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- A bit more on NDEs 11/07/2025
- Near death experiences 09/07/2025
- Pleading the fifth (monarchy) 02/07/2025
- Lessons from Civil War history 21/06/2025
- Give us a break 15/06/2025
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Category Archives: Philosophy
A bit more on NDEs
I closed my previous post with a quotation from Jesus in which he states that Scripture is sufficient for salvation if people are willing to believe God, and that even someone returning from the dead (he clearly means primarily himself, but it applies equally to the rich man or any NDE experiencer) will not convince evil men.
Posted in Philosophy, Theology
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Near death experiences
I laid myself open when I preached on the Ascension last Sunday. I majored on one of the things I find most wondrous – that there is an embodied Man in heaven, ruling all things on the throne of God. I unpacked scriptures around that. In passing, I warned people against the hundreds of YouTube videos along the lines, “God took me to heaven, and gave me this message for the world…” Even the apostle Paul was told to keep quiet about what he heard and saw, whether in or out of the body he knew not, in his one view of the third heaven.
Posted in Philosophy, Theology
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Old churches and the numinous
My pastor took an excellent line for his teaching on Pentecost Sunday last week. His main thrust was how the glory of God filled the completed Tabernacle in Exodus, and likewise the completed Solomonic temple, in 1 Kings, but after its judgemental departure (“Ichabod”) before the temple’s destruction by the Babylonians, it is not mentioned as filling the second temple built after the return from captivity. Instead, in fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, at Pentecost God’s glory (later termed the shekinah) came to dwell within every believer born again in Christ. God is no longer represented in a sacred place, but in his sacred people.
Posted in History, Philosophy, Theology
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From Athens to Bedlam
Realising late in the day that I needed some holiday reading to supplement an Agatha Christrie novel, I hurriedly ordered the book that had been on my Amazon wish-list the longest, Prof. Stephen R. L. Clark’s From Athens to Jerusalem. To my surprise it went on the list as far back as July 2012, when I heard him speak at an Intelligent Design conference in Cambridge, hosted by the Philosophy of Religion branch of the Tyndale Fellowship. Time flies when you’re geriatric, doesn’t it?
Posted in Philosophy, Theology
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Societal revival
My last blog picked up on the widespread talk of Christian revival in this country, and discussed how true revival is far broader than the usually-held idea, recalling the Great Awakening, of big meetings accompanied by spectacular spiritual and/or psychological phenomena. As was actually true in the eighteenth century too, the key thing was a general realisation that the current religion was failing, and a God-given hunger directed at biblical salvation in Jesus. The rest was contingent detail.
Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology
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The tradition of magical thinking in Darwinism
One way of detecting an ideological, as opposed to scientific commitment to a theory is when very obvious shortcomings are simply glossed over for long periods of time.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature
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Free speech on Queer Street
There’s a good article by Steven Tucker at Daily Sceptic on the sinister connotations of Queer Theory, which I first wrote about here in 2018. In this piece I want to add how, whether or not “queering” is intended to destroy society, nevertheless it will inevitably do so if permitted to continue. I add a few thoughts on how freedom of speech relates to that.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology
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Legacy
Last week I drove 200 miles to the Essex town where I practised as a doctor for thirty years, my first return visit since I retired in 2008. The reason was the funeral of my then junior partner, who sadly died recently.
Posted in History, Philosophy, Theology
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Nickel-plating gold
Bret Weinstein, as many readers know, is an evolutionary biologist who has come on a long, and now familiar, journey from trusting Western institutions to seeing them as thoroughly, and even maliciously, corrupted. Most of you are probably acquainted with his departure from the woke Evergreen University over diversity, his realisation that the COVID response defied science and logic, and his coming round to perceiving that the overwhelming degree of error points to a deep-seated conspiracy of lies rather than to incompetence.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology
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Plugging more gaps in the God of the gaps
Last Thursday I was interviewed for a podcast on God’s Good Earth by geologist Gregg Davidson, co-author with Ken Turner of the excellent Manifold Beauty of Genesis One, as well as writing an excellent sci-fi trilogy. The podcast should be online in about five weeks, Gregg says, so I’ll let you know about it when it happens.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature
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