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August 8 - August 24, 2023
The New Testament Greek word often translated as “believe” is more accurately rendered as “trust” (from the word pistis, “trust” or “believe,” rooted in the word peitho, “I persuade”). The biblical attitude is one of persuasion, a will to verify and know what is true and to respond accordingly.
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.
Common grace functions as a constant testimony to God’s goodness.
humans are surrounded by evidence for God simply because we are all made in the image of God, live in God’s universe, and are upheld by God’s common grace. “For from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36).
Psychologist Justin Barrett at Oxford University reports similar findings. Scientific evidence has shown that “built into the natural development of children’s minds [is] a predisposition to see the natural world as designed and purposeful and that some kind of intelligent being is behind that purpose.”
Why do people suppress the evidence for God? The God described in the Bible goes against the grain of today’s popular notions of spirituality. Many people may be receptive to the idea of a non-personal spiritual force that they can tap into. They might be willing to consider a great pantheistic pool of spirituality of which they are a part. But they are far less comfortable with the concept of a living, active, personal God who knows them, wants to interact with them, and has his own views about what they are doing with their lives.
The branch of philosophy that focuses on the nature of knowledge is called epistemology. We have an epistemic duty to acknowledge what we know and conform our lives to it. When we fail in that duty, we commit an “epistemological sin.”
Romans 1:25—They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.
An atheist professor once told me that the Bible teaches polytheism because the first commandment speaks of “other gods.” He said the biblical God just wanted to be the top god over a panoply of other deities. But the Hebrew phrase before me actually means in my presence or in my sight. God is saying, Get your idols out of my sight! Do not bring your phony gods into my presence!
An idol is anything we want more than God, anything we rely on more than God, anything we look to for greater fulfillment than God. Idolatry is thus the hidden sin driving all other sins.
The hidden sin beneath the others is the tendency to make an idol of “the things of this world.” We sin because we want something in the created world more than we want the Creator. 20
Writing to the Philippian church, Paul describes people whose minds are “set on earthly things,” whose “god is their belly” (Phil. 3:19). They are driven by sheer physical appetite, even if they cover their cravings under a veneer of sophistication.
The way to uncover idols in your life is to ask whether any gift has become more important to you than the Giver.
Romans 1:21—Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking.
Romans 1:28—Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind.
God gave them up
God gave them up
God gave them up
In this sense of the term, all sin is contrary to human nature, and Paul goes on to itemize a representative sampling:
“They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (Rom. 1:29–31).
The principle is that those who dishonor God inevitably dishonor themselves and others. To adapt a phrase, idols have consequences.
An idol is anything in the created order that is put in the place of God.
Those who do not honor the transcendent God beyond the cosmos must make a divinity out of some power or principle immanent within the cosmos.
Rationalism refuses to accept any source of truth beyond human reason, such as information communicated by the Creator. It is dogmatic in worshipping the idol of “unaided” or “autonomous” human reason.
Romans 1 tells us that idolatry leads to a “debased” worldview, which opens the door to oppression, injustice, and all the other evils listed at the end of the chapter.
You might picture reductionism as someone trying to stuff the entire universe into a box. When some part of creation is absolutized, then everything is redefined in its terms. Humans are recast in its image.
What do materialists do when they realize that their worldview box is too small to fit the evidence? They suppress the evidence, just as Paul says in Romans 1. They cannot deny that the concept of free will is hardwired into human thinking. What they can do, however, is reduce that concept to an illusion. A useful fiction.
At some point, every idol-based worldview contradicts reality. This creates an opportunity to make a positive case for Christianity. Because it is not reductionistic, it does not dismiss important parts of human experience as illusions. It does not create a gap or dichotomy in thinking. It does not lead to cognitive dissonance. Instead Christianity is total truth—consistent, coherent, and comprehensive. It can be lived out in the real worldview without contradicting our most basic human experience.
Idol-centered worldviews not only fail to match the external world, they also collapse internally. They are self-refuting. The technical term is that they are self-referentially absurd, which means they propose a standard for truth that they themselves fail to meet.
The argument from self-referential absurdity is a standard tool in every apologist’s toolbox. But why does it work? Again the key is reductionism. A reductionistic worldview leads to a lower view of humanity—and thus of the human mind. It reduces human reason to something less than reason. Yet the only way any worldview can argue its own case is by using reason. By discrediting reason, it undermines its own case. It is self-defeating.
Because a biblical worldview starts with a transcendent Creator, it does not deify anything in creation. Therefore it does not need to ramrod everything into a limited set of categories derived from one part of the cosmic order. Christianity liberates us from any life-denying reductionism that dishonors and debases humanity. It affirms the high dignity of humans as full persons made in the image of a personal God.
The only way teens become truly “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks” (1 Pet. 3:15) is by struggling personally with the questions.
It is far better for young people to explore the fascinating world of ideas with parents, teachers, and church leaders as guides who can give them the tools to think critically and think well. As one of my students put it, “Exposing the mind to ideas is like exposing the body to germs. It’s the way to build immunity.”
According to Romans 1, those who reject the Creator will create an idol. They will absolutize some power or element immanent within the cosmos, elevating it into an all-defining principle—a false absolute. 7 When evaluating a worldview, then, the first step is to identify its idol. What does it set up as a God substitute?
“Not believing in God is a far more arduous affair than is generally imagined,” Eagleton concludes. God cannot be rejected without putting something else in his place. The history of philosophy is largely a history of setting up God surrogates. 8
In the New Testament, the Greek word for heart (kardia) likewise means the center or core of a person’s being. 10 Thus idols of the heart are the convictions that engage us most deeply and drive our behavior.
Everyone believes something, in the sense that they must assume some principle as fundamentally true. Atheists often fail to recognize that they are in the same boat as everyone else. A common mantra on atheist websites goes like this: “Atheism is not a belief. Atheism is merely the lack of a belief in God or gods.” But it is impossible to think without some starting point. If you do not start with God, you must start somewhere else. You must propose something else as the ultimate, eternal, uncreated reality that is the cause and source of everything else.
the only feature shared by all religions is that they acknowledge something as divine—using that word to mean the self-existent, eternal reality that is the origin of everything else.
The idol in paganism is Nature itself, or a spiritual substance interconnecting all of nature.
In Romans 1 we learn that idols result from divinizing something immanent within the cosmic order. That description certainly applies to the forms. They are not personal. And though they transcend the material world, they do not transcend the cosmic order as a whole.
They assume that what we can really rely on are empirical facts—what we can see, feel, weigh, and measure.
Empiricism makes an idol of the sensory realm. Whatever is not susceptible to empirical testing is not real.
Rationalism claims that the sole source and standard of knowledge are ideas in the mind known by reason. But it is impossible to step outside our reason to test whether those ideas are accurate. Like empiricism, it lacks a way to bridge the gap from internal ideas to the external world.
The founder of empiricism was Francis Bacon. He outlined a program designed to purge our minds of all the popular notions picked up from our education and environment, and to “begin anew from the very foundations.”
Bacon proposed to rebuild knowledge on the foundation of sensations.
The founder of rationalism was René Descartes. He proposed a system to purge our minds of every fuzzy or half-baked idea, everything that can possibly be doubted, until we reach a foundation that cannot be doubted.
the philosophies they proposed did not treat God as the final source of truth. Instead they replaced God with the individual consciousness.
Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute. Just as Romans 1 says, they fastened on something within creation to serve in the place of God as their secure and certain source of truth, their ultimate explainer, the fixed foundation of knowledge.
Every nonbiblical philosophy fastens on something in creation—something known by general revelation—and tries to build a system of truth on that foundation. Inevitably, however, it proves too limited to support such an edifice.
Immanuel Kant. His innovation was to suggest that the mind does not merely reflect the structure of the world; instead it actively imposes structure and order onto the world. For Kant, reality as we know it is largely a construction of the human mind.
