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

by Nancy R. Pearcey

This tendency to absolutize some part of creation is “the source of all isms,” writes Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. 51 One part of the created order is treated as the whole. One piece of a puzzle is claimed to be the complete picture. One color in the spectrum is declared to be the entire rainbow.

By contrast, Christianity does not start with anything in creation. It begins with the transcendent Creator. Therefore, it is not limited in scope. It does not have to reduce all of reality to a single set of categories. It does not see just the trunk or the tusk or the tail. It is a transcendent point of view that sees the whole elephant—the God’s-eye view that philosophers and mystics have always sought. Though you and I are limited in our individual perspectives, we have access to the perspective of eternity.

Every ism isolates one strand from the rich fabric of truth. Christianity alone provides what the greatest philosophers and sages have sought all along: a coherent and transcendent framework that encompasses all of human knowledge.

Paul’s address was not a one-way street. He starts by acknowledging that his pagan listeners had some insight into truth, even if their

groping toward the divine was hazy: “I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23). Paul then quotes pagan poetry: “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’” (Acts 17:28). Close parallels to these lines are found in several ancient literary sources, which means Paul was tapping into assumptions that were widespread at the time. He was willing to appeal to the valid intuitions and insights of his Greek audience, even as he corrected and transformed those insights by incorporating them into the biblical universe of meaning. Paul was making the astounding claim that Christianity provides the context of meaning for the Greeks to understand their own culture.

Why does God allow people to go through what John Erickson calls the “stupid years”? To answer that, we must listen again to the message of Romans 1. The text repeats a poignant phrase that speaks volumes: “God gave them up … gave them up … gave them up” (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). The phrase does not mean God gives up on people. Just the opposite. It means he tries to get through to them by allowing them to play out the negative consequences of their idolatrous choices.

Why do idols invariably lead to destructive behavior? What is the connection? The link is that idols always lead to a lower view of human life. In Romans 1, the connection is captured in the word exchanged: They “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Rom. 1:23). 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.

Humans are not self-existent, self-sufficient, or self-defining. They did not create themselves. They are finite, dependent, contingent beings. As a result, they will always look outside themselves for their ultimate identity and meaning. They will define human nature by its relationship to the divine—however they define divinity. Those who do...

people suppress anything that threatens their favored worldview. If general revelation is evidence for God, then every substitute religion will have to deny that evidence. Yet suppression creates a deep chasm—a dualism or dichotomy—sometimes in theory

but always in practice.

6 On one side of the chasm are the things that fit inside the box, which are accepted as real and objective. On the other side are the things that stick out of the box, which are reduced to the...

The eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid argued that such extreme logical consistency in the face of contrary facts is a form of insanity. 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.” 18

The Bible describes idols as human inventions, “the work of human hands” (Ps. 115:4; 135:15). Their “craftsmen are only human” (Isa. 44:11). Those who worship idols “bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made” (Isa. 2:8). Why would Christians want to build their lives on any idea that is a product of human thinking—“the wisdom of the world” (1 Cor. 1:20)? The human heart hungers for a truth that is transcendent and eternal. God has “set eternity in the human heart” (Eccles. 3:11 NIV).

The finite cannot reach to the infinite, so the only way it is possible to know eternal truth is if God has communicated to the human race—giving his own transcendent perspective. And that’s exactly the earth-shaking claim that Christianity makes: that Scripture is communication from God, giving us information about himself, the cosmos, and history.

Of course, our comprehension of that truth is never complete or exhaustive. Our understanding is filtered through our fallible, fallen human minds, influenced by our culture and circumstances. Yet there are windows to transcendence. God’s word in Scripture gives us access to truths that are “not of human origin” (Gal. 1:11 NIV). Over against postmodern historicism and relativism, Christianity makes the liberating claim that humans have access to transhistorical truths because God himself has spoken.

other words, objective truth is possible only if the Creator has spoken to the human race, giving us his eternal, transcendent perspective—not about matters of salvation only but also about history and the cosmos. To adapt the titles

of Schaeffer’s books, it is not enough that God Is There; it is also crucial that He Is Not Silent. Only if God has communicated, the infinite reaching down to the finite, is it possible to break free—no longer trapped in our individual minds, as Enlightenment thinkers were, or trapped in a communal mind, as postmodern thinkers are. A biblical apologetics strategy will equip you to help liberate those who have been taken captive “through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition” (Col. 2:8 NIV). It will teach you how to “unmask the temporal idols” 47 and turn people toward eternal truth.

The God of Christianity does not erase our individual identity but actually affirms it. He calls us to become ever more fully the unique individuals we were created to be. Contrary to Eastern mysticism, the goal is not to suppress our desires but to direct them to what truly satisfies—to a passionate love relationship with the ultimate transcendent Person.

All the religions we have considered—whether Eastern or pagan—fit the diagnosis of Romans 1. They worship the creature instead of the Creator. They absolutize something immanent within the cosmos. Because their god is something lower than the biblical

God, they lead to a lower view of the human person. As Principle #2 says, they lead to reductionism.

As a consequence, the Islamic concept of divinity is missing key elements of personhood. For example, consider the qualities associated with relationship. Only within a relationship can God express interpersonal attributes such as love, sympathy, intimacy, self-giving, and communication. Only between distinct persons can there be giving and taking, initiating and responding, sharing and self-revelation, union and communion. For God to be fully personal, then, capable of love and community, there must be genuine plurality within the divine being itself. Historic Christian theology teaches that

these interpersonal attributes were expressed from all eternity among the three Persons of the Trinity. In this way, Christianity is able to maintain within the Godhead the highest conception of what it means to be a personal being.

“makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good.” 63 The bloodshed and death camps produced by idolatrous ideologies were not a violation of their principles (as religious wars were violations of Christian principles); they were logically consistent outworkings of the worldview.

To create a humane society, we must identify the idols that “fail to explain the whole of experience”—that lock people into partial, one-dimensional models of reality. The only basis for genuine human rights and dignity is a fully biblical worldview. Instead of absolutizing one piece of the puzzle, Christianity offers the entire puzzle with all the pieces in

harmony, creating an image of enchanting beauty. It gives a far richer, fuller, more complex vision of reality than any other worldview. Christianity includes the valid insights of all other worldviews, while avoiding their weaknesses.

What is the common thread running through all the examples in this chapter? Religions and worldviews that deny the biblical God must treat something else as the ultimate reality (Principle #1). With the exception of the other monotheistic religions, they deify something immanent within the cosmos. They absolutize some aspect of creation as the ultimate explainer. Then they reduce everything else to that single category (Principle #2). Reductionism is like trying to see the world through a single lens. G. K. Chesterton called reductionism a mental prison, “the prison of one thought.” 67 Whatever does not fit in that prison is denied and suppressed.

The result is always a vision of the world that is narrower, poorer, darker, and less humane than the biblical picture. A worldview’s concept of humanity cannot be higher than its concept of the divine.

all. As we have seen in Principle #2, God’s judgment often consists in giving people what they want and letting them experience the self-inflicted consequences of their choices. He allows them to choose ways of thinking and living that are self-destructive, tearing down the honor and dignity of others and themselves.

When Romans 1 warns that idols lead to behavior that is dishonoring, we often overlook the implication—namely, that people are meant to honor others and themselves. As Thomas Johnson writes, the text implies “that there are proper ways for people to honor themselves,” namely, by accepting God’s view of them. “When people accept their status as image-bearers of the Creator, placed in this world to fulfill his mandates, there is honor for all.” But when they create God substitutes and recast their self-understanding in the image of an idol, then there is dishonor and destruction for all. 68

We understand better now why Paul could stand before the Roman Empire and proclaim that he was “not ashamed of the gospel.” He was confident that Christianity is not only more convincing than any competing religion or worldview but also more appealing.

Philosopher J. P. Moreland says we test worldviews by how well they explain “recalcitrant facts,” those stubborn facts that every theory must explain—or else be considered falsified. 5 And we can be confident that all idol-centered worldviews will be falsified. All will fail to account for at least some of those stubborn facts. Why? Because, as we learned in Principle #2, they are reductionistic. They try to define the whole in terms of a part. Inevitably their conceptual categories will be too narrow and limited. Some parts of reality will stick out of the box.

The ability to choose from among alternatives makes a host of other distinctively human capacities possible—creativity and problem solving, love and relationships (robots do not love), even rationality itself (if our minds are preprogrammed to hold an idea, then it is not a rational decision). “Unless human beings are morally responsible,” says law professor Jerome Hall, “justice is only a mirage.” Unless humans have free will, we will not develop a sense of identity or self-worth (because everything I do is really the work of unconscious, automatic forces). 9

Free will has thus become a stand-in for the whole range of human qualities that depend on it. If you take a course in Philosophy 101, your textbook is almost certain to include

a section on free will versus determinism. In recent years, the topic has moved to center stage in philosophy. 11 Therefore it is one of the most salient facts of general revelation that can be used in testing worldviews.

A worldview is like an internal map that guides us in navigating reality. Because idols deify a part of creation, they produce maps that cover only part of reality. As a result, in the course of ordinary life, humans keep walking off the map. It happens whenever they are “compelled to believe” in free will or moral responsibility or anything else not covered by their cognitive map—whenever they “cannot live” within the map’s cramped borders.

Life itself keeps pushing them off their own map. No one can live consistently on the basis of such a limited worldview map.

From time immemorial, people have held to the ideal of the unity of truth. The universe

itself is an integrated, coordinated whole and therefore the truth about the universe must be an integrated, coherent whole. We may not be able to see yet how it all fits together. But we know that two contradictory statements cannot both be true.

The Bible does not define faith as a leap to something that has no logical ground within its own worldview—a useful falsehood. When Paul writes, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7), some Christians seem to think he is speaking metaphorically and means “by faith, not reason.” But Paul is speaking literally and he means sight. Non-material realities are

invisible. They cannot be seen. Faith is “the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1 KJV). It can take tremendous faith to act on the basis of realities we cannot see, but it is not a logical contradiction. Given the evidence, such actions can even be eminently reasonable, just as it is reasonable for physicists to count on the reality of forces and fields that they cannot see.

In Romans 1, Paul warns that idols lead to destructive behavior, to moral and social breakdown. Amazingly, some secular thinkers recognize the truth of Paul’s warning.

When we hear people talk about ideas that are false, yet necessary for a humane social order, that is a signal that they have bumped up against the hard edge of a reality that does not fit their worldview.

Ever since Kant, the phrase as if has come to signal truths that people are compelled to hold, even though they cannot account for those truths within their own worldview. They live as if Christianity were true, even though their worldview denies it. Instead of giving up their worldview in the face of contrary facts, they endure a severe mental schizophrenia.

Romans 1 says God “gives people up” to pursue their idols ever further, increasing the gap between what they profess and what they practice. We can picture worldviews falling along a continuum: The more consistently people work out the logic of their worldview, the more reductionistic the result will be, the wider the gap, and the further its leap into irrational mysticism.

To describe this clash, we’ve been using the term cognitive dissonance, but that word may be too tame. This is a searing contradiction. Paul writes that those who build their lives on idols become “futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts [are] darkened” (Rom. 1:21). The Greek word for futile means unproductive, ineffectual, failing to achieve its purpose.

No wonder Paul writes that those who reject the Creator “are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). The phrase means “without a defense,”

The strength of this approach is that it shows why worldviews fail on their own terms. It is rarely persuasive to criticize other views from within your own perspective. All that really shows is that those other views disagree with you. Instead you must step imaginatively inside other perspectives to show from within why they lack explanatory power.

This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society—ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children—have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the attic, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain.

The Bible teaches that, without God, people are morally lost. But they are also intellectually lost because they are trying to live within the limits of a worldview that is too cramped and narrow to account for their own humanity. They are forced to place their entire hope for dignity and meaning in an upper-story realm that they themselves regard as irrational and unknowable—nothing but necessary falsehoods.