Darwinism has become our culture's official creation myth, protected by a priesthood as dogmatic as any religious curia.

Clearly, Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute.

The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.

Christian adults need to think about talking to our own children as a form of cross-cultural missions. Cultural change happens so quickly that teens are exposed to ideas and worldviews very different from those of previous generations.

Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.

The whole point of building theoretical systems is to explain what humans know by pre-theoretical experience. That is the starting point for any philosophy. That is the data it seeks to explain. If it fails to explain the data of experience, then it has failed the test. It has been falsified.

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.