Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60060. Whether extraterrestrial life exists is one of those questions people expect a minister to duck. I am not going to duck it, but I am going to disappoint anyone hoping for a verse that settles it, because there is no such verse. What I can do is show you what Scripture actually claims,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60059. The first thing God makes in Genesis is created light, and He makes it on day one, which is three whole days before He hangs the sun in the sky. Sceptics point at that and say the author did not understand basic astronomy. Christians sometimes shuffle their feet and change the subject. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60058. The question of animal death sounds like a gardening problem and turns out to be a theology problem. Somebody points out that a woodland floor lives off what has died on it, that leaf mould feeds the next generation of trees, that the whole system seems to run on decay, and then asks…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60057. Are the mountains of Ararat the same today as they were in ancient times? The question comes up whenever somebody proposes an expedition to find the ark, and it deserves a more careful answer than either side usually gives. Genesis says the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, in the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60056. Whether the sun stood still over Gibeon is one of those questions that separates a reader from the text before he has begun. Joshua 10 records that Joshua spoke to the LORD in front of Israel and said, Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon, and that the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60055. Aliens and UFOs are no longer a fringe subject. Governments have released footage, congressional hearings have been held, and polling suggests a substantial minority of people now believe intelligent life elsewhere has already made contact. So the question deserves a proper answer rather than a joke, and I get asked it often enough…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60054. Biblical numerology covers two quite different things, and a good deal of confusion comes from muddling them. One is the observation that certain numbers recur in Scripture with evident significance, which is plainly true and worth studying. The other is the practice of treating numbers as carriers of hidden meaning, calculating with names…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60053. The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, sold something in the region of eighty million copies, and left a residue of assumptions that is still with us two decades later. I still meet people who believe that the church suppressed rival gospels, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and that the doctrine of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60034. Few phrases generate more heat in a Christian conversation than systemic racism, and a good deal of that heat comes from people arguing past one another because they are using the words differently. Before anyone can agree or disagree, it is worth being clear about what is actually being claimed. At its simplest…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60052. String theory comes up in church conversations more often than you might expect, usually because somebody has watched a documentary and wants to know whether it undermines Genesis. It is a proposal in theoretical physics which suggests that the fundamental constituents of matter are not point particles but tiny vibrating filaments, and that…