I think with any question that’s asked, you have to concede that there’s something to it. Sometimes Christians have been a bit anti-science and I always think it’s important to respond with a bit of honesty. But in terms of the actual issues, I’m of the view that Christians can disagree over evolution. Sensible, godly, Bible-believing Christians have different views on that. but in terms of the science/God thing, I reckon it’s a lot clearer. Science only strengthens our belief in God for the simple reason that the more science discovers, the more it is clear that our universe is not accidental. It is rationally ordered that the elegant mathematics work at the tiniest level right out to the massive universal level. And that is the principle argument for God’s existence that philosophers have employed for years. It’s precisely because we live in a rational, ordered universe that there must be a rational mind behind it. In other words, every time science discovers how something works, what they’re actually discovering is how our universe is beautifully, elegantly, mathematically ordered. That just points to God. Every scientific discovery – every real discovery – Christians ought to be able to say, “Fantastic, more of God’s wisdom is discovered.”

That’s just one way people use the word “faith”. I think it’s an unfortunate way. The Oxford English Dictionary defines faith as a belief based on evidence, testimony or authority. In other words, faith isn’t the opposite of evidence and testimony. Faith is reasoned. It’s based on good evidence. But obviously when you trust something or someone, not every aspect of your trust is proven. You might have good reasons to trust someone and that’s enough to put your faith in them. We’re exercising faith every time we walk into a doctor’s surgery and trust them with our wellbeing. What we’re doing is trusting that they are an authority, that they’ve got the documentation and so on. And I think Christianity has got a great deal of evidence to support it, biblical, philosophical. Not proof, but enough evidence for someone to express trust in this as a reasonable way of understanding the world.

This is the age-old question and I don’t think anyone should rush too quickly to defend God on this. Because if someone’s actually experienced suffering it doesn’t matter how philosophically tight our answer is. It’s going to seem irrelevant. But philosophers long ago came to the agreement that suffering doesn’t disprove the existence of God, because in order to use suffering to disprove, God, you’d first have to show that God couldn’t have good reasons for allowing suffering to continue. And until you can prove that he doesn’t have good reasons, you can’t use suffering as proof that he doesn’t exist. Now, philosophers are pretty much in agreement on that one, but that doesn’t help someone who’s really going through suffering. And so this is where I think the Christian faith has a wonderful, unique approach because it says two things: Even if we can’t explain why you’re suffering in this moment, God has promised a wonderful future where he’s going to resolve the pain. So there’s hope; there’s a reason to get up out of bed. There’s a reason to look forward to God’s good future where he’s going to make everything right. The Bible says that God hasn’t just left it to the future. He’s entered into history; he’s suffered injustice and insult, the betrayal of friends and ultimately torture – agony – and a final breath on the cross. So the God we bring our questions to is the God who himself has wounds, and that’s something that no other tradition, no philosophy, no religion can offer: a God who understands our pain because he’s close; because he’s experienced it.

Because sometimes we are! It’s just the reality. At the Center for Public Christianity, we made a documentary about the best and worst of the Christian faith. There’s nothing like being a student of history to realise that there are a lot of bodies buried out there in Christian history. So I think we can, again, acknowledge that there is something to this. Christians have been self-righteous, they’ve been hypocrites. The thing that I keep coming back to that is that Jesus wrote a beautiful tune. His tune was love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. And he took it all the way to the cross where he loved his enemies and gave himself for us. And Christians have sometimes sung that tune beautifully, in tune. Sometimes they’ve just sung it very poorly. But we all know to distinguish between the beautiful composition and the pretty awful performance. You don’t blame the composition just because the performance ruins it. We’ve got to understand that there’s a musical score that Jesus brought into the world and Christians have sometimes sung up and sometimes not, but I guess the challenge for anyone who believes is to make sure you’re singing the tune of Jesus.

Ah, yes. People say this like it’s something we invented recently at a party over a glass of Chardonnay. But it’s a really old idea. It goes right back to the fifth century BC with a philosopher called Protagoras. And he’s the guy who said, “Things are for every man what they seem to him to be.” In other words, “What’s true for you is true for you. It doesn’t have to be true for me.” But in the next century, Plato pointed out that the statement is kind of illogical because if it’s true, that things are only relative, then that includes Protagoras’ idea that things are relative. In other words, if Protageros’ claim is true, it proves that it’s false because he’s claiming one proof that everything’s relative. So you can actually tie yourself up in a completely self-contradictory idea. As soon as people say “There’s no such thing as genuine truth”, you can ask, “Is that a genuine truth?” The reality is that we don’t apply this way of thinking to anything other than religion and ethics because in normal life, either something is true or it isn’t. It’s like maths: some answers can be a little bit closer to the true answer, but answers are either true or they’re false. So either Jesus did die on the cross or he didn’t. There’s no way it can be true for me that he died on the cross, but not true for you. It’s either true or false. And therefore one of us is right and one of us is wrong.