Category Archives: People

The trouble with Dawkins

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Professor Richard Dawkins is a clever chap, and a scintillating writer.  Some who read The God Delusion will be bowled over by his rhetoric.  But, as various replies have been showing, there are significant gaps in his knowledge and serious flaws in his argument.  For example, in attempting to demonstrate the extent to which people do Bad Things in the name of religion, he asserts that, conversely, ‘individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism’ (p278).…

Adiaphora: agreeing to disagree

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In my short piece on Faultlines in Evangelicalism, I mentioned post-modernism’s distrust of ‘certaintist’ positions.  This contrasts with evangelicals’ perceived desire to be certain about everything.  I was interested to see John Stott in his book Evangelical Truth make a plea for evangelicals to distinguish carefully between essentials of the faith which cannot be compromised and those matters of secondary importance – adiaphora – in which there is a sincere disagreement amongst evangelicals as to what Scriptures teaches.  …

Carson on MacLaren

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I’ve been reading (well, listening to, actually, on my MP3 player) Brian McLaren’s book, A Generous Orthodoxy. McLaren is a leader in the Emerging Church movement and is an engaging writer and speaker. I found D.A. Carson’s review of McLaren’s writings in Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, 158-182, to be fair and perceptive. Carson evidently thinks that McLaren, in his generosity, is giving too much away. I’m inclined to agree with him. Anyway, here’s a summary of Carson’s comments.…