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

by Nancy R. Pearcey

Paul argued that the events grounding the Christian worldview were not “done in a corner” (Acts 26:25–26). Shepherds, kings, doctors, and tax collectors could all check out the facts that are central to the Christian message. What is being communicated is an accurate description of reality, not a belief system about it.

Scripture nowhere encourages the notion that “faith” equals commitment quarantined from evidence or isolated from the mind—the “will to avoid knowing what is true,” as Friedrich Nietzsche put it in his work The Antichrist.

we must acknowledge that a falsified “faith” is quite properly a discarded faith. It is a futile faith and therefore not worth keeping.

Materialists thereby deny the reality of mind (while they use their minds to advance materialism), determinists deny the reality of human choice (while they choose determinism), and relativists deny the fact of right and wrong (while they judge you if you disagree).

Ideologues may advance their idols under politically correct banners of tolerance, diversity, and fairness, but the actual impact is regress, not progress, fragmentation, not wholeness. People are crushed. The human being necessarily revolts against gods that fail.

How does physical nature give evidence for God? Because the existence of the universe cannot be explained as a product of natural causes alone. This is as true for us as it was for Paul’s first-century readers.

It is sometimes said that a mind capable of forming an argument against God’s existence constitutes evidence for his existence. That is, a conscious being with the ability to reason, weigh evidence, and argue logically must come from a source that has at least the same level of cognitive ability. “He who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see?” (Ps. 94:9). The cause must be capable of producing the effect. Water does not rise above its source.

In the words of theologian Thomas K. Johnson, we “can take the account of Adam and Eve hiding from God behind a bush or tree as a metaphor for the history of the human race.”

The most fundamental decision we all face over the course of our lives is what we will recognize as the ultimate reality, the uncaused source and cause of our existence. Everything else in our worldview depends on that initial decision.

The first commandment may seem outdated if we think of idols as statues of wood or stone. But Scripture treats the topic of idolatry far more subtly. 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.

We sin because we want something in the created world more than we want the Creator.

When a worldview exchanges the Creator for something in creation, it will also exchange a high view of humans made in God’s image for a lower view of humans made in the image of something in creation.

Materialism reduces thinking to biochemical processes in the brain, akin to the chemical reactions in digestion. But digestion is not something that can be true or false. It is just a biological fact. If thinking is reduced to brain processes, then our ideas are not true or false either. But in that case, how can the materialist know that materialism is true? The philosophy is self-refuting.

Competing worldviews often appear more attractive when they acquire the allure of the forbidden. 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.

When evaluating a worldview, then, the first step is to identify its idol. What does it set up as a God substitute?

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 important question is not which starting points are religious or secular, but which claims stand up to testing.

When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.

Another widely held idol today is empiricism, the claim that the only valid form of knowledge consists of empirically verified facts.

to define what is rational solely by whether it fits the tenets of your own worldview is an invalid move because it rules out all other truth claims by definition.

In the twentieth century, secular utopian idealists presided over the extermination of a hundred million people, killed for ‘a higher good’ by the apostles of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. History has never produced a more efficient set of butchers.”

When a worldview exchanges the Creator for something in creation, it will also exchange a high view of humans made in God’s image for a lower view of humans made in the image of something in creation.

When you allow yourself to be reasoned out of what you know by common sense, just because some philosophical system requires it, he wrote, “we may call this metaphysical lunacy.”

Postmodernists reject any claim to a truth that is universal, objective, or eternal. They insist that everyone’s perspective is “situated” within a context that is particular, local, and historically contingent. But of course, the same critique applies to postmodernists’ own claims—they, too, are “situated” within a particular, historical context.

Pantheism is typically summarized as the doctrine that god is the universe and the universe is god (pan means all; theism means god). God is called the One or the All. The world is seen as a manifestation or emanation of the divine essence.

The lesson is that idol-based ideologies are invariably dehumanizing, and if unchecked they lead to repression, coercion, oppression, war, and violence. In the twentieth century alone, they have taken far more lives and created more havoc than all the religiously motivated witch hunts, inquisitions, and wars of the previous centuries.

Philosopher John Gray, though himself an atheist, writes that “when atheism becomes a political project, the invariable result is an ersatz religion that can only be maintained by tyrannical means” 64—by secret police and death camps.

When a worldview fails to account for all of reality, what do adherents do? Do they say, “I guess my theory has been falsified; I’d better toss it out”? Most people do not give up that easily. Instead they suppress the things that their worldview cannot explain, walling them off into a conceptual area separate from reality—an upper story of useful fictions. Wish fulfillment.

A Christian’s motive in apologetics should be a God-inspired grief for the lost.

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.

“If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”

“Without timeless and universal moral principles, it seems that we cannot criticize the values of different cultures or times, no matter how repugnant they may seem.”

Postmodernists decided that if totalitarianism results from totalizing metanarratives, then the way to prevent concentrations of power is to maintain a variety of mini-narratives. 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.

Postmodernism began with the noble goal of unmasking the implicit imperialism of modernist worldviews. But, ironically, it has itself become imperialist, insisting that postmodernists alone have the ability to unmask everyone else’s underlying interests and motives—to deconstruct and debunk them. It thereby essentially silences every other perspective. Worse, 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.”

Ironically, moral relativists even pride themselves on being morally superior to others. After all, they are tolerant and nonjudgmental. They are not like other people who are insufferably bigoted and closed-minded, deserving the harshest condemnation. Every person draws a line in the sand somewhere that allows him or her to feel morally superior, like the Pharisee in Jesus’s parable who thanked God that he was not like other people (Luke 18:11).

Science still has to assume that the world has an intelligible order. Yet the materialist or naturalist worldview cannot account for that order. If the universe is the product of non-rational processes, why does it have a rational order? If the universe is not the product of a mind, why it is comprehensible to the human mind?

“So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological world view.”

That is they adopt faith as to the existence of physical laws and their origin.

When science is treated as the sole source of truth, then it becomes scientism. Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars expressed a commitment to scientism when he said, “Science is the measure of all things.” Bertrand Russell tipped his hand in his remark, “What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.” 30 The assumption is that whatever cannot be known by science is not real. But consider: Is that statement itself a fact discovered by science? Clearly not. It goes beyond anything science could possibly establish. It is a metaphysical assumption, an arbitrary definition of what counts as genuine knowledge.

as Dallas Willard points out, when Scripture commands us to avoid “vain philosophy,” it does not mean we should avoid all philosophy. After all, when Scripture commands us to avoid immodest clothing, it does not mean we should avoid all clothing.