Iain Strachan

[Author's note:  One of the biggest questions facing believers is the problem of pain and suffering.  There are no easy glib answers to this question.  It is clear that on a planet of fixed size, if there is birth there has to be death to make room.  But what if all pain were removed and death was always painless?  I have tried to imagine what this would be like in the following story ..] One in fifty thousand is not much to worry about.  It is hardly worth concerning yourself when you go to sleep that one in fifty thousand will not wake up the next day, and you could be one of them.  One in fifty thousand will go to sleep, content and happy and painless, and will be carried off by the silent swathe that passes over the slumbering.  One in fifty-one thousand one hundred and thirty-five, to be precise, the statisticians have calculated.  It is so curious an exactitude that one may expect to live, on average for precisely threescore years and ...

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, had a vision of a galaxy teeming with intriguing alien life forms that it was the Enterprise's five-year mission to seek out. In successive Star Trek franchises the spiritual beliefs of these alien species were often investigated. It seems Roddenberry was preceded in this idea by Alice Meynell (1847-1922), an English Catholic mystical poet, who wrote the following marvellous poem in 1917. Christ in the Universe With this ambiguous earth  His dealings have been told us. These abide:  The signal to a maid, the human birth,  The lesson, and the young Man crucified. But not a star of all  The innumerable host of stars has heard  How He administered this terrestrial ball.  Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word. Of His earth-visiting feet  None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,  The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,  Heart-shattering secret of His way with us. No planet knows that this  Our wayside planet, carryin...

I recently listened to a debate between the foremost "New atheist" spokesman Richard Dawkins, and Oxford Mathematics professor John Lennox, who is an evangelical Christian. Dawkins led off in his typical manner, attempting at the outset to ridicule Lennox for believing in miracles. Doubtless this will give Dawkins acolytes much to cheer about; though it is difficult to see how it is constructive dialog offered by a human being interested in rational discussion. He started by saying that he was accustomed to debating with "sophisticated theologians", (presumably ones who don't believe in miracles) but in Lennox, he had found a scientist who believed that Jesus turned water into wine. He outlined what this entailed - that somehow Jesus had interacted with the water molecules and added proteins, carbohydrates, tannin and alcohol to it. This, and other beliefs (such as walking on water, dying for our sins etc), he stated were "profoundly unscientific"....

I've just finished watching the Royal Institution Christmas lecture series for 2008, which was televised last week in the UK. This is a long and venerable lecture series, dating back to 1825 when the first series of lectures were given by Michael Faraday (see here for a list of all the lecturers). I myself attended the lectures in 1969 (Prof. Sir George Porter on Time Machines) and 1970 (J. Napier on evolution). The lectures are primarily aimed at schoolchildren from the ages of 11 onwards. Many eminent scientists have given these lectures before, including both holders of the post of Professor of Public Understanding of Science, Richard Dawkins, and the current holder, Marcus du Sautoy. This year's lectures were of special interest to me as they were given by my PhD supervisor, Chris Bishop, who is head researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. In one of the lectures, Bishop gave an amusing demonstration of the precision of the laws of physics; saying that the small...

Today we undertook a massive clearout of the garage and attic. The chaotic jumble of papers, books, toys and so forth was thoroughly sorted, some to keep for special memories, but many assigned for recycling. My past life seemed to flash about me with fond and forgotten memories revived and relived once again in a random patchwork of reminiscence. Here was found my first ever Paddington Bear book, whose stories delighted me as a child. Among my extensive university lecture notes was an essay I wrote on how to explain the particle-wave duality of Quantum Mechanics to a non-scientist. In it, I had tackled the problem of how we understand that light can be simultaneously a particle and a wave, by making an analogy with Christian Theology - that theologians too have the magnum mysterium of Christ being fully man and fully God at the same time. My crusty physics professor (Sir Brian Pippard, who was Cavendish professor of Physics at Cambridge) was not impressed, and wrote the following c...

One of the wackier ideas I've come across recently is the Quantum Suicide thought experiment. For a full explanation look here It concerns one of the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, (a subject I studied a long time ago at University & wasted many late evenings in pointless discussions of its philosophical implications). In the "Many Worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, all possible outcomes of an event occur in separate parallel universes. Consider a radioactive atom that has a 50/50 chance of decaying in any given second. We are unable to predict which of these outcomes will happen, only the chance of one or the other. Albert Einstein didn't like this idea, and was often quoted as saying "God does not play at dice". (Well, coin-tossing in this case). Enter the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) to the rescue. In fact at the end of a second, there are two parallel universes, one in which the atom has decayed, and one in which it hasn...

I wrote a while back of Darwin's letter to Asa Gray, where he said he considered the marvellous universe we live in to be the result of designed laws, with the minor details, whether good or bad, left to what we may call chance. Darwin, as is well-known was an agnostic, but I'd like to develop these ideas a little from my point of view as a Christian. One thing many of my Christian friends have a problem with is evolution. Much of this may be due to the increasingly hostile attitudes of prominent evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins. But I suspect also part of the problem is the idea that all this complexity can come about from random, chaotic processes. However, this does not imply the absence of a designer, or a creative intelligence, and evidently Darwin didn't think so either. The fact is that systems that obey physical laws can often pick out what they need from random processes - and turn randomness into order. Consider what happens when you draw a bow across a ...

Went on an open top bus tour round London today to see the lights, with mother and family. We had a wonderfully entertaining guide giving the commentary. He said his name was George, but if we didn't like the tour and filled in a feedback form that would be read by the managers in his company, then his name was Shirley (I've changed the names to preserve anonymity). I've decided I liked him and hence he is "George". Despite having been to London so many times, it was very interesting to get an "overview" and tour round so many sites, embellished by many anecdotes given by George. I now know the origin of phrases such as "laughing your head off", "on the wagon", "one for the road", and the locations in London where they originated. I now know where various famous people live - that Margaret Thatcher has a police guard outside her house to prevent her escaping, how much Madonna paid for the lease on her London house, and ...