Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (16 page)

Secular Mysticism

We still live in the shadow of Kant. In
What Is Thought?
, computer scientist Eric Baum argues that the mind is essentially a computer program produced by evolutionary processes; thus free will is an illusion. The logical argument is “airtight,” Baum insists. Astonishingly, he then adds, “But who really cares, for all practical purposes? It’s much more reasonable and practical for my genes to build me believing in free will, and for me to act and think
as if
I have free will.” It is a useful fiction.

But a useful fiction is still a fiction. And to hold it, when your own worldview denies it, is irrational. We might even call it a form of secular mysticism. Baum admits as much. “Free will is a very useful theory” for describing human behavior, he writes. Yet it is still “wrong.” To be precise, it is “not even wrong”—because it “cannot be given any logical interpretation” (at least, not within his worldview). Thus Baum concludes, “The belief is simply mystical.”
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One group of thinkers has even been labeled “mysterians.” They argue that human intelligence is simply not equipped to solve the mystery of consciousness—that it evolved to solve purely practical problems like obtaining food and making tools. A representative of this group, Colin McGinn, writes, “Consciousness
must
have evolved from matter somehow but nothing we could contrive or imagine seem[s] to offer the faintest hope for explanation.… We just don’t have the faculties of comprehension that would enable us to remove the sense of mystery.”
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Francis Schaeffer in
The God Who Is There
observes that every worldview containing a two-story dualism leads ultimately to “mysticism” in the sense that adherents must affirm truths that their own worldview cannot rationally explain.
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It is ironic that many thinkers who pride themselves on being champions of rationality have accepted a form of mysticism—driven to that extreme position by the impulse to suppress the facts that contradict their preferred worldview.

Darwinian Psychopaths

Romans 1 says God “gives people up” to pursue their idols ever further, increasing the gap between what they profess and what they practice. We can picture worldviews falling along a continuum: The more consistently people work out the logic of their worldview, the more reductionistic the result will be, the wider the gap, and the further its leap into irrational mysticism. The choice facing them becomes ever clearer: Will they follow the evidence of general revelation? Or will they cling to their theories in the face of the evidence?

Let’s follow a series of examples to watch for ourselves how the gap grows ever wider—and more disturbing.

We began with Slingerland; now let’s see where he ends. As a Darwinist and materialist, he acknowledges that his reductionist view of humans as essentially robots is contrary to ordinary experience. It is “alien and often repugnant, from any sort of normal human perspective.” Gesturing toward his own daughter, Slingerland writes, “At an important and ineradicable level, the idea of my daughter as merely a complex robot carrying my genes into the next generation is both bizarre and repugnant to me.” Such a reductionistic view “inspires in us a kind of emotional resistance and even revulsion.”

Indeed, he writes, if you do
not
feel that revulsion, something is wrong with you: “There may well be individuals who lack this sense, and who can quite easily and thoroughly conceive of themselves and other people in purely instrumental, mechanistic terms, but we label such people ‘psychopaths,’ and quite rightly try to identify them and put them away somewhere to protect the rest of us.”
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What can we say when someone urges us to adopt a view of humanity that he himself admits is bizarre and repugnant? A view that ought to inspire revulsion? A view so dangerous that, when acted on, it would justify us in labeling people “psychopaths” and locking them up?

There is a severe clash between what his Darwinian materialism tells him (in the downstairs) and what his lived experience tells him (in the upstairs). Which one will he accept as true?

To describe this clash, we’ve been using the term
cognitive dissonance
, but that word may be too tame. This is a searing contradiction. Paul writes that those who build their lives on idols become “futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts [are] darkened” (Rom. 1:21). The Greek word for
futile
means unproductive, ineffectual, failing to achieve its purpose. As this example clearly shows, idol-based worldviews do not produce what a philosophy of life is meant to give us—a coherent, logically satisfying worldview that makes sense of all of life.

The Greek word for
foolish
reinforces the theme. Its root (
syniēmi
) means to synthesize, to put things together in the mind, and therefore to understand, to be wise. Thus to be foolish is to fail to connect ideas or link them into a meaningful structure, a coherent whole. Scripture is giving a spot-on description of the fragmented, fractured, internally contradictory two-story worldviews that result from embracing idols.

No wonder Paul writes that those who reject the Creator “are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). The phrase means “without a defense,” and it originally referred to a legal defense in a courtroom. In the Greek, the word is
anapologétos
, which has the same root as the word
apologetics
. The passage implies that those who adopt Creator substitutes end up with two-story worldviews that are not defensible as logically consistent, coherent, or realistic. Their worldviews do not fit reality as they themselves experience it.

The strength of this approach is that it shows why worldviews fail on their own terms. It is rarely persuasive to criticize other views from within your own perspective. All that really shows is that those other views disagree with
you
. Instead you must step imaginatively inside other perspectives to show from within why they lack explanatory power.

MIT Prof: My Children Are Machines

When God gives people up to their idols, they experience a growing conflict between their worldview and their lived reality. When I teach these concepts in the classroom, an example my students find especially poignant is
Flesh and Machines
by Rodney Brooks, professor emeritus at MIT. Brooks writes that a human being is nothing but a machine—a “big bag of skin full of biomolecules” interacting by the laws of physics and chemistry.

In ordinary life, of course, it is difficult to actually see people that way. But, he says, “when I look at my children, I can, when I force myself, … see that they are machines.”

Is that how he treats them, though? Of course not: “That is not how I treat them.… I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis.” Certainly if what counts as “rational” is a materialist worldview in which humans are machines, then loving your children
is
irrational. It has no basis within Brooks’s worldview. It sticks out of his box.

How does he reconcile such a heart-wrenching cognitive dissonance? He doesn’t. Brooks ends by saying, “I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs.”
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He has given up on any attempt to reconcile his theory with his experience. He has abandoned all hope for a unified, logically consistent worldview. He has no defense.

This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society—ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children—have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the attic, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain.

The Bible teaches that, without God, people are morally lost. But they are also intellectually lost because they are trying to live within the limits of a worldview that is too cramped and narrow to account for
their own humanity
. They are forced to place their entire hope for dignity and meaning in an upper-story realm that they themselves regard as irrational and unknowable—nothing but necessary falsehoods.

Tragically, over time those humane ideals will inevitably lose their hold. After all, we are made in God’s image as logical beings; thus we tend to follow the logical consequences of our premises. It is psychologically impossible to accept concepts that we regard as fictions, no matter how useful. If someone like Brooks genuinely thinks his children are just mechanisms operating by whirring gears, that conviction will eventually erode the “unconditional love” he feels for them. If the leadership classes in a society genuinely think people are machines, that conviction will eventually erode political liberty. Idols have practical consequences.
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Chesterton: Christianity “Too Good to Be True”

Today Christians have an unprecedented opportunity to present the biblical worldview as positive and life affirming. If you begin with matter operating by blind, mechanical forces, then logically humans cannot ultimately be anything
but
complex mechanisms. Your starting assumptions limit the categories available to you.

But if you begin with a transcendent personal Agent, then you have a perfectly logical explanation for why humans are likewise personal agents. The cause is adequate to the effect. The very phenomena that are so problematic for scientific materialism—like free will, consciousness, love—can be logically accounted for within a Christian worldview. No part of human experience falls outside its categories. Nothing sticks out of the box. The human person is no longer a misfit in a deterministic world. There is no division into an upper and lower story because you don’t need a mystical attic to stash things that don’t fit in your worldview. Christianity continues to affirm the unity of truth as a coherent, logically consistent whole. In Christ, all things still “hold together” (Col. 1:17).

G. K. Chesterton wagers that secularists reject Christianity not because it is a bad theory but because it seems “too good to be true.” For the materialist, “the universe is a universal prison.” It shackles humans in an interlocking chain of cause and effect. Thus when a secularist encounters the biblical view, “it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom.”

If secularists find Christianity “incredible,” Chesterton concludes, that is because it is so incredibly positive in affirming a high view of human freedom and dignity.
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Secular thinkers often criticize Christianity for being irrational. Yet ironically, today it is a biblical worldview that coheres in a logically consistent system. It liberates us from cognitive dissonance, imparting a profound inner unity and peace. It accords with the natural human longing for a life of integrity and wholeness. (The word
integrity
comes from the Latin word for wholeness.) When talking with secular people, we can show them how Christianity fulfills
their own
highest hopes and ideals.

Of course, not everyone who accepts materialism or naturalism goes on to accept determinism. But I suggest that’s only because they are not as careful to work out the logical outcome of their premises. Often people accept ideas that sound attractive or sophisticated but do not follow those ideas all the way to their final implications. By giving examples of scientists and philosophers like those we have met in Principle #3, we can provide a reality check. People are more likely to be persuaded when they learn the negative consequences of materialism and atheism from the writings of materialists and atheists themselves.

Walking Off the Postmodern Map

So far we have applied the practical test to Enlightenment worldviews. What happens when we apply Principle #3 to the other side of the coin—the continental tradition that stems from the Romantic movement? As we saw earlier, instead of absolutizing the lower story (matter), philosophical idealism absolutizes the upper story (mind). It claims that ultimate reality is the mental realm of ideas. Schopenhauer describes idealism by saying it takes the “eternal truths” that were the foundation of all previous philosophy, “investigates their origin, and then finds this to be in man’s head.”
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But if the eternal truths really are “in man’s head,” then the logical conclusion is that they are
not
eternal after all. They are merely human constructs, relative and changing. In our day, postmodernism has drawn that conclusion. It holds that humans have no access to an objective or extra-mental world. In Rorty’s succinct phrase, truth is “made rather than found.”
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If materialism keeps its old trunks in the attic, we might say postmodernism keeps its old trunks in the basement, labeled with postmodern jargon like “Logocentric,” “Post-Colonialist,” “Metanarrative,” and “False Consciousness.”

Let’s ask the same question we posed to Enlightenment worldviews: Does postmodernism account for the facts of universal human experience? Can it be lived without contradiction in the real world? Or does it lead to an untenable dualism?

The answer is that in practice postmodernists do not live consistently on the basis of their own philosophy. They do not treat all ideas as human constructs. Instead, like every other normal person, they test their mental concepts against extra-mental states of affairs in dozens of ways. They
thought
the bread was in the refrigerator but found it was on the counter. They
thought
their keys were on the table but found they were in a pocket. How? By comparing their internal thoughts with a state of affairs in the external world.

In everyday life, postmodernists are just as concerned about objective truth as anyone else. Dallas Willard comments, “I have noticed that the most emphatic of Postmodernists turn coldly modern when discussing their fringe benefits or other matters that make a great difference to their practical life.”
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If we use the metaphor that a worldview is a mental map, postmodernists keep walking off their map. It is too small to account for the full geography of who they are.