Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (19 page)

Surprisingly, however, Darwin never confronted this internal contradiction in this theory. Why not? Because he expressed his “horrid doubt” selectively—only when considering the case for a Creator.

From time to time, Darwin admitted that he still found the idea of God persuasive. He once confessed his “inward conviction … that the Universe is not the result of chance.” It was in the next sentence that he expressed his “horrid doubt.” So the “conviction” he mistrusted was his lingering conviction that the universe is not the result of chance.

In another passage Darwin admitted, “I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man.” Again, however, he immediately veered off into skepticism: “But then arises the doubt—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?”

That is, can it be trusted when it draws “grand conclusions” about a First Cause? Perhaps the concept of God is merely an instinct programmed into us by natural selection, Darwin added, like a monkey’s “instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.”

In short, it was on occasions when Darwin’s mind led him to a theistic conclusion that he dismissed the mind as untrustworthy.
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He failed to recognize that, to be logically consistent, he needed to apply the same skepticism to his own theory.

Modern followers of Darwin still apply the theory selectively. Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature,” in which “mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.”
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In other words, God is an idea that appears in the human mind when the electrical circuitry of the brain has evolved to a certain level of complexity.

To be logically consistent, however, Gould should turn the same skepticism back onto Darwin’s ideas, which he never did. Gould applied his evolutionary skepticism selectively—to discredit the idea of God.

Applied consistently, Darwinism undercuts not only itself but also the entire scientific enterprise. Kenan Malik, a writer trained in neurobiology, writes, “If our cognitive capacities were simply evolved dispositions, there would be no way of knowing
which
of these capacities lead to true beliefs and which to false ones.” Thus “to view humans as little more than sophisticated animals … undermines confidence in the scientific method.”
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Just so. Science itself is at stake. John Lennox, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, writes that according to atheism, “the mind that does science … is the end product of a mindless unguided process. Now, if you knew your computer was the product of a mindless unguided process, you wouldn’t trust it. So, to me atheism undermines the rationality I need to do science.”
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Of course, the atheist pursuing his research has no choice but to rely on rationality, just as everyone else does. The point is that he has no philosophical basis for doing so. Only those who affirm a rational Creator have a basis for trusting human rationality.

The reason so few atheists and materialists seem to recognize the problem is that, like Darwin, they apply their skepticism selectively. They apply it to undercut only ideas they reject, especially ideas about God.
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They make a tacit exception for their own worldview commitments.

Why Science Is a “Miracle”

It is clear now why Christianity played a significant role in launching the scientific revolution in the first place. Only a biblical worldview provides an adequate epistemology for science. First, a rational God created the world with an intelligible structure, and second, he created humans in his image. In the words of historian Richard Cohen, science required the concept of a “rational creator of all things,” along with the corollary that “we lesser rational beings might, by virtue of that Godlike rationality, be able to decipher the laws of nature.” Theologian Christopher Kaiser states the same idea succinctly: the early scientists assumed that “the same Logos that is responsible for its ordering is also reflected in human reason.”
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For the early scientists, the image of God was not a dry doctrine to which they gave merely cognitive assent. Nor was it a purely private “faith.” They treated it as a public truth, the epistemological foundation for the entire scientific enterprise. Their goal, they said, was to think God’s thoughts after him.
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At the time of the scientific revolution, biblical epistemology was the guarantee that the human mind is equipped to gain genuine knowledge of the world.

And it still is today. A widely quoted essay by Eugene Wigner is titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Wigner asks why the mathematical formulas we devise in our heads work so well in describing the external universe. The match between them “is something bordering on the mysterious.” Indeed, “there is no rational explanation for it.” No explanation, that is, within scientific materialism.

“It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us,” Wigner muses. At the very least, “certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.”
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By contrast, a biblical worldview offers a perfectly reasonable explanation for the effectiveness of mathematics—namely, that a rational God created humans in his image to think his thoughts after him.

In fact, looking at history, we find that a biblically inspired confidence in the mathematical structure of the universe came
first
, before any actual scientific discoveries. Mathematician Morris Kline writes, “The early mathematicians were sure of the existence of mathematical laws underlying natural phenomena and persisted in the search for them because they were convinced
a priori
that God had incorporated them in the construction of the universe.”
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People must first be convinced there
is
a mathematical order in nature. Otherwise they will not go searching for it—and science will not get off the ground.

What this means is that even today, anyone who wants to pursue science has to adopt an epistemology derived from a biblical worldview—at least in practice. To do science, even the most hard-boiled atheist must function
as if
Christianity were true.

Postmodern Prison

What about postmodernism? What happens to it if we apply the test of self-referential absurdity?

As we saw earlier, postmodernism absolutizes the social group. It claims that individuals are largely constituted by their membership in a community. When we absorb the language of our community, in the process we absorb its worldview—the story line or narrative it invokes to explain the world. Thus when we speak, we are only externalizing a story line that we have first assimilated.

Postmodernists express this idea using paradoxical statements like, “Language speaks us, rather than we speak it.”
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Their point is that we cannot even think apart from the language we have assimilated from our community. Nietzsche, with his typical flair, wrote that we are trapped in the “prison house of language.”

Because worldviews are transmitted through language, postmodernists use the metaphor of “language games.” Just as baseball and football are games with virtually no rules in common, so worldviews are said to be language games, each with its unique set of rules. Each community has its own language game for making sense of the world—what Jean-François Lyotard calls little narratives. But there is no universal narrative—no “metanarrative”—that is valid for all human beings at all times. In Lyotard’s words, “There is no possibility that language games can be unified or totalized in any metadiscourse.”
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Yet what reasons can Lyotard give us for accepting his theory? Isn’t his own view just one more language game like all the others? Isn’t he trapped in the prison house of his own language, just like everyone else? Then why should we pay any attention to it?

Postmodernism is an example of what is called a “performative contradiction,” which means that a position is contradicted in the very act of being asserted.
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Everyday examples of a performative contradiction include saying (in English), “I cannot speak English.” Or, “I do not exist” (to make the statement, I must exist). When a postmodernist asserts that there is no universally valid truth, he is implicitly claiming that his
own
assertion is universally valid and true. To make the statement, he has to occupy the transcendental position that postmodernism says is not there to be occupied. Thus every time a postmodernist states his position, he contradicts it. The position is self-refuting.

Barthes Busted

When postmodern thought was applied to literary theory, it gave rise to an offshoot called deconstructionism. Recall that for postmodernism, individuals are constituted by their membership within a community. The implication is that individuals do not really have original or creative ideas but merely reflect the ideas of their communities. For example, literary critic Roland Barthes says a piece of writing is merely a “tissue of quotations” absorbed from the surrounding culture.

Barthes is best known for his slogan “the death of the author”—by which he means the death of the very concept of individual creativity. In his view, writers are akin to the bards or shamans of old, who were not inventors of their own stories so much as transmitters of the stories of their clan, tribe, or community. Jacques Derrida means the same thing in his paradoxical statement “Texts have no author.”
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Moreover, we all belong to a variety of communities based on attributes such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity—all with conflicting outlooks and interests. As a result, every author will unconsciously reflect conflicting social messages. For Barthes, a text is a mix “in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”
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The goal of the literary critic is to dig beneath the surface of the text to excavate and disentangle those clashing meanings.

This is called
deconstructing
the text—hence the term
deconstructionism
.

What reason does Barthes give for accepting such a theory? As Alan Jacobs writes, “As soon as deconstructionists get in the business of providing reasons, they are perforce in the business of making claims and thus are subject to their own critique.”
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What happens if we subject Barthes’s views to his own critique? We have to conclude that he, too, is merely a mouthpiece for social forces such as race, class, and gender. His “own” writings do not offer original or creative insights but are merely collages of conflicting quotations absorbed unconsciously from the communities to which he belongs. The “death of the author” must include Barthes himself.

In practice, the only way deconstructionists can function is to tacitly exempt themselves from the critique they apply to everyone else. They presume to stand above the fray, with unique insight to deconstruct
everyone else’s
statements as products of underlying interests and power struggles, while treating their
own
writings as immune to the process of deconstruction. They write as though they alone are able to transcend the social forces of race, class, and gender that render everyone else a victim of false consciousness.
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Thus ironically, postmodernists contradict their own views every time they write a book or article. Deconstructionists hope their own work will be treated as a serious contribution from a creative mind, not merely a replay of cultural messages. They continue to author books arguing that there is no author.

Theologian Mark C. Taylor, himself a postmodernist, explains that the death of the author was an inevitable result of the death of God: “The death of God was the disappearance of the Author who had inscribed absolute truth and univocal meaning in world history.” And because humans are made in the image of God, Taylor concludes, “the death of God implies the disappearance of the author.”
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For if there is no Creator, then humans do not have the dignity of being sub-creators. They are merely products of social and historical forces.

Postmodernism and Terror

To understand the source of postmodernism, we must place its founders in their historical context. Why were they so opposed to grand metanarratives? The answer is that they viewed them as the source of brutal, oppressive political regimes. Most of the founders of postmodernism were Europeans who had witnessed firsthand history’s bloodiest and most oppressive political systems—Nazism and Communism. As we saw in Principle #2 both of these systems centered on a single principle: race (Nazism) or economic class (Communism). Both embraced a grand vision of history moving inexorably toward some ideal society. And both became totalitarian, using their utopian visions to justify secret police and death camps.

After World War II, many European thinkers who had suffered under these oppressive regimes decided that the source of totalitarianism lay in “totalizing” metanarratives. By “totalizing” they meant a worldview that focuses on a single dimension of human experience, elevating it to a false absolute and subordinating everything else to its categories. When a one-dimensional, totalizing worldview gains political power, those who disagree will be marginalized, oppressed, left out, silenced, dominated, co-opted, controlled, and coerced. They will be stigmatized as different, perceived as “the other,” locked up in concentration camps. All must bow to the state-enforced idol—or be burned in the fiery furnace of oppression.

Postmodernists’ insight into the dynamics of false absolutes should sound familiar. We have been making a similar critique, showing how idols are created when some part of creation is absolutized. The mistake postmodernists made was to think the source of the problem was a commitment to any comprehensive truth. In
The Postmodern Condition
, Lyotard says the conviction that there is only one truth, the whole truth, leads inevitably to “terror”: “The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one [truth].”