Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (2 page)

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I was once invited to give a presentation on Capitol Hill on the application of Christian worldview principles in the public arena. During the question period, the audience hushed in surprise as a congressional chief of staff stood up and announced, “I lost my faith at an evangelical college.”

Not at a secular university, not in political battles on Capitol Hill—but at a respected evangelical college.

How did it happen? Afterward, I sought out the chief of staff to hear his story. Bill Wichterman explained that the professors at his college had taught the prevailing theories in their discipline—most of which were secular and sometimes explicitly anti-Christian. Yet they did little to offer a biblical perspective on the subject.

Bill met with several of his professors outside of class, always asking the same question: “How do you relate your faith to your academic discipline—to what you teach in the classroom?” Tragically, not one could give him an answer.

Eventually Bill concluded that Christianity did not
have
any answers, and he decided to abandon it. “I was sorry to give up my Christian faith,” he told me. “But it seemed to have no intellectual foundation.”

Bill’s story reflects an all-too-common pattern today. When young people leave home, they often leave behind their religious upbringing as well. In the past, many returned to Christianity after they married and had children. But today, a growing number are staying away for good.
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Is there hope? Can a biblical worldview equip us with the resources to meet the challenge, reverse the pattern, and confidently set forth our case in the public arena?

The answer is a resounding yes.
Finding Truth
offers a fresh and original strategy to answer the questions raised by young people—and seekers of all ages. It unpacks five powerful principles from Scripture that cut to the heart of any competing worldview or religion. It highlights the life-giving truths that everyone wants but only Christianity can give.

Study Your Way Back to God

How does Bill’s story end? After graduating from college, he discovered there is a field called apologetics that supports Christian claims with logic and reasons. He read books by C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, and many others. Eventually he was persuaded that Christianity has the intellectual resources to respond successfully to competing worldviews after all.

He told me, “I studied my way back to God.”

My personal history is similar to Bill’s. Though raised in a Lutheran family, I could not get answers to the questions that bubbled up in my mind as a teenager. Midway through high school, I abandoned my religious upbringing altogether. Years later, in a ministry called L’Abri hidden away in a tiny village in the Swiss Alps, I finally met people who could answer my questions. (I tell my story in Principle #5.)

My own years of searching and struggling as an agnostic left me with an intense conviction that Christians need to take questions seriously. They need to be prepared to help people “study their way back to God.”

The task can seem daunting. At every turn—from the classroom to the workplace to the Internet—ideas contrary to Christianity are clamoring for our allegiance. Learning how to respond thoughtfully to every competing worldview would take a lifetime of study. And what happens when we encounter a
new
idea? Do we have to come up with a new argument every time?

Or is it possible to find a single line of inquiry that we can apply universally to all ideas?

That was a question I wrestled with for years after I became a Christian. What I have discovered is that the Bible itself offers a powerful strategy for critical thinking—five principles that cut to the heart of any worldview. By mastering these principles, you will be equipped to answer any challenge—while making a compelling and attractive case for Christianity.

Give Me Evidence

The key passage is the first chapter of Romans. Because the apostle Paul was writing to a congregation that had not heard him speak before, he presents the Christian message in a comprehensive way suitable for an audience hearing it for the first time. In fact, we can think of Romans 1 as Paul’s apologetics training manual. It provides effective tools for making sense of worldviews from ancient times to our own day. (If you are not familiar with Romans 1, you may want to flip forward to the appendix and read it first.)

Where does Paul begin his training manual? His first major point is that all people—everywhere and at all times—have access to evidence for God’s existence. How? Through the created order: “the things that have been made.” This is called
general
revelation because it is evidence for God that is accessible to anyone, including those who do not have the written Scripture (which is called
special
revelation). As the psalmist writes, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge” (Ps. 19:1–2). Let’s begin with the verses where Paul explains the concept of general revelation:

We all have access to evidence for God through creation.

Romans 1:19—What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

Romans 1:20—His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

Paul’s claim is that both physical nature and human nature give evidence for the Creator. “The whole creation of God preaches,” as Jonathan Edwards put it.
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How does physical nature give evidence for God? Because the existence of the universe cannot be explained as a product of natural causes alone. This is as true for us as it was for Paul’s first-century readers. Let’s run through a quick survey of some of the most relevant areas of scientific research: the origin of the universe and the origin of life.

The origin of the universe has given rise to a puzzle known as the fine-tuning problem. The fundamental physical constants of the universe are exquisitely balanced, as though on a knife’s edge, to sustain life. Things like the force of gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, the ratio of the mass of the proton and the electron, and many other factors have just the right value needed to make life possible. If any of these critical numbers were changed even slightly, the universe could not sustain any form of life. For example, if the strength of gravity were smaller or larger than its current value by only one part in 10
60
(1 followed by 60 zeros), the universe would be uninhabitable.
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Cosmologists call this the Goldilocks dilemma: Why are these numerical values so precisely calibrated that they are not too high, not too low, but just right to support life? A
New York Times
article says, “These mysterious numbers … are like the knobs on God’s control console, and they seem almost miraculously tuned to allow life.”
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What makes the fine-tuning problem so puzzling is that there is no
physical
cause to explain it. “Nothing in all of physics explains why its fundamental principles should conform themselves so precisely to life’s requirement,” says astronomer George Greenstein. Indeed, they interact in an intricately coordinated way to fulfill a goal or purpose—which is the hallmark of design. As physicist Paul Davies says, “It’s almost as if a Grand Designer had it all figured out.”
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Evidence from Life

The origin of life is equally difficult to explain by any naturalistic scenario. Every cell in our bodies contains a complex coded message. Today the origin of life has been reframed as the origin of biological information.

The central role of information explains why scientists have failed “to cook up life in the chemistry lab,” says Davies. “Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information”—which is clearly
not
chemical. Genetic information can be described only by using terminology borrowed from the mental world of language and communication: DNA is “a genetic ‘database,’ containing ‘instructions’ on how to build an organism. The genetic ‘code’ has to be ‘transcribed’ and ‘translated’ before it can act.”

Biologists’ favorite analogy for DNA is a computer: The molecule itself (the physical chain of chemicals) is the hardware. The DNA (the encoded information) is the software. In origin-of-life research, the focus is on building the hardware. “Attempts at chemical synthesis focus exclusively on the hardware—the chemical substrate of life,” Davies writes; they “ignore the software—the informational aspect.”
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Yet any twelve-year-old kid with a laptop knows that building an electronic device out of copper, plastic, and silicone has nothing to do with writing code to create a software program.

The surprising implication is that even if scientists succeeded in coaxing all the right chemicals to link up and form a DNA molecule in a test tube,
that would do nothing to explain where the encoded genetic information came from
.

In all of human experience (and science is supposed to be based on experience), the source of encoded information is an intelligent agent. Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that an intelligent agent was necessary at the origin of life.
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Yet we don’t really need the latest findings from science to recognize that a mind is needed to explain the universe. In every age, people have realized that an
intelligible
universe must be the product of
intelligence
. In ancient Rome, the Stoic philosophers offered an argument from design that sounds very familiar to modern ears. In the century before Christ, the great Roman orator Cicero wrote, “When we see something moved by machinery, like an orrery [model of the planetary system] or clock or many other such things, we do not doubt that these contrivances are the work of reason.” He then drew the logical conclusion: “When therefore we behold the whole compass of the heaven moving with revolutions of marvelous velocity and … perfect regularity …, how can we doubt that all this is effected not merely by reason, but by a reason that is transcendent and divine?”

Sounding almost biblical in his language, Cicero wrote, “You see not the Deity, yet … by the contemplation of his works you are led to acknowledge a God.”
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Clearly, people in the ancient world were capable of “reading” the message of general revelation in nature. The opening theme in Romans 1 is that anyone can conclude that the created order is the product of an intelligent being. Created things speak of God: “Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Ps. 19:4).

Evidence from Personhood

In speaking of evidence from creation, however, Paul does not mean only physical nature. He also means human nature. Human beings are among the things “that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). Because I have written about the evidence for God in physical nature in earlier books,
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in the rest of this book I will focus on human nature.

How do humans constitute evidence for God? Because they are personal agents. In philosophical terminology,
personal
does not mean warm and friendly. A personal being is a conscious agent with the capacity to think, feel, choose, and act—in contrast to an unconscious principle or substance that operates by blind, automatic forces (such as the forces of nature).
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The existence of personal beings constitutes evidence that they were created by a personal God, not by any non-personal cause.

We’ll discuss the details of this argument in later chapters, but the gist is clear: Because humans are capable of knowing, the first cause that produced them must have a mind. Because humans are capable of choosing, the first cause must have a will. And so on. Philosopher Étienne Gilson captures the argument neatly: because a human is a
someone
and not a
something
, the source of human life must be also a
Someone
.
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Many Bible writers use the same reasoning when they speak against idolatry. Their implied argument is that despite external appearances, an idol is a
something
, not a
someone
. “They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5–6). Therefore idols cannot be the origin of beings who
do
speak and see and hear. The prophet Jeremiah says mockingly, They “say to a tree, ‘You are my father,’ and to a stone, ‘You gave me birth’” (Jer. 2:27). It is the height of illogic to think that humans originated from anything with lower functionality than themselves—from a something instead of a Someone.

It is sometimes said that a mind capable of forming an argument
against
God’s existence constitutes evidence
for
his existence. That is, a conscious being with the ability to reason, weigh evidence, and argue logically must come from a source that has at least the same level of cognitive ability. “He who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see?” (Ps. 94:9). The cause must be capable of producing the effect. Water does not rise above its source.

Atheists’ Children and Their God

General revelation falls under the category of
common grace
, the blessings God bestows on all people regardless of their spiritual condition (in contrast to
special grace
, the blessings of salvation). The concept of common grace is derived from Jesus’s saying that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). Common grace functions as a constant testimony to God’s goodness. When Paul preached to a Gentile audience in an area that is now Turkey, he used an argument from common grace: God “did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17). The regularity of the natural order allows humans to grow food, raise families, invent technology, and maintain some level of cultural and civic order. All human endeavors depend on God’s common grace.