Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

by Nancy R. Pearcey

16). A Christian’s motive in apologetics should be a God-inspired grief for the lost. We should be brokenhearted over the dehumanizing reductionisms that dishonor and destroy our fellow human beings. We should weep for people whose dark worldviews deny that their life choices have meaning or moral significance. We should be moved by sorrow for people whose education has taught them that their loves, dreams, and highest ideals are ultimately nothing but electrical impulses jumping across the synapses in their brains. We should mourn for postmoderns who think that (as Schopenhauer said) the “eternal truths” are only in one’s head.

We often hear stereotypes that Christianity is negative and repressive; that it regards human nature as corrupt and worthless; that it places little value on life in this world. But in reality the Christian worldview has a much higher view of human life than any competing system. It gives a logical basis for the facts of experience that are denied by the dominant secular worldviews of our day: freedom, creativity, love, personal significance, genuine truth.

Living things are best explained by discovering what purpose their parts serve. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood. The purpose of the eye is to see. Fins are designed for swimming, and wings for flying. All the components work together in a coherent, coordinated fashion to achieve a goal.

“We treat organisms—the parts at least—as if they were manufactured, as if they were designed, and then we try to work out their functions,” Ruse writes. “End-directed thinking—teleological thinking—is appropriate in biology because, and only because, organisms seem as if they were manufactured, as if they had been created by an intelligence and put to work.” 2 Surprisingly, even Darwin did not deny that the world looks as if it were designed. He merely argued that the appearance of design is misleading—that the same teleological order can be created by material forces instead.

the phrase as if signals cognitive dissonance. It indicates that certain ideas are inescapable in practice, no matter what a person’s worldview says. When a concept (such as design) has to be assumed in order to understand living systems, that is a clue that it is a part of general revelation.

What about Freud? “Freud’s notion that religion is wish fulfillment can be turned against his own theory,” Egnor said. “In fact, it is much more plausible that atheism, rather than Christianity, is a form of wish fulfillment. For if there is no God, then no one is watching, there is no moral accountability, and you can do what you want (as long as you can get away with it).” As Polish poet Czesław Miłosz observes, there is great relief in “a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”

Internal contradictions are fatal to any worldview because contradictory statements are necessarily false. “This circle is square” is contradictory, so it has to be false. Scripture assumes that logical contradictories cannot both be true: “No lie is of the truth” (1 John 2:21); God “never lies” (Titus 1:2); God “cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13).

we will discover that virtually all idol-based worldviews are self-refuting. Why? Because they are reductionistic. When reductionism is applied to the human mind, it reduces reason to something less than reason. It says the ideas in our minds are products of natural selection (Darwinism) or economic conditions (Marxism) or electrochemical responses in the brain (contemporary neuroscience). Yet the only way a worldview can build its own case is by using reason. Thus when it discredits reason, it undercuts its own case. It is self-defeating.

the law of non-contradiction states that two antithetical propositions cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. Biblical theology does not say that God is One in the same sense that God is Three. And Jesus was using paradoxical language to make a point (a paradox is an apparent contradiction). His statements were plays on words to catch people’s attention, but they were not logical contradictories.

What happened, though, when the test of logical positivism was applied to itself? Its central claim was that statements are meaningful only if they are empirically testable. But is that statement empirically testable? Of course not. It is not an empirical observation. It is a metaphysical rule—an arbitrary definition of what qualifies as knowledge. Thus when the criterion of logical positivism was applied to itself, it was discredited. It stood self-condemned. Logical positivism had been so influential for such a long time that its collapse sent shock waves all through the intellectual world. Its fall “was the most important philosophical event of the 20th century,” says William Lane Craig.

This penchant for debunking has been labeled the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (hermeneutics is the science of interpretation). Those who practice it have been dubbed the “masters of suspicion.” 11 To be logically consistent, however, the masters should practice equal suspicion toward their own views—which they rarely, if ever, do.

Scripture teaches that we deceive ourselves all the time about our true motives: “The heart is deceitful above all things, … who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). Taken on its own terms, however, a hermeneutics of suspicion is radically reductionistic. It simply abandons the question of truth, reducing it to questions of power and desire.

Showing how theories commit suicide is an essential tool in any apologetics toolbox.

idol-based worldviews are reductionistic.

The process of reductionism includes human cognitive faculties—things like reason, logic, rationality. It reduces human rationality to some non-rational force or process. Yet once a theory makes the claim that our ideas are not the product of rational thought, that claim must be applied to all ideas—including the theory itself. The debunkers end up debunking their own theories. Or they would, if they were consistent. To avoid discrediting their own views, the debunkers tacitly exempt themselves from the critique they use to discredit everyone else. They act as if they are not blinded by the same irrational forces that distort and bias everyone else’s views—they are mysteriously able to rise above the forces that enslave everyone else—they alone are capable of achieving an untainted insight into reality. Even though they have stuffed the entire universe into a box, strangely they themselves are not trapped in that box. They somehow have the power to float above the box, rendering their own theories objectively valid and true.

idol-based worldviews are logically contradictory—which means they fail.

By contrast, a Christian worldview is not reductionistic. It does not reduce reason to something less than reason, and therefore it does not self-destruct. A Christian epistemology (theory of knowledge) starts with the transcendent Creator, who spoke the entire universe into being with his Word: “And God said” (Gen. 1:3). “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). John uses a Greek word, Logos, that means not only Word but also reason or rationality—the underlying principle that unifies the world into an orderly cosmos, as opposed to randomness and chaos. The Greeks who heard John’s gospel understood that he was claiming that Christ is the source of the order and coherence of the universe.

This biblical view has two crucial implications. First, the intelligible order of the universe reflects the mind of the Creator. Second, because God created humans in his image, our minds correspond with that order as well. There is a congruence between the structure of the world and the structure of human cognition—a correlation between subject and object in the act of knowing. As Plantinga writes, “God created both us a...

Of course, humans are broken, fallen creatures, and as a result our thought processes are darkened and distorted. Nevertheless, even after the fall, we are still human. We still retain the image of God. Throughout history, the Bible has inspired confidence in the essential reliability of human cognitive faculties.

Science itself is at stake. John Lennox, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, writes that according to atheism, “the mind that does science … is the end product of a mindless unguided process. Now, if you knew your computer was the product of a mindless unguided process, you wouldn’t trust it. So, to me atheism undermines the rationality I need to do science.”

the atheist pursuing his research has no choice but to rely on rationality, just as everyone else does. The point is that he has no philosophical basis for doing so. Only those who affirm a rational Creator have a basis for trusting human rationality.

The reason so few atheists and materialists seem to recognize the problem is that, like Darwin, they apply their skepticism selectively. They apply it to undercut only ideas they reject, especially ideas about God. 25 They make a tacit exception for their own worldview commitments.

For the early scientists, the image of God was not a dry doctrine to which they gave merely cognitive assent. Nor was it a purely private “faith.” They treated it as a public truth, the epistemological foundation for the entire scientific enterprise. Their goal, they said, was to think God’s thoughts after him. 27 At the time of the scientific revolution, biblical epistemology was the guarantee that the human mind is equipped to gain genuine knowledge of the world.

a biblical worldview offers a perfectly reasonable explanation for the effectiveness of mathematics—namely, that a rational God created humans in his image to think his thoughts after him.

In fact, looking at history, we find that a biblically inspired confidence in the mathematical structure of the universe came first, before any actual scientific discoveries. Mathematician Morris Kline writes, “The early mathematicians were sure of the existence of mathematical laws underlying natural phenomena and persisted in the search for them because they were convinced a priori that God had incorporated them in the construction of the universe.”

Postmodernism is an example of what is called a “performative contradiction,” which means that a position is contradicted in the very act of being asserted.

When a postmodernist asserts that there is no universally valid truth, he is implicitly claiming that his own assertion is universally valid and true. To make the statement, he has to occupy the transcendental position that postmodernism says is not there to be occupied. Thus every time a postmodernist states his position, he contradicts it. The position is self-refuting.

Thus ironically, postmodernists contradict their own views every time they write a book or article. Deconstructionists hope their own work will be treated as a serious contribution from a creative mind, not merely a replay of cultural messages. They continue to author books arguing that there is no author.

When a one-dimensional, totalizing worldview gains political power, those who disagree will be marginalized, oppressed, left out, silenced, dominated, co-opted, controlled, and coerced. They will be stigmatized as different, perceived as “the other,” locked up in concentration camps. All must bow to the state-enforced idol—or be burned in the fiery furnace of oppression.

By rejecting any universal truth, postmodernism undercuts its own claim to truth.

Think of it this way: If all claims can be deconstructed, then what about the claim that the rich should not oppress the poor? Or that we should resist bigotry and racism? Those claims, too, can be deconstructed. Thus postmodernism may appear to be radical, but as Jacobs writes, “it is in fact unable to offer resistance to the political status quo.” 40 Lived out consistently, postmodernism leads to complicity with evil and injustice.

Lived out consistently, the theory also leads to the coercive suppression of diversity.

By celebrating the diversity of communities and their language games, postmodernists hope to avoid the coercion of a society organized by a single absolutized category.

In practice, however, only select groups are singled out to represent “diversity”—certified victim groups based on things like race, class, gender, ethnic group, and sexual identity. Rarely is there a push for intellectual or political or theological diversity, when those views run counter to postmodernism. And the analysis of the problem is typically derived from Marxism: some group is said to be victimized and oppressed, and the path to liberation is to revolt against the oppressors, often through political activism.

Politically correct university courses are not liberating students to think for themselves. They are turning students into cadres of self-absorbed reactionaries ready to take orders from the faddish theorist of the moment.

The attraction of postmodern criticism, he writes, is that it allows you to pose as the superior thinker who humiliates “naïve believers” by deconstructing their beliefs.

if you do not share postmodernism’s specific definition of diversity, it is likely to be imposed by force. An article in the Atlantic observes that “political correctness morphed into a tyranny of speech codes, sensitivity training, and book banning.” 44 The drive for diversity, which was supposed to be the safeguard for liberty, has itself become coercive and homogenizing. Diversity has become a code word for a new form of tyranny.

The Bible teaches that God created humans as embodied beings, biologically connected to families, living in particular nations at particular periods in history. We are rooted in the physical, material world—and that is not a negative limitation that must be transcended. On the contrary, Genesis states repeatedly that the material creation is intrinsically good: “And God saw that it was good.”

Christianity refuses to reduce individuals to their communities, as postmodernism does. Christians are reborn into a redeemed community that transcends all natural communities. Even the family, the most basic biological community, does not determine our primary identity. All who become Christians are “children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will [to have a child], but born of God” (John 1:12–13 NIV). The Bible’s liberating message is the promise that we can transcend the sin and brokenness of our natural communities because our primary identity is to be children of God.

Understanding reductionism equips us with a powerful means to “destroy arguments … raised against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:5).

the physical universe was brought into being by a God of love and beauty. It is a product of plan and design.

Christianity was nothing short of revolutionary. It teaches that there is only one God, and that he created matter. It is therefore intrinsically good. Christianity’s greatest scandal, however, was the incarnation—the claim that the God himself took on a physical body. He was not an avatar who just appeared to be human (as the Gnostics taught). He actually became human. The incarnation grants an astonishingly high dignity to the material world.

To counter empiricism, Christians can show that a biblical worldview offers a better basis for trusting our senses.

When our perceptual faculties are in good working order, and functioning in the environment for which they were designed, we naturally trust that the colors and shapes we perceive are real objects in a real world.

To counter rationalism, we can show that Christianity honors human rationality as part of the image of God. It is no historical accident that the Middle Ages, when Christianity flourished, was the age of great rational system builders like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas. Their confidence in reason was unsurpassed because they regarded it as a gift from God. They were certain that the world is the creation of a reasonable God,

Christianity also stands against the “masters of suspicion” who claim that human rationality is swamped by non-rational forces. The biblical God invites us to “reason together” (Isa. 1:18). Sanctification comes through “the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2), and the goal is to learn to love God “with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37). The word logic comes from Logos, the word used to describe Jesus in John 1:1. The implication is that logic reflects the nature of God’s own mind and character.

To counter postmodernism, Christianity offers an even more radical insight into the contingency of human knowledge.

In every area, Christianity encompasses the valid insights of all other worldviews, while avoiding their weaknesses. It incorporates the best insights of idol-centered philosophies, without falling into any limited, life-denying reductionism. This is genuinely good news.

a worldview is not the same thing as a theology. A worldview applies theological truths to fields such as philosophy, science, education, entertainment, and politics.

The Christian message will be most relevant when it is articulated at the specific points where people recognize the flaws and failures of their own worldviews.