Creation: Law and Probability

Ten illustrious contributors explore an important but neglected topic on the interface of science and theology, i.e, the relationship between law and probability within creation.

Read about a book in which I edited that discusses this relationship in more detail on my website.

Social Division

Divisions in society are sharper now than for some years, between young and old, left and right, poor and wealthy, immigrants and the indigenous population, leavers and remainers, nationalists and unionists etc. The task of building social consensus seems enormously difficult. There are so many different opinions about everything, and it seems that everyone wants their point of view to be the one that prevails. People seem very willing to pick an argument about anything and everything.

Read about my view on the current social division in the world on my website.

Christians and Bioethics

An examination of issues in bioethics from the perspective of Christianity. The contemporary world is facing some very difficult ethical issues in regulating the possibilities resulting from bioethical research – cloning, genetic engineering of food, organ transplantation, reproductive medicine and euthanasia.

Read about a book in which edited that covers the relationship between Christianity and the work in bioethics.

Anger at the Grenfell Towers fire

There has been a huge and understandable outpouring of anger over the Grenfell Towers fire. Society endlessly struggles with anger, swinging between fear of the harm that anger can do, and fear of the harm that it does to suppress it. The twentieth century became increasingly tolerant of anger, compared to the Victorian period, and I am broadly sympathetic to that. I think the earlier fears of anger were often exaggerated.

In my latest blog, I discuss the anger that has been generated from the horrible incident at Grenfell Towers.

Hope, Politics and Religion

As I have said before, hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism is a matter of simply expecting things to go well, whereas hope can survive in adverse circumstances. Hope is primarily as much a matter of determination to make things better, leading to a belief in that being possible.

Recently, many successful elections are often those that inspire hope. In my latest article i discuss these campaigns and the impact they have had on those targeted - especially the youth.

The Psychology of Religious Knowing

In my latest article I take a look at my book 'The Psychology of Religious Knowing', which was co-authored with Mark Williams.

This work describes the psychological processes involved in arriving at religious knowledge. It is argued that the ways in which people come to know other things, particularly how people arrive at personal insights, is close at many points to how they arrive at religious insights. The psychological processes involved in religious knowing are described in the terminology of contemporary cognitive psychology.

Read more about 'The Psychology of Religious Knowing' on my blog.

A Psychologist’s Approach to God as Trinity

Next Sunday is ‘Trinity Sunday’. I want to continue my recent blogs that have taken a psychologist’s approach to occasions in the Christian year, and take a psychologist’s look at the Trinity. At first glance the Trinity may seem unpromising ground for a psychologist, but there are two aspects to the idea of God as Trinity.

One concerns the essence of God, and the relationality that is at the heart of God. Theologians have recently written a lot about that. The other aspect concerns how humans come to know God, and is nicely summed up in the title of a book by my former teacher, Professor Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God.

Read A Psychologist’s Approach to God as Trinity in full on my website.