that the answer is always mind-numbingly banal. The woman is sawn in two, right before your eyes, and you’re amazed. You then discover the method and you’re disappointed at the simplicity.

The same holds for Jillette’s attempt to construct a godless morality. It looks clever and sophisticated, but then the veil is drawn back and you see how it was done, namely by sidestepping the very question that matters the most: what do “good” and “evil” actually mean in the first place? When it comes to magic and illusion, a good trick is a good trick because it achieves its purpose: it entertains. But when a trick obfuscates, hides, or manipulates, I think it’s a bad one. Excuse me, Mr. Jillette, but you appear to have a metaphysical ball up your sleeve.

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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