Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (14 page)

Christianity agrees with Hamlet when he said to Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” Reductionistic worldviews insist that there are
fewer
things in heaven and earth. Living according to these worldviews is like living in a concrete bunker with no windows. Communicating a Christian worldview should be like inviting people to open the door and come out. Our message ought to express the joy of leading captives out of a small, cramped world into one that is expansive and liberating.

We understand better now why Paul could stand before the Roman Empire and proclaim that he was “not ashamed of the gospel.” He was confident that Christianity is not only more convincing than any competing religion or worldview but also more appealing. In Scripture, the phrase “put to shame” does not usually mean to be psychologically embarrassed. It means to trust in something that lets you down, that fails to come through. “Let me not be put to shame; let not my enemies exult over me” (Ps. 25:2). Because “the Lord G
OD
helps me … I know that I shall not be put to shame” (Isa. 50:7). So when Paul says he is “not ashamed of the gospel,” he is saying that a Christian worldview will not let you down. It will not disappoint.
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Christianity fulfills the human hunger for a unified, integrated worldview to live by. It has the intellectual resources to provide a holistic, internally consistent guide to life.

Of course, being attractive does not mean a worldview is true. To test whether it is true or false, we need to move to Principle #3. When we ask whether an idea is true, typically what we mean is, Does it fit the world as we know it? Does it match up with the facts? In Principle #3, we’ll see how Romans 1 outfits us with a powerful set of tools to test worldviews and uncover truth.

PRINCIPLE #3

• • • • •

A few years ago, CNN published an article titled “Why I Raise My Children without God.” Instantly it went viral. The author, a young mother named Deborah Mitchell, listed several reasons why she shielded her children from learning about God—most of them variations on the problem of evil. Mitchell argued that a loving God would not allow “murders, child abuse, wars, brutal beatings, torture and millions of heinous acts to be committed throughout the history of mankind.”
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The classic Christian answer to the problem of evil is that God created humans with free will—and they have made a horrific mess of things. This is called the free-will defense, and it acknowledges the tragic reality of sin and suffering, while at the same time affirming human dignity. It portrays humans as genuine moral agents whose choices are so significant that they alter the direction of history, and even eternity.

Having rejected the Christian answer, what did Mitchell offer as an alternative? She proposed a materialistic worldview in which humans are completely determined, without free will. “We are just a very, very small part of a big, big machine,” she intoned, “and the influence we have is minuscule.” We must accept “the realization of our insignificance.”

Is
that
meant to be an appealing alternative to Christianity? That humans are little machines trapped in a big machine? That their actions are insignificant? Mitchell claimed that her materialist view leads to “humbleness.” But it is not humbling; it is dehumanizing. It essentially reduces humans to robots.

More importantly, it is not true. Its view of humanity runs counter to the data of human experience. All civilizations throughout history have recognized that humans are moral agents capable of making responsible choices. There is no society without some moral code. The testimony of universal human experience is that humans are not merely little robots.
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After all, what is a worldview intended to explain? A worldview is meant to give a systematic explanation of those inescapable, unavoidable facts of experience accessible to all people, in all cultures, across all periods of history. In biblical terms, those facts constitute general revelation. Philosophers sometimes refer to them collectively as the life-world, or lived experience, or pre-theoretical experience.
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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.

The Gravity of Fact

You might think of this as the practical test of a worldview. Just as scientists test a theory by taking it into the lab and mixing chemicals in a test tube to see if the results confirm the theory, so we test a worldview by taking it into the laboratory of ordinary life. Can it be lived out consistently in the real world, without doing violence to human nature? Does life function the way the worldview says it should? Does it fit reality? Does it match what we know about the world?

We could say that the purpose of a
worldview
is to explain what we know about the
world
. If a worldview contradicts our fundamental experience of the world—what we know by general revelation—that is a good sign that it should be scrapped. As Dooyeweerd put it, every philosophy “ought to be confronted with the datum of naive experience in order to test its ability to account for this datum in a satisfying manner.” Any philosophy that “cannot account for this datum in a satisfactory way must be erroneous.”
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Philosopher J. P. Moreland says we test worldviews by how well they explain “recalcitrant facts,” those stubborn facts that every theory must explain—or else be considered falsified.
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And we can be confident that all idol-centered worldviews
will
be falsified. All will fail to account for at least some of those stubborn facts. Why? Because, as we learned in Principle #2, they are reductionistic. They try to define the whole in terms of a part. Inevitably their conceptual categories will be too narrow and limited. Some parts of reality will stick out of the box.

Consider the CNN article that went viral. It proposed a materialist philosophy that reduces humans to machines, determined by material forces. What sticks out of that box? Human freedom. The undeniable fact is that humans do make choices. This fact serves as evidence that a person is
not
“a very, very small part of a big, big machine.” Instead humans are personal beings capable of willing and choosing—which means their origin must be a personal Being, not the blind forces of nature.

Recall that in philosophy,
personal
does not mean warm and friendly; it means a being with the capacity to think, feel, choose, and act, in contrast to a non-thinking substance whose action is automatic. Consider what happens when you combine sodium with chlorine: the atoms react with one another to produce sodium chloride (table salt). The atoms do not make a conscious decision to interact. They do not choose to transfer electrons to form an ionic bond. The process takes place by purely automatic physical forces. Materialism claims that human behavior can likewise be explained solely by physical forces at work in our brain chemistry. The existence of free will counters that theory. It constitutes evidence that humans were not created by automatic physical forces but by a personal Agent.

It is ironic that people who reject Christianity—who think that without God they can finally be free—end up with philosophies that deny human freedom.

To become familiar with the practical test, we will walk through several examples. The benefit of working with examples is that you will learn to analyze the actual wording and reasoning used by secular thinkers in real-world situations. The most surprising thing we will discover is that many of them, when pressed, actually acknowledge that their worldview does not fit the facts. The examples in this chapter will help you make the case using their own words.

I, Robot—We, Machines

Do not be tempted to think that worldview questions like these are esoteric—irrelevant to ordinary people. When I was a teenager, I was already wrestling with the same questions raised by the young mother writing for CNN. After rejecting my Lutheran upbringing, I embraced physical and social determinism. I saw it as one more nail in the coffin of Christianity, for the Bible clearly teaches that humans exercise moral responsibility: “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil.… Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live” (Deut. 30:15, 19).

Of course, theologians debate the exact nature of human freedom. The Reformers, Luther and Calvin, emphasized that humans can do nothing to contribute to salvation. The liberating message of the gospel is that we do not have to earn or work for salvation; that both justification and sanctification are by “hearing with faith” (Gal. 3:2, 5). But the Reformers did not mean that we cannot choose whether to have ham or turkey on our sandwich for lunch. By contrast, materialism holds that humans only
think
they are choosing ham or turkey. In reality their behavior is driven by natural forces such as neurons firing in the brain—just like sodium reacting with chlorine.
All Christians agree in rejecting this materialist conception of humans as mere robots or meat machines.
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The Bible teaches that humans are fallen sinners, but the fall did not make us less than human. It did not make us machines.

Obviously, humans are not free to do anything we might dream up, because we are creatures and not the Creator. We are also embedded within a physical universe and a social world; we each have a personal history that affects our choices. Yet within those parameters, we have some range of genuine choice and accountability. Our actions are not simply links in a closed chain of causally connected physical events. We have the capacity to be first causes, starting a new chain of cause and effect.

It was not until I went to L’Abri, however, that I heard cogent arguments in favor of free will. The arguments centered on the universality of human experience. The testimony of all known cultures through all of recorded history is that humans do exercise moral freedom and responsibility. From time to time, quirky individuals have raised objections, but civilizations as a whole cannot survive without the conviction that people can be held responsible for their actions.

Even materialists often admit that, in practice, it is impossible for humans to live any other way. One philosopher jokes that if people deny free will, then when ordering at a restaurant they should say, “Just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined I will get.”
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It seems that we are forced to accept the reality of free will.
Humans are so constituted that they cannot function without it. It is one of those stubborn facts that must be accounted for by any worldview.
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These were some of the arguments I encountered while studying at L’Abri. As a result, I began to seriously consider whether my deterministic worldview might be mistaken. It began to look as though humans do have moral freedom after all. And if my worldview did not account for it, well, I needed to look for one that did. It was the beginning of an intellectual turnaround. Christianity began to look considerably more plausible.

How can we make Christianity more plausible for our own friends and family members who are seekers, agnostics, or skeptics?

Principle #3

Test the Idol: Does It Contradict What We Know about the World?

We have worked through two principles in worldview analysis. First we identify its idol. Second we identify its reductionism. Now we will ask whether idol-centered worldviews fit the real world.

Let’s stay with the questions of free will because it is so central to human dignity. The ability to choose from among alternatives makes a host of other distinctively human capacities possible—creativity and problem solving, love and relationships (robots do not love), even rationality itself (if our minds are preprogrammed to hold an idea, then it is not a rational decision). “Unless human beings are morally responsible,” says law professor Jerome Hall, “justice is only a mirage.” Unless humans have free will, we will not develop a sense of identity or self-worth (because everything
I
do is really the work of unconscious, automatic forces).
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What is at stake is nothing less than our “
respect for persons
,” says one philosopher. For if determinism is true, then “we are, in the final reckoning, merely playthings of fortune.”
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Free will has thus become a stand-in for the whole range of human qualities that depend on it. If you take a course in Philosophy 101, your textbook is almost certain to include a section on free will versus determinism. In recent years, the topic has moved to center stage in philosophy.
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Therefore it is one of the most salient facts of general revelation that can be used in testing worldviews.

Why Secularists Can’t Live with Secularism

Let’s practice applying Principle #3 to several examples, using secularists’ own words and writings. An especially clear example is Galen Strawson, a philosopher who states with great bravado, “The impossibility of free will … can be proved with complete certainty.”

Yet in an interview, Strawson admits that, in practice, no one accepts his deterministic view. “To be honest, I can’t really accept it myself,” he says. “I can’t really live with this fact from day to day. Can you, really?”

But if humans “can’t really live with” the implications of a worldview, is it a reliable map to reality? Watch for phrases like this as you read through other examples. Often they are clues that someone is trying to live out a worldview that does not fit the real world—that he or she has bumped up against one of the intractable facts that point to the biblical God.

Moreover, Strawson insists that he is not alone, that even cognitive scientists who publish books and journal articles favoring determinism do not accept it as a workable theory to live by. They “may accept it in their white coats, but I’m sure they’re just like the rest of us when they’re out in the world—convinced of the reality of radical free will.”
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In short, their
practice
contradicts what they
profess
. They are trapped in cognitive dissonance.

Strawson states the conflict in striking terms: “Powerful logical or metaphysical reasons for supposing we can’t have strong free will keep coming up against equally powerful psychological reasons why we
can’t help believing
that we do have it.… It seems that we
cannot live
or experience our choices as determined, even if determinism is true.”
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What are the telltale phrases here? That there are ideas “we can’t help believing.” That “we cannot live” on the basis of contrary ideas, even if we think they are true. When a concept (like free will) keeps bubbling up inescapably and irresistibly even in the mind of someone who disavows it—
whose worldview directly denies it
—that’s a good clue that it is a truth of general revelation that is being suppressed. The created order refuses to fit inside the box of any idol-based worldview.

No matter how hard people work to suppress their knowledge of God, creation itself keeps challenging them. “Human life is a continual wrestling match with God and his created order,” writes Thomas Johnson.
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When talking with skeptics and agnostics, we can show that their worldview fails to account for reality as
they themselves
experience it. The truths of general revelation cannot be ultimately suppressed.

A worldview is like an internal map that guides us in navigating reality. Because idols deify a
part
of creation, they produce maps that cover only
part
of reality. As a result, in the course of ordinary life, humans keep walking off the map. It happens whenever they are “compelled to believe” in free will or moral responsibility or anything else not covered by their cognitive map—whenever they “cannot live” within the map’s cramped borders. Life itself keeps pushing them off their own map. No one can live consistently on the basis of such a limited worldview map.