LAST week I went to a lecture in the speaker’s state rooms given by the Oxford professor of mathematics John Lennox.

As anyone who visits his website johnlennox.org will see, he is a powerful advocate of the Christian faith.

I always find it of enormous reassurance to hear the witness of great intellects and scientific minds and to know that faith is not just confined to the more simple ones like my own.

He came to talk about his latest book, which is not about maths but about the prophet Daniel, who survived regime change and remained at the heart of government when the Babylonian Empire was conquered and replaced by Darius the Mede.

That survival of regime change is a comforting thought for a minister as we approach our own highly unpredictable general election.

I was brought up on the familiar biblical stories of the talented and promising young men of Israel being taken into captivity in Babylon, of Daniel in the lion’s den, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace, and Nebuchadnezzar’s dream – which only Daniel could recall and interpret (remember, Nebuchadnezzar had forgotten the dream on waking, so he demanded to know not only the interpretation, but also to be reminded of the dream itself).

All these will be familiar to my generation, taught at school and Sunday school.

I fear, however, that we may have been the last generation so taught, with the consequence that these stories are now much less familiar to our children.

They remain, however, at the very heart of our language and cultural heritage.

You can hear the echo of them in everyday phrases like ‘into the lion’s den’ or ‘the writing is on the wall’ (a reference to Belshazzar’s feast where the disembodied hand spelled out his, and his empire’s doom).

These histories act as a corrective to our self-absorbed obsession with our own troubled times.

We need to appreciate the broad sweep of history over thousands of years.

Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem in the year 590 BC or thereabouts, some 2,600 years ago.

Truly dreadful things happened then, as they do now.

One of the most common criticisms of biblical belief is that is completely irrational to try and explain and reconcile the dreadful things that happen as being consistent with an all-powerful, and yet loving creator.

This is a profound and unanswerable question.

To reject biblical belief on this basis however, doesn’t solve the problem: We are still confronted with explaining extraordinary evil, or simply choosing not to explain it, and avoiding, as far as is possible, thinking about it at all.

If we are to believe that we are in a universe without a creator and with no ultimate purpose, then we are faced with a mind numbing and awful consequence: that our existence is merely a device by which the DNA molecule seeks to reproduce itself, and all those lives extinguished without justice or purpose, will remain without them forever.

What a dreadful and depressing reality.

I know that I prefer to take refuge in the comfort of biblical belief.

After all, there is always the possibility that it might actually be true – and what is there to lose if it isn’t?