Dr Paul Allen

Unbelievers love to bring forth unreasonable commands from the Bible to prove that it’s wrong. Leviticus 19:19 is one of their favourites: “You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind. You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material. Now, that certainly seems odd, doesn’t it? But Jonathan Morrow explains it all clearly enough in Think Christianly . On page 166, he quotes Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart: These and other prohibitions were designed to forbid the Israelites from engaging in the fertility cult practices of the Canaanites. The Canaanites believed in sympathetic magic, the idea that symbolic actions can influence the gods and nature…. Mixing animal breeds, seeds, or materials was thought to “marry” them” so as magically to produce “offspring,” that is, agricultural bounty in the future. I had never heard that before. Had you? Naturally, I wondered whether it was s...

The sick love of controversy — or the “unhealthy craving for controversy,” as Paul calls it in 1 Timothy 6:4 . The question is from a podcast listener named Brett. “Pastor John, hello! We live in an age of controversy. And that controversy-loving spirit has come into the church.  The Apostle Paul clearly warns us against people in the church who have a ‘diseased’ (nosōn) or ‘unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.’ That’s 1 Timothy 6:4–5 . I wonder if you can lay out principles for what this ‘diseased craving for controversy’ looks like in the church today.” I’ll try to do that in just a moment — namely, lay out some principles to try to avoid what Paul’s denouncing in these verses. But first, let me say a word about what Brett calls our “age of controversy.” He’s right, ...

Imagine all the holy books of all the religions disappeared tomorrow so that all knowledge of religion was gone. Imagine, too, that all science vanished. People would rediscover math eventually. They rediscover science eventually. As for religion? Sure, they’d invent gods again, but new ones. The ones we have now would never come back again. The idea, naturally, is that science and math are built on timeless and unchanging reality. Religions depend on whatever people might invent, and they’re nothing more than inventions. As an argument against religion, this one’s a non-starter. It’s irrational — which is all too grievously typical of popular-level atheism lately. Typical Atheist Irrationality I’m speaking here primarily of popular-level atheism, such as you commonly find in blogs and on social media. The so-called (and fading) “New Atheists,” such as Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Lawrence Krauss, and Sam Harris also belong in this group. There are exceptions to this rule o...