Dr Paul Allen

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...

I thought I understood culture until I moved abroad and went grocery shopping in Asia. I couldn’t read any labels, so I was painstakingly selecting each item, relying on pictures and translation apps. Suddenly, an elderly woman came over, pulled a bottle of dish soap out of my shopping cart, and spoke rapid Chinese as she wagged her finger at me. She returned my selected soap to the shelf, picked up a different brand, and put it in my cart. I was speechless and indignant. What in the world? How dare someone invades my privacy and replace an item in my shopping cart? Now that I’ve been in Asia for more than six years I better understand what was happening—not only with the elderly woman but also in my soul. Culture is like the proverbial iceberg. We may think we understand our culture, but much remains below the surface. We might not see it until someone crashes into our subconscious cultural beliefs. Sure, culture affects what we eat, where we live, and the clothing we wear. But cultur...

More than seventy killings took place in London in the first quarter of 2018. A surgeon in a London hospital reports that the number of children and young people being brought in with knife injuries is at an all-time high.2 This great city, blessed in the past by some of the greatest gospel preachers in church history, is waking up almost daily to headlines telling of another life snatched away. Politicians debate increasing police funding. Newspapers argue about law enforcement. Alice Springs in Central Australia young kids are smashing the town apart. In Philadelphia, cars are burned while people do drug injections openly in the streets. The USA has had numerous cities under siege by various groups. The root of the problem was described in a book aptly titled Death in the City, written nearly fifty years ago by the apologist Francis Schaeffer. In a culture that has deliberately turned away from God, what basis is there for morality? Schaeffer warned that Western societies in the 1960...

A definition of philosophy is that it’s the disciplined exposition and defense of a worldview. And what is a worldview? Well, it’s just the way you look at the whole world around you. Buzzing, blooming confusion You come into this world and you find a “buzzing, blooming confusion,” as one philosopher said. You see shapes and you hear sounds, and eventually, you sort them out. You see people: this is your mother. This is your father. This is your toy. This is your dog. And you start dividing the world into things and dividing the world into people, and eventually, you get some broader notions: that’s the sky up there, and that’s the stars and the sun and the moon. And you start asking yourself questions about how it fits together. Well, that’s what philosophers do at a more sophisticated level. They ask, “What does the whole world look like? If I were to define the structure of the whole world, what would it be like?” Materialism, pantheism, and deism And today, some people, of course, ...

According to new data from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University’s American Worldview Inventory 2021 (AWVI 2021), the most prevalent “seductively-unbiblical ideas” embraced by American adults include: ** the spiritually inclusive idea that “having faith matters more than what type of faith you have” ** the belief that all faiths are of equal value ** belief in “karma,” the idea rooted in Eastern religions that you ‘get what you give’ ** the dismissal of absolute truth ** commitment to personal, subjective morality ** the idea that people are “basically good” ** the idea that success is determined by happiness, comfort, goodness, or fulfilled potential ** belief that sexual relations apart from marriage are morally acceptable ** the rejection of the notion that people are inherently sinful ** the conclusion that the purpose of accumulated personal wealth is unrelated to God’s purposes Surprisingly, the data revealed that even the 6% of adults who have a biblical ...

Scholar Ryan T. Anderson. He wrote a book called, "When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment." It was sold on Amazon for over three years and received high praise from a former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a longtime psychology professor at NYU, a professor of medical ethics at Columbia Medical School, and other acclaimed medical professionals. But the same week Congress was mobilizing to pass the Equality Act, Amazon unilaterally canceled his book - removing it from their platform with no notice. According to the Far Left, free speech exists... as long as you don't say anything that undermines their worldview.

In case you failed to notice literally every major corporation changing its logo to a rainbow hue, June is now upon us, and that means 30 days of religious-like devotion to the gods of sexuality and identity politics – what our cultural powerbrokers refer to as “Pride” month. If you’re anything like me, the ironies are too much not to note. A supposedly oppressed minority with every organ of cultural power at its disposal insists on its powerlessness. Meanwhile, just within the last week, a teacher in Virginia was suspended from his job for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns. “Inclusion,” we’re coming to see, stands for the very opposite when confronted with even respectful difference. What might the response be to “Pride Month” for those who believe that Scripture is not only true but good when it depicts true sexual freedom as the union of one man and one woman in marriage? First, we should understand that Christianity has always held a distinct sexual ethic, especially i...

If someone asked you how you know Christianity is true, how would you answer them? Would you appeal to your transformed life, the witness of miracles, or apologetic arguments? C.S. Lewis once provided his own explanation. In the closing line of a paper to Oxford’s Socratic Club, he wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Lewis believed Christianity provides a framework for understanding many commonsense ideas that people in our society affirm. I agree. If you listen carefully to what people claim are the powerful truths they live by, you’ll recognize that Christianity is the only worldview that can justify all of them. Consider the following claims about reality and how not every belief system can account for them. The Universe Began to Exist Prior to modern science, people believed the universe was eternal. That idea has been rejected by Big Bang cosmology, the second law of thermodynam...

QUESTION : A Christian man, husband, and father who lives in Sweden writes in with today’s question.  I live in Sweden, a coercive country — socialist in a lot of ways. Homeschooling exemptions for religious convictions were outlawed here not long ago. We must send our children to school, or the government threatens to take them away from us. The state forces children to begin preschool when they’re just six years old. Christian schools are practically illegal, and a school may have a ‘Christian profile,’ but it’s a meaningless title. These few Christian schools are still not allowed to be ‘religious’ or teach a Christian worldview. They’re still forced by law to abide to the same teaching plan as secular, atheistic schools to give children a secular education and must even teach our children LGBTQ as a positive norm. In such a country, Pastor John, how should we parent?” ANSWER : Let me try to build up a case or an understanding from the more basic and broad principle to the immed...

But, what should Christians think about vaccines and their use? What ethical and theological questions arise? Do the COVID-19 vaccines bring unique moral questions? What does the Christian worldview have to say about the entire set of questions? Let me offer seven points for consideration. First, Christians do not believe in medical non-interventionism. Instead, we believe in the moral legitimacy of medical treatment. A Christian worldview authorizes treatment—and we do so as an extension of the doctrine of creation and the dominion God has given to humanity as revealed in the opening chapter of Genesis. Pressing against disease and viruses is part of our mandate. Some might say, “I believe in the sovereignty of God, and if God wants me to have this virus then he will give me the virus. I don’t need medical intervention because I trust God.” That kind of logic, if pressed to its logical conclusion, however, is untenable—we wouldn’t treat any sickness, cancer, or injury. Medical treatme...

The appearance of a new episode of the  Star Wars  film series is an important moment for Christian witness. To be sure, we can shrug our shoulders, since  Star Wars  is old news. Or we can enthusiastically introduce our grandchildren to what we might think is a beloved, harmless yarn. Or we can—and should—discover in the series an occasion to sharpen our presentation of the gospel message and help our children and grandchildren, and anyone else who might be interested, to understand the culture in which they live. In this famous and creative saga, which we must respect for its artistic value, we find many positive ideals—bravery, friendship, love, and spirituality, and others—which help explain the success of the series. However, in examining  Star Wars'  account of the mystery and nobility of human life, the Bible's answer, in comparison, emerges with incomparably more convincing power. The Star Wars Phenomenon Answering questions of moralit...