Religion is not a substitute for science – it was never meant to be that. It’s true that primitive religions tried to explain how the world was created by appealing to supernatural entities. They were mythologies. Religion tries to give answers to a different set of questions: not how we came to exist, but why we came to exist. Christianity, in common with the other monotheistic religions, is not a description of the origins of life but an explanation of the meaning of life.

Mainstream faith is eminently reasonable – because what we believe is internally consistent, as well as being entirely consistent with reality. Of course, faith makes claims beyond the things that are evident, outside empirical reality, but this is what faith is about – it does not mean it is not true. Some claims outside empirical reality are superstitious nonsense, but others are not. We can use reason and experience to tell the difference.

Atheists claim that there is nothing outside empirical reality and the dogmatic ones assert that there cannot be anything. As believers, we would ask: “How do they know?” We find their “faith” in this respect truly amazing – much more impressive than our own faith in God.

This approach is called Ockham’s razor (he was a believer, by the way). It says that to explain something one should make as few assumptions as are necessary. This applies only to possible explanations for what we observe. When it comes to faith, it is misused by atheists. It fails, because we don’t believe in God to explain what we see (science is good enough for that), but because faith is an answer to our search for meaning.

First, religious belief is about experiencing God. It’s not just the mere belief that God exists in the same way that extra-terrestrials may exist. We do not expect everyone to believe in God; if we did, then the onus would indeed be on us to prove it beyond doubt, and of course this would be impossible. We respect people who choose not to believe, for whatever reason. Dogmatic atheists, on the other hand, claim that belief in God is impossible, that it goes against the evidence, that nobody in their right mind can possibly be a believer. They are the ones who expect others to think like them. So the onus is on them to prove, to believers and agnostics alike, that faith is a logical impossibility or that it is inconsistent with what we know about the world. We don’t think they can do that.

For every great scientist who says that God doesn’t exist, there is a great scientist who is a believer, and a great scientist who is neutral – but they tend to make less noise about it. Many religious scientists made crucial contributions to our understanding of the world, and of evolution, and it did not diminish their faith – on the contrary. If you are curious, look up J. C. Maxwell or Georges Lemaître or Francis Collins. The fact of the matter is that God’s existence is not a question that can be decided by science.

We have to be clear about the difference between what some religious people choose to do, and what God wants us to do. It’s true that religion often aggravates things when they do go wrong, and it can easily be perverted by unscrupulous leaders – but other good things can be easily perverted too (patriotism, justice or love, for example). But there are always factors other than religion behind all the evils attributed to religion:  greed, lust for power, despair or fear. One could go as far as to say that religious people who commit atrocities in the name of God are not religious at all – for they have totally lost sight of what God is calling us to do and substituted their own prejudices for God’s will.

Miracles are not magic. They are events that make us pause and think. The word comes from the Latin miraculum, object of wonder. Even when they appear to defy the laws of nature, we think that this is not the case – they are unusual ways in which God interacts with nature (in smaller ways, we also interact with nature without breaking any natural laws). Then there are miracles that are not by any means supernatural but are just as important as signs – the miracle of human love, the miracle of forgiveness, or the miracle of perseverance in the face of great injustice or adversity.

A more difficult question is why miracles do not happen every time we pray for them. There is no easy answer to this, but the explanation may have something to do with free will, and something to do with God’s long-term plan – we believe He is a God who provides, sometimes in ways we do not expect

There is no hard evidence for God: a God whom we could define empirically would not be God. Faith is different from knowledge, but it still has a sound basis. For Christians, this basis is the historical figure of Jesus, the Bible, the fact that it all makes perfect sense, and the actual experiences and actions of Christians down the ages.

Christians are also free thinkers. And most of us take all hard evidence into account in our thinking. Humanism, along with the whole Renaissance movement, was developed by devout Christians: people who thought that what we think about God and the world should not be dictated to us by arbitrary human authorities but should be the product of free thinking. Many Christians down the ages, like William Tyndale, gave their lives so that we can now enjoy what we call freedom of conscience.

The great religions have much in common; religious people of good will always find much common ground. In broad terms at least, we also agree on what God is calling us to do: to love God and to love each other. But Christianity adds something unique and crucial to our understanding of God: through Christ, God engaged with our human condition and redeemed it.

God gave humans free will. The consequences of this are often awful, but it is hard to imagine what we would be like without free will. God gave us choice – we would be less than human without it.

God created a world rich in possibilities – rich in moral choices for humans and rich in outcomes for nature. The world, as we understand it now, is not like clockwork. The same laws of nature and natural processes that led to our existence can also result in destruction. Nature in itself is indifferent and pitiless, and in this we agree with atheists. Certainly not everything that happens is decreed by God in minute detail, because then there would be no free will. But Christians think that there is a God of compassion, a God of providence, who can overcome suffering.

In fact some of the greatest witnesses to God’s presence have been people who have experienced great suffering.

Only certain literal interpretations, like “creationism” (believing that the universe is 6,000 years old and that there was no evolution), have been proven wrong. But the Bible never set out to provide a scientific account of how the world was created or how it works. It tells us that God made the world, and that it is a rational world, amenable to science (this is a huge difference from primitive religions, which believed in capricious gods to explain natural phenomena). Even before the scientific age, it was obvious to Christians that the Bible could not possibly be literally true. St Augustine saw the book of Genesis as allegorical and creation being something achieved in a single instant in the mind of God. We now know that it took almost 14 billion years, but Augustine’s view is still valid. The Bible concerns itself mainly with God’s dealings with the world and His people. Literal interpretations, which scientists find so easy to demolish, are a relatively recent phenomenon. So, the conflict arises between bad approaches to science and faith. Proper science and proper faith will never be in conflict.

No, like all great literature, the Bible uses metaphor extensively. We need to understand what the people who wrote it had in mind, and what the people who read it down the ages thought it meant. This is one of the reasons why tradition matters. As St Paul put it, “the letter kills but the Spirit gives life.”

It’s based on the life of Christ. The unique idea of Christianity is that God became human, engaged with the human condition, experienced that which is worst about it, but triumphed over death. We believe that we have been redeemed through this act, that we have been given the possibility of eternal life with God the Father, through Christ the Son. The Christian faith is a source of healing and comfort for the individual and for society.

Christians are people who try to respond, through worship and prayer and through their daily lives, to the saving grace of God through Christ. In this way we can enter an eternal life-giving relationship with a God whose greatest desire is that we wholeheartedly devote ourselves to Him through faith.

You might equally well say that atheism is wishful thinking – the very common wish not to have a father figure, not to be accountable. If Christianity were wishful thinking, a human invention to make us feel good, it would be less demanding and uncompromising than it is.

It is of course possible to lead a decent life without believing in Jesus – thank God for that! But we believe that our sense of right and wrong, our sense of justice and our love for other people come from God. These may have evolved along with our species (for example close-knit communities have a better chance of survival), but they still come from God. And only by responding to God’s call, and with His help, can we become the best people we can be. On the other hand, if we consciously turn our backs to God, we are left with our limited and selfish selves. Unfortunately, this is exactly what is often happening, because so much of our world has turned its back to God and is as a result materialistic and selfish.

Christians, and other believers, believe in life before death (as well as after). If we are serious about our faith, we will want to see at least some of our values reflected in public life, however imperfectly. But values are not rules.

No policy is purely fact-based: all policies are also based on values or ideologies, good or bad. Of course, the ways in which values can be translated into policy are often difficult to discern in a complex world, and it would be a mistake to be dogmatic about this. Christians do not necessarily agree with each other about which policies are the right ones. But we should not put ideologies above people. We totally reject theocracies, which are in fact dictatorships trying to use God as their excuse. And we base our recommendations on hard facts, not just on faith. It is often secularists and people who have turned their backs to God, who seem to base their choices on ideologies and prejudices, rather than on facts, and can be absolute about their favoured policies. History shows that the results are often catastrophic.

In any case, Christian values have never been more relevant to the problems of the world than today. Would it not be fair to say that materialism, self-centredness and the pursuit of short-term gain have contributed to our present environmental, social and economic problems? And might not the faith-based values of selflessness, community, and the duty to care for the natural world and for others, be part of the solution?

They are different “denominations”. We can agree about the fundamental ideas at the centre of Christianity. But we differ in our detailed theological approaches, our traditions and our practices. If anything, different denominations are proof that Christians are free thinkers. We admit with sadness that Christians often went wrong because of these different approaches, refusing to accept diversity. However, there are now strong ecumenical movements, which try to find common ground amongst Christians and which have made huge progress over the last 100 years or so.

It is one of the many churches that resulted from the Reformation. It shares this with protestant churches. But it is also rooted in tradition. The Church of England emerged from the Reformation as a church that was both catholic and reformed.

We would say that it combines scripture, tradition and reason, valuing all these important elements of faith. Like protestant churches, it stresses the good news of the Bible (it is “evangelical”); but it is also rooted in tradition; and it values reason, being unafraid to look forward. We think that this makes it a welcoming church, a challenging church, and a happy church. Many of us would also point to the profoundly beautiful and inspiring texts of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer as great examples of Anglican heritage.

By no means! The Anglican Church is historically a church of English speaking people. But we like to think that Holy Trinity is an open and welcoming church. Holy Trinity has members from many different nations, and services in a variety of styles.

Come and see!

There are of course many useful books, sites and blogs on these matters, one of which is:

• Tokens of Trust, An Introduction to Christian Belief, by Rowan Williams