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Likewise, cultures in the grip of inadequate worldviews begin to actualize societies that are less than humane. 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.
The link is that idols always lead to a lower view of human life.
Despite the vast diversity of religions and philosophies, they all start by putting something created in the place of God.
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.
Biologist Jerry Coyne defines physicalism as “the view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics.” This view, he says, “must be true unless you’re religious.” 25 But is this view itself religious? Is it a divinity claim? Without a doubt.
In the words of philosopher Galen Strawson, the denial of consciousness “is surely the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought.” It shows “that the power of human credulity is unlimited, that the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith, is truly unbounded.” It reveals “the deepest irrationality of the human mind.”
The Protestant Reformers taught that when we turn away from God at the core, then everything we do is affected, including our thinking. We come to our desks or laboratories with a complex set of motivations and predispositions already in place, which predetermine to some degree what we accept as plausible or true. Far from being neutral blank slates, our minds are predisposed to interpret new data in light of the convictions we already hold—what we want to be true.
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.
Living according to these worldviews is like living in a concrete bunker with no windows. Communicating a Christian worldview should be like inviting people to open the door and come out. Our message ought to express the joy of leading captives out of a small, cramped world into one that is expansive and liberating.
Just as scientists test a theory by taking it into the lab and mixing chemicals in a test tube to see if the results confirm the theory, so we test a worldview by taking it into the laboratory of ordinary life. Can it be lived out consistently in the real world, without doing violence to human nature?
From time to time, quirky individuals have raised objections, but civilizations as a whole cannot survive without the conviction that people can be held responsible for their actions.
Thus to be foolish is to fail to connect ideas or link them into a meaningful structure, a coherent whole. Scripture is giving a spot-on description of the fragmented, fractured, internally contradictory two-story worldviews that result from embracing idols.
“I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs.”
To be logically consistent, however, the masters should practice equal suspicion toward their own views—which they rarely, if ever, do.
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.
Ironically, materialism cannot even be stated without refuting itself.
In short, it was on occasions when Darwin’s mind led him to a theistic conclusion that he dismissed the mind as untrustworthy. 21 He failed to recognize that, to be logically consistent, he needed to apply the same skepticism to his own theory.
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.”
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.
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.” 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.
In short, every atheist has to adopt a biblical worldview to pursue science at all.
Nagel even grants that a theistic worldview would solve his problems—that the existence of God would explain the very things that Darwinism cannot explain, like mind and morality. Nevertheless, he rejects the theistic answer. Why? The reason is not so much intellectual as emotional: “I want atheism to be true … I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” He admits that his underlying motive is a “fear of religion itself,” rooted ultimately in a “cosmic authority problem.”
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 Richard Dawkins writes, “There is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
William Provine, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, states the conclusion more bluntly: If no God exists, he says, then “no ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth.”
In today’s grievance culture, it seems that some new group is always coming forward to complain that they are offended. It can be easy for Christians to pick up the same victim language. But our motivation for speaking out should not be only that we are offended. After all, we are called to share in the offense of the Cross. We are called to love the offender.
Principle #1 is to identify the idol.
Principle #2 is to identify the reductionism.
Principle #3 is to test the worldview against the facts of experience, the truths of general revelation.
Principle #4 is to show that every reductionistic worldview is self-defeating.
Principle #5 is to make the case for a Christian worldview.
