Dr Paul Allen

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) New Atheist websites tend to give the impression that scientific theories are based only on evidence. Religion on the other hand, they posit, runs away from evidence. Richard Dawkins’ argument that atheism is rational and scientific, while religion is irrational and superstitious, is clearly being picked up here. But just how reliable is it? Dawkins often argues that there’s no need for faith in science , in that the evidence for a correct conviction compels us to accept its truth. He first set out his views on this matter in The Selfish Gene in 1976 and has not changed his mind since. [Faith] is a state of mind that leads people to believe something—it doesn’t matter what—in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence, then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. Though this seems clear and persuasive, it’s actually an unsustainable vie...

Image of Stephen Fry (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) STEPHEN FRY AND CANCER Stephen Fry  was  asked  what he would say if he were "confronted by  God ."   Fry replied,  "I'd say, bone cancer in children? What's that about?  How dare you create a world to which there is such misery that is not our fault. It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil.  Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain. That's what I would say." Interviewer:  "And you think you are going to get into heaven, like that?"  Fry replied:  "I wouldn't want to. I wouldn't want to get in on his terms. They are wrong. Now, if I died and it was Pluto,  Hades , and if it was the 12  Greek gods , then I would have more truck with it, because the Greeks didn't pretend to not be human in their appetites, in their capriciousness, and in their unreasonableness.  They didn't p...

The ascent of man?   José-manuel Benitos / Wikimedia Commons . Photoillustration by Matt Connolly. Late last week, the Texas Board of Education failed to approve a leading high school biology textbook—whose authors include the  Roman Catholic biologist Kenneth Miller of Brown University —because of its treatment of evolution.  According to  The New York Times , critiques from a textbook reviewer identified as a "Darwin Skeptic" were a principal cause.  Yet even as creationists keep trying to undermine modern science, modern science is beginning to explain creationism scientifically. And it looks like evolution—the  scientifically uncontested explanation  for the diversity and interrelatedness of life on Earth, emphatically including human life—will be a major part of the story. Our brains are a stunning product of evolution; and yet ironically, they may naturally pre-dispose us  against  its acceptance. 1871 satirical...

Charles Robert Darwin. A copy made by John Collier (1850-1934) in 1883 of his 1881 portrait of Charles Darwin. According to Darwin's son Erasmus, "The picture is a replica of the one in the rooms in the Linnaean Society and was made by Collier after the original. I took some trouble about it and as a likeness it is an improvement on the original." Given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1896. See source website for additional information. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In thousands of classrooms all over the world teachers are indoctrinating naïve and impressionable students with the notion that they are an accident, the result of millions of years of random anomalies and lucky deformities, or that what they do with their lives is just a matter of preference and there is no divine designer who created them.  But the Bible tells us that God designed us with a purpose in mind. Psalm 139:14 says we have been “fearfully and wonderfully made.”  It is only in re...

English: Caricature of Charles Darwin from Vanity Fair magazine. Caption read "Natural Selection". (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life , and some to shame and everlasting contempt." ( Daniel 12:2 )   Some claim that the Old Testament knows nothing of a resurrection, but this promise of God clearly refutes such a notion. Not only will some be raised to everlasting life, but some to everlasting shame and contempt!   What a bitter end this will be for those who now look with contempt upon the Bible. The Hebrew word translated "contempt" is used only one other time, in the very last verse of Isaiah , but is there translated "abhorring." "And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh" ...

English: Stamp of Moldova; Mircea Eliade (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In 1832, when The Beagle docked in Southern Australia on the way to the Galapagos Islands , Charles Darwin witnessed naked Aboriginals dancing themselves into delirium all night long. You can now see this scene at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert, attended by sixty thousand hi-tech moderns, including Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. But Darwin, a notable father of Secular Humanism, was shocked, finding the native display “a most rude, barbarous scene.” Once ever so secularly humanist, moderns now find orgiastic sexuality and occult spirituality quite acceptable. Who or what produced this massive change in Western culture ? Many influential sources can be named: Darwin, spiritualized by Teilhard de Chardin ; the goddess worship of radical feminism; the occultism of theosophist Madame Blavatsky ; the political radicalism of Gramsci, Marcuse and Saul Alins...