Dr Paul Allen

The woke ideology that Dawkins detests did not arise in a vacuum but is the logical outworking of the scientific materialism that he has championed. Woke ideology embraces two plus two equals five, freedom of speech being an outdated relic, reason being a tool of oppression, and merit being a conceit of the privileged. Dawkins opposes this nonsense, but it is nonsense that his scientific materialism has invited. Woke ideology is not a betrayal of scientific materialism but its logical conclusion. In fact, it becomes pretty appealing once people realize that on materialistic grounds, we are here for no reason and have no destiny beyond this brief life, so the only meaning our life can have is the meaning we give it, the meaning we construct for it. And if conventional educational values like freedom of thought and expression get in the way of the meaning we construct for ourselves, so much the worse for those values. The scientific materialism of Dawkins epitomizes modernity. The woke i

The Genealogical Adam and Eve – An interview with Ben Withington Having first read William Lane Craig's fascinating book, The Quest for the Historical Adam, that book kept mentioning a computational geneticist named Joshua Swamidass as a dialogue partner.  I’d better read his book about the genealogical Adam and Eve.  Right off the bat, as a Biblical scholar, both books are excellent, and both, in my view, have some significant exegetical deficiencies, which is not entirely surprising since Craig is a philosopher and Swamidass, is a scientist.   Regarding the ethos of each book, Craig is more definitive and specific about his conclusions, and Swamidass is more open to a variety of possibilities though he takes a definite position on the genealogical as opposed to the genetic ancestry we all have, particularly regarding Adam and Eve. Both books affirm that yes, there was a historical Adam, with Craig thinking it must have been hundreds of thousands of years ago, and Swamidass showin

Ardel Caneday Would a reasonable Christian read John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress allegorically or figuratively? The answer is Neither because the adverbs “allegorically” and “figuratively” describe not how to read his similitude but how Bunyan wrote it.  Thus, he requires us to read it for what it actually is, an allegory. Authors of literature, not readers, have authority over their texts to assign symbolic or figurative properties to settings, events, persons, and things they embed within their texts.  Readers are obligated to comprehend how an author represents the world being portrayed textually, whether the realm portrayed is fictional or real. Thus, we are not at liberty to read The Pilgrim’s Progress according to our whims. We are not free to assign our own arbitrary meanings to the author’s text. Bunyan wrote it as an allegory. He assigned figurative representational significances to the settings, events, persons, and things. Readers do not have that role. However,