Dr Paul Allen

By Randy Alcorn I first posted about “the problem of goodness” on my blog 14 years ago, but it is still relevant to conversations I’m having today with others (nothing has changed other than that I am 14 years older!). People always talk about the problem of evil, and how it threatens the Christian worldview, but they almost never talk about the problem of goodness and how it threatens non-Christian worldviews, including the evolutionary framework, survival of the fittest, materialism, and naturalism. That people would sacrificially do great good for the benefit of others—who naturalism sees as weak links in the chain that deserve to cease to exist—is absolutely extraordinary and cries out for an explanation. —Randy While atheists routinely speak of the problem of evil, they usually don’t raise the problem of goodness. But if evil provides evidence against God, then shouldn’t goodness count as evidence for Him? And wouldn’t that be evidence against atheism?  From a non-theistic vie...

In C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the character Mark describes his life as “the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.” Along with his wife, Mark functions as a personification of modernity, and his beliefs represent many secular people today. Yet through the events of the plot, Mark becomes awakened to transcendence. While imprisoned and subjected to psychological torture, he has a profound moral experience: There rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked, some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else—something he vaguely called the “Normal”—apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was—solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. In m...

Fear of God Then there’s the other fear: The fear that it might be true after all. I respect those atheists who’ve been honest about it. Thomas Nagel is an eminent professor (now emeritus) of law and philosophy at New York University. He famously wrote, I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind …. This i...