Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (17 page)

As we saw in Principle #2, postmodernism is a form of anti-realism, the view that reality is a social construction. Yet humans cannot help functioning as though the external world is real and our knowledge of it is basically reliable. Those who deny that we have access to an external reality still look both ways before crossing the street. They avoid jumping off balconies. They hold their breath under water. In other words, they know that there is an extra-mental reality to which they must adapt their behavior; otherwise the consequences will be disastrous.

We all learned this basic truth from the time we were tiny. As toddlers, when we bumped into the wall or tipped over our chair and crashed to the floor, we discovered in a painful way that the universe has an objective structure. When the toy box did not contain the toy we wanted, we discovered that reality does not bend to our subjective desires. Anything that we are compelled to affirm, simply in order to function in the world, is part of general revelation.

Christianity explains
why
truth is not merely a human construction. The world is not a creation of my own mind. It is the handiwork of God. The human mind cannot usurp the Creator’s role and function. The biblical concept of creation gives logical grounds to support what humans inescapably conclude by experience from the time we are toddlers.

Remarkably, Rorty concedes that the very idea of objective truth—a truth that is “out there”—makes sense only on the basis of a Christian worldview. “The suggestion that truth is out there … is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own,” a “nonhuman language” written into the cosmos.
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Rorty is harkening back to an image that Christians have embraced since the church fathers—the idea that there are two books: the book of God’s word (the Bible) and the book of God’s world (nature). And because the world itself is a kind of book, there is a message and meaning written in the cosmos itself. Humans should be able to “read” certain fundamental truths in creation. We should be able to discern evidence for God in general revelation, just as Romans teaches.

Don’t Impose Your Facts

Earlier we learned that all idols lead to a mental dichotomy or dualism—and postmodernism is no exception. Philosopher William Lane Craig points out that virtually no one applies postmodernism consistently across the board: “People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of
religion
and
ethics
.”
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In short, they apply their postmodern skepticism selectively.

Think of it this way: We often hear people say, “Don’t impose your religion on me.” But we never hear people say, “Don’t impose your facts on me.” Why not? Because facts are assumed to be objective and universal, binding on everyone.

The upshot is that most people function as modernists
and
postmodernists—depending on the situation. When dealing with religion and morality, most people no longer think in terms of true and false. They no longer look to religion for an explanatory system to answer the cosmic questions of life. Instead they choose a religion the way they choose a wallpaper pattern or an item on the menu, says philosopher Ernest Gellner. It has become an area of life where it is considered acceptable to act on the basis purely of personal taste or feelings. By contrast, Gellner says, when “serious issues are at stake” like making money or meeting medical needs, then people want solutions based on “real knowledge.” They want to know the tested outcomes of objective science and research.
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What this means is that most people live fragmented lives. In the private world of home, church, and relationships, they operate on a postmodern view of truth as subjective and relative. But in the public world of work, business, and finance, they operate on a modernist view of truth as objective and verifiable. In short, they no longer live as whole persons with a consistent, coherent philosophy of life.

No wonder philosopher Louis Dupré says that the central challenge of our age is the lack of any integrating truth: “We experience our culture as fragmented; we live on bits of meaning and lack the overall vision that holds them together in a whole.” As a result, people feel an intense need for self-integration. Christianity has the power to integrate our lives and create a coherent personality structure, but only if we embrace it as the ultimate, capital-T truth that pulls together all lesser truths. Our commitment to Christian truth “cannot simply remain one discrete part of life,” Dupré says; it must “integrate all other aspects of existence.”
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Anything less is neither beautiful nor compelling enough to ignite our passion and transform our character.

A Harvard Professor’s Admission

I once delivered a presentation that included several of the examples in this chapter. Afterward a Harvard professor came up to me from the audience, visibly upset. After all, I had criticized the work of university professors at places like Harvard—his own colleagues. “
They know
their theories don’t explain ordinary life outside the lab,” he said emphatically. “But why throw it in their faces?”

The first thing that struck me was that he had let slip an amazing admission. These scientists and philosophers
know
that their theories do not fit the real world? In Romans 1, Paul says the testimony of general revelation is knowable by everyone. Was this professor unwittingly confirming what Paul says?

When we read in Romans 1 that those who worship idols are “without excuse,” those words may seem harsh. In this chapter, however, we have met several scholars who openly acknowledge that their reductionist theories clash with the facts of experience. They are aware, at some level, that they harbor a severe contradiction. Derek Parfit says this type of inner conflict is actually quite common. Addressing his fellow philosophers, he writes, “At a reflective or intellectual level, we may be convinced that some view is true; but at another level, one that engages more directly with our emotions, we may continue to think and feel
as if
some other view were true.” He concludes, “Many of us, I suspect, have such inconsistent beliefs about the metaphysical questions that concern us most,” such as free will, consciousness, and the self.
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How do philosophers justify living with “inconsistent beliefs”? Yale philosopher Karsten Harries ventures to say many hold a “double truth” theory. They are “hard-wired” to hold certain ideas as true in terms of first-person experiences—but they hold the same ideas to be false according to science. Here’s how Harries puts it: “As intelligent agents we are
compelled to believe
certain things, most importantly that our will is free, that we are selves that persist through time, that there are moral truths that can be universalized, beliefs which as individuals committed to science we yet
know to be false
.” That is, “false” according to a materialist conception of science.
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You would think that when people realize they hold inconsistent beliefs, they would look for better ones. As we have seen, however, many scholars entrench themselves even more deeply in their reductionism. To acknowledge the evidence from general revelation would point them toward the biblical God—and so they suppress the evidence.

Fascinatingly, there are even a few who admit that getting rid of God is precisely the goal of their reductionist theories. Take Francis Crick, who became a household name after he and James Watson discovered the double-helix structure in DNA. Crick freely admits that he sought out reductionist theories because he wanted to discredit religion. “I went into science because of these religious reasons, there’s no doubt about that,” he said in an interview. “I asked myself what were the two things that appear inexplicable and are used to support religious beliefs.” The two things, he decided, were the origin of life (physical nature) and of consciousness (human nature). His goal was to explain away both of them by reducing them to physical-chemical causes.

In the same interview, Watson also expressed his religious motivation. The discovery of the double helix, he said, gives “grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours.”
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At least for some people, the purpose of proposing reductionist theories is to deny the Creator and to expropriate his divine power.

Secularism Is Too Small for Secularists

The second thing that struck me about the Harvard professor’s comment was that he characterized an analysis of someone’s worldview as “throwing it in their faces.” The goal of testing worldviews should never to be attack those who hold them but to open their minds to a better alternative. People often hold half-baked ideas that they would reject if they understood more clearly where those ideas lead. So they erect a kind of buffer zone to protect themselves from recognizing the illogical and inhumane consequences of their worldviews. An effective method of apologetics can be to gently press people to think more critically by peeling away the protective layers so they can see the implications of their views more clearly. Only then will they be truly free to make tough choices about their fundamental convictions.

When pressing people to the logic of their conclusions, however, we must act with love and empathy, for when people feel the full force of their views, it can be deeply unsettling.
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Scripture says that when Paul noticed the many idols dotting the landscape in Athens, he was “provoked,” a word that is also translated stirred, distressed, troubled, or grieved (Acts 17:16). A Christian’s motive in apologetics should be a God-inspired grief for the lost. We should be brokenhearted over the dehumanizing reductionisms that dishonor and destroy our fellow human beings. We should weep for people whose dark worldviews deny that their life choices have meaning or moral significance. We should be moved by sorrow for people whose education has taught them that their loves, dreams, and highest ideals are ultimately nothing but electrical impulses jumping across the synapses in their brains. We should mourn for postmoderns who think that (as Schopenhauer said) the “eternal truths” are only in one’s head.

When talking to people trapped in a secular worldview, we can help them to see that it gives no basis for the realities of life that they themselves care most about. The very fact that they cannot live within its cramped confines is a sign that they were made to live in a larger, richer conceptual universe. Secularism is too small for secularists. We should begin by expressing solidarity with their deepest longings for meaning and significance—and then show that in a biblical worldview, those longings are not merely illusions or useful fictions but living realities.

We often hear stereotypes that Christianity is negative and repressive; that it regards human nature as corrupt and worthless; that it places little value on life in this world. But in reality the Christian worldview has a much higher view of human life than any competing system. It gives a logical basis for the facts of experience that are denied by the dominant secular worldviews of our day: freedom, creativity, love, personal significance, genuine truth. How can we be anything but loving and joyful in communicating such a life-giving message?

Another common negative stereotype is that Christianity is irrational and obscurantist. In the next chapter, you will learn how to turn the tables on that charge—to show that in reality it is idols that lead to irrational and self-contradictory worldviews. You will learn a simple yet devastating strategy to demonstrate how idolatrous worldviews shoot themselves in the foot.

PRINCIPLE #4

• • • • •

Do Christians have to check their science at the church door? Michael Egnor, a leading brain surgeon, used to think so. After years of rigorous scientific training, he was sure a scientific worldview was incompatible with any form of religion.

Ironically, it was science itself that showed him how mistaken he was.

“I was raised as an agnostic and grew up pretty much as a scientific materialist,” Egnor told me.
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He came to regard Christianity as an inspiring set of moral tales—lessons that were spiritually uplifting but not true.

Why was he so certain? Because, in his view, science had decisively disproved all theistic claims. “As a science major in college,” Egnor said, “I was steeped in Darwinian evolution, which seemed to demonstrate that life could be explained perfectly well by material mechanisms alone. There was no reason to invoke God.” Darwin’s theory seemed to have discredited the classic argument from design.

Egnor’s studies also covered Freud, whose theories persuaded him that “religion is wish fulfillment—a product of the search for a father figure, a way of working out our internal fears and desires.” As a result of his university studies, he told me, “Every time I even considered Christianity, I was stopped cold by the thought that it would mean abandoning scientific integrity.”

Over the years, Egnor rose to the top of his field. He was appointed professor and vice president of neurosurgery at State University of New York, Stony Brook, and became an award-winning brain surgeon, named one of New York’s best doctors by
New York Magazine
. One of his specialties is the treatment of hydrocephalus (“water on the brain”), and while developing a theory of blood flow to the brain, his research took a surprising turn. He realized the cranial system he was studying was like an ingeniously designed gadget. The filter that protects the delicate capillaries from the pulsating force of the heartbeat “is a finely tuned mechanism analogous to vibration dampers widely used in engineering. In fact, most of what I needed to know was not in biology textbooks but in
engineering
textbooks.”

And what engineers do, of course, is design things.

Eventually Egnor realized that virtually all biological research operates on the presumption of design. For example, a standard procedure in biology is called “reverse engineering,” which is modeled on the kind of thinking you would do if you came across a widget and did not know how it functioned. You would take it apart piece by piece, working backward to reproduce the engineer’s thought process when he originally designed it. That’s exactly the kind of analysis that biologists do in the laboratory. They tease apart molecules like proteins or genes, asking what each part does and how they interact to achieve their function.

In essence, biologists operate on the basis of design all the time—in practice at least—regardless of which theory they hold.

Philosopher Michael Ruse, though himself an outspoken Darwinist, says biology unavoidably relies on “design-type thinking.” Living things are best explained by discovering what purpose their parts serve. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood. The purpose of the eye is to see. Fins are designed for swimming, and wings for flying. All the components work together in a coherent, coordinated fashion to achieve a goal.

“We treat organisms—the parts at least—
as if
they were manufactured,
as if
they were designed, and then we try to work out their functions,” Ruse writes. “End-directed thinking—teleological thinking—is appropriate in biology because, and only because, organisms seem
as if
they were manufactured,
as if
they had been created by an intelligence and put to work.”
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Surprisingly, even Darwin did not deny that the world looks as if it were designed. He merely argued that the appearance of design is misleading—that the same teleological order can be created by material forces instead.
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As we saw in Principle #3, the phrase
as if
signals cognitive dissonance. It indicates that certain ideas are inescapable in practice, no matter what a person’s worldview says. When a concept (such as design) has to be assumed in order to understand living systems, that is a clue that it is a part of general revelation.

It’s Not Brain Surgery … Oh Wait, Yes It Is

In Egnor’s work in the lab as a medical researcher, he ran into the same cognitive dissonance again and again. “I was surprised at how little the Darwinian paradigm contributed to my work,” he told me. “By contrast, the design paradigm aligned nicely with the most important aspects of my research.” Eventually he had to make a decision. When theory and facts contradict one another, which would he follow?

Egnor’s guiding principle was to follow the evidence wherever it leads. He decided the best explanation for why living things function as if they were designed is that they
were
designed. “I came to see that Darwinism is a philosophical bias more than coherent science. Darwinian processes may explain some patterns and changes in gene frequency in populations, but the evidence does not even remotely support the claim that chance and necessity fully account for the appearance of complex design in living things.”

What about Freud? “Freud’s notion that religion is wish fulfillment can be turned against his own theory,” Egnor said. “In fact, it is much more plausible that atheism, rather than Christianity, is a form of wish fulfillment. For if there is no God, then no one is watching, there is no moral accountability, and you can do what you want (as long as you can get away with it).” As Polish poet Czesław Miłosz observes, there is great relief in “a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders
we are not going to be judged
.”
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Egnor finally realized that if he were to follow the facts wherever they lead, he would have to accept Christianity. And having a scientist’s respect for facts, that’s what he did. Immediately he discovered a new sense of unity and wholeness. The biblical God proved to be a sufficient integration point to unify all areas of his life, both professional and personal. Christianity is a worldview conceptually rich enough to account for all of human experience.

“Now I see science as another way to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation,” he told me. “I bring science into church with me. Truth is unitary.”

Tests for Truth

Egnor’s story illustrates the two major ways to test a philosophy or worldview: Does it fit the facts? And is it logically consistent? These are the same questions we raise in testing any idea—whether in a science lab, a court of law, or when asking a friend why she showed up late. First, does the explanation match what we know about the world? That’s the question we asked in Principle #3. Second, does the explanation hold together logically? That is the question we will consider now in Principle #4.

Internal contradictions are fatal to any worldview because contradictory statements are necessarily false. “This circle is square” is contradictory, so it has to be false. Scripture assumes that logical contradictories cannot both be true: “No lie is of the truth” (1 John 2:21); God “never lies” (Titus 1:2); God “cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13).

An especially damaging form of contradiction is self-referential absurdity—which means a theory sets up a definition of truth that it
itself
fails to meet. Therefore it refutes itself.

You’ve probably heard the argument from self-referential absurdity in ordinary conversation, even if you didn’t call it that. To the relativist who says there are no absolutes—are there are
absolutely
no absolutes? To the skeptic who says we can’t know anything for sure—do you know
that
for sure? In each case, the critic is turning the claim back on itself to show that it undercuts itself. It is self-defeating.

Apologist Greg Koukl likes to say this is how a philosophy commits suicide. When its own criteria are applied to itself, it kills itself. It slits its own throat.
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People sometimes dismiss this kind of argument as nothing but a snappy put-down, a parlor game. A university student who had recently abandoned his Christian upbringing told his parents he now realized there are no absolute truths. When they asked whether that statement itself was absolutely true, he dismissed their response as a rhetorical trick and refused to engage any longer. In Principle #4 we will discover why it is not a trick but a valid and powerful form of argument.

In fact, we will discover that virtually
all
idol-based worldviews are self-refuting. Why? Because they are reductionistic. When reductionism is applied to the human mind, it reduces reason to something
less
than reason. It says the ideas in our minds are products of natural selection (Darwinism) or economic conditions (Marxism) or electrochemical responses in the brain (contemporary neuroscience). Yet the only way a worldview can build its
own
case is by using reason. Thus when it discredits reason, it undercuts its own case. It is self-defeating.

Of course, most worldviews are plagued by a variety of logical difficulties and contradictions. To track each one individually would seem an endless task. But because idol-centered worldviews are all reductionistic, this one fundamental flaw is predictable.
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Learning to identify it will empower you with a laser-focused strategy that you can apply to any and every worldview you encounter.

As soon as Christians raise the problem of contradictions, we are likely to get pushback from people claiming that Christianity itself contains contradictions. They point to the doctrine of the Trinity or to Jesus’s paradoxical statements such as “You must lose your life in order to save it.” But these are not genuine logical contradictions. In logic, the law of non-contradiction states that two antithetical propositions cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. Biblical theology does not say that God is One
in the same sense
that God is Three. And Jesus was using paradoxical language to make a point (a paradox is an
apparent
contradiction). His statements were plays on words to catch people’s attention, but they were not logical contradictories.

More to the point, Christianity is not self-referentially absurd. Because it is not reductionistic regarding human reason, it is not self-refuting. It does not commit suicide.

Principle #4

Test the Idol: Does It Contradict Itself?

To see why the argument from self-referential absurdity is not just a rhetorical trick, let’s start with a historical example. Throughout much of the twentieth century, American academia was dominated by an extreme form of empiricism called logical positivism. As we saw earlier, classic empiricism puts everything into the box of the senses. Any statement that cannot be traced back to sense impressions is rejected as false. Logical positivism took this claim a step further: it insisted that any statement not reducible to sense impressions is not just false, but cognitively meaningless—that is, not even subject to standards of true and false.

Take, for example, a moral statement such as “Slavery is unjust.” Justice is not something you can stuff into a test tube or study under a microscope. The logical positivists argued that therefore the sentence “Slavery is unjust” has no cognitive content. It is merely an expression of personal feelings or preference. It really means “I don’t like slavery.” This view of morality is sometimes called emotivism because it reduces moral statements to expressions of emotion, like saying “Boo!” or “Hooray!” And “Hooray!” is not something that can be true or false. A moral statement may be important to the person saying it, but according to logical positivism, it is cognitively meaningless. It is literally nonsense.

This view of morality has percolated through all levels of society. After all, it is much easier to dismiss someone’s views by saying “That’s just a value judgment” and treating it as a subjective preference instead of examining it seriously as a valid candidate for truth.

What happened, though, when the test of logical positivism was applied to itself? Its central claim was that statements are meaningful only if they are empirically testable. But is
that
statement empirically testable? Of course not. It is not an empirical observation. It is a metaphysical rule—an arbitrary definition of what qualifies as knowledge. Thus when the criterion of logical positivism was applied to itself, it was discredited. It stood self-condemned.

Logical positivism had been so influential for such a long time that its collapse sent shock waves all through the intellectual world. Its fall “was the most important philosophical event of the 20th century,” says William Lane Craig.
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The strategy of applying a philosophy’s own standard of truth to itself proved to be no mere rhetorical trick. It is a powerful tool for testing truth claims. And it can be applied to many other philosophies to show that they self-destruct in the same way.

Hitting the Marx

The key to identifying where a worldview commits suicide is to uncover its particular form of reductionism. Any theory that says, “Truth claims are nothing but X” is susceptible to self-refutation. For example, Karl Marx said that truth claims are nothing but rationalizations of economic interests: Laws are created by the rich to protect their property. Religion is the “opiate of the people,” placating the poor with false promises of a happy afterlife.
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But what happens if we apply Marx’s rule to his own theory? Did he create it merely to rationalize his own economic interests? If so, we can dismiss it as a serious truth claim. The theory commits suicide.

Or take Friedrich Nietzsche. He held that all human action is driven by the will to power: Morality is invented by the weak to give them leverage over the strong. Religion is a “holy lie” used to control people.
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But what about Nietzsche’s own theory? Was it driven by his own will to power? Then why should the rest of us pay any attention to it? The theory undercuts itself.