Sitting at the breakfast table, drinking the perfect cup of Earl Grey tea, looking out at a deep blue sky and a sparkly blue sea watching the dolphins jumping. Not in the Caribbean but in North Wales last week. Sometimes it's hard to see how the new creation is going to beat this one!

I've also recently read Ian McEwan's 'Saturday'. I would thoroughly recommend it as a thought-provoking and page-turning read, though I think it's unlikely to make it onto my list of regular re-reads.

McEwan seems to be addressing two different ways in which our actions and their consequences cannot be held to be our responsibility.

At one level, he demonstrates very effectively the far-reaching consequences of the most minute of all of our actions. We can't possibly know all of these consequences and even if we could attain the kind of omniscience required to work them all out, we couldn't compute them. We'd be paralysed. And so we can't possibly be held responsible for these kind of consequences of our actions.

But McEwan also wants to explore genetic predeterminism. Who we are and thus how we behave is determined by our genes. And so we can't be held responsible.

McEwan clearly doesn't want to work through the logical consequences of this view. If we're not responsible for our actions (because they're genetically determined) or their consequences (because we can't know what they'll be) there can be no sense of moral right or wrong. And yet there is morality in McEwan's world. Some actions are good and some are bad.

So there must be more to this than McEwan admits. Like, for instance, an all-seeing, all-knowing God who can act in a perfectly moral and responsible way, not bound by any genes, nor limited by lack of foreknowledge. Like a proper understanding of the human will which acts responsibly on the basis of a whole range of factors (no doubt, including genetic factors) but is not thereby constrained to act against itself in such a way as to lessen responsibility.

There's something wonderfully reassuring about children's fiction. I've recently re-read Harry Potter 5 and 6 and thoroughly enjoyed both.

I feel I ought to give some warning here for anyone who has not read but intends to read these books (it seems quite unlikely that any such person exists...). If that's you, you should know that I'm about to give away some of the plot.

Dumbledore's explanation of the prophecy concerning Harry and Voldemort makes it clear that the giving of the prophecy itself affects its own fulfilment (or not). J.K.Rowling evidently has a more developed understanding of speech-act theory and the purpose of prophecy than lots of OT scholars and preachers. It was because he knew of the prophecy that Voldemort made his attack on Harry thus marking him as Voldemort's potential conqueror and also conferring on Harry some of Voldemort's own powers which could be used in defeating him! Making a prophecy is not a neutral event; it has consequences which may either lead to its own fulfilment or which may act as a warning to prevent the circumstances described in a prophecy.

Incidentally, the content of the prophecy about Harry and Voldemort strikes me as one of the most meaningless sentences ever written: 'either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives'. Surely throughout books 1-6 both Voldemort and Harry have managed to live while the other survives? And their mutually exclusive existence has no logical link to the first part of the prophecy - that either must die at the hand of the other. Why couldn't someone else see Voldemort off?