Dr Paul Allen

I grew up in Australia, in a loving, secular home, and arrived at Sydney University as a critic of “religion.”  I didn’t need faith to ground my identity or my values. I knew from the age of eight that I wanted to study history at Cambridge and become a historian. My identity lay in academic achievement, and my secular humanism was based on self-evident truths.  As an undergrad, I won the University Medal and a Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake my PhD in History at King’s College, Cambridge.  King’s is known for its secular ideology and my perception of Christianity fitted well with the views of my fellow students: Christians were anti-intellectual and self-righteous. After Cambridge, I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford.  There, I attended three guest lectures by world-class philosopher and atheist public intellectual, Peter Singer.  Singer recognised that philosophy faces a vexing problem in relation to the issue of human worth. The natural world yiel

English: Jesus Christ - detail from Deesis mosaic, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) One of the things most alarming about today’s culture is the way in which evangelicals are responding to attacks. Gone are the days, it seems at times, when believers devoted themselves to thinking deeply about the world in order to respond humbly to the church’s enemies without ceding any intellectual ground.  Having one’s heart in the right place is all that matters - that a passion for Jesus and the life of the mind are mutually exclusive . What this view misses is that burning hearts are not nourished by empty heads. We must develop our minds if we are to sustain our passion for the Savior and deal with the bias against us. From the college professor , to the politician, to the man on the street , believing the Bible is increasingly considered a leap of faith for the weak minded and uneducated. Trusting in Jesus Christ as the only way to God is labeled ignorant an