Dr Paul Allen

  “Who needs God? Man can make it on his own.” So claimed Reason, the philosophy that captured the imagination of seventeenth-century France. Its champions, Voltaire and Descartes, among others, tried to fashion a worldview ruled completely by reason. French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal, though raised in the heyday of Enlightenment thought, found reason inadequate: “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.” He concluded, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know at all”—a statement that soon became the chief critique of rationalism and the starting point for a defense of the Christian faith that still influences people today. Scientific prodigy Pascal’s mother died when he was 3, and his father moved the family from Clermont-Ferrand, France, to Paris, where he homeschooled Blaise and his sister. By age 10, Pascal was doing original experiments in mathematics and physical science. To help his fat...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Facebook has never been more addictive. In 2013, it was 63% of Facebook users who checked in daily. In 2014, that number shot up to 70%. If you check Facebook day after day, you join over 864 million others with the same compulsive routine. For many of us, Facebook is a kind of addiction, a default habit that is now rewiring our brains. Ofir Turel, a psychologist at Cal State Fullerton , has the research to prove it. To make his point, he says Facebook addicts driving a car are more likely to respond faster to a push notification alert on their phone than to street signs. “That’s the power of Facebook,” he said. Turel co-authored a study showing Facebook addiction engages the same impulsive regions of the mind as drug addicts , but with one significant difference. Facebook addicts, unlike compulsive drug abusers, “have the  ability to control their behavior, but they don’t have the  motivation  to control this behavior because th...

Portrait of Pascal (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Augustine,Confessions). “There is a God -shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus” ( Blaise Pascal , Pensées). Certain of the elders of Israel came to me and sat before me. And the word of the Lord came to me: “ Son of man , these men have taken their idols into their hearts, and set the stumbling block of their iniquity before their faces… . Therefore speak to them and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God: Any one of the house of Israel who takes his idols into his heart and sets the stumbling block of his iniquity before his face, and yet comes to the prophet, I the Lord will answer him as he comes with the multitude of his idols, that I may lay hold of the hearts of the house of Israel, who are all estranged from me through their idols.’” ( Ezek...

English: Icon of Jesus Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Dead works are the works of our hands. These are works of selfrighteousness , and they are appropriately called "dead" works because they lead to death. Twice the book of Proverbs says, "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death" (14:12; 16:25). We rely on work. We get significance from our work. We like a job that is well done. And well we should, because God created us to work. Yet all of our labors are useless, and thus dead, if they do not point to the worship of God. Any significance and esteem we attain from our labor apart from the end of bringing God glory and establishing His rule upon the earth is misplaced. Such godless labor may appear good to us and even receive the applause of others, but heaven finds it repulsive and defiled by sin. In other words, unless we have been washed in the blood of Christ , all our good deeds are worthless, useless, vain, and dead....

Image via Wikipedia No one puts it as bluntly as Blaise Pascal in his  Pensées : All men seek happiness . This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves. There you are. Warrior, pacifist, suicide, sluggard, workaholic; if you’re a human, you’re a hedonist. You can try to deny it, but you can’t change it. If you want to try your hand at stoicism, forget the Bible . It has little for you. Scripture does not support the idea that our motives are more pure the less we are pursuing our own joy. Nope. In fact, according to the Bible, unless we are pursuing our happiness we cannot even come to God : “for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he  rewards ...

Image via Wikipedia Blaise Pascal was a French mathematical genius who was born June 19, 1623.  After running from God until he was 31 years old, on November 23, 1654 at 10:30 pm, Pascal met God and was profoundly and unshakably converted to Jesus Christ .  He wrote it down on a piece of parchment and sewed into his coat where it was found after his death eight years later. It said, Year of grace 1654, Monday 23 November, feast of St. Clement . . . from about half past ten at night to about half an hour after midnight, FIRE. God of Abraham , God of Isaac , God of Jacob , not of philosophers and scholars. Certitude, heartfelt joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. God of Jesus Christ. "My God and your God." . . . Joy, Joy, Joy, tears of joy. . . Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. May I never be separated from him. In 1968 Pascal and C. S. Lewis and Jonathan Edwards and Dan Fuller and the Bible teamed up to change my life forever with those words, "Joy, joy, joy, tears o...