At Above Bar Church, Southampton, we’re doing something a little different for the next few weeks on Sunday evenings. The congregation is splitting for the teaching part of the service. Andrew Page is teaching a series on Hosea, while John Risbridger is doing a Bible overview and I’m teaching a short series on apologetics. This is the first of six sessions, and it’s a very general introduction. I’m grateful to Marcus Honeysett for suggesting the great opening discussion question. Those of you who have read William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics may recognise some of his influence on me here.

Related posts:

1. Apologetics questions The final session of a six-week series on apologetics...
2. Is religion evil? The third in the series on apologetics at Above...
3. Introduction to the prophets The first of five sessions on the prophets in...

According to a ComRes poll conducted on behalf of Theos, ’70% of people believe in the human soul, 55% believe in heaven and 53% believe in life after death.’ Here is yet another example of the inconsistency of beliefs: belief in heaven is higher than belief in life after death. 5% of those who claim to believe in heaven don’t think there is life after death (the disparity is not found in London or the south-east, but is highest in the eastern region with 37% believing in life after death and 56% believing in heaven). So what is heaven, then? Is it Philip Pullman’s ‘republican heaven’ – a state of joy, purpose and connectedness we create here on Earth because, as he so often says, ‘there ain’t no elsewhere’? And what do all those people who believe in the human soul think it is? Presumably the 300 people surveyed who claim belief in the soul but reject life after death think it disappears at death. Do they equate it with human consciousness, as many humanists are inclined to do?

More troubling is the rise in superstitious beliefs:

Almost four in 10 (39%) of people believe in ghosts, 22% believe in astrology or horoscopes, 27% believe in reincarnation and 15% believe in fortune telling or Tarot, the research reveals.

The comparison with the 1950s is especially striking. In 1950, only 10% of the public told Gallup that they believed in ghosts, and just 2% thought they had seen one. In 1951, only 7% of the public said they believed in predicting the future by cards and 6% by stars.

That’s roughly a four-fold increase in belief in ghosts and astrology, and a doubling of belief in tarot. Interesting, given that Richard Dawkins and other atheists think they are driving superstition away along with religious belief (they see the two as the same category, of course, which they are not). It confirms the remarks of Mollie Ziegler Hemmingway in the Wall Street Journal recently:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith – it’s what the empirical data tell us.

The study Hemmingway quotes, conducted by Baylor University, found that levels of superstitious belief are lowest, not among atheists, but among traditional, historically orthodox Christians. She says:

This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener,” skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.

G.K. Chesterton is often quoted as saying ‘He who does not believe in God will believe in anything.’ He didn’t say it, in fact (see here), but there is certainly a great deal of truth in the statement.

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