Dr Paul Allen

Human beings have a universal belief in right and wrong. As C.S. Lewis has observed, moral codes from cultures throughout world history vary over what specific behavior they consider moral, but there is an underlying agreement that objective moral values and duties exist. Any adequate worldview must be able to explain this feature of reality. Science and Morality In his book The Moral Landscape , atheist Sam Harris claims science can provide a basis for objective morality. But in his recent book Stealing from God , Frank Turek has written a piercing response: “Science might be able to tell you if an action may hurt someone—like giving a man cyanide will kill him—but science can’t tell you whether or not you ought to hurt someone. Who said it’s wrong to hurt people? Sam Harris? Is his nature the standard of good?” In other words, science is a descriptive discipline, but morality is a prescriptive discipline. Science can describe how things work, but it can never tell us how we ...

Richard Dawkins at the 34th American Atheists Conference in Minneapolis. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Many of the New Atheists — Richard Dawkins , Sam Harris , Daniel Dennett , and Christopher Hitchens . These authors have been causing quite a stir in recent years, both inspiring fellow atheists and shaking up the faith of believers.  Unlike more substantive atheists in the academy, this new wave of atheism typically engages in emotional argumentation and rhetorical bluster—often with little substance and plenty of distortion.  God is “not good” and is “a moral monster.” Religion is the chief source of humanity’s problems—“the root of all evil.” One particular point of attack is Old Testament ethical issues, including claims like these: “the Bible promotes owning other human beings,” “the Old Testament demeans women,” or “God commands genocide.”  Q. Some people claim that the Old Testament allows polygamy. What do you say? A.   For one thing, the Ol...

Oil painting of a young John Calvin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Mark Twain quipped, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Closer to our own day, the atheist author Sam Harris defined faith as “the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail.” Richard Dawkins , perhaps the most famous atheist of our generation, claims: “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” The one thing all of these definitions have in common is the explicit or implicit idea that faith is in conflict with reason. Unfortunately, some Christians in the history of the church have said things that have provided support for this view of the relationship between faith and reason. Martin Luther , for example, made very strong negative statements about reason, many of which are quoted by skeptics in their attempts to prove that Christianity is inher...

Author: Paul Copan.  Today's "new atheists" are not at all impressed with the moral credentials of the Old Testament (OT) God . Oxonian Richard Dawkins thinks that Yahweh is truly a moral monster: "What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh-and even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us." [1] Dawkins deems God's commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac to be "disgraceful" and tantamount to "child abuse and bullying." [2]  Moreover, this God breaks into a "monumental rage whenever his chosen people flirted with a rival god," resembling "nothing so much as sexual jealousy of the worst kind." [3]  Add to this the killing of the Canaanites-an "ethnic cleansing" in which "bloodthirsty massacres" were carried out with "xenophobic relish." Joshua...