Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (24 page)

Later, while studying in Germany, I took a train to L’Abri, the ministry of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, nestled in a tiny village among the snowy peaks of the Swiss Alps. I intended only to meet up with family members who were visiting briefly. But the approach to Christianity that I encountered there took me completely by surprise. It was the first time I met Christians who could address my questions—who engaged with the wider intellectual and cultural world. It was so appealing that, paradoxical as it may sound, after only a month I left. To tell the truth, I fled: I was wary of being drawn in by the emotional attraction of L’Abri instead of acting from genuine intellectual conviction.

While there, however, I had discovered apologetics and I continued reading on my own. Eventually I was intellectually persuaded that Christianity is true. Or as I thought of it at the time, I admitted that God had won the argument. By then I had no connection to a church, so I reached out again to L’Abri. A year and a half later, I returned to Switzerland for several additional months of study to deepen my understanding of a Christian worldview.

What Is
Your
Answer?

The questions I had as a young person are not unique. Many teens and young adults struggle with intellectual questions, even if they are not intellectuals in a stereotypical sense. Just talk to those who have rejected Christianity.

Sociologist Bradley Wright at the University of Connecticut asked former Christians why they de-converted. The researchers expected to hear stories about people leaving the church because they had been hurt or emotionally wounded. To their surprise, the reason given most frequently by former Christians was that they could not get answers to their doubts and questions. In fact, they could not even get the church to treat their questions seriously. A former Southern Baptist (obviously still angry) said, “Christians always use the word ‘faith’ as their last word when they are too stupid to answer a question.”
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Eventually, the doubters concluded that the church did not offer answers because there
are
no answers.

Churches have an obligation to equip their congregations to answer the questions that inevitably arise from living in a post-Christian society. Both young people and adults are subject to a constant barrage of secular and pagan ideas. Churches, schools, and families must take the responsibility for providing cogent and compelling answers.

One effective way of responding to doubters and skeptics is to help them face the real-world implications of their own views. I once had a conversation with a teenager who had been raised in a Presbyterian family. “I don’t think I’m a Christian anymore,” she told me.

“That’s interesting,” I said. “What have you accepted instead?

“What?”

“If there is no God, what then? What
do
you think is true, and how would you support it?”

The teen was speechless. Her entire focus had been on reacting against her parents and church. It had not occurred to her that she now bore the responsibility to think through the options for herself and make an informed search for truth.

As she began to study the alternatives, she realized that giving up Christianity was not a matter of merely deleting a few files of doctrine from her mind. Christianity is an entire worldview that undergirds many of the great ideals of Western culture, from justice to equality to universal human rights—ideals that the teenager did not want to give up.

When people raise questions about Christianity, often the best response is not to shut them down, but precisely the opposite. Start by pressing them to take more seriously the implications of their own position. As a matter of intellectual integrity, they should stop free-loading and take a fearless inventory of the logical and practical conclusions of their own convictions.

The stakes are high. What God said to the ancient Hebrews is just as true today: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore
choose life
, that you and your offspring may live” (Deut. 30:19). Christianity is either true or false, but it cannot be dismissed as inconsequential.

Lesson from
To Kill a Mockingbird

What’s the first step in equipping ourselves to press people to the logical conclusion of their worldview? Obviously, we must
know
their worldviews. We need to educate ourselves on the systems of thought widespread in our culture.

Think of it as missionary training. All Christians are called to be missionaries (Matt. 28:18–20). As every missionary, pastor, or teacher knows, a key to effective communication is “Know Your Audience.” The more thoroughly we know our audience’s worldview, the better prepared we will be to speak to their questions, objections, and hidden assumptions. As a character in
To Kill a Mockingbird
says, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
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What would you think of a missionary in a Muslim country who refused to learn about Muslim culture? He would not be very effective in communicating a biblical message. Cultivating a missional mind-set means being willing to learn both the language and the thought patterns of our mission field.

When Paul said, “I have become all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9:22), he did not mean dressing like the locals. Nor was he embracing cultural relativism. Instead he was taking the assumptions of his audience into consideration in his language and approach. He tried to see the world through their eyes so he could communicate more persuasively. Ravi Zacharias, who grew up in India but came to the West as a young man, says, “Being able to speak in two languages from opposite ends of the world helps you to be sympathetic and, I believe, effective in not just hearing but
listening
; in responding not to the question but to the questioner.”
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Learning to listen is especially important with young people. Cultural change occurs so rapidly today that children often absorb assumptions that are radically different from adult culture. One young woman wrote a blog lamenting that her family and church gave her no preparation for attending a secular university: “My parents had absolutely no idea what went on at university and therefore they had no idea how to help me prepare for it.” They did not teach her how to argue persuasively for Christianity in a pluralistic context: “The most troubling thing was the amount of differing beliefs and worldviews I encountered, from professors and other students. At the time I thought they had much better arguments than I did for the validity of their views.”
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This represents a striking failure on the part of the adults in this young woman’s life—first of all, a failure of love. A central motivation for learning about worldviews should be to “love your neighbor” (Matt. 22:39). Christians are called to love people enough to listen to their questions and do the hard work of finding answers.

Scripture calls us to an exquisitely balanced approach: “speaking the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15). That balance is spelled out in the flagship verse for apologetics: “Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you”—there’s the truth. “Yet do it with gentleness and respect”—there’s the love (1 Pet. 3:15).

In the original Greek, the word Peter uses for defense is
apologia
, from which we get the word
apologetics
. But he is not talking about giving answers to intellectual questions only. The verse appears toward the end of a letter dealing largely with the theme of unjust suffering. Peter has just admonished Christians not to take their own revenge but to be willing to suffer for the sake of righteousness. Why does he speak of apologetics in
this
context? It seems that Peter is saying the goal of apologetics is not just to present better arguments but to exhibit a better character, especially when suffering hostility and opposition.

In Romans 1, Paul likewise sets his message in the context of suffering. That great ringing verse “The righteous shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17) is a quotation from the book of Habakkuk, where the prophet asks God why evil always seems to win—why God allows his people to be attacked, oppressed, exploited, enslaved, and killed (Hab. 2:4). God’s answer is that Habakkuk must “live by faith,” confident that God is able to work good out of evil and injustice.

If we do not cultivate the same confidence, the danger is that Christians will tend toward defensiveness and anger. In today’s grievance culture, it seems that some new group is always coming forward to complain that they are offended. It can be easy for Christians to pick up the same victim language. But our motivation for speaking out should not be only that we are offended. After all, we are called to share in the offense of the Cross. We are called to love the offender. Christians will be effective in reaching out to others only when they reflect biblical truth in their message, their method, and their manners.

A biblical practice of love can attract the unlikeliest of converts. Even a young man living a wild life of sex, drugs, and gangs, whose dramatic story we will unfold at the end of the next chapter.

• • • • •

“Critical thinking?” the radio host burst out. “Most people on the conservative Christian Right would say that’s one of the biggest dangers we have—this ‘nonsensical’ idea of critical thinking.”

I was the guest on a radio program hosted by Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. This is an organization that works relentlessly to remove all expressions of Christianity from the public arena. On the air Lynn asked about my book
Saving Leonardo
: “Why did you write a book about worldviews? About philosophies?” I replied that my goal was to give people skills to understand the world they live in, to help them develop critical thinking.

That’s when Lynn interrupted me. He seemed incredulous that Christians would care about cultivating the mind. Later when I wrote an article about the interview for
Christianity Today
, my husband (an editor) suggested the title “How Critical Thinking Saves Faith.”
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Hostile radio hosts may not understand, but Scripture itself encourages humans to use their minds to examine truth claims: “Test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). It turns out that you have to practice the first part of the verse—testing everything—in order to develop the wisdom to recognize and hold on to the good.

Today the need for critical thinking is greater than ever. We live in a technological age where information of every kind is available at the click of a mouse. There is no “safe” place where young people can avoid the challenge of contrary worldviews. Christians must become independent thinkers with the tools to think critically about diverse points of view—weighing the evidence and judging the validity of arguments. “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (Prov. 18:17). Christians must learn to examine both sides in order to develop “sales resistance” to the many dubious ideas hawked in the media, politics, education, entertainment, and yes, churches.

In today’s pluralistic, multicultural world, no one can survive long on secondhand ideas.

Some Christians seem to think the way to avoid being “conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2) is by avoiding “worldly” ideas. A better strategy is to learn the skills to critically evaluate them. G. K. Chesterton argued that ideas are actually
more
dangerous to the person who has not studied them. Because he has no mental filter, a new idea will “fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler.”
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He is more likely to become intoxicated.

A Romans 1 strategy provides the basic tools to avoid being intoxicated. Its five principles will empower you to cut to the heart of any worldview and weigh its central tenets—to gain an “understanding of the times” in which we live (1 Chron. 12:32). With training in critical thinking, you will be prepared to interact with any point of view respectfully and intelligently.

In this chapter, we will survey several key applications to show how critical thinking can save
your
faith. We will end with the story of hip-hop artist Lecrae to discover why he is “not ashamed” of the gospel.

Churched but Not Prepared

Recently a mother told me with tears in her eyes that her son had lost his faith at a state university. The teen was a psychology major, and ever since Freud, most psychological theories have treated Christianity as a form of psychopathology, a symptom of neurosis, an infantile regression. Though the young man came from a strong Christian family and church, he was completely unprepared to critically evaluate the theories he was learning in the classroom. Within a semester, he had abandoned his religious upbringing altogether.

How can we help a student in psychology who is struggling to respond to Freud’s charge that religion is a symptom of emotional immaturity? Or a student in English who has to answer Foucault’s charge that truth claims are merely power plays? Or a law student whose professor tells the class that law has no relation to morality? A unique feature of a Romans 1 strategy is it can be applied universally to analyze and respond to any theory.

Let’s remind ourselves of its key elements. Principle #1 is to identify the idol. Every nonbiblical worldview starts with an idol, a God substitute. Romans 1 says that if humans do not worship the Creator, they will make a deity out of something in the created order. Like the blind men and the elephant, they fasten on some part of the created order and declare it to be the ultimate reality.

Principle #2 is to identify the reductionism. When one part of creation is deified, the other parts will be denigrated. Why? Because a part is always too small to explain the whole. Something will always stick out of the box. That “something” will be suppressed—devalued, dismissed, or denied. Otherwise it would count as evidence to falsify the worldview.

Reductionism is always dehumanizing. It exchanges a high view of humanity made in the image of God for the image of something in the created order. And because the idol is something lower than the biblical God, its concept of humanity will also be lower. It will deny key attributes that make us distinctively human. And when reductionistic worldviews gain political power, the consequences are oppressive, coercive, and inhumane.

Principle #3 is to test the worldview against the facts of experience, the truths of general revelation. No matter how hard people try to suppress the evidence for God, the created order itself keeps challenging them. Both physical nature and human nature give evidence of the Creator. Therefore every idol-based worldview will fail to fit the evidence. It will contradict the knowable facts of general revelation.

The more self-aware people are, the more clearly they will realize that they cannot live consistently on the basis of their own reductionistic worldviews. The truths of general revelation—the things they “can’t help believing” and living—create a gap between what they profess and what they practice. As a result, they live with a mental dualism, maintaining two sets of inconsistent beliefs.

Principle #4 is to show that every reductionistic worldview is self-defeating. It commits suicide. That’s because it reduces reason to something less than reason. Yet the only way a worldview can build its
own
case is by using reason. Thus it undercuts itself. It is self-refuting.

Everyone who proposes a reductionist worldview must make a tacit exception for his own thinking—at least, at the moment he is stating his claims. But that, too, creates a logical inconsistency. It is an admission that there is one thing that the worldview does not cover—namely, the person who is proposing it. Either way, then, a reductionistic worldview fails.

Principle #5 is to make the case for a Christian worldview. By focusing on the points where competing worldviews fail, we can be assured that we are answering questions that are actually relevant. By identifying the points where non-Christians are free-loading, we can be confident that we are addressing areas where they sense a need for something more.

Stealth Secularism

The philosophies discussed in this book form the backbone to all of Western thought. I’ve had students from many different disciplines, and they discover that the Romans 1 approach gives them tools to critique any theory, no matter what their field. An undergraduate recently wrote, “The method of critique you taught in this class has been incredibly helpful to me, not just in class but in my life—reading books and watching movies.” A master’s student wrote, “When watching television or movies with my family, I used to be afraid of secular ideas seeping into my psyche, but now I finally have the skills to identify and critique them. My kids are intrigued and delighted.”

The point about books and movies is especially important. After all, this is how most people pick up their ideas about life. They don’t think,
I need a personal philosophy
and sign up for a philosophy course at the local university. Instead they absorb their ideas about life through the books they read, the movies they watch, the music they listen to.

Worldviews do not typically come with a warning label attached to tell us what we’re getting. They do not ask permission before invading our mental space. Instead there is what we might call a “stealth” secularism that uses images and stories to bypass people’s critical grid and hook them emotionally, sometimes without their even knowing it. That’s why it is imperative to learn the skill of deciphering worldviews when they come to us not in words, where they are easier to recognize, but in the idiom of picture, composition, plot line, and characterization.
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Take, for example, one of the most influential philosophies covered in earlier chapters: materialism or naturalism. In the nineteenth century, a movement arose that was actually called literary naturalism. Novels and plays began to appear that portrayed humans as merely products of nature, without free will, determined by their genes and the environment.

Virtually every student I have taught has read books by Jack London, like
Call of the Wild
. But what they
don’t
know is that as a young man, London underwent what one historian calls “a conversion experience” to radical materialism by reading the works of Charles Darwin. He memorized long passages from Darwin and could even quote them by heart (like Christians who memorize Scripture). He wrote about dogs to soften the blow, but his real message was that
humans
are nothing but evolved organisms, with no free will, governed by natural selection and survival of the fittest.

In London’s short story “The Law of Life,” an old Eskimo is left behind by his family to die in the snow. As the wolves close in to devour him, the old man ponders that evolution assigns the individual only one task: to reproduce so the species will survive. “Nature did not care. To life she set one task, gave one law. To perpetuate was the task of life.” After that, if the individual dies, “What did it matter after all? Was it not the law of life?”

The story pounds home the theme that humans have no higher purpose beyond sheer biological existence.

High culture filters down to pop culture, so materialist themes appear in movies and television as well. In a famous episode in
Star Trek
, the characters debate whether the android Lieutenant Commander Data is a machine.

He is, of course, but Captain Picard retorts, “It is not relevant. We [humans], too, are machines, merely machines of a different type.”

Naturalism tries to appeal by posing as tough and realistic. But, ironically, its main weakness is that it is not realistic enough. As we saw in Principle #3, it does not fit the real world. It holds that humans are essentially machines with no free will. But no one can live like a machine. We make choices every moment of the day.

Critics point out that the literary naturalists themselves did not live by their own philosophy. A Yale historian says they accepted “determinism as a theory but not something to live by.” I would suggest that is because no one
can
live by it in practice. It is not true to life.

Philosophy in Paint

Not only literature but also the visual arts were deeply influenced by philosophy.

Impressionism

Everyone knows what an impressionist painting looks like, with its little dabs and dashes of color. But
why
did impressionists decide to break up images that way? Because they were influenced by the philosophy of empiricism, which claims that the ultimate foundation of knowledge is sensations. To reach that foundation, empiricism says, we must reach down to the level of sheer sensory input. We must not even interpret sensations in terms of discrete objects standing in three-dimensional space, but only as patches of color filling our field of vision.

That’s why the great impressionist Claude Monet wrote, “When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow.” His goal was to cut through to the level of raw, immediate sense data. Spots. Streaks. Patches of color.

Recall that according to empiricism, humans mentally construct the world out of color patches (see Principle #1). Monet wanted to convey the same idea visually. Clearly, he was not interested just in painting pretty pictures. He was wrestling with the philosophical problem of knowledge (epistemology)—not in philosophical terms but in artistic terms.

For many of us, it is easier to grasp abstract ideas when they are fleshed out in visual form. After learning how empiricism was expressed visually, how would you respond to someone who is an empiricist—who says, “I can’t accept Christianity because its central claims cannot be directly verified by empirical science”?

You might respond by asking: Why do you think
empiricism
should be the test for truth? After all, does anyone really think the ultimate basis for knowledge is color patches? Does anyone really reject everything
non
empirical, like love or justice? In practice, no one is a fully consistent empiricist. It fails the practical test. Christianity respects the empirical dimension (see Principles #1 and #4), but as one thread in a rich fabric of truth.

Cubism

Take another example. Everyone knows what a cubist painting looks like, with its little squares and rectangles. But
why
did the cubists decide to break images up that way? Because these artists were influenced by the philosophy of rationalism. The apex of the scientific revolution was the development of mathematical physics. In Galileo’s famous saying, the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics—“and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.”

Rationalism thus inspired a kind of geometric formalism. The intellectual springboard for cubism was a remark by Cézanne that artists should “interpret nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone”—virtually a paraphrase of Galileo. The cubists’ goal was to portray the underlying mathematical structure of the cosmos. They broke objects down into little squares and rectangles to reflect nature’s hidden geometric blueprint.