Dr Paul Allen

As the BBC   reported   in April, “JK Rowling has challenged   Scotland’s new hate crime law   in a series of social media posts — inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence.” According to the  law , “A person commits an offence if they communicate material, or behave in a manner, ‘that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive,’ with the intention of stirring up hatred based on the protected characteristics,” which include “transgender identity.” In response, Rowling posted a series of comments on April 1, all with pictures of men who identified as women, before  explaining , Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them. In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual w

TIME IS RUNNING OUT -GENDER IDEOLOGY VERSUS SCIENCE Recently, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service released an almost 400-page report on the state of “gender identity services for children and young people.” It’s named the “Cass report” after lead researcher and paediatrician Hillary Cass, who was chair of an independent review commissioned by NHS of Great Britain.  It is the most comprehensive evaluation of the available evidence and “sets out the recommended clinical approach to care and support they should expect, the interventions that should be available, and how services should be organized across the country.” The Shaky Foundation for “Gender-Affirming Care” Contrary to the standard narrative peddled by trans activists, the report affirmed that so-called “gender-affirming care” is built on “shaky foundations.” Far from being settled, the evidence supporting the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-change surgeries to “treat” gender dysphoria is “fragile.”

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

When the militant atheist, Christopher Hitchens, was alive, he made the audacious claim that the authenticity of the gospels has been shown to be “in tatters for some time, and the rents and tears only become more obvious with better research”. [i] In reality, this comment is so manifestly outrageous as to beggar belief. Here’s why: Galilee synagogues For many years, contemporary scholars were troubled by a lack of synagogues. Prior to 2008, no archaeological evidence for any synagogue existing in Jesus’ time could be found in the region of Galilee. As the gospels mention that “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues” (Mt 4:23), this was a bit of an embarrassment. Some scholars concluded that the claim that Jesus preached in the synagogues of Galilee was an invention of the gospel writers.  But then, in 2009, archaeologists discovered the remains of a pre-AD 70 synagogue in the Galilean town of Magdala (the town where Mary Magdalene came from). Later that year, they

If appreciating some of the ideas in St. Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ was enough to make you a Christian,” a friend said to me some years ago, “then I’d be a Christian. But a personal God? The miracles? I can’t get there yet.” Whenever I write about the decline of organized religion in America, I get a lot of emails expressing some version of this sentiment. Sometimes it’s couched in the form of regretful unbelief: I’d happily go back to church, except for one small detail — we all know there is no God. Sometimes it’s a friendly challenge: OK, smart guy, what should I read to convince me that you’re right about the sky fairy? So this is an essay for those readers — a suggested blueprint for thinking your way into religious belief. But maybe not the blueprint you expect. Many highly educated people who hover on the doorway of a church or synagogue are like my Augustine-reading friend. They relate to religion on a communal or philosophical level. They want to pass on a clear ethical inherit

If God is making a comeback, where has He been all this time? Well, literally speaking, He didn’t go anywhere. He’s just been banished from the landscape of respectable “scientific” discourse. But if one takes the long view of history, this dramatic banishment happened very recently indeed. It wasn’t so long ago that even notorious freethinkers like Voltaire took God’s existence as a matter of course. But with the rise of methodological naturalism and the wide acceptance of naturalistic frameworks like Darwinism, a new consensus gradually formed that God had been put out of a job. Theism became a fringe view, something “serious” academics didn’t entertain in public if they wanted to be “respectable.”   If the word “God” pops up in a physics book, like Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, it’s understood to be metaphorical, a place-holder word for the ultimate all-explaining mathematical principle. What happened? The status game changed.   “We’ve become very guild-oriented in scien

A letter to an atheist friend, The other day, you asked me how I could believe in God, given all that we know today. Though I joked about the ancient Egyptians being similarly impressed with their high-tech knowledge of pyramids and beer, it’s a question I actually take very seriously. In fact, I’ve given my academic and professional career to some version of it, particularly as it relates to science. I wanted to put a few of my thoughts down in writing for you — that way you can mull them over in your own time. Not that I expect that what I say will immediately change your mind. But I’d be surprised if it (eventually) had no significant change in the way you think about the evidence for or against God, at least when it comes to science. None of the points I’ll make here is intended to provide absolute certainty; no amount of mere reasoning could do that — whether for or against God. This is why I find crowing triumphalists, whether believers or unbelievers, so frustrating a

Saying you won’t believe in God unless there is evidence he exists is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Christian God, says one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists. Professor Ard Louis from Oxford University spoke with Australian author and historian John Dickson about the rationality of the universe While Louis believes there must be a mind – a Creator – behind our universe, he told Dickson that one of the difficulties he has as a scientist and a Christian is science’s culture of scepticism. “When we think about God, what happens is that people assume we should take the same approach that we do in science: we should assume there is no god unless we find evidence to the contrary. So the default position is the assumption that there is no god.” – Professor Ard Louis “That culture is antithetical to Christian faith,” says Louis. “Skepticism is really good in science. If you come to me and say ‘I’ve discovered this new virus in my lab,’ then the right approach

Many people grew up believing that science and theology are enemies and that the secular forces of science are lined up against the angels of light in a battle to the death. This warfare motif goes back to two influential books of the nineteenth century: John Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and Andrew White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom . Both books claimed that science was winning the war and that defeat for religion was imminent. Thomas Huxley, famously known as Darwin’s Bulldog, was another nineteenth-century figure who lived and breathed this warfare narrative. He wrote, “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that wherever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched if not slain.” We smile knowingly. The metaphor i

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

The claim that Christianity is at war with science is one of the most common claims I hear from people today. In fact, the belief that Christianity is opposed to modern science is one of the top reasons young people cite for leaving the church. www.hopecollege.com But where did this idea come from? Is it accurate? In 1896 Cornell University president Andrew Dickson White released a book entitled A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom . White is largely credited with inventing and propagating the idea that science and Christianity are adversaries in the search for truth. White cast Christians as fanatics who clung to scriptural claims that the earth was flat. But is this account true? Sociologist Rodney Stark responds, White’s book remains influential despite the fact that modern historians of science dismiss it as nothing but a polemic—White himself admitted that he wrote the book to get even with Christian critics of his plans for Cornell . . . ma

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. [Gen. 2:19] In Genesis 2:19–20 we find the birth of science . One of the tasks of science is to harness the forces of the natural world, making them work for us rather than against us. We improve our agricultural skills; we discover fire and atomic energy; we devise ships for the sea and planes for the air. In this way we exercise dominion over the human environment, as God commanded in Genesis 1:28. Since the fall and the entrance of sin into the world, the ability to enjoy dominion has been greatly frustrated. The enterprises of science begins with taxonomy—the separating of things into categories. In taxonomy, we see the process of individuation. What is the difference between (or what “individuates”) a man and an ape? To carry out individuation we

Christians from every theological tradition have for centuries confessed their faith by  reciting the Apostles' Creed . Elsewhere I have taught on the actual content of this creed, but if there is one aspect of this confession that we often fail to reflect on, it is the creed's opening words:  I believe . Here I want to consider faith in relation to what are often seen as its opposites—reason and sense perception. Epistemology is the division of philosophy that seeks to answer one question: How do we know what we know, or how do we know what is true? Reason, sense perception, or some combination of the two have been among the most common answers to this basic question. Our minds function according to certain categories of rationality. We try to think in a logically coherent manner. Our judgments and deductions are not always correct and legitimate, but our minds always look for logical, intelligible patterns. Some people say that we find true knowledge exclusively wit