Matters of Life and Death

Evolution vs creationism. It's been one of the most divisive and contentious debates within Christianity. But is there a way to tackle these questions without falling into rancour and accusation? In this episode we tentatively attempt just that, exploring first what we can all agree on about God as Creator, and then looking through five big areas of disagreement. Can we sustain the idea the univer...

Archie’s case underlines the growing crisis over the lack of trust many ordinary people have in medical professionals. Nobody wants to go back to absolute deference to doctors, but is there an alternative to furious hostility and judges having to rule on care decisions? Doctors and patients also need to wrestle with a new participant in these vexed and fraught conflicts – the public, newly involve...

Twelve-year-old Archie Battersbee died on 7 August, after months of legal wrangling between doctors who believed he was brain dead and wished to end life support, and his family who resisted this. This tragic case has captured a lot of media attention, and in this episode we try to unpick some of the complicated medical and ethical challenges thrown up by the story. Why is it so much harder today...

In this episode we pick up our conversation with clinical geneticist Melody Redman to talk about a new NHS programme in England which is piloting whole genome sequencing of newborn babies. Why are scientists and doctors interested in collecting a child’s entire set of genes and storing them for the rest of their life? What medical benefits might result from this, and what ethical challenges does i...

Each of us carries around in our cells about 20,000 different genes – a unique set of biological code which shapes how our bodies develop. As scientists better understand genes and how they work, genetics is becoming a more and more important field of modern medicine, particularly in diagnosing conditions. But this comes with a brand new set of ethical challenges to think through. In this episode,...

Resuming our conversation about suffering, we think through some faithful Christian responses to evil and loss. How can the church reintegrate the deeply Biblical tradition of lament into its corporate and individual life, picking up on the psalms and ultimately Jesus on the cross? And what might a resilient and hope-filled fellowship of believers look like in the light of this?   For more resourc...

The problem of suffering has been one of the most intractable and painful theological debates for centuries. But is it perhaps not a problem to be solved, but a deeper mystery to be journeyed through? Is suffering solely a consequence of human sin since the Fall, or were we made to be fragile, dependent and broken? And how does knowing Jesus's death and resurrection are not simply a response to pa...

In the second half of our conversation with theologian Andrew Davison, we ask what the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for Christian faith and teaching. Whether it is single-celled organisms or fully-fledged intelligent sentient life, would its discovery change how we think about God as creator? Are aliens also made in the image of God? And if so, do they have their own Jesu...

In the week the first images from the new James Webb Space Telescope were beamed back to Earth, we are joined by theologian Andrew Davison to consider the spiritual value of cosmology and astrophysics. Andrew is a theologian of the sciences and especially interested in the deep questions about life thrown up by new developments in space exploration. We consider what the telescope might discover, h...

Hello, and welcome to Matters of Life and Death. Today we’re going back to our conversation about simulation for part two of this re-broadcast. Last week’s episode discussed the growth of deep fakes and other digital technologies which allow us to simulate human faces and speech with increasing accuracy. We thought about how these developments had been presaged for decades by sci fi, such as Phili...

For the next two weeks we’re dipping back into the Matters of Life and Death archive to bring you an episode we first broadcast last year. It’s all about simulation. We live in an era when digital technology is making it increasingly easy and cheap to create fake but compelling images or videos of people, or even entirely artificial human-like personalities. Machine learning tools and progress in...

Could it be that some knowledge – including whether your unborn child has a serious genetic condition – is actually not helpful, and even harmful to us? In this episode we dig further into the complex ethics of prenatal screening and explore what the Christian tradition makes of seeking to understand the future, and the different arguments for and against aborting children we know will be disabled...

Pregnant women today are offered a battery of tests and screening for their unborn child, looking for an ever-increasing range of conditions and risks. But is the onward march of technology in this sphere always an unmitigated good thing? With abortion for a disability legal in the UK up to term, women are being given terrible choices previous generations never faced: give birth to a child who pro...

Demographic trends reveal clearly the next century will be one increasingly dominated by older people. If God is giving us a lot more folk in their later years, what are they for in church life? Has the modern church, terrified of decline, alienated its faithful, older congregants in a desperate attempt to lure back the young? And what wisdom and service do older Christians have to offer their chu...

The world’s population is rapidly becoming older and older, with many developed nations seeing unprecedented proportions of their citizens in retirement age. Why is this taking place, and does this presage an era of economic stagnation or a utopia of stability? How have fears over demography shifted as fertility rates plummet across the world, and how can we avoid pitting the young against the eve...

In the second part of our conversation on robot rights, we explore three Christian responses to calls for robot personhood, spanning the spectrum of hostility to optimism about the development. What Biblical truths and doctrines can we turn to as we wrestle with what is a fundamentally brand new dilemma? And how would our theology and practice as believers change should conscious, intelligent, aut...

If and when autonomous and intelligent robots come into existence, should they be granted rights, or even personhood? A growing number of technologists argue governments must lay out what status conscious and rational machines would have before they actually have been invented. But how can we decide what is and isn’t a person, and what rights and responsibilities such a thing should have? And how...

Abortion is a flashpoint issue in both the church and wider culture, with the very language you choose used as a cudgel for either side. So how can Christians talk about it and respond to it in a way which cools tensions rather than inflames them? How has the church’s thinking on abortion and pregnancy changed over the many decades John has been involved in healthcare? And can a pro-life believer...

Rates of unplanned pregnancies rose significantly during the coronavirus lockdowns. What kind of support is out there for women (and men) facing this situation, and how can the church try and plug the gaps? In this episode we speak with Sophie Guthrie-Kummer, who runs a charity in London which has offered pregnancy crisis counselling (among other services) for two decades, to hear what this work l...

This is part two of our re-broadcast of last year’s John Stott episode, to mark what would have been his centenary. Is Stott’s vision of lay Christians persuading for Christ in the public square a naïve fantasy in the 21st century? And should we be more cautious before lionising evangelical titans like Stott in this age of scandal and disappointment? (Originally broadcast in April 2021). Resources...

This month marks 101 years since the late John Stott was born, and his centenary last year prompted a flurry of events to mark the centenary of this highly influential vicar, Bible teacher and evangelical leader. ‘Uncle John’, as he was affectionately known, also had a huge impact on John's life and career and so we dialled in back then to reflect on not just the legacy of Stott’s many decades of...

In Britain as in many countries there is a growing campaign to legalise assisted suicide and to make doctors prescribe on request lethal drugs to terminally ill patients. In the second part of our interview with Sarah Foot, a Christian palliative care doctor, Sarah explains why her colleagues are overwhelmingly opposed to this, the ignorance which lies behind many of the arguments for changing the...

Over the past 60 years a new field of medicine has emerged – palliative care. In this episode we interview Sarah Foot, a Christian palliative care doctor, who explains how she treats the physical, mental, social and even spiritual needs of those who are dying, the Christian foundations of the discipline, and what impact her profession has on her.   If you want to go deeper into some of the topics...

Following on from our discussion last week on the rise of climate fatalism, we discuss what an authentically Christian response to our environmental crisis would look like. How can we steer a middle path between complacency and despair? Does our different theology of the future change how we act on climate change? And, what can we learn from our evangelical forbears about how to live well in the f...

The latest report from the UN's climate scientists was both incredibly downbeat about climate change and almost entirely ignored by a media fixated on Ukraine. In this episode we consider the communication and changing narratives around climate change, why an unscientific hyper-fatalism has set in with many activists, and what impact this might be having on younger generations terrified humanity i...