Dr Paul Allen

We live in an age of narcissism. It is the era of self-actualization, the relentless race to perfect the self. Time  magazine reported in 2013 that “ Narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their twenties as for the generation that’s now 65 or older. . . . 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.” As the West has become more narcissistic, so have the people in our churches. We see it on social media. We hear it over coffee. We see it when young people break away from living and breathing social groups to snap a selfie. We also see it in our evangelism. A decade or two ago our evangelism still pointed outward. We spoke of the existence of God , objective truth, and the historical reliability of the resurrection. Now, swaths of churches have moved on to leading with personal testimonies. This contextualization isn’t necessarily wrong. In a postmodern era, stories are often more powerful than o

English: Alvin Plantinga after telling a joke at the beginning of a lecture on science and religion delivered at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) One of the most misleading headlines imaginable recently appeared over an opinion column published in USA Today . Tom Krattenmaker, a member of the paper’s Board of Contributors, set out to argue that there is no essential conflict between evolution and religious belief because the two are dealing with completely separate modes of knowing.   Evolution, he argued, is simply “settled science” that requires no belief . Religion, on the other hand, is a faith system that is based in a totally different way of knowing— a form of knowing that requires belief and faith. The background to the column is the recent data released by the Pew Research Center indicating that vast millions of Americans still reject evolution. As the Pew research documents, the rejection of evolution has actually increased in certa

English: Image of Alvin Plantinga released by Plantinga into the public domain and supplied directly to me. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Richard Dawkins , Daniel Dennett , Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens , collectively known as the “new atheists,” embody one of the most aggressive recent manifestations of both “scientism” and ”naturalism.” This new atheism is characterized by extreme forms of both scientism, a view about knowledge that holds that only what can be demonstrated scientifically deserves to be considered knowledge, and naturalism, a view about reality that holds that only the material world is real. Hence it is hostile to religion in all forms, viewing it as merely a kind of superstition; it is likewise hostile to much “folk” understanding, including traditional claims about the nature and source of morality. It is thus good news for everyone that Alvin Plantinga , one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuri

Image via Wikipedia Alvin Plantinga is among the preeminent philosophers of his generation. After a long career, chiefly at Calvin College and the University of Notre Dame (where he is emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy), Plantinga has formally retired, but he hasn't been idle. In his new book,  Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism  (Oxford University Press), he sheds light on a subject that is often obscured by posturing and superficial polemics. John Wilson, editor of  Books & Culture , spoke with Plantinga about the underlying harmony between scientific and religious accounts of reality. Most of your book is taken up with the proposition that there's superficial conflict but deep concord between theistic religion and science. In certain areas, the right word would be  alleged  conflict. For example, I argue that there's no real conflict between evolutionary theory—that is, the scientific theory of evolution apart fr

Image via Wikipedia How did this book come about for you? Like any philosopher of religion, I’ve followed the new atheist movement with interest.  But after reading   numerous responses   from Christian apologists , I noticed a conspicuous lack of attention to the moral-psychological roots of atheism.  Given that the biblical writers emphasize this dimension of unbelief, I thought someone needed to address it. How does this book uniquely contribute to critiques of atheism and the “new atheism”? Most Christian apologists’ responses to the new atheists challenge their arguments and reveal the many fallacies in their objections to religious faith.  This is helpful, of course, and I applaud the work of Ravi Zacharias ,   Alister McGrath ,   Dinesh D’Souza ,   Paul Copan ,   William Lane Craig ,   Tim Keller , and others for their superb contributions to the debate.  What they so well demonstrate is that atheism is not the consequence of any lack of evidence for God.  So the question natur

Image via Wikipedia How did this book come about for you? Like any philosopher of religion, I’ve followed the new atheist movement with interest.  But after reading   numerous responses   from Christian apologists , I noticed a conspicuous lack of attention to the moral-psychological roots of atheism.  Given that the biblical writers emphasize this dimension of unbelief, I thought someone needed to address it. How does this book uniquely contribute to critiques of atheism and the “new atheism”? Most Christian apologists’ responses to the new atheists challenge their arguments and reveal the many fallacies in their objections to religious faith.  This is helpful, of course, and I applaud the work of Ravi Zacharias ,   Alister McGrath ,   Dinesh D’Souza ,   Paul Copan ,   William Lane Craig ,   Tim Keller , and others for their superb contributions to the debate.  What they so well demonstrate is that atheism is not the consequence of any lack of evidence for God.  So the question natur