Dr Paul Allen

QUESTION: Has it been proven that Moses existed? DICK HARFIELD RESPONSE H istorians took the biblical narrative for granted until the Rosetta Stone was deciphered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, enabling linguists to begin translating Egyptian hieroglyphics. There was the expectation that evidence of the Israelites in Egypt would soon be found in the copious ancient Egyptian writings, but this gradually gave way to puzzlement because there was clearly no evidence of any Israelites in Egypt, nor of the ten plagues of Moses or even the biblical Exodus. Historians had to begin thinking the unthinkable: either there was no Exodus, or it was simply a minor event that did not really change history. Either way, there was no catastrophic series of plagues, loss of an entire army in pursuit of the Israelites, or even the dramatic economic downturn that one would expect after the loss of a huge number of productive slaves. The evidence is now in: nothing happened—there was  no bi...

A doctor’s refusal to release a study showing no benefit of so-called “gender-affirming care” for children proves, once again, that the push to sterilize and mutilate minors is about following an agenda, not science. Following the “science" can be about leveraging authoritative positions to bully people into preordained outcomes, even as actual science pointed elsewhere. Today sees “science” justifying the barbaric medical procedures dubbed “gender-affirming care,” which is liberal speak for pumping kids with puberty blockers and hormones under the guise of boosting their emotional happiness. But when a taxpayer-funded study set out to validate the ideology’s core premise, it backfired spectacularly — leaving the lead researcher desperate to bury the damning results. Wrong Hypothesis Enter Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the loudest proponents of so-called gender-affirming care. Olson-Kennedy herself spearheads the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at the Children’s H...

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 ri...

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 “fragi...

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, ...

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...

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...