Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (33 page)

37.
Mark C. Taylor,
Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 261. Taylor is referring specifically to architecture, though he generalizes to the other arts: “Inasmuch as the author-architect is made in the image of God, the death of God implies the disappearance of the author-architect.”

38.
Lyotard,
Postmodern Condition
, 81–82; and Eagleton,
Culture and the Death of God
, 192.

39.
West,
Introduction to Continental Philosophy
, 40.

40.
Jacobs, “Deconstruction,” 190.

41.
Chronicle of Higher Education
, June 27, 1997, B13, cited in Carl P. E. Springer, “The Hermeneutics of Innocence: Literary Criticism from a Christian Perspective,” Leadership U,
www.leaderu.com/aip/docs/springer.html#ref6
.

42.
Frank Lentricchia, “Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic,”
Lingua Franca
, September/October 1996, 64.

43.
Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,”
Critical Inquiry
, 30 (winter 2004): 237–39. As Latour remarks, “One thing is clear, not one of us readers would like to see
our
own most cherished objects treated in this way” (italics in original).

44.
Karen Swallow Prior, “‘Empathetically Correct’ Is the New Politically Correct,”
Atlantic
, May 23, 2014.

45.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism and Humanism,” in
The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature
, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Fiedelson Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 828.

46.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in
The Foucault Reader
, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, Pantheon, 1984), 81, 94. The philosopher is John McCumber,
Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 323. An example might be helpful: Judith Butler illustrates both the dissolution of the subject and the idea that the self is a product of group identity. She argues that a person has no core gender identity—in fact, there is no “stable subject” to “have” a gender. Instead gender is continually being created through the very acts by which it is expressed: “Gender is always a doing.… There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; … identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its result.” Moreover, “gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities.”
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge, 1990), 25, 3.

47.
See
Total Truth
, 132–33, 138, and 408, n. 17.

48.
From the 1984 edition.

49.
The first part of the quote is from an interview with Slavoj Žižek in
The Believer,
July 2004. The second part of the quote is from Slavoj Žižek,
The Fragile Absolute, or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
(London: Verso, 2002), 129.

50.
See Dennis Hollinger, “The Church as Apologetic: A Sociology of Knowledge Perspective,” in
Christian Apologetics in a Postmodern World
, ed. Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1995), 183.

51.
Francis Schaeffer,
The Mark of the Christian
, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006), passim.

52.
Materialism’s low view of the material world has powerful real-world implications for issues such as abortion and homosexuality. See
Saving Leonardo
, chapter 3, and “Transgender Politics vs. the Facts of Life,” The Pearcey Report,
www.pearceyreport.com/archives/2013/07/nancy_pearcey_transgender_politics_vs_facts_of_life.php
.

53.
Alvin Plantinga,
Warrant and Proper Function
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 5, “Perception.”

54.
See
The Soul of Science
, chap. 1.

PRINCIPLE #5: Free-Loading Atheists

1.
“Barna Survey Examines Changes in Worldview among Christians over the Past 13 Years,” March 6, 2009,
www.barna.org/barna-update/21-transformation/252-barna-survey-examines-changes-in-worldview-among-christians-over-the-past-13-years#.VC1nu_ldWSo
. Only one question in the survey addresses a genuinely worldview issue: belief “that absolute moral truth exists.”

2.
Hume,
Inquiry
, 77. Hume consistently pits reason (philosophy) against nature (“instinct or natural impulse”), complaining that nature keeps us from following our thoughts to their logical conclusions. See
Treatise of Human Nature
, 101.

3.
Johnson,
First Step
, 25. This section draws on a lecture of mine titled “Sexual Identity in a Secular Age,” presented August 5, 2013, Houston Baptist University, Summer in the City lecture series.

4.
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of “De la démocratie en Amérique,”
vol. 3, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), 733.

5.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Will to Power
, sect. 765.

6.
Luc Ferry,
A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 77 (italics in original).

7.
Richard Rorty, “Moral Universalism and Economic Triage,” presented at the Second UNESCO Philosophy Forum, Paris, 1996. Reprinted in
Diogenes
, vol. 44, issue 173 (1996).

8.
Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,”
Journal of Philosophy
80, no. 10 (October 1983): 583–89. “Free-loading” is what I called “philosophical cheating” in
Total Truth
, 319–21. Francis Schaeffer calls it “intellectual ‘cheating’” in “A Review of A Review,”
The Bible Today,
October, 1948, 7–9.
See Study Guide

Robert Kraynak, professor of political science, notes that the number of people who are free-loading is increasing: “What is so strange about our age is that demands for respecting human rights and human dignity are
increasing
even as the foundations for those demands are disappearing. In particular, beliefs in man as a creature made in the image of God … are being replaced by a scientific materialism that undermines what is noble and special about man, and by doctrines of relativism that deny the objective morality required to undergird human dignity.” “Justice without Foundations,”
New Atlantis
,
www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/justice-without-foundations
. Kraynak adds: “Post-modern relativists like Rorty and Darwinians like Dennett and Pinker have commitments to social justice, understood as democracy, human rights, and respect for human dignity, that are completely inconsistent with their philosophical and scientific views. Darwinian evolution does not support democracy and human rights or the inherent dignity of the individual—if it supports any kind of moral code, it would be a code of the strong dominating the weak” (
http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2012/01/kraynaks-nietzschean-attack-on.html
).

9.
A. R. Hall,
The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude
(Boston: Beacon, 1954), 171–72. Moreover, the concept of laws in nature was not considered metaphorical, a mere figure of speech, but literally true. As historian John Randall explains, “Natural laws were regarded as real laws or commands, decrees of the Almighty, literally obeyed without a single act of rebellion.” John Herman Randall,
The Making of the Modern Mind
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 274. See also Stephen F. Mason,
A History of the Sciences
, originally published under the title
Main Currents of Scientific Thought
(New York: Collier Books, 1962), 173, 182.

10.
Mary Midgley, “Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete? Of Course Not,” John Templeton Foundation,
www.templeton.org/belief/
.

11.
Paul Davies, “Physics and the Mind of God: The Templeton Prize Address,”
First Things
55 (August/September 1995): 31–35.

12.
Many people mistakenly think science arose only after the Enlightenment had liberated Europe from its former Christian influence—that science is therefore a product of secularism. Not so. Sociologist of religion Rodney Stark goes so far as to say, “The ‘Enlightenment’ [was] conceived initially as a propaganda ploy by militant atheists and humanists who attempted to claim credit for the rise of science.”
For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 123.

13.
John Gray,
Straw Dogs
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), xi–xii, xiii, 4, 49. Gray argues that the whole of Western liberalism is actually parasitic on Christianity. He maintains, for example, that liberalism’s high view of the human person is derived directly from Christianity: “Liberal humanism inherits several key Christian beliefs—above all, the belief that humans are categorically different from all other animals.” No other religion has given rise to the conviction that humans have a unique dignity. Think of it this way: If Darwin had announced his theory of evolution in India, China, or Japan, it would hardly have made a stir. “If—along with hundreds of millions of Hindus and Buddhists—you have never believed that humans differ from everything else in the natural world in having an immortal soul, you will find it hard to get worked up by a theory that shows how much we have in common with other animals.” The West’s high view of human dignity and human rights is borrowed directly from Christianity. “The secular world-view is simply the Christian take on the world with God left out,” Gray concludes. “Humanism is not an alternative to religious belief, but rather a degenerate and unwitting version of it.” John Gray, “Exposing the Myth of Secularism,”
Australian Financial Review
, January 3, 2003.
See Study Guide

In another article, Gray writes, “The idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is Biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith.” Thus virtually every variety of atheism today “is a derivative of Christianity.” Gray, “The Atheist Delusion,”
Guardian
, March 14, 2008. To read more, see
Total Truth
, 320.

14.
Thomas Nagel,
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 48–52.

15.
Nagel,
Mind and Cosmos
, 18–19. Nagel writes that we need an alternative view of the cosmos that makes “mind, meaning, and value as fundamental as matter and space-time in an account of what there is” (20). See also Thomas Nagel, “The Core of ‘Mind and Cosmos,’”
New York Times
, August 18, 2013.

16.
Nagel,
Mind and Cosmos
, 128. “Nagel was immediately set on and (symbolically) beaten to death by all the leading punks, bullies, and hangers-on of the philosophical underworld. Attacking Darwin is the sin against the Holy Ghost that pious scientists are taught never to forgive.” David Gelernter, “The Closing of the Scientific Mind,”
Commentary
, January 1, 2014.

17.
Thomas Nagel,
The Last Word
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 130–31. Nagel proposes that the same cosmic authority problem “is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.”

18.
Nagel,
Mind and Cosmos
, 15. My goal is “not to offer an alternative” but merely to show why an alternative is needed (12). “All that can be done at this stage in the history of science is to argue for recognition of the problem, not to offer solutions” (33). Nagel hopes to find an explanation that involves some kind of teleology (purpose) immanent in the material cosmos, to avoid the need for a transcendent Purposer. He writes of his “ungrounded intellectual preference” for an immanent teleology, or what he calls a “naturalistic teleology.” “My preference for an immanent natural explanation is congruent with my atheism” (12, 26, 93). He admits that he is not confident that the concept of “teleology without intention makes sense” (93), and his hunch is correct: it does not.

One philosophy that Nagel considers—but does not embrace—is the idea of a mind permeating the universe from within. This view is called panpsychism. It is the neo-Platonic notion that everything is permeated by a rudimentary form of mind or consciousness. Panpsychism is being revived today especially among proponents of process thought and process theology. They argue that life and consciousness could not emerge from sheer matter. Therefore there must be some rudimentary form of life and consciousness even at the lowest levels of matter. Read this description by an adherent: “The type of panpsychism I find compelling is that developed into a comprehensive system by Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Charles Hartshorne, David Ray Griffin, and many others during the 20th Century. It is growing in popularity, but still a minority view. The basic idea is that all components of the universe have at least some rudimentary type of consciousness or experience, which are just different words for subjectivity or awareness.… No modern panpsychist that I know of argues that a chair or a rock is conscious. Rather, the molecules that comprise the chair or rock presumably have a very rudimentary type of consciousness.” Tam Hunt, “The C Word—Consciousness—and Emergence,”
Santa Barbara Independent
, January 8, 2011. In the recent book
Consciousness and Its Place in Nature
, British philosopher Galen Strawson defends panpsychism, and it has also been supported by Australian philosopher David Chalmers and Oxford physicist Roger Penrose.