Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (34 page)

19.
Raymond Tallis,
Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity
(Durham: Acumen, 2011), 212–13 (italics in original).

20.
Tallis,
Aping Mankind
, 317. On neuroethics, Tallis is quoting Paula Churchland in
Neurophilosophy
. On neuroeconomics, see, for example, Dan Monk, “Nielson (NLSN) clients use neuroscience to craft better commercials,” WPCO Cincinnati. Copyright 2013 Scripps Media.

21.
Tallis,
Aping Mankind
, 332; 59–71 and chap. 8; and 348.

22.
Emily Wax, “Thinking Man’s Therapy,”
Washington Post
, August 22, 2011.

23.
Eagleton,
Culture and the Death of God
, 204.

24.
Luc Ferry,
A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living
(New York: Harper, 2011), 6.

25.
Pierre Hadot,
Philosophy as a Way of Life
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 103, 83.

26.
Pierre Hadot,
Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, originally published in French in 1989), 75–76.

27.
Alain de Botton, “Can Tolstoy Save Your Marriage?,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 18, 2010; Samuel Muston, “Too Cool for Night School?,”
Independent
, January 9, 2014. For a review of Botton’s book, see Douglas Groothuis, “Religion for Atheists: A Nonbeliever’s Guide to the Uses of Religion,”
Denver Journal
, 16 (January 24, 2013).

28.
André Comte-Sponville,
The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
, trans. Nancy Huston (New York: Penguin, 2006).

29.
“Britain’s First Atheist Church,”
Huffington Post UK
, July 1, 2013; and “Atheist ‘Mega-churches’ Take Root across US, World,”
Newsmax
, November 10, 2013.

30.
Wilfrid Sellars,
Science, Perception, and Reality
(Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1991), 173; and Bertrand Russell,
Science and Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 235.

31.
John Gray, “A Point of View: Can Religion Tell Us More Than Science?,”
BBC News
, September 16, 2011.

32.
Michael Bond, “Atheists Turn to Science during Times of Stress,”
New Scientist
, June 7, 2013.

33.
W. R. Thompson, “Introduction,” in Charles Darwin,
Origin of Species
(New York: Dent, 1956), 12.

34.
“Evolution, akin to religion, involves making certain a priori or metaphysical assumptions, which at some level cannot be proven empirically.” Michael Ruse, “Nonliteralist Antievolution,” AAAS Symposium: “The New Antievolutionism,” February 13, 1993, Boston,
www.leaderu.com/orgs/arn/orpages/or151/mr93tran.htm
. Cf. Tom Woodward, “Ruse Gives Away the Store,”
http://simpleapologetics.com/tomwoodward.html
.

35.
The piece was composed by Gregory Brown. Watch a performance here:
www.gregorywbrown.com/missa-charles-darwin/
.

36.
Stuart Kauffman, “Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred,”
Edge
, November 12, 2006. Kauffman goes on: “This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet—it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System.… Shall we use the God word? It is our choice. Mine is a tentative ‘yes.’ I want God to mean the vast ceaseless creativity of the only universe we know of, ours.” Francis Schaeffer warned that undefined religious words like “God” can be used for their connotations to manipulate people emotionally. See
The God Who Is There
and
Escape from Reason
.

37.
Views like Kauffman’s are sometimes labeled religious naturalism. Examples of religious naturalism include Jerome A. Stone,
Religious Naturalism Today
(New York: State U. of New York Press, 2008); Chet Raymo,
When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: Making of a Religious Naturalist
(Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2008); Loyal Rue,
Religion Is Not about God
(Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

38.
Jeremy Rifkin,
Algeny
(New York: Viking, 1983), 188, 195, 244.

39.
C. S. Lewis,
The Abolition of Man
(New York: HarperCollins, 1947), 29.

40.
Richard Dawkins,
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
(London: Orion, 1995), 155.

41.
On solipsism, see Principle #1 in this book. Philosopher Stephen Thornton notes that much of modern philosophy would lead to solipsism, if followed out to its logical conclusion: “While no great philosopher has explicitly espoused solipsism, this can be attributed to the inconsistency of much philosophical reasoning. Many philosophers have failed to accept the logical consequences of their own most fundamental commitments and preconceptions. The foundations of solipsism lie at the heart of the view that the individual gets his own psychological concepts (thinking, willing, perceiving, and so forth.) from ‘his own cases,’ that is by abstraction from ‘inner experience.’

“This view, or some variant of it, has been held by a great many, if not the majority of philosophers since Descartes made the egocentric search for truth the primary goal of the critical study of the nature and limits of knowledge. In this sense, solipsism is implicit in many philosophies of knowledge and mind since Descartes and any theory of knowledge that adopts the Cartesian egocentric approach as its basic frame of reference is inherently solipsistic.” “Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds,”
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
,
www.iep.utm.edu/solipsis/
.

42.
Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” 1903, in
Mysticism and Logic
(New York: Routledge, 1986).

43.
From a debate between William B. Provine and Phillip E. Johnson at Stanford University, April 30, 1994, titled “Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy?,”
www.cjas.org/~leng/provine.txt
.

44.
Lewis adds that the hunger for truth will “force you not to propound, but to
live through
, a sort of ontological proof” for God’s existence. Lewis,
The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism
, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 204–5 (italics added).

45.
Bradley Wright, “Why Do Christians Leave the Faith? The Fundamental Importance of Apologetics,”
Patheos
, November 17, 2011; “Why Do Christians Leave the Faith? The Problem of Responding Badly to Doubt,”
Patheos
, December 1, 2011; and “Why Do Christians Leave the Faith? The Relative Unimportance of Non-Christians,”
Patheos
, December 8, 2011. See also Larry Taunton, “Listening to Young Atheists,”
Atlantic
, June 6, 2013.

46.
Harper Lee,
To Kill a Mockingbird
(New York: Grand Central, 1960), 39.

47.
Ravi Zacharias and R. S. B. Sawyer,
Walking from East to West
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), 36.

48.
“What I Wish I’d Known before I Went to University,”
Beyond Teachable Moments
(blog), June 25, 2014,
http://beyondtm.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/what-i-wish-id-known-before-i-went-to-university/twitter.com
.

PART 3—How Critical Thinking Saves Faith

1.
Nancy Pearcey, “How Critical Thinking Saves Faith,”
The Pearcey Report
, December 22, 2010. When
Christianity Today
published the article, the editors changed the title to “How to Respond to Doubt,”
www.christianitytoday.com/women/2010/december/nancy-pearcey-how-to-respond-to-doubt.html?paging=off
.

2.
G. K. Chesterton,
Heretics
(Radford, VA: Wilder, 2007 [1905]), 115.

3.
For more detail, along with sources, for the art movements described in the following section, see
Saving Leonardo
, chapters 4–9.

4.
These words are from a description of all-black paintings by Ad Reinhardt. Walter Smith, “Ad Reinhardt’s Oriental Aesthetic,”
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
4, no. 3/4 (summer-autumn 1990). See also Jack Flam, “Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings, the Void, and Chinese Painting,”
Brooklyn Rail
, January 16, 2014.

5.
Ravi Zacharias,
Can Man Live without God?
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1994), 21.

6.
Cited in Richard M. Gamble,
The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation
(Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2003), 30.

7.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Two Theological Perspectives: Liberation Theology and Progressivist Theology,”
The Emergent Gospel: Theology from the Developing World
, eds. Sergio Torres and Virginia Fabella (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1978),
Papers from the Ecumenical Dialogue of Third World Theologians
, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, August 5–12, 1976, 227–55, quote 241.

8.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation
(Boston: Beacon, 1984), 145.

9.
See William Hasker, “The Problem of Evil in Process Theism and Classical Free Will Theism,”
Process Studies
29, no. 2 (fall-winter 2000).

10.
Myron Penner,
The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2013), 99. Penner does offer some qualifications: The fact that human knowledge is “finite, fallible, and contingent” does not mean that the gospel truths “are therefore
false
or
relative
in any absolute and final way” (120, italics in original). However, throughout the book, Penner endorses postmodern thinkers and concepts in an uncritical manner that makes it problematic to explain how (as he tentatively writes) “it may just be possible after all to speak about Christian truth” (40).

11.
C. S. Lewis, “On Learning in Wartime,” in
The Weight of Glory
(New York: Macmillan, 1980), 28.

12.
Dallas Willard, “The Redemption of Reason” (speech, Biola University, La Mirada, CA, February 28, 1998),
www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=118
.

13.
Allan Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind
(New York: Touchstone, 1987), 58.

14.
Lecrae, interviewed by Dustin Stout, “Lecrae on Engaging Culture for Jesus: #R12,” ChurchMag, October 24, 2012,
http://churchm.ag/r12-lecrae-engaging-culture/
.

15.
“Interview: Lecrae Talks about Going from ‘Crazy Crae’ to Christian Rapper,”
Complex
, June 8, 2012.

16.
Lecrae Moore, “Because Jesus Lives, We Engage Culture,” Resurgence Conference, October 9–10, 2012,
http://cdn.theresurgence.com/files/R12_Newsprint_web.pdf
. For additional places where Lecrae quotes
Total Truth
, see the Liberty University Convocation, March 22, 2013,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCVBUA8SMTs;
Matt Perman, “Lecrae and the Doctrine of Vocation,”
What’s Best Next,
October 6, 2013,
http://whatsbestnext.com/2013/10/lecrae-doctrine-vocation/
.

17.
Cited in Emma Green, “Lecrae: ‘Christians Have Prostituted Art to Give Answers,’”
Atlantic
, October 6, 2014.

18.
To read the context of the quotes in this section, see
Total Truth
, 35, 75–76, 83–84.

19.
Cited in Andrew Greer, “Lecrae: Defying Gravity,”
Today’s Christian Music
, September 1, 2012.

20.
Cited in Chad Bonham, “A Conversation with Christian Hip-Hop Artist Lecrae,” Beliefnet,
http://features.beliefnet.com/wholenotes/2012/06/a-conversation-with-christian-hip-hop-artist-lecrae.html#ixzz2IjfeLe91
.

21.
Lecrae, interview, “We Engage Culture for Jesus,” Encouragements through the Word, March 4, 2013,
http://encouragementsthroughtheword.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/we-engage-culture-for-jesus-an-interview-of-christian-artist-lecrae/
.

Romans 1:1–2:16

1
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,
2
which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures,
3
concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh
4
and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,
5
through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations,
6
including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,

7
To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

8
First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world.
9
For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you
10
always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you.
11
For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you—
12
that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.
13
I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that I have often intended to come to you (but thus far have been prevented), in order that I may reap some harvest among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles.
14
I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish.
15
So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.

16
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
17
For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

18
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
19
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
20
For 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. So they are without excuse.
21
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
22
Claiming to be wise, they became fools,
23
and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

24
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,
25
because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

26
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature;
27
and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
29
They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips,
30
slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
31
foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
32
Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

1
Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.
2
We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things.
3
Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God?
4
Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?
5
But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

6
He will render to each one according to his works:
7
to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life;
8
but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury.
9
There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek,
10
but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek.
11
For God shows no partiality.

12
For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.
13
For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.
14
For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.
15
They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them
16
on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.