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May 20 - October 4, 2018
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).
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. 11
The regularity of the natural order allows humans to grow food, raise families, invent technology, and maintain some level of cultural and civic order. All human endeavors depend on God’s common grace.
Psychologist Paul Bloom at Yale University reports that “when children are directly asked about the origin of animals and people, they tend to prefer explanations that involve an intentional creator, even if the adults who raised them do not.” 12 In other words, children tend to hold a concept of God even if their parents are atheists.
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.” Even if a group of children were put “on an island and they raised themselves,” Barrett adds, “I think they would believe in God.” 13 It appears that we have to be educated out of the knowledge of God by secular schools and media.
Suppose what you thought was a non-personal spiritual force, which could safely be treated as an inanimate object, turns out instead to be a transcendent Person—with a legitimate moral claim on your life?
At the heart of the human condition, we might say, is an epistemological sin—the refusal to acknowledge what can be known about God and then to respond appropriately:
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.
As Paul says in Romans, if you reject the biblical God, you will deify something within the created order. 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.
New Atheists like to think of themselves as nonbelievers, but they believe devoutly in matter (or nature) as their substitute religion.
Christianity offers a high view of the human person, created in the image of a transcendent Person. It affirms all the features that make us fully human.
We could say that the purpose of a worldview is to explain what we know about the world. If it contradicts what we know about the world through general revelation, then it fails.
If a materialist were to acknowledge the reality of free will, that would give evidence that humans are personal beings whose origin must be a personal Being. Therefore materialists have to suppress the evidence from general revelation. Otherwise it would falsify their worldview.
For example, a person may propose cultural relativism, which claims that there is no universal truth. But that statement itself makes a universal claim. Thus it contradicts itself.
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.
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.
Ironically, then, adherents of reductionist worldviews have to disregard their own reductionism—at least while arguing their case. They have to borrow Christianity’s high view of reason in order to give reasons for their own view.
Christianity has greater explanatory power than any other worldview or religion. It fits the data of general revelation better. And it leads to a more humane and liberating view of the human person.
“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.
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.
If you press any set of ideas back far enough, eventually you reach an ultimate starting point—something that is taken as the self-existent reality on which everything depends.
Pantheism teaches that it is a mistake to draw any moral distinctions. Everything merges into the One. The end result, however, is that you cannot distinguish good from evil—which means you have no basis for fighting against evil.
For Plato, the pre-eminent form is the form of the good; to see the good, involves “a conversion, a turning of the soul” from darkness to light. The true philosopher is the person who contemplates this “divine order.”
The materialist creed was captured nicely by the late philosopher Dallas Willard: “There is one reality, the natural world, and physics is its prophet.”
Empiricism makes an idol of the sensory realm.
Both Bacon and Descartes expressed some level of Christian conviction. 41 Nevertheless, the philosophies they proposed did not treat God as the final source of truth. Instead they replaced God with the individual consciousness.
The entire scientific enterprise is based on the assumption that our sensations provide a reliable picture of reality. But empiricism takes this fact of experience and absolutizes it—tries to make it carry a philosophical weight it is not able to carry. Thus
A biblical worldview enables Christians to approach every viewpoint with a free and respectful attitude, knowing that virtually every perspective offers something of value. We can glean what is good wherever we find it. We can enjoy the best works of any culture. We can delight in the artistry and beauty found in classic works of art and literature. We can learn from the insights found in science and philosophy. We should refuse to allow good words like empirical and rational to be taken over by secular worldviews. Instead we should work to fill these terms with balanced biblical content.
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 person accepts materialism as a life philosophy, its effects do not stay neatly contained within the mental realm. It leads to destructive personal behavior and harmful public consequences.
You can make any worldview appear successful simply by denying anything that does not fit into its box.
If the elites hold a materialism that reduces humans to computers, then they will treat people like computers.
Postmodernism virtually defines a person’s identity in terms of the groups to which he or she belongs.
And if there is no objective or universal truth, then any claim to have objective truth will be treated as nothing but an attempt by one interpretive community to impose its own limited, subjective perspective on everyone else. An act of oppression. A power grab.
Postmodernism is leagues away from the materialism rampant in the science department, but it is equally dehumanizing. Materialism reduces humans to products of physical forces. Postmodernism reduces them to products of social forces.
Whatever a worldview identifies as the divine becomes the lens through which it sees everything, the sieve it uses to sift out what is real.
It is ironic that people who reject Christianity—who think that without God they can finally be free—end up with philosophies that deny human freedom.
Francis Schaeffer in The God Who Is There observes that every worldview containing a two-story dualism leads ultimately to “mysticism” in the sense that adherents must affirm truths that their own worldview cannot rationally explain.
The very phenomena that are so problematic for scientific materialism—like free will, consciousness, love—can be logically accounted for within a Christian worldview.
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.
Or take Friedrich Nietzsche. He held that all human action is driven by the will to power: Morality is invented by the weak to give them leverage over the strong. Religion is a “holy lie” used to control people. 9 But what about Nietzsche’s own theory? Was it driven by his own will to power? Then why should the rest of us pay any attention to it? The theory undercuts itself.
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.
If our thoughts are also biological facts, determined by biological laws, then they are not the sort of thing that can be true or false either.
As one philosopher says, the materialist functions as though he were an “angelic observer” somehow able to float above the determinist cage in which he locks everyone else. 15 In essence, materialists must tacitly assume a Christian epistemology, at least when they are arguing for their claims.
Ironically, materialism cannot even be stated without refuting itself.
