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

• Is there a God?

• Why is there suffering and pain?

• Has science buried God?

• Which religion is true?

• Is the Bible trustworthy?

• Who was Jesus?

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

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

https://burningquestions.ca

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

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

Again, rarely will anyone protest.

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

Usually, there is a stunned silence at this point.

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

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

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

If.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we need your help!

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

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

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

Thanks for your help!

Andy and Michael

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

My essay, Fire on the Mountain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All this reminds me of a dream …

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

“What are you doing?” I shouted up.

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a 50 foot drop!”

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

~+~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because it’s there.2

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

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

God has set eternity in the human heart.3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s no escape.

If we are only matter we don’t matter.

But what if we’re not just matter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and there’s some more good news.

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So What’s Going On?

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MIND BEHIND THE MEANING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE QUESTION OF EVIL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE QUESTION OF HOPE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO NAÏVE ANSWERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The First Cause of Intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

Humans, Creativity, and the Image of God

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do I get a copy?

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

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

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A Quick Overview ... Keep Reading for the Deep Dive!

• The Claim: The Bible Society’s 2025 Quiet Revival report says monthly church attendance rose from 8% to 12% of adults between 2018–2024, driven mainly by Gen Z. Reported attendance among 18–24s quadrupled (4%→16%), with young men at 21%. Growth was strongest in Catholic and Pentecostal churches, with increased Bible reading and greater ethnic diversity.

• Context: If correct, this would mark a reversal of long decline. The report suggests Gen Z is finding faith for meaning and community, with young churchgoers reporting better wellbeing.

• Challenges: Other datasets (e.g. British Social Attitudes, denominational counts) show decline, not growth. Critics highlight survey flaws (opt-in sample, “priming” questions, over-reporting) and note that nothing else corroborates such dramatic youth-led growth.

• Bottom Line: Encouraging hints exist, but the evidence is weak and inconsistent. At best, it may signal modest growth in small groups, not a broad revival. Future surveys will show whether this is a real shift or a statistical blip.

Introduction

In recent years, headlines have suggested a surprising shift in religious trends: a so-called “Quiet Revival” in church attendance among young adults in England and Wales. This term comes from a 2025 report by the Bible Society titled The Quiet Revival, which claims that decades of church decline have halted and reversed, largely due to renewed interest from Generation Z (roughly ages 18–24). According to the report, young people—especially young men—are flocking back to churches, bringing growth in congregations alongside increased Bible engagement and potential benefits for community and mental health. Such claims have generated excitement in some church circles, but also scepticism from scholars and commentators. This briefing paper examines the evidence behind the Quiet Revival claim, summarises the Bible Society’s report and its key findings, and then explores the challenges and critiques raised about the data and conclusions. Finally, it offers a balanced view on how to interpret these findings, what to treat with caution, and what signs might be genuinely hopeful, along with suggestions for further investigation.

Summary of The Quiet Revival Report

Report Background and Methodology

The Bible Society’s The Quiet Revival report is based on two large-scale surveys conducted by the polling firm YouGovin 2018 and 2024. The first survey in 2018 sampled about 19,100 adults in England and Wales, and the second in late 2024 sampled about 13,146 adults. Both surveys asked respondents about their religious identification and their actualchurch attendance (excluding special occasions like weddings or funerals). By comparing these two points in time, the report assesses changes in churchgoing over a six-year period. The samples were weighted to reflect population demographics, and the Bible Society noted that the large sample sizes give a high level of statistical confidence (though, as we will see, some statisticians dispute this interpretation of survey accuracy). The 2024 survey was conducted online between early November and early December 2024, serving as an update to the 2018 baseline.

Key Findings: Growth in Church Attendance

According to The Quiet Revival report, church attendance in England and Wales rose dramatically between 2018 and 2024. Some of the headline findings include:

• Overall Increase in Attendance: The share of the adult population attending church at least once a month grew from about 8% in 2018 to 12% in 2024. In raw numbers, this would equate to an increase from roughly 3.7 million adult churchgoers to 5.8 million—a surge of about 50–56%. The report claims this marks the end of the long-running decline in church attendance, effectively “busting the myth” of inevitable church decline.

• Gen Z Leading the Resurgence: The most striking growth was among young adults, especially those in Generation Z (approximately ages 18–24). In 2018 only 4% of 18–24 year-olds reported attending church at least monthly; by 2024 this jumped to 16%. In other words, reported regular churchgoing in this age group roughly quadrupled. Young men in particular showed a dramatic rise—from 4% attending monthly in 2018 to 21% in 2024—while young women increased from 3% to 12%. This represents an inversion of historical patterns, with young men now apparently more involved in church than young women. The report notes that 18–24 year-olds have become the “second most likely age group” to attend church regularly, second only to the very elderly in likelihood.

• Shifts in Gender and Diversity: Overall, the survey found men (of all ages) slightly more likely to attend church than women—13% of men vs 10% of women attend monthly—reversing a long-standing gender gap in church involvement. The growing youth attendance also coincides with increased ethnic diversity in churches. In 2024 about 19% of all churchgoers were from minority ethnic backgrounds, but among younger adults (18–54) this was nearly one-third (32%). The report highlights that almost half of young Black adults (18–34) surveyed—around 47%—said they attend church at least monthly, indicating significant engagement in some minority communities.

• Growth in Catholic and Pentecostal Churches: The resurgence appears strongest outside the traditional Church of England. In 2018, Anglican churches (Church of England and Church in Wales) accounted for about 41% of self-identified churchgoers, but this share fell to 34% by 2024. Meanwhile, Roman Catholic affiliation among churchgoers rose from 23% to 31%, and Pentecostal affiliations from 4% to 10%. In raw terms, the Bible Society’s figures imply that Catholic mass attendance could have more than doubled over six years, and Pentecostal participation nearly tripled, even as Anglican attendance grew more slowly. Among young adult churchgoers (ages 18–34), only 20% now identify as Anglican (down from 30% in 2018), whereas 41% identify as Catholic and 18% as Pentecostal. This suggests that much of the new growth is happening in Catholic parishes and black-majority or charismatic Pentecostal churches, rather than in the Church of England. The report points to immigration and demographic change as partial explanations—for example, many recent immigrants from Africa or Latin America bring with them a strong Catholic or Pentecostal faith, contributing to growth in those congregations.

• Increased Bible Engagement: Alongside rising attendance, the Quiet Revival study finds an upswing in personal Bible reading and enthusiasm for Scripture. In 2024, two-thirds (67%) of churchgoing Christians reported reading the Bible at least weekly outside of church services—a notable increase compared to a few years earlier. A significant minority of young adults expressed curiosity about the Bible: nearly one-third of 18–24 year-olds said they were curious to learn more about the Bible. This age group also reported higher rates of prayer and spiritual practices than older generations. For instance, 40% of 18–24 year-olds in the survey said they pray at least monthly, and over half (51%) had engaged in some form of “spiritual practice” in the past six months. The Bible Society interprets this as evidence that Gen Z is relatively “spiritually open”—sometimes dubbed “the spiritual generation”—even if they grew up in a more secular environment.

• Mental Health and Meaning: The report links some of this youth interest to a search for meaning and community amid a backdrop of mental health challenges. It notes that younger adults report higher levels of anxiety and aimlessness and suggests that many are turning to faith as a source of hope, belonging, and purpose. Churchgoing young people were far more likely to agree that their life is meaningful compared to their non-churchgoing peers (in one statistic, 80% of young churchgoers felt their life had meaning, versus about 52% of non-churchgoers). The authors suggest that churches might be providing a sense of community and “healing” for those struggling, as well as satisfying an openness to spirituality among Generation Z. In the words of Bible Society’s Chief Executive, this quiet revival is “low key, but widespread,” potentially “transformational in terms of how Christians think about themselves”.

• Other Notable Points: The study emphasizes that Christianity in the UK may be shifting from a nominal, cultural identity to a smaller but more actively committed core. The decline in people identifying as Christian (as seen in the national census and other surveys) is acknowledged, but the report argues that those who do retain a Christian identity are now more likely to be practicing it actively. It also notes that many non-churchgoing people would consider attending if invited by a friend or family member (around one-third of non-attenders said they might go if personally invited), highlighting the importance of personal relationships and invitation. In fact, over 20% of non-churchgoing young adults (18–34) said they would read the Bible if a trusted friend or family member recommended it to them. Based on the findings, the report’s authors encourage churches to invest in intergenerational friendship, discipleship (especially Bible teaching), and community outreach, to nurture this nascent growth.

Challenges and Critiques of the Findings

Given how counterintuitive these findings are—a religious rebound led by young people in an otherwise secularizing society—it is no surprise that they have been met with scrutiny. Numerous observers, including sociologists of religion and church commentators, have raised questions about whether The Quiet Revival data truly indicate a real-world shift or whether they might be an artifact of survey methodology or statistical flukes. Here we outline the major challenges and critiques, explained in plain English:

1. Contradictions with Other Data Sources

Perhaps the strongest reason for scepticism is that the Bible Society’s results conflict with virtually every other reliable source on religious trends in the UK. For decades, data have shown declining church attendance, and most of those trendlines do not show a sudden reversal in the late 2010s or early 2020s. Key examples:

• British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA): This annual, gold-standard survey (using random sampling) monitors religious affiliation and practice. The BSA data for 2018–2023 show declining church participation, not growth. Specifically, the share of adults in England and Wales identifying as Christian and attending church monthly fell from about 12.2% in 2018 to 9.3% in 2023—nearly a 25% relative drop. This directly contradicts the Bible Society’s claim that 12% of adults were attending by 2024 (up from 8% in 2018). In other words, the best available survey suggests churchgoers became fewer, not more, over that period.

• Churches’ Own Attendance Counts: Major Christian denominations conduct annual headcounts (e.g. the Church of England’s Statistics for Mission returns, and similar counts by Catholic dioceses, Methodists, Baptists, etc.). These recorded attendance figures uniformly show no sign of a boom—in fact, they show continued declines or at best slow recovery from the COVID-19 lockdowns. For example, the Church of England’s average weekly attendance in 2022 was about 20% lower than it was in 2019 (before the pandemic). The number of people regularly worshipping in CofE parishes each month actually fell slightly, from around 1.1 million in 2018–2019 to about 1.0 million by 2022. The Catholic Church likewise saw its Mass attendance drop—in England and Wales, Sunday Mass attendance fell from roughly 702,000 in 2019 to 555,000 in 2023, a decline of 21%. These official figures make it hard to believe the survey’s implication that Catholic churchgoing doubled or that overall church attendance jumped by millions. In fact, one critic noted that over 70% of the growth claimed by the Bible Society comes from just two denominations (Catholic and Pentecostal) which are otherwise reporting shrinkage in their own counts.

• Other Surveys and Polls: The discrepancy isn’t only with BSA and church records. Even other polling by YouGov itself does not replicate such growth. Professor David Voas, a leading sociologist of religion, points out that YouGov maintains a large ongoing panel as part of the British Election Study (BES). That panel was asked identical questions about church attendance in 2015, 2022, and 2024. The BES data (which comes from a more controlled long-term sample) shows the share of adult churchgoers actually declined from 8.0% in 2015 to 6.6% in 2024. Yet, the Bible Society/YouGov surveys found 8% in 2018 rising to 12% in 2024. Such a stark divergence—two results from the same polling company, one showing decline and the other a rise—raises red flags. It strongly suggests that one (or both) sets of surveys are not accurately capturing reality.

In sum, if a true revival of this magnitude were happening, we would expect to see at least some corroborating evidence—fuller churches, higher headcounts, or other surveys picking it up. So far, however, church leaders and statisticians note that on-the-ground indicators (like local church registers or national surveys) do not reflect a millions-strong influx of worshippers. This inconsistency is a primary reason for caution.

2. Survey Methodology and Sampling Concerns

Another area of critique centers on how the data were collected. The Bible Society’s findings rely on online surveys from YouGov’s panel, and experts highlight several methodological issues that could distort the results:

• Non-Random, Self-Selected Sample: Unlike BSA, which randomly selects people to interview (ensuring everyone in the population has a chance to be included), YouGov polls use a volunteer panel. People sign up to take surveys (often for small rewards), and then YouGov draws a quota sample from that pool—meaning they pick respondents to match demographic targets (age, gender, region, etc.). While quotas can make the sample look representative on the surface, it’s not the same as true random sampling. Important but less obvious differences might remain. For instance, those who join an online panel might systematically differ from those who don’t in ways that affect church attendance (they could be more socially isolated, more compliant, or simply more eager to profess certain behaviors). Young adults in particular are a notoriously hard-to-reach group in surveys, and those young people who do respond to online polls may not be typical of their generation. In short, because respondents opt in, the results may be skewed by unknown biases—and thus cannot be assumed to generalize to all young adults in England and Wales. Professor Voas notes that with non-probability samples of this kind, one cannot calculate a true margin of error or confidence interval, despite the Bible Society report’s claim of a 1% margin of error. Presenting precision metrics from a non-random survey is misleading, since statistical theory for margin of error only applies to random samples.

• Question Order and “Priming” Effects: It has emerged that the 2024 survey included additional questions before the key attendance question that were not present in 2018, possibly influencing respondents’ answers. In the 2024 questionnaire, people were first asked a series of questions about meaning, community, and purpose in life (for example, whether they feel their life is meaningful, or if they seek to make a difference in the world). Only after reflecting on these personal values were they asked if they had attended church recently. Psychologists warn that this kind of priming can bias results. By nudging respondents to think about purpose and community, the survey may have inadvertently made church attendance feel more salient or desirable, leading some to recall or report attendance more readily than they otherwise would. The 2018 survey, by contrast, went straight into religious attendance questions without this lead-in. This difference in context could partially explain why the 2024 respondents were more likely to report going to church. Essentially, the two surveys might not have been comparing apples with apples—subtle changes in survey design can yield different outcomes even with identical questions.

• Sample Composition and Weights: The two surveys differed in sample size (around 19k vs 13k respondents) and possibly in their exact composition. YouGov would have applied weighting to ensure each sample matched the population on basic demographics. However, if there were subtle shifts—say, if one sample had relatively more people from areas or social classes with higher churchgoing—that could influence results. Church statistician John Hayward points out that factors like social class or urban/rural mix can significantly affect church attendance, yet these variables are not always fully accounted for in weighting. If the 2024 sample by chance included a few more people inclined toward church (or the 2018 sample a few less), it could create an illusion of change. Normally, large sample sizes help average out such issues, but they do not guarantee full comparability. There are also anomalies in the data which hint at sampling quirks—for example, the share of 18–24 year-olds claiming daily or multiple times per week church attendance jumped inexplicably in 2024 (from essentially 0% in 2018 up to 2% and 7% in 2024). By extrapolation, that would mean almost half a million 18–24 year-olds attending church almost every day—a result most observers find impossible to believe. This raises suspicion that some respondents may have rushed through the survey or provided insincere answers just to earn their incentive, perhaps ticking a high-frequency attendance box without much thought. Such noise could inflate the overall attendance figures.

In summary, while YouGov is a reputable polling firm and the Bible Society’s surveys were professionally conducted, their methodology (opt-in online panels, complex weighting, and subtle survey differences) leaves room for error. The consensus among critical experts is that the data may not be reliable enough to prove a real trend. As a rule, trends that appear in high-quality random surveys and in multiple data sets are more trustworthy than one-off findings from a specific poll with potential design issues.

3. Self-Reporting Biases and Overstatement of Attendance

Another important consideration is the difference between reported behavior and actual behavior. Church attendance is a behavior that surveys have long struggled to measure accurately, because people often over-report how often they go. This is known as social desirability bias—many view churchgoing as a virtuous or expected activity, so when asked, they tend to exaggerate their frequency a bit (often unintentionally). Historically, surveys have found more people claiming to attend church than ever show up in actual church counts, and in the Bible Society’s data this gap between reported and recorded attendance appears to have widened.

For example, in 2018, 8% of adults (about 3.7m people) told pollsters they attended church monthly, whereas under 1 million were actually counted in pews; by 2024, the survey claimed 5.8m attendees (12%), far above the likely real figure (well under 2m). This growing gap suggests many respondents over-claimed their attendance. One factor may be the rise of online services—some people now count watching church online as attendance, which the survey captured but official counts may not. In short, self-reported data should be taken with a grain of salt.

Overall, the Quiet Revival findings may reflect changing attitudes or definitions of churchgoing as much as actual increases in attendance. We should be careful about taking people’s word at face value when it comes to how often they go to church. In fact, prominent commentators note that the Bible Society’s data might be capturing an increase in interestor openness to religion among young people, more than a literal surge in weekly churchgoing. It’s possible to acknowledge that spiritual curiosity has grown without concluding that all those who said “yes” to a survey are now faithfully in the pews every Sunday.

4. Reactions from Experts and Sceptics

The boldness of the Quiet Revival claims has prompted a number of public responses from academics and church analysts. Two notable voices are Professor David Voas and the blogger known as “Church Mouse,” both of whom have openly identified as Quiet Revival sceptics.

• David Voas (UCL): Voas, a leading sociologist of religion, finds the Quiet Revival claims hard to believe. He notes that gold-standard data show churchgoing actually fell from 12.2% to 9.3% of adults between 2018 and 2023, and that the Bible Society’s supposed Catholic “surge” is directly contradicted by the Catholic Church’s own attendance counts (Mass attendance dropped ~21% over that time). Voas argues the opt-in survey method likely introduced bias, and he flags the report’s finding that men are now more likely to attend church than women as especially implausible (given the usual female advantage in religiosity). He cautions that we shouldn’t take these results at face value and calls for relying on rigorous random-sample surveys and better data transparency to verify any trends.

• Church Mouse Blog: The well-known (albeit anonymous or should that be anony-mouse) “Church Mouse” blogger similarly remains unconvinced. After reviewing the underlying data tables (which were released some months after the report’s launch), they pointed out anomalies—for example, a jump in 18–24-year-olds claiming daily church attendance, which would imply an absurdly large number of young daily worshippers. This suggests some respondents overstated or inaccurately recorded their behavior. They also observed that the 2024 survey’s question order could have primed higher responses, and suggested the result could simply be a rogue poll that needs confirmation. Church Mouse commented that if such a poll had shown a massive decline in attendance, churches would likely have dismissed it as an outlier—so they should be equally sceptical of an unexpected increase. His conclusion is that a bit of survey bias (and inaccurate self-reporting) probably explains the “quiet revival” finding, unless and until stronger evidence emerges. While he would welcome a true resurgence, he argues that rigorous scrutiny is needed, and he “clings to some hope that this instinct is wrong” even as the evidence to the contrary is strong.

Meanwhile, some church leaders have cautiously welcomed the Quiet Revival report but acknowledged the need to see those results reflected in their own congregations. Whilst the BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less, which investigates statistical claims, concluded that more data are required—either the 2018 or 2024 survey (or both) could be an outlier, and only future surveys will confirm if there is a lasting change.

Conclusion: Caution, Hope, and Next Steps

So, is there really a “Quiet Revival” going on among young adults in England and Wales? The prudent answer is: it’s too early to tell, and the evidence is mixed. The Bible Society’s report offers a thought-provoking datapoint—it captures a snapshot in which more young people reported going to church than one might have expected. This is certainly intriguing, and it’s something churches will be happy to explore further. However, it’s crucial not to get carried away by one optimistic survey. Here are some balanced takeaways:

• Treat with Caution: These dramatic findings should be viewed sceptically. They conflict with most other evidence, and a single survey with noted flaws is not enough to prove a true reversal of long-term religious decline. Decades of secularization are unlikely to have suddenly reversed course; at the very least, we need confirmation from other reliable sources before believing that the tide has truly turned.

• Signs of Hope: On the other hand, there are some encouraging possibilities. Certain churches (for instance, immigrant-led congregations and youth-focused ministries) are growing, and it’s plausible that while fewer young people identify as religious today, those who do are more actively engaged than past generations were. The Quiet Revival report may have captured a real but modest uptick among a small core of spiritually inclined young adults. Many church leaders anecdotally report that some young people are indeed showing new interest in faith—attending Alpha courses, joining student ministries, or exploring prayer and the Bible. These green shoots are worth nurturing, even if they don’t (yet) represent a mass movement.

• Need More Evidence: To know if a revival is really happening, we need further evidence. Future independent surveys (like BSA or other longitudinal studies) and church attendance statistics in the coming years will be crucial. If the trend is genuine, other data will eventually show it—for example, the next census or the next few years of BSA results might register an uptick in religious practice among young adults. Likewise, churches could track whether their youth attendance is noticeably rising or if membership inquiries from Gen Z are increasing. Until such corroboration occurs, the Bible Society’s report should be seen as an intriguing early signal, but not definitive. In fact, the Bible Society itself has acknowledged that their results might be on the “upper end” of possible estimates. In the spirit of good research, we should encourage more data collection and even hope the Bible Society releases the full dataset for independent analysis, to allow others to verify and probe the findings.

• Interpret Responsibly: The best approach is cautious optimism. Churches should welcome and nurture any increase in youth interest—providing the authentic community, support, and meaning that young people may be seeking—but they should avoid prematurely declaring a sweeping “revival.” Over-hyping unproven results could lead to disappointment or complacency. It’s important to balance hope with realism: continue investing in outreach to younger generations, address their questions and needs (as the report recommends, through discipleship and building genuine relationships), but wait for clearer confirmation before making grand claims. In short, be hopeful but humble. Treat this data as a possible sign that something new may be happening—yet remain grounded until it’s confirmed by the weight of evidence.

In conclusion, the Quiet Revival report has sparked an important conversation. It challenges the narrative of inevitable church decline and invites us to pay attention to how attitudes to faith might be changing among the young. While we should be cautious about the boldest claims, we can still find encouragement in the idea that faith is not dead among Gen Z—some are indeed finding something meaningful in Christianity. The coming years will tell whether this is the start of a lasting trend or a statistical mirage. In the meantime, churches and society should keep an open mind: there may be early signs of religious renewal quietly blooming, even if they’re not yet a full-blown revival.

Whatever it is, the quiet revival isn’t quite revival ... at least not yet. But we can be encouraged that something is happening—I’ve been seeing this out on the field ever since the pandemic (e.g. loads more students at mission week events, whilst wherever I speak at churches around the country there are signs of new life) but I think that extrapolating it into talk of “revival” may be slightly overcooking it.

My big takeaway—both from the data and from on-the-ground experience—is that those aged 35 and under are more spiritually open, their questions have changed (from hostility under the New Atheism to far more existential/pragmatic questions). But there’s still a lot of work to do in terms of connecting them from those questions to helping them see why Jesus. And when they come to faith, there’s a need to take the work of discipleship seriously.

As I glanced around the church we attend in Swindon a few Sundays back I was struck that (a) it’s chockfull of people who have come to Christ in the last six or seven years; (b) the average age is probably early 40s, meaning 50 somethings like me are wildly outnumbered. So I’m encouraged, but still wary of going too mad with the revival language. This is notthe Welsh Revival. But God is on the move and there is a cultural shift of sorts happening. So, let’s keep praying and inviting—people of all ages—to our churches.

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In the British newspaper The Times there is another fascinating (all the more so because the journalist is clearly a bit baffled by all this) article on the return of especially young people to churches. The “quiet revival” isn’t quite revival, let’s not get too carried away, but God is very much on the move and this story fits a pattern.

Read the whole article here: https://bit.ly/4mks6UH

Check out the new edition of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist in which the last chapter explores more of what’s going on right now.

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Learn how to have natural conversations with your friends and family about your faith. Discover four key questions that invite people into engaging discussions about what matters most in life.

How to Talk about Jesus without Looking like an Idiot explores why you don’t need to be afraid or uncomfortable, the four questions that help people open up, the five steps to respond to tough questions, and how to effortlessly bring faith into a conversation. It doesn’t need to be awkward. Everyday conversations that open the door to evangelism can be painless and natural. Let me help you find easy ways to talk about the true meaning of life and learn how to share the gospel with your neighbours, friends, and family.

The book is available in the UK, USA, Canada, and Australia. There is also a Swedish translation available!

The English version is available in paperback, e-book, and audio book formats.

You can buy it via any of the links below or if you signup to support Solas, the evangelism organisation I lead, we’ll send you a free copy as a gift! You can also read a free sample.

UK:

• 10ofThose

• IVP

• Eden Books

• Waterstones

• Amazon

USA:

• 10ofThose USA

• Tyndale (the publisher)

• ChristianBook.Com (USA, Canada)

• Amazon

Canada:

• 10ofThose Canada

• Amazon

• Word Alive

Australia:

• Koorong

Sweden:

• Apologia

Read a Free Sample!

Download chapter 1 (and the table of contents and foreword by Lee Strobel) as a PDF.

Audio Book

I’m delighted that How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot is also available as an audiobook (narrated by me!):

• Audible

• Apple

E-Book

You can also read How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot as an e-book:

• Apple Books

• Amazon Kindle

• Kobo

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

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

The New Atheism, the insanely popular movement that in the 2000s made celebrities of many atheists, has all but collapsed. Christopher Hitchens is dead. Sam Harris has become a figure of fun. Daniel Dennett has retreated behind his beard and his study door. Lesser-known figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali now claim they’re Christian. And then there’s Richard Dawkins.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Dawkins. His book The God Delusion, whilst riddled with more inaccuracies than a government computer system, was remarkably readable and was the first New Atheist work I read whilst researching my 2014 rebuttal book, The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist. Dawkins and I almost did a dialogue in Toronto two years later, but he had to pull out due to poor health.

Dawkins’ star has plummeted somewhat of late, not helped by a series of online controversies, including suggesting that any woman pregnant with a Down’s Syndrome child has a moral duty to abort it; he also had his Humanist of the Year Award revoked for his critique of the transgender movement.

However, Dawkins has recently been trying to reinvent himself, not least by rebranding as more reflective, less pompous, less dismissive, more open to a conversation, such as the one he recorded with the YouTuber Alex O’Connor, also known as “Cosmic Skeptic”. Although a committed atheist, Alex is an excellent and balanced interviewer and his conversation with Dawkins was wide-ranging, covering everything from Christianity’s social utility (Dawkins was surprisingly positive) to a few arguments for Christianity that Alex found interesting.

About forty minutes into their conversation, Alex asked Dawkins who was the most formidable debate opponent he’d ever met. Dawkins looked utterly startled and replied: “I don’t think there any” because “there are no good arguments”. This came as a considerable surprise as even many fans of Dawkins suggested at the time that Dawkins’s first debate with his fellow Oxford professor, John Lennox, in 2007, was won by Lennox using rather good arguments.

But Alex then brought up William Lane Craig, a philosopher who is arguably one of the most formidable Christian debaters in the world. WLC as he is affectionately known to his legion of fans, has debated almost every well-known atheist, including all the New Atheists. With one exception: Richard Dawkins.

In 2011, WLC did a debate tour in the UK and both Christians and atheists tried to organise an encounter with Dawkins, who ducked and weaved and failed to show: in the end, an empty chair was placed on stage to represent the absent Dawkins. I was reminded at the time of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which the chicken-hearted Sir Robin “bravely ran away”.

At the mention of WLC, Dawkins’s whole demeanour changed and what followed was something akin to a character assassination. Dawkins said he had no time for “professional debaters”, that he had “contempt” for WLC who was a “fundamentalist” and even that “I don’t want to be in the same room as him”. As Alex gently pushed back, Dawkins tried to claim it was all because WLC believes in the historicity of the Old Testament and some of the “evil things” therein. “But you’ve debated lots of other people who believe the same things!” pointed out Alex.

What is going on here? Isn’t there a massive double-standard in claiming “there are no good arguments” but then running away from debating a philosopher who appears (from his successful debate track record) to have plenty. To be fair to Dawkins, all of us can be guilty of living in echo chambers, hanging out only with those who agree with us, not reading widely, or making excuses not to have our beliefs challenged.

One belief of Dawkins that he consistently avoids having challenged is his frequent use of the word “evil”, which popped up again in his conversation with Alex. People like WLC who believe that, say, the killing of the Canaanites in the Old Testament really happened and can be justified theologically, are “evil”. But in a purely material world, where precisely is Richard getting these moral categories from? Aren’t we all, on Dawkins’s view of the world, just genetic puppets dancing to our DNA? It was, in part, the inability of atheism to account for morality that led an older Oxford atheist, C. S. Lewis, to abandon decades of scepticism and follow Christ.

Christians don’t need to be afraid of arguments: contra Dawkins, there are many excellent arguments for Christianity. There are also some good arguments for atheism—I just happen to think that the Christian case is far stronger. But we don’t show the power of our arguments by running away: I’m still hoping that one day William Lane Craig and “Brave Sir Richard” may yet have a proper debate.

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