Turtles Nearly All The Way Down

Suppose we have an infinite regress of turtles, each supported by an earlier turtle, with no first turtle, and suppose that if there is any last item, it’s not a turtle. In this case, the multiplicity of the turtles explains why any given turtle is supported. But no multiplicity of turtles fundamentally explains the supported turtles. Consequently, then, something that is other than a multiplicity of turtles fundamentally explains the supported turtles.

Those who know about the cosmological argument can probably see where I’m heading next.

Sceptics of Divine creation cleave to multiplicity of turtles with an earliest turtle hypothesis, where turtles here mean physical reality (of, being generous, however many universes). But Christians insist on the multiplicity of turtles with no earliest turtle as the cause of all turtles, because if turtles have an explanation, then their fundamental explanation cannot also be turtles, or even a first turtle.

A Type I multiplicity does not explain the turtles, because it does not explain any turtles earlier than the earliest turtle in the multiplicity. And a Type II multiplicity explains any turtle in the sequence as having an antecedent turtle cause, but not the cause of all turtles.

Applying this to real physics, because all physical causation is transitive, then all physical systems that exist must have a non-physical cause. Or in turtle language, anything non‑physical that explains the multiplicity of turtles explains all turtles (that is, all of physical reality) - because for any physical item, it is either a supported turtle or there is a supported turtle prior to it, and no regress can be explanatory as a whole.

That’s a simple way of stating why it has to be the case that a non‑physical entity explains all of physical reality.

 

Odds, Ends & Stray Musings: Trinity-Sun Analogy

 

One of the strange things about the Trinity is that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all equally God, yet there seems an inevitable order in which we pray “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” It doesn’t seem quite right to pray “In the name of the Holy Spirit, Father and Son” or any other variant - yet if they are all equally God, it might be strange that the order matters.

I suspect the revealed order “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” is primarily to do with the fact that the Father is active in the world before the Son, and then the Son is active in the world by becoming Incarnate, and then the Holy Spirit is sent to deepen the intimacy of the relationship. 

No analogy can fully capture the essence of God, but perhaps we can think of it a bit like our interaction with the sun. The sun’s energy gives us the trinity of light, heat, and warmth – but its light reaches us first, not because it travels faster (it doesn't), but because we perceive visible radiation immediately; then heat follows as matter absorbs the radiation, and warmth is the personal experience that results. Similarly, the Father’s creative act is like light, the Son’s incarnate presence is like heat, and the Holy Spirit’s indwelling is like the warmth.

Odds, Ends & Stray Musings: Uneven Intuition

 

Suppose an atheist hears two scenarios:

Scenario 1: A man comes to believe Jesus is Lord by seeing a miraculous healing in church

Scenario 2: A man comes to believe Jesus is Lord by a direct, personal impartation from the Holy Spirit.

Both of those scenarios are, in fact, common in the world – but if an atheist were to reject them both as unsatisfying, he’d probably be more unsatisfied at the second than the first.  Yet this is hard to justify, because Scenario 1 and Scenario 2 differ in how the belief is acquired, not in the epistemic status of the belief itself.  That is, given the truth of Christianity and how God does His fundamental imparting of revelation (1 Corinthians 12:3), then unbeknown to him, the atheist’s greater discomfort with Scenario 2 is driven by accidental or psychological features, not by a genuine epistemic asymmetry.

Odds, Ends and Stray Musings: God's Nearness

 

Some people say they have an absence of evidence for God’s existence or that He has remained hidden from them. The problem is, if God knows us and cares about us even more than we know and care about ourselves (as per Acts 17:27-28 - 'In Him we live and move and have our being), then He cannot really be absent or hidden. It must be the case that something in the individual human state - whether distraction, woundedness, pride, fear, myopia, or simply not being ready yet – prevents the individual from recognising Him, as He is already as near as we need Him to be (especially given verses like 2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 4:18 and John 1:10–11).

Everything At Once Part 2

 

If you’ve dipped into ancient Christian philosophy, you might have come across Boethius’ idea of how eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life, and how that means for us, as creatures created to spend eternity with God (should we choose to accept the gift), that there is a sense in which our state of being encompasses all of life at once (see an earlier blog post Everything At Once that conveys something similar).

I think there is a sense in which that’s true - and to see why, we only need to think of what it’s like being ourselves in the present moment. Our ‘now’ sensation encompasses our history, where we can recall to mind the time we had a burger and chips with our chum in secondary school, and the time we grazed our knee when falling off our skateboards, our first day at work, and so forth. Our whole remembered life is in us in the present moment, even though we’ve forgotten much of it. What is remembered is there.

God doesn’t have the problem of forgetting things; His perfect Mind persists through endless time by being both part of time and outside time altogether. He sees all events - past, present, future - in a single, timeless now. But while we don’t have perfect minds, we are made in His image, and we do, in one sense, possess the fullness or potential fullness of life all at once, in that everything we are, everything we’ve done, and everything we could be, are all part of a single, unfolding reality. A kind of unified experience of being in which there always exists the potential tapping into the ever-present totality of life - a bit like how a tree contains its whole life in a single moment: rings of the past, leaves and branches of the present, and all the future growth contained within, all existing together in the living organism.

Consider what this means for you and for your potential if you think about it in the right way. Imagine that your life is like a film reel composed of countless frames. Each frame shows a single moment of your experience - a snapshot of what you think, feel, and perceive at that instant. If your life is everlasting (this life and the afterlife), then the film reel simply stretches on forever. Frame follows frame, moment follows moment - the story continues indefinitely, but always one scene at a time. Now imagine something stranger. Suppose that instead of a film reel, your entire life is encoded in a holographic plate - a two-dimensional interference pattern that contains, within every microscopic region, the information for the entire three-dimensional image. In a hologram, the whole is present in every part: each tiny patch of the plate can reconstruct the whole scene, though with varying degrees of clarity. In this “holographic” version of your life, every point of time contains the fullness of your whole existence - not just a slice of it.

I like what that implies about our potential - and the fact that we are never all we could be. Through this model, every thought, every stage, every experience is co-present within the single timeless structure of your being, and you can tap into the entirety of your life simultaneously, as the hologram possesses the entire image for us to navigate at once. It gives a real sense of what you might call a totality waiting to be awakened step by step with each new improvement, every fresh edification from experience, and every new unfolding – that all that we could be is, in some sense, already here in potentia - shimmering beneath the surface of our awareness, waiting to be drawn into the light of our becoming. Life is a journey, of course, and a continual invitation to open ourselves up to the infinite depth that already dwells within.

Why We Cannot Hold God Accountable

 

For years, I held the view that God is morally responsible for the creation story He chose to create. Given presumably an infinite number of possible creation stories He could have chosen, I wondered why He chose one with quite so much suffering in it. I guess, in a C.S. Lewis-esque ‘God in the Dock’ kind of way, I tended to put God “on trial” by judging His creation story by my mere human standards. But about twenty five years ago, I had an epiphany, where I started to develop the kernel of an idea about how absurd it is to even think of our perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God in terms of humanly discerned responsibility and accountability. So much so, that I came to realise that it’s preposterous to hold God morally responsible for anything, but that the reason why is far from obvious.

When we think of human responsibility in terms of right and wrong, and better or worse, we assign value judgements based on various possible scenarios - and if we have high standards, a hypothetical ideal that we bring to bear on the metric. When writing an essay, dealing with a noisy neighbour, or fixing something in the house, we can do a good or bad job, and make the results better or worse according to our efforts and conduct. But that is because everything we do is measured against a standard higher than ourselves, where however well we do, we always fall short of perfection. And the more complex the task, the further from the ideal we end up - a bit like how the bigger the circle we try to draw with a pencil, the less like a perfect circle it looks.

Now, to be clear, I’m not of the school that thinks all genuine value reduces to intrinsic value, and extrinsic value is wholly derivative. Some philosophers subscribe to this - they contend that greatness is identical to, and exhausted by, intrinsic value. That is, there is no greatness in itself apart from such value, and what is called extrinsic value is merely value derived from intrinsic value. But I reject this, because as far as humans are concerned, it’s clearly not true that an item has extrinsic value only insofar as it contributes to, or realises, something possessing intrinsic value. Some values are fundamentally relational - like, say, loyalty, fairness, courage, responsibility, artistic expression, comedy, hospitality, solidarity, and so forth - and not merely instrumental. To put it in formal mathematical language, even if intrinsic value exists, “greatness” is a multi-dimensional evaluative space rather than a single axis.

I can show further why it’s wrong by applying this to God, but with a caveat that, in actual fact, the proposition that genuine value reduces to intrinsic value, and extrinsic value is wholly derivative, is much truer of God than it is us. In fact, it’s nearly entirely true of God, but not quite wholly true. To say that God is the greatest possible being is to say that God possesses intrinsic value to the maximal degree permitted by possibility. In other words, God instantiates intrinsic greatness at its logically maximal extent by being the I AM under consideration (Exodus 3:14, John 5:58) - there can be nothing greater than God. But even God, about whom there is no possible increased greatness, has a greatness that is not maximally contained intrinsically; and we can surmise this because we know He desired to create - that is, to express His perfection extrinsically in creation - in order that He could have a loving relationship with His creation. God couldn’t have been maximally manifest or wholly fulfilled in His intrinsic perfection because He desired extrinsic value in terms of loving relationships. Don’t get me wrong, I do think God’s desire to create is itself part of His perfection, and His relationality is not a limitation but an expression of maximal perfection. But it must be true that God + creation is superior to God alone; otherwise, God would have had no reason to create anything at all.

An analogy from physics might help. We could think of intrinsic value like a rest mass: a property something has in itself, independent of external reference frames; and extrinsic value as being like kinetic energy - it exists only relative to interactions or relations; it is not a fundamental property but one that arises from a system’s relation to something else (a frame of reference, a field, a transformation). On this analogy, claiming that a being’s value is entirely intrinsic is like claiming that a particle’s rest mass is its fundamental property, while any additional energies - such as kinetic or potential energy - are purely relational and therefore derivative. And when applied to God, the analogy suggests that calling God the greatest possible Being is akin to saying that, if a particle possessed the highest rest mass permitted by physical law, that intrinsic property would define its fundamental status, with all other forms of energy remaining secondary and relational.

Perhaps now you can see what I mean by saying that it’s preposterous to hold God morally responsible for anything. Jack is morally responsible if he chooses to commit a bad act instead of a good one, or does a bad job rewiring the house because he chose to get drunk, because he had better options available to him, and better versions of himself that could have conducted those decisions. But our perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God cannot do anything better, and has no higher intrinsic or extrinsic state He can manifest. So, therefore, He cannot be responsible for something He cannot possibly be or enact, and He cannot possibly be or enact anything that is not good or perfect. 

You may say that in attributing goodness and perfection to God through my human-centric lens I am making a value judgement and assigning some kind of positive responsibility, but only insofar as I am projecting human standards onto a Being for whom such standards simply do not apply in quite the way a human can understand. It’s perhaps a bit like how a dog can discern a happy marriage from an unhappy one, but could only import crude canine speculation about the nature of deep love between beloveds.

God cannot be morally responsible for who He is, and who He is, is perfection, under which He has maximal compulsion to do the greatest things, even if by our human standards we might foolishly dwell in the illusion that we are equipped to act as judge. The accused stands above indictment, and the plaintiff lacks standing to bring a case.

Answered Prayer & Probability

 

A lot of people don't believe that God answers prayers. I will show you why we can be reasonably sure He does. God answering prayers is basically this; a Christian prays for x, x happens, therefore x happened because God answered the prayer. That happens a lot, but this apparent pattern is complicated by two common exceptions: times when a Christian prays for x, and x does not occur; and times when x occurs without anyone praying for it at all.

It is easy to understand why both exceptions occur, though; when a Christian prays for x, and x does not occur, we ought to conclude that x was the wrong prayer or not aligned with God's will. And x occurring without anyone praying for it at all does not tell us anything much about whether God answers prayers, any more than a fair coin landing heads tells us whether coins in general are biased.

A more appropriate way to affirm that God answers prayers is to look at what is being prayed for, and ask what the likelihood of the event is anyway without the prayer. For example, suppose Jack has a deck of cards, and prays that, after shuffling them, he will draw the king of diamonds. Since there are 52 cards in the deck, there is a 1 in 52 probability of this happening by chance alone. If 52 independent people were each to pray that they would draw the king of diamonds from their shuffled deck, probability suggests that, on average, one of them would succeed and might therefore conclude that their prayer had been answered.

What we are therefore looking for, in order to justify belief in answered prayer, is to consider events that occur where there is an astronomically low probability that it would happen by chance, but which are specifically and unambiguously prayed for in advance. This requirement precludes cases in which low-probability events are later interpreted as answers to prayer simply because they happened to occur, and excludes low-probability events that do in fact occur by chance, but lack any prior, specific prayer corresponding to them.

At this point, the sheer weight of Christian testimony should be ample evidence that God answers prayers - the kind of prayers which significantly undermine objections such as 'it is only anecdotal testimony' or 'there is no medical verification'. I have been instantly healed a few times immediately after prayer - from a pulled muscle in my leg, and from a chronic tooth pain - and I have witnessed a blind person given their sight back immediately after prayer, a severely deformed leg twist around, grow and be restored immediately after prayer, and a lady crippled and confined to a wheelchair all her adult life stand up and walk immediately after prayer. And they are merely a few experiential drops in a sea of miraculous testimony amassed worldwide.

The likelihood of any one of those events happening by chance is astronomically low, so the likelihood of any one of those events happening by chance immediately after prayer is even lower (for obvious reasons). Therefore, the most likely explanation is that these immediate healings were answers to prayer - especially when these events are considered cumulatively. If the likelihood of an instant healing is almost zero and it happens straight after prayer, the best explanation is the prayer caused it to happen. If the same thing repeats five times in just my experience, the best explanation being answered prayer becomes cumulatively stronger. When this pattern is multiplied across the experiences of Christians more broadly, answers to prayer become so much more plausible that it would be difficult to dismiss without adopting an unjustified scepticism.

 

EDIT TO ADD:

A friend asked about why miracles aren’t more attested to in terms of medical statistics.

My comment: Let me start with a question for you; even if we simply focus on the prayer examples I outlined - to keep it concrete and less abstract – I wonder why you focused not on them but on the proposition that if prayer worked like a predictable medical intervention that it would yield statistical differences in population health data. Please don’t misunderstand, I understand the appetite to broaden it to a wider empirical investigation, but if one is faced with gold standard evidence with 5 evident miracles, then a lack of consistent, predictable formal medical outcomes is not adequate to undermine it by itself.

I agree with your point that prayer and belief in God can enhance outcomes through psychological and community engagement – and given the truth of Christianity, one could reasonably expect that any behaviours that align with His truth can be expected to enhance well-being and utility.  But most Christians understand that prayer is about relationship with God Himself, and is therefore unlikely to be friendly to statistical analyses when treated too mechanically. God is not a God who likes to be tested as though He has something to prove – especially if one doesn’t approach Him with humility (not saying you lack humility). Once one is in a relationship with Him, and gets to experience the power of His love, grace and what He can do for us, those kinds of empirical probing can only fail to enchant. A bit like if a bodybuilder has shown us he can bench press 200kg, investigations about whether he can curl two 5kg pink dumbbells seem quite remiss.

Incidentally, I don’t think you’re being closed-minded or churlish at all - you’re attempting to apply a consistent standard of evidence, which is the very bedrock of empirical investigation. And it remains an interesting question about how some truthful phenomena manifest primarily through population-level statistics and how some operate more at the level of cumulative testimony. But as I’ve argued in other articles, the cumulative testimony in favour of Christianity is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for its truth. 

How The Bible Is True

Someone asked me what it means to say the Bible is true. I responded that it is true at different levels, and I alluded to the zooming in and out model I included in one of my books, which might interest some of you with a similar question of that nature.

“The interfacing between the physical and the metaphysical is merely a case of zooming in and zooming out, rather like how a photographer zooms in and out with a camera lens. Zooming in gives you a better perspective of local, select details, but on its own it would be too narrow a focus to see the wider picture. Zooming out gives you a comprehensive look at the wider picture, but on its own it lacks the finer details of the perspective of the local picture.”

For example, we can look at a painting and consider its effects in terms of aesthetics, and its investment of meaning, and its evocation of emotion. Or we can consider it in terms of its physical constitution, which can be reduced to paint particles, atoms and smaller sub-atomic constituents. The first is a zooming out with an artistic, creative lens, and the second is zooming in with a scientific, empirical lens (with opportunity for overlap in either). Similarly, the lenses through which we view nature as a whole are variable; we can see it as an object of empirical study but also as a wondrous creation and a grand narrative, choreographed by the Divine, of which we are a central part. A tsunami can be assessed in terms of plate tectonics and the Earth's crustal deformation, or it can be assessed in terms of human suffering and issues surrounding theodicy. The particular lens of reality is the one chosen by the beholder depending on what he or she is trying to describe. 

Similarly, you can think of the Bible as being true in terms of zooming in and zooming out, where it is true at different levels - at the level of the paragraph, the chapter, the book, and the whole, and how the more we zoom out to discern the complete, interconnected panorama of revelation, the truer it gets. The reason the Bible becomes truer the more we zoom out is because scripture can be understood as nested sets: the paragraph is a subset of the chapter, the chapter is a subset of the book, the book is a subset of the whole. This means that the set of truths at each level expands as we zoom out further, so each zoomed out set encapsulates the truths of the sets it contains, until we get to the whole, which encapsulates the entirety of Biblical truths.

This also means that at the most zoomed in level there may well be verses that come across as difficult to reconcile - even appearing inconsistent, contradictory or morally short-sighted at times, especially out of context. But the more we zoom out into the expanse of chapters, books, and ultimately the entire canon, these tensions will find their place within a larger Divine narrative, showing how individual statements contribute to a coherent, unified truth. In other words, because God entrusted the writing of scripture to flawed humans under the guidance of His Spirit, apparent difficulties in the texts at the micro-level dissolve into the broader, deeper narrative at the macro-level, where the richness, profundity, and interconnection of the whole Bible reveal the awesome love, grace, and sovereignty of Christ.

Think of it this way - as we zoom out, the set of truths expands, capturing not only the local truths of individual passages but also the patterns, themes, and overarching purposes that emerge across chapters, books, and ultimately the entire canon. At the level of the whole, the Bible’s truth is fullest, because all the smaller subsets - the paragraphs, chapters, and books - are integrated into a unified vision that reveals its deepest meaning and coherence.

 

Unifying Moral Philosophy

 

If you're new to philosophy, you'll get told that there are loads of moral theories to consider, and you'll end up entangled in a complex web of interrelated and competing propositions that take you far off course from fundamental principles. Here I’m going to show that you only really need the big four, and I'm going to radically simplify things by showing that the big four moral theories in philosophy are really just partial rational reconstructions of a unified moral reality whose fullness is revealed in Christ. In other words, the fundamental moral theories we engage with in moral philosophy are partial, distorted, or truncated apprehensions of a deeper moral reality that finds its unity in Christ.

First, I’ll briefly summarise the big four moral theories. Consequentialism judges actions by their outcomes: the right act is the one that produces the best overall result. Deontology is underwhelmed by outcome-based morality, insisting that some actions are inherently right or wrong because of moral duties and principles that must be followed regardless of consequences. Virtue ethics shifts the focus from isolated acts to the formation of character, arguing that morality is about becoming a good person whose habits naturally produce right action. Natural law provides the deeper foundation for all of this by asserting that morality is grounded in the purpose and structure of human nature, so the good is what fulfils the kind of creature we were created to be, and moral rules are practical guides to flourishing.

To see how the fundamental moral theories are embedded in a deeper Christ-centred reality, we must first recognise that Christ is the moral telos: the final purpose toward which all moral action is directed. Creation has a purpose - relationship with God - and moral norms are ordered toward that end. Outcomes matter in worldly terms, but they matter primarily because they shape us toward or away from that end. Likewise, God’s commandments are truthful expressions of the good life for creatures made in God’s image.

From this perspective, each of the four moral theories presents a genuine aspect of moral reality, but each is but a subset of the full picture - the moral perfection of God. Let me try to lay it out. Consequentialism correctly insists that the consequences of our actions matter; God cares about results, because results shape the moral formation of the world and the flourishing of individuals. But consequentialism becomes incomplete when it treats outcomes as the sole criterion of rightness, inadequately capturing the wrongness of actions even if they produce good effects.

Deontology corrects this by insisting that moral duties are binding, but it can become rigid when it divorces duties from the moral telos and the real effects of action, treating rules as if they are extricable from human flourishing, which scripture confirms is untrue. Virtue ethics rightly returns us to character, arguing that morality is about becoming a person who naturally loves well; but it can become incomplete if it fails to specify the objective good toward which virtue aims, or if it ignores the need for moral rules in a fallen world.

So, here we could say that natural law provides the missing foundation, in that it explains why moral norms bind, why virtues are ordered toward human flourishing, and why outcomes and duties are not ultimately mere human construct, but in fact rooted in the purpose God built into human nature.

Thus, when seen most truthfully, the “big four” are not competing systems, as many philosophers think - they are more like four lenses we use to view the same horizon. Consequentialism highlights the moral importance of results, deontology highlights the binding authority of duty, virtue ethics highlights the formation of character, and natural law supplies the metaphysical and theological grounding that makes all three intelligible. When they are properly understood, they complement each other, and they all point toward the same moral reality revealed in Christ.

We are nearly there, but while I think everything above is correct - it won’t quite do by itself, because we now have to frame this though God’s love (agape) as the inner power that explains why telos, duty, consequence, and virtue all cohere. Because at the very deepest level, the unity of these moral perspectives cannot be explained by abstract teleology alone, only by Divine love. To offer a musical analogy, the telos explains the intended harmony of the piece, but only love explains the Divine unity and expressiveness of the performance. In other words, one can play some of the correct notes and still miss the music; love is what binds the timing, tone, cohesion and emphasis into something intelligible as music rather than mere notes and chords.

Or to put it another way, the telos explains where the journey is going, but love explains the call to undertake it, persevere through it, and be united with fellow travellers along the way - because the whole journey and the final destination is all about love really. If we could peep behind the stage door and see the full production scenes for the grand cosmic narrative, we’d see that every human motive, aspiration, connection, desire and decision - from the clothes we wear, the career we pursue, the friendships we cultivate, the families we form, the sacrifices we make, the approval we seek, the meaning we chase - was really a reaching out for love rightly ordered and finally fulfilled in God.

That is why I think Christ names love of God and love of neighbour as the two great commandments, because in doing so He reveals love not merely as one moral value among others, but as the true form of all moral goodness. Love explains why consequences matter, because to love another is to seek their true good; it explains why duties bind, because love respects the dignity and inviolability of persons; it explains why virtue is central, because love must be learned, habituated, and embodied in character; and it explains why natural law has authority, because love is ordered toward the flourishing of the kinds of creatures God created us to be. Detached from love, consequentialism becomes a mere calculus of instrumental optimisation, deontology becomes mere legalism, virtue ethics becomes mere self-cultivation, and natural law becomes mere biology. Rooted in love, however, these are revealed as distinct but harmonious ways of articulating what it means to live rightly before God and with one another.

Why There Is No Such Thing As A 'Cultural Christian'

 

Strident atheist Richard Dawkins has made the headlines recently by referring to himself as a ‘cultural Christian’. In a recent social media post, I stated that there isn’t really such a thing as a cultural Christian – it’s just special pleading, to excuse a lack of real faith and obedience yet associate yourself with Christian virtues. And after a discussion ensued, I wrote a few more things, so thought I’d turn it into a blog post, in case it’s useful to any of my readers.

I went on to say that you either accept Jesus as Lord and Saviour and seek wholeheartedly to live in accordance with that belief, or like a branch cut from the vine, you bear no fruit and remain far from the source. Jesus is clear; discipleship is full commitment – and while genuine faith can be immature, inconsistent, or still forming, discipleship ultimately entails real allegiance to Jesus as Lord, expressed in repentance and a transformed direction of life. There is no ‘cultural’ middle way there.

One or two Christians took issue and said they do believe there is such a thing as a ‘cultural Christian’ – but I think much of the defence of ‘cultural Christian’ here rests on a category error. The proper definition of a Christian is somebody who has accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour – it’s a clear cut demarcation line (see 1 Corinthians 12:3, John 3:3, John 1:12, Romans 10:9, 2 Corinthians 5:17). This isn’t to deny, as I said above, that genuine Christians may be immature, inconsistent, or still growing - but those are questions of discipleship, not definition. One cannot be a “Cultural somebody who has accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour” if they haven’t accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. Similarly, one cannot be a ‘cultural Christian’ by virtue of merely living in a Christian country, any more than a man who is not legally qualified to offer advice about the law can call himself a lawyer, just because he mixes in circles in which lawyers mix. In using the lawyer illustration, I do not, of course, mean to imply that one has to be qualified to be a Christian. Quite the contrary.

Consequently, then, the two most vociferous arguments presented in support of there being such a thing as a ‘cultural Christian’ actually had it backwards, where the objection actually strengthen my case and weakens theirs. I’ll take them in turn:

1. The faulty ‘salt’ metaphor objection
One commenter claimed the ‘salt’ metaphor (from Matthew 5:13) argues in favour of a ‘cultural Christian’, although he has subsequently deleted that comment, so hopefully he now sees it is faulty. Here’s why. Let’s simplify it in set-theoretic terms. Let the set of Christians mean those who have accepted Christ as Lord, as per my proper definition. And let the set of people influenced by Christianity mean all those whose thinking, behaviour, or moral intuitions have been shaped by Christianity. It is obviously true that the set of Christians is contained within the larger set of people influenced by Christianity. But it is not true that the set of people influenced by Christianity is contained within the set of Christians. Being influenced by Christianity does not make someone a Christian. The “salt” metaphor describes how Christians affect those influenced by Christianity. It does not claim that those who are affected by this influence thereby become Christians themselves. So, to infer the existence of “cultural Christians” from the “salt” teaching is therefore a non sequitur - it illegitimately moves from the fact of influence to a claim about identity, without any logical justification. Salt seasons meat; it does not turn meat into salt.

The salt metaphor describes the effect Christians have on the world, not the definition of who is a Christian. One must comprehend that influence does not equal membership. In fact, we can take it further, when we see Jesus warn that “If the salt loses its saltiness, it is no longer good for anything” (Matthew 5:13). That is, salt that becomes indistinguishable from meat ceases to be salt. A “cultural Christian” category actually describes unsalty salt in Jesus’ terms - so the metaphor actually cuts against the commenter’s argument, and strengthens mine.

2. The faulty ‘connotational /notational’ objection
The second objection was that since natural language is connotational rather than notational "cultural Christianity" does have utility, and that in denying there is such a thing as a ‘cultural Christian’ I am attempting to use natural language as if it were notational alone. To which I say, it’s strange that the objector would use the connotational/notational language distinction on their side of the discussion, as this one also weakens the opposition’s case and strengths mine. Here’s why. Defining one’s terms and precision of language is the bedrock of a discussion, and that is why I reject the notion of a ‘cultural Christian. That is, connotational language is still not extricable from meaning - and because natural language is connotational, misleading connotations matter more, not less. So when the commenter said “The phrase has utility because natural language is connotational”, they are getting it backwards. I think the phase ‘cultural Christian has less utility because natural language is connotational – and whether one is a Christian or not belongs in a much more precise category of language, in that one either is a Christian or one isn’t. 

So, ironically, I think the objector’s comment is actually conceding my concern. The primary issue is about whether a term that grammatically predicates “Christian” of people or societies can do so without implying some form of Christian identity. That implication is not something I’m inventing; it’s carried by ordinary usage of the word “Christian” as a noun. So, because language carries connotations, attaching “Christian” to a person or culture inevitably suggests belonging, not merely influence. That is why the phrase does not remain neutral, even when someone hedges it with quotation marks.

In closing
Being ‘born again’ and having the Holy Spirit is a binary distinction (see 1 Corinthians 12:3). So, this is a discussion about semantic scope. I am not denying that Christianity has cultural effects, of course, or that people may identify with those effects. I am denying that the word ‘Christian’ can be detached from allegiance to Christ without losing its meaning. If all people mean is “culturally influenced by Christianity,” then that phrase already exists and is perfectly clear. Introducing the noun “Christian” does no additional explanatory work - so precision of language and definition is key here. Once we are talking about individuals, “Christian” is not a loose cultural or sociological descriptor. In both Scripture and ordinary language, it names allegiance to Christ, because that’s how Christ defines it. Therefore, culturally influenced by Christianity does not equate to 'cultural Christian' because, as I said clearly above, a Christian is someone who has accepted Jesus as Lord and Saviour and has received the Holy Spirit as a result. If you accept that definition (and proposition) - and I can't see why you wouldn't - then one either is or is not a Christian. And therefore, the term 'cultural Christian' is a bogus distraction. A British Muslim who has lived in the UK all his life might be "culturally influenced by Christianity", but we wouldn't be helping matters of clarity much if we called him a 'cultural Christian'.

And this applies to Richard Dawkins too. However much one may admire aspects of Christianity or acknowledge its cultural influence, the New Testament uses the word Christian to describe those who have come to personal allegiance to Jesus Christ. That invitation remains open to everyone, at any stage of life, and Christianity has always insisted that becoming a Christian is not about heritage or admiration, but about response. And there’s always time for Richard – my dear mum became a Christian at the age of 79, and is now 80, and has been totally transformed by her new relationship with God. The invitation remains open to all.

Help! My Children Aren’t Christians!

Or alternatively: “Help! My Children Aren’t Christ-centred!” I’m sure we all know many Christian parents of young people who are not in an active relationship with Christ, who show little interest in coming to church, and who currently show no sign of wishing to fully engage with the Christian faith. Let’s analyse some possible reasons why. First, let me draw your attention to this Bana article Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church - which is over ten years old now - but indications from my searches online today suggest the same multifactorial pattern is still prevalent in 2025. The six reasons are, in summary: 

1 – Churches seem overprotective

2 – Teens’ experience of Christianity is shallow

3 – Churches appear antagonistic to science

4 – Church teaching on sexuality feels simplistic, judgmental

5 – They wrestle with Christianity’s exclusivity

6 – Church feels unfriendly to doubt

Now, if you see the world in the way I do, you might already sense that this is quite a mixed bag, and that it evokes the Nietzschean problem (it’s not always easy to tell vice from virtue, and virtue from vice), in that from the perspective of many of those outside the church, some of these I think are virtues being confused with vices; and from the perspective of many of those of us inside the church, some of them are vices being confused with virtues. Let’s take each in turn, where I’ll elaborate on what the findings are, then make a comment:

Reason #1 – Churches seem overprotective
“Today’s teens have unprecedented access to ideas and culture. They want faith to connect with the world, yet experience Christianity as stifling, fear-based, risk-averse. One-quarter say “Christians demonize everything outside the church” (23%). Others feel the church “ignores the problems of the real world” (22%) or is too worried about “movies, music, and video games” (18%).”

My comment: This is the one I find most ambiguous. Christianity has always been, in one sense, radically protective of its truths and virtues, especially in the sense that it has the power to expose and diminish falsehoods. And when the faith is put into proper practice, as per scriptural teachings, it guards the soul against idols that masquerade as freedom but quietly enslave too – so there is probably a lot of virtue being confused with vice here in Reason #1, especially in a world full of people wanting to be gods of their own lives. Yet, on the other hand, when young people in church experience what they deem overprotectiveness, it’s often their particular church’s defensive crouch, in which the leadership behaves as though culture is primarily a contaminant rather than a mission field, so there is mileage in the concern too. But I think a profound truth that always abounds – and especially in the modern era, with floods of competing falsehoods and distractions, more prevalent than ever before - is that a Christian faith that cannot trust its own truths and robustness in the open air of any society and culture will struggle to retain those not rooted in relationship with Christ.

Reason #2 – Teens’ experience of Christianity is shallow
“Many feel something is lacking in church. One-third say “church is boring” (31%). A quarter say faith isn’t relevant to their careers or interests (24%), or that “the Bible is not taught clearly or often enough” (23%). One-fifth say “God seems missing from my experience of church” (20%).”

My comment: Hmmm, okay, but remember that boredom is rarely about a lack of stimulation; it is almost always about a lack of depth within a mind not fully pursuing the adventure of truthseeking. When young people say church feels shallow, I believe that what they are really coveting - often inarticulately - is a faith so much more truthful, powerful and transformative than anything that the weight of life alternatives can hope to offer them. Acquire a relationship with God of such depth and growth that it transforms your heart and mind, reorders your desires, and draws you into the gravitational pull of ultimate meaning, and do all this with the consistently devoted mindset required, and the chances of it appearing boring or shallow are zero. If young people do not encounter this level of exhilaration, it is not surprising that it seems absent in many typical church services or congregations. The places I’ve visited where God appears to be somewhat absent or diluted is often because, for the members, He has been reduced to a comforting abstraction rather than proclaimed as the living centre of reality.

Reason #3 – Churches appear antagonistic to science
“Young adults feel tension between Christianity and science. Many say “Christians are too confident they know all the answers” (35%) or that churches are “out of step with the scientific world” (29%). Some see Christianity as “anti-science” (25%) or were “turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate” (23%). Science-minded believers struggle to stay faithful in science careers.”

My comment: Yeah, well I’m sure my views on this are crystal clear by now. Christianity has nothing to fear from science, and science says very little about the most important questions that belong in Christianity’s domain. When both are apprehended properly, they are no more in conflict than T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is in conflict with Watson and Crick’s The Double Helix. Yet when the church speaks as though faith were threatened by honest empirical inquiry, it inadvertently implies that truth it is trying to defend is fragile. And in cases when religious fundamentalism distorts empirical facts, it actually cannot tolerate external questions because it knows deep down in the recesses of the conscience that it may not survive them. The bogus, humanly-constructed conflict between faith and science has undoubtedly been one of the most damaging things to the Christian faith – it’s all such a shame, and so entirely unnecessary.

Reason #4 – Church teaching on sexuality feels simplistic, judgmental
“In a hyper-sexualized culture, young believers struggle with chastity and delayed marriage. Research shows many are as sexually active as peers. One-sixth feel judged for their “mistakes” (17%). Among Catholics, two-fifths say church teachings on sexuality and birth control are “out of date” (40%).”

My comment: This is often a case of virtue being confused with vice. Christian sexual ethics are costly, demanding, and countercultural, but entirely necessary and beneficial - and one can easily see the mass harms caused by their abandonment, which is what has happened in much of modern culture has largely abandoned. On the other hand, judgemental Christianity is also a malady, especially when mercy is low. In a world already saturated with shame, anxiety and identity crises, young people who come smack against the church’s failure to accompany them patiently through failure and mistakes, are likely to see even Christianity’s most profound truths and virtues as vehicles of condemnation. If that happens to you, please do find a more loving and gracious church - there are plenty out there.

Reason #5 – They wrestle with Christianity’s exclusivity
“Shaped by values of openness and diversity, young adults want common ground. Three in ten say “churches are afraid of other faiths” (29%) and feel “forced to choose between my faith and my friends” (29%). One-fifth say church feels like a “country club, only for insiders” (22%).”

My comment: Here again, the vice–virtue confusion is acute. While exclusivity without humility or invitation is prohibitive to community, Christianity is exclusive in the same way that truth is exclusive: not because it wishes to exclude, but because it cannot be two contradictory things at once. To say that Christ is the way, truth and life is a claim about reality. Truth precludes falsehood in a healthy and beneficial way, a bit like how medicine deals with our sickness in order to heal. So one cannot come to a full life in Christ except on His terms, which also happen to be the best terms we will ever encounter.

Reason #6 – Church feels unfriendly to doubt
“Young adults say church isn’t a safe place for doubts. They feel unable “to ask my most pressing life questions” (36%) and many have “significant intellectual doubts” (23%). One in six say their faith “does not help with depression or emotional problems” (18%).”

My comment: Yes, this is a big problem – and runs counter to Tennyson’s great observation that “There lives more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds”. One of the best lessons to be learned is that doubt is not the opposite of faith; indifference is. As we see in so many Biblical figures, doubt is often the sign that faith is alive enough to contemplate, to wrestle with, and to pursue God with even greater depth. When churches treat doubt as a moral failure rather than an intellectual and spiritual journey, they unintentionally teach young people to either pretend or leave – which probably engenders a near 100% hit rate because churches that treat doubt as a moral failure are places one would be advised to leave anyway. If the church cannot be a place where questioning, uncertainty, and intellectual struggle are spoken aloud, young people will seek other spaces that at least allow them to tell the truth as they see it, even if it takes them off course for a while.

In closing, I will mention something from a previous blog post that might be useful as an adjunct to the above. A friend of a friend, a researcher called Dave Fenton, did some research on young people who had fallen away from the church at a young age and were no longer following Jesus or on a close walk with Him. The researcher found that the most common reason given was that they felt their parents weren’t living a very Christian life at home, outside of the church – and that their outside conduct didn’t live up to the messages being preached in the church.

So, if the title “Help! My Children Aren’t Christians!” is relatable (and similarly for other young people you know, not just your own children), then I think this taps into one of the all-time most important questions about Christianity – one that never goes away: What kind of faith are people being invited into? Because one thing we can always say with confidence is that young people are exquisitely sensitive to what is real. They may not always be quite ready to give their life to Christ (I know that feeling when I was on the cusp of becoming a Christian), but they can usually embrace authenticity, honesty, mystery, difficulty, and cost that offers genuine transformation. But they rarely forgive boredom, fear, inauthenticity, dishonesty, false humility, false confidence, exaggerated certainty, judgementalism, artifice or pretence.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a hard balance for Christianity to strike, because too much cultural compromise or cultural insulation creates barriers. But Christianity can truly flourish when it is lived as a truthful, honest, life-changing, exhilarating encounter with the living God, and parents and elders who manufacture relevance or dilute conviction will only end up dissuading in the long run. They need only to embody a faith worth exploring and acquiring - one that trusts truth, welcomes honest struggle, and radiates a joy proportionate to the transformative reality it proclaims. If we get back to that, then all the signs are that, for young people, Christianity can be irresistibly caught and sustained.

 

Ways Not To Believe Part II

Having argued that non-belief is probably the best term to describe people who are not Christians (see here), it’s probably worth considering whether disbelief is just belief in the negation or a distinct cognitive standpoint. If we think that to not believe q = to believe not-q, then we contend that If Jack believes p, then he automatically believes not-(not-p), which is equivalent to believing p again.

But if not believing is a distinct cognitive standpoint, in at least some way independent of belief in negation, then it’s more akin, say, to how distrust is not identical to belief that someone is untrustworthy, or how dislike is not identical to belief that something is bad. On this view, one can believe p without actively disbelieving not-p. Under this condition the distinction of not believing constitutes a more robust, attentive, or attitude-laden response than simply believing the negation.

Logically: belief(p) → disbelief(not-p) – but whether in the case of rejecting Christianity that feels to the sceptic like it applies may be a matter open for debate with the beholder.

I think if I were to probe the sceptic and take it to its natural course, I’d conclude that whether disbelief is really just shorthand for “belief in the negation,” or whether it is a distinct cognitive standpoint in its own right, depends a lot on whether we are dealing with professed disbelief, unbelief or non-belief. And I wonder, if you asked most non-Christians, would they instinctively know straight way which of the three applies to them? For many, under the terms above, they may not have given it much thought.

If disbelief is simply the flip side of belief - nothing more than affirming not-p when one denies p - then the distinction I’ve drawn collapses neatly into classical logic. On that account, to believe Christianity is false just is to disbelieve it, and the psychological texture of that rejection is irrelevant. But I have argued before that disbelief is more like a worldview in itself, and is a more intentional state than mere logical complement, and far more than most sceptics would like to acknowledge.

Taken with my part one article, it seems quite a compelling case that disbelief occupies a firmer, more deliberate space than either unbelief or non-belief - not because logic requires it, but because lived cognition and behavioural values exhibit it. It’s not quite the same for, say socialists vs. capitalists, because in that case, once we understand human minds as packages of values, economic assumptions, moral priorities, and social aims, socialists are actually capitalists pretending not to be (see here). 

 

Ways Not To Believe

 

I was thinking about how one should express a lack of belief in Christianity’s truth, in terms of the difference between disbelief, unbelief and non-belief. I don’t know if my definitions accord with yours - and please do say if you interpret your lack of belief differently to this - but I take disbelief to be the firmest and most deliberate form of not being a Christian, where a person with disbelief thinks Christian doctrines are not true and responds with a kind of cognitive rejection. In other words, the person has considered Christian teachings and rejects them.

I take unbelief and non-belief to be softer form of not being a Christian, and the distinction between the two is subtler than the distinction between either one of them and disbelief. I take unbelief to be a lack of belief, without specifying whether it's due to rejection, doubt, indifference, lack of exposure, and so forth. We can therefore think of unbelief as a broader term used to mean anyone who does not believe in Christianity’s truth, and non-belief as simply a purely descriptive distinction of lacking belief. So, in summary, as I see it, it’s roughly this:

Disbelief = “I believe Christianity is false.”

Unbelief = “I do not believe in Christianity’s truth” (but reasons vary).

Non-belief = “I lack the belief in Christianity’s truth” (pure description).

Consequently, the set of disbelief is contained within the set of unbelief, and both sets, disbelief and unbelief, are contained within the set non-belief. That is, the terms can be understood as nested sets: disbelief is a subset of unbelief, because anyone who rejects Christianity (disbelief) also lacks belief (unbelief), and both of these are subsets of non-belief, the broadest category describing anyone who simply does not hold Christian belief for any reason.

I have brought this consideration to bear on my editing of books I’m going to send to publishers, because I have been deliberating on the best term to use when describing non-Christians. It may vary in some contexts, but in broad application, non-belief/non-believer, therefore, appears to be the best option. 

Creationism Is Rooted In Fear

A chap I know has started sharing some daily posts on the subject of creation. It became apparent right away that he is a creationist whose posts contained frequent scientific errors and faulty interpretation of scripture. So, being the dutiful and well-meaning citizen that I am, I left some comments (which, in a cowardly, dishonest and, as we'll see below, fearful manner, he deleted from public viewing), then offered him some further gentle encouragement and advice after he sent me a private message. But I also expressed concern that his errors would mislead the very people he said he hopes will get saved. He said science isn't really his thing, so I even offered to look at his drafts prior to posting, and advise on any suggested adjustments beforehand, to help him produce accurate posts. Alas, after a few more messages between us, it became clear that my creationist acquaintance has inadequate interest in ensuring what he is posting is correct, and has proceeded to carry on posting inaccurate and misleading information on his daily offerings. 

What strikes me most about conversations like this with creationists is how they are so rigidly closed, lacking humility and curiosity, and how they maintain an unhealthy indifference to whether their beliefs are true or not. Which is why I want to say that there are lots of factors at play in creationism (evolution-deniers) - closed-mindedness, dogmatism, confirmation bias, misinformation, etc - but the two primary traits that both underpin the others and run through them are, I believe, ignorance and fear (unless they are a Hawk, see my Hawks, Pigeons & Sparrows blog here - in which case it's usually power and control). Fear because they are beset by religious fundamentalism that threatens their black and white identity, and ignorance because it’s the safest place to remain to assuage their fears. Like in many other walks of life, fear is utterly crippling to an individual’s ability to be liberated by truth, free enquiry, critical thinking, relationships, adventure, travel, personal development, self-awareness and intellectual curiosity.

And if you’re a creationist reading this thinking “Huh, I don’t feel particularly fearful about my creationism”, well that probably just means that your fear has been so deeply ingrained and normalised that you don’t even recognise it as fear - it falsely masquerades as confidence or denial to keep the fear in check.

The above shows why classic psychological literature says that the opposite of most fear is knowledge and understanding. Some elements of fear, of course, have their initial opposite in courage (courage to step out of your comfort zone and dare to try something) but it is the knowledge and understanding of that pursuit that brings it to fruition. For example, if you’re socially anxious and require courage to go to a social gathering, courage might get you there, but it’s the familiarity brought with knowledge and understanding (repeated experience) that will assuage your fears in the longer term.

Most people who have not been ensnared by creationism understand that the opposite of the fear that drives their creationism is knowledge and understanding; of why there is nothing to be fearful of accepting evolution as consistent with their Christian faith; of why smarter scriptural interpretation would expend their theological comprehension; of why embracing reality leads to a deeper, more meaningful engagement with both the natural world and their spiritual journey, and so on. The opposite of being afraid is embracing knowledge and understanding, because courage leads to curiosity, which leads to learning, and ultimately, to wisdom and liberation.

We could even apply this to one of the most important Biblical truths, but perhaps in reverse; "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10). Remember, “fear of the Lord” here means deep reverence, awe, and respect for God's greatness, standards goodness and truth – so it is a healthy fear that is likely to increase with the pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. In other words, seeking God is a healthy fear and desire to be everything you can be, and rejecting God is an unhealthy fear of what you could be if you were courageous enough to seek. That’s why the unhealthy fear that underpins the creationists’ mindset is also stopping them being the Christians they have the potential to be in places they can't yet realise.

The Power of Children Praying

 

Earlier today I was in such eye-watering agony that I could barely function. So Zosia asked for prayer for me on Family Viber, and alongside the many deeply appreciated prayers, my super-adorable three-year-old niece appeared on video and said the sweetest, cutest prayer for me. Almost immediately, all the pain drained out of my body. Praise God.

It made me reflect on the rare and profound power of children’s prayers, and how this speaks directly to Matthew 18:3: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” When innocent children pray with such sincerity, they ask simply, trust completely, and love without motive or calculation. Their prayers are so pure - unburdened by ego, anxiety, or self-consciousness. Their hearts are open, their intentions are clean, and their dependence is honest. And that kind of prayer carries such a quiet, astonishing power - the very power Jesus was pointing to in Matthew 18:3, and one that inspire us all to pray with the same simple trust, openness, and dependence that children naturally possess.

On The Trinity

I haven’t read anything by the Christian philosopher and theologian Richard Swinburne, but I know he posited a famous defence for the Trinity on the grounds that with the three-person God, where God is perfectly loving, He needs to be triune so you have each person loving the others, and each pair jointly loving the third. The thinking goes that if God were just one person, He couldn’t be essentially loving unless He had someone to love - which would make love dependent on creation. And mutual love between two persons of God is good, but not the highest form of love, because the highest love requires two persons jointly loving a third in a self-giving, cooperative way. Consequently, a three person God is both the minimum needed (as per above) and the maximum (because anything additional is superfluous).

Now, I’m of the school that says God is so far beyond our comprehension that speculating about the precise nature of God as triune is a bit like …I don’t know….a chimpanzee speculating on the equations in quantum theory. But that’s ok, it’s fun to speculate, and we are loved by God and made in His image, so I’ll share some thoughts.

I do think it’s probably right that God must be a Trinity - three persons - because perfect love requires mutual love (at least two persons), and shared, cooperative love (at least three persons). And it’s probably compelling that those two types of love are also fundamental to the three most powerful loves in the world; marital love, parental love and love between friends.

But I also think we have to be smart enough to see that the Trinity as described in scripture is (like a lot of scripture) the most simplistic way that humans can get a limited sense of who God is and what He is like. In other words, we know that in describing God as three persons, one God, we mean that somehow He is tri-aspectual (three aspects of one God) and that the Trinity is God's way of revealing Himself in scripture in a way we can grasp - allowing us to understand aspects of His nature. Apart from what we can discern through scripture, through the Incarnation where the Word became flesh, and through our own relationship with Him through the Holy Spirit, we perhaps only understand God as tri-aspectual in the same way that a foetus tries to understand its mother - surrounded by her, sustained by her, hearing the rhythm of her heart, yet unable at this stage to comprehend the fullness of her being.

It is at that level that we can comprehend God as three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where each is fully God, not a part or a third of God - and where they are distinct in relation, not in nature or power. Perhaps the most helpful way to think of this - in admittedly very limited human form - is that of a single music chord; it is made of three notes sounding at once, and each note is fully itself, fully part of the chord, yet the chord isn’t the chord without all three. There's unity, diversity, and shared essence - and that might be a little like how we can sense God as triune, and how His triune nature invites us to love Him even more deeply.

We might even glimpse something compelling in the way God describes us: as His friend (John 15:15), His bride (Isaiah 62:5), and His child (1 John 3:1). Perhaps these are more than metaphors - they may be the ideal descriptors to echo the mutual, self-giving love within the Trinity itself - a love so complete and overflowing that it gives rise to the three most powerful forms of love we know: friendship, covenantal marital love, and the bond of family. These aren’t just ways we relate to God - they’re reflections of how God, in His very being, relates within Himself and then with us.

 

The Philosophy of Miracles

In a recent article, I defined a miracle as an event that requires action from God because it defies the natural laws or scientific explanation within His creation. I argued that miracles are everywhere, and that they are one of the best arguments for the truth of Christianity. Now I’d like to follow up with a philosophical piece that considers what it’s like for a sceptic who has never experienced a miracle, and the thought process that will hopefully aid their evaluation.

When it comes to miracles, an open-minded agnostic has two sets of propositions to consider.

Here is the first set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.
P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.
P3: Christians claim to have experienced miracles.
C: Therefore, there is a reasonable chance that miracles occur.

Here is the second set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.
P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.
P3: Atheists claim to have experienced no miracles.
C: Therefore, there is a reasonable chance that miracles do not occur.

Let’s unpack how we can arrive at the best conclusion about which set is most likely. Using the well-known Popperian black swan problem, the situation with miracles works like this. In philosophy of science, a “black swan” is something that seems impossible or extremely unlikely because it has never been observed - like how Europeans once believed all swans were white until black swans were discovered. The discovery of even one black swan overturned what people thought they knew. In the same way, when Christians testify that miraculous events occur, they are essentially saying that “black swans” exist - relatively infrequent events that challenge ordinary expectations. Remember, as noted in the previous article, these events are only infrequent relative to the enormous number of non-miraculous events that occur; they are frequent relative to the sceptic’s assumption that they do not occur at all. Unbelievers argue that since they’ve never seen such events, miracles probably don’t exist, much like someone who assumes all swans are white simply because they’ve never encountered a black one.

Starting from scratch, the empirical evaluation can be undertaken as follows. Statements that insist that black swans do exist cannot be falsified without a rigorous search throughout the whole swan domain to confirm that there are no black swans. But although showing that black swans exist is not easily falsified, their existence is more easily verified, because one example of a black swan is sufficient to verify the statement. Assigning a universal property to all items of a set and decreeing all swans are white can be falsified by one black swan. The trouble is, where the statement ‘all swans are white’ is relatively easy to falsify, in most empirical investigations it is not so easily verified, because the whole swan domain must be searched and checked before the statement “all swans are white” can claim to be verified.

Furthermore, one can seldom fully verify or falsify claims of a miraculous nature from the outside, because our observations are mediated through complex and variable conditions, through inward phenomenological experiences, and through a host of anomalous events that fall beyond the reach of ordinary empirical investigation. This difficulty is especially clear when we recall that verifying the proposition “black swans exist” requires only the observation of a single black swan - something straightforward in uncomplicated empirical science - whereas verifying the proposition “miraculous events exist” cannot be observed through quite the same straightforward process, since it requires us to probe a vast, complex, and often inaccessible domain of human experience.

The statement ‘all swans are white’ is testable by being falsifiable, yet it should also be remembered that deductive falsification is not the same as proposing an absence of verification. In order to comprehensively falsify a grand sweeping claim, one must compress all this hard to manage data into a true falsifying singular statement, and sceptics who do not wish to believe tend to dismissively shade over into selectively proactive induction as the objects they deal with get more complex, intractable and inaccessible. The epistemological pathways for miracles are not converged upon by this method because they are usually highlighted by a few known dots, which can be joined by large tracts of inference and a proactive search, rather like when one visits a single Internet web page with just a few search tags typed into a search engine.

Given that there is a fairly large degree of asymmetry when one compares empirical science and the establishing of evidence of the miraculous, the swan domain is best used analogically as a sense-making interpretive structure that seeks to piece together numerous testimonies and anecdotal claims (the more the better) and consider a more innovative method of investigation into the miraculous than most sceptics currently employ.

Because miraculous events, unless experienced first-hand, are not easily comprehended through standard empirical methods that rely on observing patterns and drawing general conclusions, one of the hardest things for unbelievers to apprehend is that the full scope of created reality, with its intractable and inaccessible web of human experiences and divine intervention, does not offer an easy epistemological route to explaining everything naturally. Instead, comprehending such events requires a methodology where one infers and evaluates the experience against their own background to determine if it is truly miraculous by the above definition.

Clearly, given that the miraculous seems to be a dish that is only consumed by those who experience it first-hand, we can be sympathetic as to why unbelievers remain unsatisfied with second-hand testimonies. However, sceptics must be careful not to quarantine themselves from investigation by adopting an attitude that allows them to hastily dismiss all anecdotal evidence as unsatisfactory and preclude themselves from proactive investigation. When God does act miraculously in people’s lives, one thing is abundantly clear, if you do not adopt some proactive search or radical thought process that brings you into contact with the real nature of the investigation, the chances of you finding this truth are seriously minimised.

To summarise at this point, the problem for unbelievers is that they cannot be sure that no black swans exist unless they know for sure that miracles are impossible, and they cannot know that miracles are impossible unless they are sure that there are no such things as black swans. Christians do not face the same epistemological problems because many (if not most) have experienced some kind of miracle that has demonstrated to their satisfaction that God is active in their life. Naturally, the unbeliever may claim that the Christians are using a debatable explanatory filter that defaults to intelligent agency as the best explanation of such events, but as I said in the first article, the Christian can rightly insist on two powerful things; 1) that the unbeliever has no experience of the Holy Spirit, so is not rightly placed to discern the miraculous; and 2) that miracles are everywhere if you know where to look, and remain one of the very best arguments for Christianity’s truth.

If an enquirer’s first steps lead him into huge sense-making structures that attempt to embed a very wide degree of life into a grand creation story narrative, where Christ is recognised as the Creator and sustainer, then he will undoubtedly find it gets more exciting the further he gets into it.  As above, a search engine only needs a few key search words to sift out a few web pages from millions - so, in principle, if this venture into the miraculous is seen as a join-the-dots experiment (that may well involve a lifetime of growth), a few dots may be enough to put one on a solid conceptual footing to begin the adventure.

All this shows why, between the consideration of the two sets - set 1 there's a reasonable chance that miracles occur, or set 2 there's a reasonable chance that miracles do not occur - set 1 is astronomically more likely than set 2. Even aside from the positive reasons to believe in miracles cited in the previous article, on philosophical grounds too, set 1 ought to seem more reasonable to an open-minded agnostic than set 2, because if miracles occur by virtue of God performing them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then you'd expect that in the vast majority of cases, Christians are the only people to have experienced miracles in terms of God's providence. But equally, if miracles occur because God performs them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then it is to be expected that most atheists have not experienced a miracle that would convince them that miracles, and ultimately God, exist.

Therefore, given the astronomically high number of claims of the miraculous in the world, you'd expect set 1 to have a higher probability of being the right set of propositions than set 2. Much like, if there were a group of people in the world who couldn't see the colour red, you'd expect them to be the people claiming there are no such thing as a red experience, even though a lot of other people are claiming to have had them.

And one final point that I think is vitally important but so often neglected. Miracles won’t just pop into the creation story in random fashion. Something as profound as the miraculous in the creation story is going to be a deliberate intervention from God Himself, and inevitably bound up in a deeper narrative related to how clearly and humbly we perceive Him and discern His will, much like in the case in Mark 8:22-26 with the healing of a blind man at Bethsaida.