Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (30 page)

42.
Katherine Timpf, “Harvard Plans ‘Mandatory Power and Privilege Training’ for Poli-Sci Students,”
Campus Reform
, May 13, 2014.

43.
“One would hope that any young person precocious enough to read Kant would have the ability to recognize historical context and to approach critically statements that sound unethical, bigoted, or scientifically dated to her modern ears. One would hope parents buying Kant for their kids could do the same without chiding from publishers.” Josh Jones, “Publisher Places a Politically Correct Warning Label on Kant’s
Critiques
,”
Open Culture
, March 20, 2014.

44.
Dallas Willard, “What Significance Has ‘Postmodernism’ for Christian Faith?,”
www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=70
.

45.
Richard Rorty,
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
(Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1999), 22.

46.
Rorty,
Contingency
, 21.

47.
Dooyeweerd,
New Critique
, I:58, n. 3.

48.
Nirvana “is a state beyond and without desire or personal, individual existence.” “Despite the considerable differences between these two religions (and the pluralism within each religion), the enlightenment experience of both nirvana (Buddhism) and moksha (Hinduism) requires the negation of individuality, personality.” The individual’s personal existence “is dissolved into the impersonal divine.” Groothuis,
Christian Apologetics
, 385–87.

49.
Ivan Granger, “Li Po—The Birds Have Vanished into the Sky [the title of the poem],”
Poetry Chaikhana Blog
, March 18, 2013,
www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2013/03/18/li-po-the-birds-have-vanished-into-the-sky-2/
. Granger continues: “The ‘mountain’ is finally recognized as your true Self, your only self, eternal.” That is, your individual self dissolves into the pantheistic deity.

50.
Lit-sen Chang,
Zen-Existentialism: The Spiritual Decline of the West
, cited in Walter R. Martin,
Kingdom of the Cults
, revised, updated, and expanded (Grand Rapids, MI: Bethany, 2003), 309.

51.
A philosophical movement called personalism pointed out that both Enlightenment and Romantic worldviews dehumanize the person: “Personalism … emerged only in the context of the broad critical reaction against what can be called the various
impersonalistic
philosophies which came to dominate the Enlightenment and Romanticism in the form of rationalistic and romantic forms of pantheism and idealism.… Personalism thus arose as a reaction to impersonalist modes of thought which were perceived as dehumanizing. The impersonal dynamic of modern pantheism and monism in both their rationalistic and Romantic forms underlie many of the modern philosophies that personalism turns against, idealistic as well as materialistic.… Certain distinctive characteristics can be discerned that generally hold for personalism as such. These include an insistence on the radical difference between persons and non-persons and on the irreducibility of the person to impersonal spiritual or material factors.” Williams and Bengtsson, “Personalism,”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
.

52.
In the Koran, the angel Gabriel is portrayed as claiming that he is “confirming previous scriptures” (Sura 2:97). Those previous scriptures are the Hebrew Torah, the psalms of David, and the Gospels of Jesus Christ (Sura 4:163; 5:44–48).

53.
Sura 4:171.

54.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr,
Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization
(New York: HarperOne, 2002), 3, 6; and see
Total Truth
, appendix 2. The French philosopher René Guénon (who converted to Islam) argued that the concept of the divine as a non-personal Absolute is a common core uniting neo-Platonism in the West, Hinduism in the East, and Islam in the Middle East. See Parviz Morewedge, ed.,
Neoplatonism and Islamic Thought: Studies in Neoplatonism, Ancient and Modern
, vol. 5 (New York: SUNY, 1992); Majid Fakhry,
Al-Farabi, Founder of Islamic Neoplatonism: His Life, Works and Influence
(Rockport, MA: Oneworld, 2002); and Ian Richard Netton,
Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity
(Ikhwan Al-Safa’) (New York: Routledge, 2003). A helpful summary by Netton can be found in “Neoplatonism in Islamic Philosophy,” Islamic Philosophy Online,
www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/H003.htm
.

55.
C. S. Lewis,
Mere Christianity
(New York: HarperOne, 2000), 174. The same intellectual weakness besets unitarianism and deism, which have functioned for many people in the West as temporary stepping-stones from full-blooded Christian theism to outright atheism.

56.
Robert Letham,
The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship
(Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2004), 444–46. Similarly, theologian Peter Toon writes, “the Christian understanding of personhood flows from the Christian doctrine of the three persons who are God.… If God is simply a monad then he cannot be or know personality. To be personal, otherness must be present together with oneness, the one must be in relation to others.”
Our Triune God: A Biblical Portrayal of the Trinity
(Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1996), 241. See also Anthony Thiselton, “Further Issues on ‘Interpreting God’: Christology and Trinity,” chap. 23 in
Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning, Manipulation and Promise
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995). Henri Blocher comments: “If God is caught in the perennial dipolarity of the One and the Many … he cannot claim real independence, absolute primacy and ultimacy. He is defined by reference to another principle than himself, he is included together with the plural world in a broader totality—he is
correlative
. In order for God to be autarkic, self-sufficient, ‘self-contained’ … he needs to be the foundation of both unity and diversity, holding them eternally within himself.” That is, God must be a Trinity. “Immanence and Transcendence in Trinitarian Theology,” in
The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age: Theological Essays on Culture and Religion
, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997).

57.
Williams and Bengtsson, “Personalism,”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
. This explains why many Islamic philosophers have adopted neo-Platonism, with its non-personal concept of the divine One.

58.
Udo W. Middelmann, “The Islamization of Christianity,” Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation,
www.theschaefferfoundation.com/footnote4_1.php
.

59.
“No one thought it important for children to understand the meaning of the Koran—after all, even adults, even great theologians, understand only snippets of its total significance. What was important in education was memorization of the Word of God. The actual, spoken words should be learned by rote such that their recitation becomes second nature.… It was always recognized that the most essential formal learning was memorization of the divine Word, whether or not its meaning was understood.” Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick,
The Vision of Islam
(New York: Paragon, 1994), xvi, xviii, xxxvii–xxxviii.

Sociologists tell us that a focus on mechanical ritual is typical of religions that have a less personal conception of God. These religions tend to stress precision in the performance of rituals and sacred formulas. (Placating the gods becomes similar to magic, which involves manipulating forces, not interacting with a personal being.) By contrast, religions with a highly personal God worry less about ritual precision because a personal Being with knowledge of the worshipper’s inner intentions will respond to impromptu supplication and spontaneous prayer. See Stark, “Why Gods Should Matter in Social Science.” See also Justin L. Barrett, “Smart Gods, Dumb Gods, and the Role of Social Cognition in Structuring Ritual Intuitions,”
Journal of Cognition and Culture
2, no. 3 (2002): 183–93.

60.
Richard Schweder, “Atheists Agonistes,”
New York Times
, November 27, 2006.

61.
See Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karei Bartošek, Jean-Louis Margolin,
The Black Book of Communism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). See also R. J. Rummel,
Death by Government
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 1996); and Jung Chang and John Halliday,
Mao: The Unknown Story
(New York: Random, 2006).

62.
Gilson,
God and Philosophy
, 136.

63.
Aldous Huxley,
The Devils of Loudun
(New York: HarperCollins, 1952), 123.

64.
John Gray, “The Atheist Delusion,”
Guardian
, March 14, 2008.

65.
Those enslaving yokes may even be demonic. The Bible often treats idols as fronts for spiritual forces. In the Old Testament, the psalmist says the Israelites sacrificed their children to demons: “They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons … whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan” (Ps. 106:37–38). In the New Testament, Paul warns that pagan sacrifices are “offered to demons” (1 Cor. 10:19–20). What does this frankly supernatural language mean? Many philosophies treat evil as merely the privation of good, as dark is the absence of light. But those who have suffered under oppressive, bloodthirsty regimes often speak of experiencing evil as an active malevolent force. The Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who was imprisoned by Communist authorities for fourteen years, reports that the guards would torture inmates, screaming, “We are the devil.” Richard Wurmbrand,
Tortured for Christ
(Basingstoke, UK: Marshall Pickering, 1983), 35. In short, good and evil are not merely abstractions. Just as goodness has its source in a personal Being, so, too, much of the evil in the world is connected to powerful personal beings.

66.
Isaiah Berlin,
The Roots of Romanticism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3.

67.
G. K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy
(Rockville, MD: Serenity, 2009), 54.

68.
Johnson,
First Step
, 33.

69.
See Hays,
Echoes
, 38.

PRINCIPLE #3: Secular Leaps of Faith

1.
Deborah Mitchell blogs under the name
http://ireport.cnn.com/people/TXBlue08
. “Why I Raise My Children without God,” CNN iReport, January 14, 2013,
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-910282
. Mitchell is the author of
Growing Up Godless: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Kids without Religion
(New York: Sterling Ethos, 2014).

2.
The CNN author’s argument from evil fails logically as well. If my argument against God is that the world has too much injustice and cruelty, that presumes a moral standard by which we can identify injustice. But a purely material universe does not generate moral standards. It tells us only what
is
, not what
ought
to be. Therefore materialism does not give a basis for saying the world is unjust. Moreover, if humans are nothing but complex biochemical machines, then to call their actions evil is illogical. Machines do not have the capacity to choose good or evil, nor do we hold them accountable for their actions.
See Study Guide

3.
The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl is the origin of most of these phrases. See Richard Kearney,
Modern Movements in European Philosophy
, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 13–15. Dooyeweerd uses the terms “pre-theoretical experience”or “naïve experience.” This is not the same as “naïve realism” or a copy theory of knowledge; rather it refers to a “pre-theoretical datum, corresponding with the integral structure” of experience.
Twilight
, 14. Reformed epistemology gets at roughly the same idea in its concept of “properly basic” knowledge—what we know immediately, not as a result of logical inference or discursive argument. Reformed epistemology was in turn inspired in part by Thomas Reid’s common-sense realism. Reid argued that there are truths “which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and of which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them.”
Inquiry
, 33. For more detail, see
Total Truth
, chapter 11.

4.
Dooyeweerd,
New Critique
, I:83 and
Twilight
, 14. Through pre-theoretical, concrete experience, humans have access to “undeniable states of affairs” in the “cosmic order”—undeniable because they “force themselves on everybody.” And “it is the common task of all philosophical schools and trends to account for them.”
New Critique
, I:115–16; II:71–73.

5.
J. P. Moreland,
The Recalcitrant
Imago Dei
: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism
(London: SCM, 2009), 4.

6.
Alvin Plantinga writes: “Some people think of John Calvin himself, that
fons et origo
of Reformedom, as accepting determinism. But this is far from clear. Calvin did, of course, endorse predestination: but determinism doesn’t follow. Predestination, as Calvin thinks of it, has to do with salvation; it implies nothing about whether I can freely choose to take a walk this afternoon.” Plantinga, “Bait and Switch,”
Books and Culture
, January/February 2013. Likewise with Luther. He wrote
The Bondage of the Will
arguing that humans can do nothing to contribute to their salvation. But he did not mean we cannot choose what to wear today.
See Study Guide

7.
Sean Carroll, “Free Will Is as Real as Baseball,”
Cosmic Variance
(blog),
Discover
, July 13, 2011,
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/07/13/free-will-is-as-real-as-baseball/#.VHSb7r4ULyx
. Carroll is paraphrasing from John Searle,
Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 11.