Dr Paul Allen

When it comes to secular origin stories, creationism is everywhere. I’m not talking about the origins of life. Evolution remains the favorite answer to that question. But when it comes to the creation of the modern world—our Western, liberal outlook—the denial of evolution is everywhere. Nowadays your average Westerner considers their values, goals, and moral intuitions to have emerged, almost miraculously, from the darkness of ancient religions and superstition. Such convictions have arrived in history, so it’s assumed, fully formed and without dependence on prior beliefs and practices. But a more careful historian—one who pays attention to cultural developments over the centuries—will deny such creationism. In particular, he or she will see the undeniably Christian origins of a secular-liberal worldview. Let me give two examples: modern science and the Enlightenment. Both movements are central to the Western imagination, and both display the unmistakable signs of evolution from a com...

J.P. Moreland is one of the 50 most influential living philosophers . He has spent his career writing largely in the philosophy of mind and the intersection of science and faith. He considers his most recent book, Scientism and Secularism , to be one of his most important contributions yet. It is a book with philosophical depth but is written for non-specialists. Interviewer : You've written a new book called Scientism and Secularism and have said its one of the most important books you have ever written. What makes this book so unique and timely? MORELAND : Our culture is rapidly going the way of Europe, namely, it is becoming more secular. At the root of this change is a false view of knowledge called scientism: The only knowledge we can have of reality comes from the hard sciences, especially, chemistry and physics. This leaves theological, ethical, political, and other claims most important to us as assertions no one can know are true. Scientism opens the door for Postmoder...

G.K. Chesterton once said, “When people stop believing in God , they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” This has proven true time and again in history. Now, we’re seeing it in America. A recent headline on MarketWatch .com announced that “millennials are ditching religion for witchcraft and astrology.” So, young people are not simply ditching spiritual beliefs. They are ditching belief in God for belief in witchcraft and astrology. An Increase in Secularization According to the report, “Interest in spirituality has been booming in recent years while interest in religion plummets, especially among millennials.” Yes, “more than half of young adults in the U.S. believe astrology is a science, compared to less than 8% of the Chinese public. The psychic services industry — which includes astrology, aura reading, mediumship, tarot-card reading and palmistry, among other metaphysical services — grew 2% between 2011 and 2016.” To support this anecdotally, MarketWatch ...

The  editorial  in  The Age  last month could scarcely contain its enthusiasm that the Andrews government in Victoria had recently decided to end Special Religious Instruction (SRI) in school hours and replace it with lectures on domestic violence and respectful relationships. The editor writes: "At last, classrooms in the government school system in this state will be used for what they were intended: academic teaching and not religious instruction. Some 143 years after Victoria's Education Act made clear that education must be free, secular and compulsory, the Andrews government has committed to abolishing special religious instruction classes during school hours. That is as it should be. The Age has consistently argued over decades that, beyond reading, writing and arithmetic, there should be room for lessons about various belief systems and for discussion about ethics and social awareness. But the school hours funded by the taxpayer should not be used...

With December 25 fast approaching, the secular media are sure to turn their interest once again to the virgin birth. Every Christmas, weekly news magazines and various editorialists engage in a collective gasp that so many Americans could believe such an unscientific, supernatural doctrine. For some, the belief that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin is nothing less than evidence of intellectual dimness. One writer for the New York Times put the lament plainly: "The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time." Does belief in the virgin birth make Christians "less intellectual?" Are we saddled with an untenable doctrine? Can a true Christian deny the virgin birth, or is the doctrine an essential component of the Gospel revealed to us in Scripture? The doctrine of the virgin birth was among the first to be questioned and then rejected after the rise of historical criticism and the undermining of...

This is an excerpt of the annual Smith Lecture, organised by the City Bible Forum and that it is named in honour of the late Rev Bruce Smith. This excerpt is reproduced here, with permission. You can read the full lecture, here . Let me begin with a personal confession. Not very many years ago, it would have been quite inconceivable to me that, one day, I’d be extolling the greatness of Christianity – let alone be invited to give a public lecture on the subject. For the first 35 years of my life, when it came to religion, I was a disengaged agnostic – drifting towards atheism. I cannot stress enough why this was so. It was not because I’d had some bad experience within a church. It was certainly not because I had ever given careful thought to the question of God’s existence, and then rejected the notion as improbable. Rather, it was because, not having been raised in a religious home, and having attended exclusively state schools, I knew next to nothing about Christianity – or any ...

Image via Wikipedia I have just ordered my copy of "The Unintended Reformation: How a religious revolution secularized society" by Brad Gregory. Before the Protestant Reformation , Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West .  Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief ; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile lib...