About

I have been asking questions about God since I was old enough to ask questions about anything.

I was sent to Sunday school as a child, christened like most children of my generation, and it was there, sitting in those early sessions, that the questions started forming. Not rebellious ones particularly. Just honest ones. How do we know this. What is the evidence for this. Why is this presumed to be true simply because everyone says it is.

My parents were not academics. My father left school at fourteen. Neither of them held qualifications of any note in the conventional sense. What they did have, and what they gave to me and my brother without ever making a project of it, was a habit of mind. They asked why. They challenged what was simply assumed. My father had a way of putting it that has stayed with me ever since. Just because everyone else is doing it does not make it right.

My parents later said they wished they had not had us christened. Not with any great drama. Simply that on reflection it felt like something that was just done, a social convention dressed in the language of faith, and that on examination it did not hold up. That small admission always struck me as an act of considerable intellectual honesty from two people who owed that honesty to no tradition or institution. They had simply thought about it and changed their minds. That is rarer than it should be.

I had known of Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and Dennett for some time before any of them pulled me fully into this debate. What changed that was a single evening.

In 2009 Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry took the platform against Ann Widdecombe and Archbishop John Onaiyekan at an Intelligence Squared event in London. The motion was that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. What followed was not really a debate in the conventional sense. It was a demolition, conducted with wit, precision and an almost uncomfortable command of the evidence. The audience vote shifted so dramatically that those in favour of the motion actually decreased by the end.

Fry is not always given the credit he deserves alongside Hitchens in that room. What struck me about both of them was not anger, there was very little anger, but clarity. They were not ranting. They were simply making the case, point by point, and the case was overwhelming.

That evening crystallised something that had been forming since Sunday school. It gave shape and language to a position I had been moving toward my entire life without quite having the framework to articulate it.

This site is where that articulation continues.