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...

By Dan Crabtree According to a 2020 study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 21% of American adults suffer from a mental illness. Johns Hopkins says it’s 26%. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) says that in the US, 7 million people have a bipolar disorder, 21 million people have a major depressive episode each year, and 19.1 million people suffer from an anxiety disorder. As a result, NAMI records, suicide is the second leading cause of death for people ages 10-24, which has increased by 35% since 1999. Although many have, on the whole, become more educated, more technologically sophisticated, and our hospitals more medically advanced than ever before, according to these statistics, we are also more depressed, more anxious, and more attention deficit than ever before. In short, we are living under the sovereignty of psychology. Ours is a culture ruled by mental health diagnoses. For those who desire to live by the Bible, the ubiquity of ps...

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 greatest question of our time,” historian Will Durant offered, “is not communism versus individualism, not Europe versus the UK, not even East versus the West; it is whether men can live without God . ” That question, it now appears, will be answered in our own day. For centuries, the Christian church has been the center of Western civilization . Western culture, government, law, and society were based on explicitly Christian principles. Concern for the individual, a commitment to human rights, and respect for the good, the beautiful, and the true—all of these grew out of Christian convictions and the influence of revealed religion. All of these, we now hasten to add, are under serious attack. The very notion of right and wrong is now discarded by large sectors of American society . Where it is not discarded, it is often debased. Taking a page out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, modern secularists simply declare wrong, right, and right, wrong. A NEW LANDSCAPE Quaker theo...

“Where is God when things go wrong?” I am asked to speak on this subject more often than on all the other options combined. People are puzzled, skeptical, or simply angry that a sovereign, loving God could allow atrocities, wickedness, injustice, and hideous evil to take place on His watch. It is impossible in a few sentences even to summarize how I answer these concerns, but I often begin by positing the case if there were no God. This would reduce 9/11 to a spectacular, noisy, colorful rearrangement of atoms of molecules; it would turn solemn services of mourning for national tragedies into pointless pantomimes; it would make it futile for anyone who is suffering from physical, mental, or psychological pain, or trauma of any kind to seek supernatural help. Most people have never thought this through, and when I sense that this is the case, I point them to a loving Creator, the violation of whose law is the root cause (though obviously not always the immediate cause) of all suff...