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

by Nancy R. Pearcey

if you begin with a transcendent personal Agent, then you have a perfectly logical explanation for why humans are likewise personal agents. The cause is adequate to the

effect. The very phenomena that are so problematic for scientific materialism—like free will, consciousness, love—can be logically accounted for within a Christian worldview. No part of human experience falls outside its categories. Nothing sticks out of the box. The human person is no longer a misfit in a deterministic world. There is no division into an upper and lower story because you don’t need a mystical attic to stash things that don’t fit in your worldview. Christianity continues to affirm the unity of truth as a coherent, logically consistent whole. In Christ, all things still “hold together” (Col. 1:17).

If secularists find Christianity “incredible,” Chesterton concludes, that is because it is so incredibly positive in affirming a high view of human freedom and dignity. 32

Secular thinkers often criticize Christianity for being irrational. Yet ironically, today it is a biblical worldview that coheres in a logically consistent system. It liberates us from cognitive dissonance, imparting a profound inner unity and peace. It accords with the natural human longing for a life of integrity and wholeness. (The word integrity comes from the Latin word for wholeness.) When talking with secular people, we can show them how Christianity fulfills their own highest hopes and ideals.

We all learned this basic truth from the time we were tiny. As toddlers, when we bumped into the wall or tipped over our chair and crashed to the floor, we discovered in a painful way that the universe has an objective structure. When the toy box did not contain

the toy we wanted, we discovered that reality does not bend to our subjective desires. Anything that we are compelled to affirm, simply in order to function in the world, is part of general revelation.

Christianity explains why truth is not merely a human construction. The world is not a creation of my own mind. It is the handiwork of God. The human mind cannot usurp the Creator’s role and function. The biblical concept of creation gives logical grounds to support what ...

No wonder philosopher Louis Dupré says that the central challenge of our age is the lack of any integrating truth: “We experience our culture as fragmented; we live on bits of meaning and lack the overall vision that holds them together in a whole.” As a result, people feel an intense need for self-integration. Christianity has the power to integrate our lives and create a coherent personality structure, but only if we embrace it as the ultimate, capital-T truth that pulls together all lesser truths. Our commitment to Christian truth “cannot simply remain one discrete part of life,” Dupré says; it must “integrate all other aspects of existence.” 39 Anything less is neither beautiful nor compelling enough to ignite our passion and transform our character.

Afterward a Harvard professor came up to me from the audience, visibly upset. After all, I had criticized the work of university professors at places like Harvard—his own colleagues. “They know their theories don’t explain ordinary life outside the lab,” he said emphatically. “But why throw it in their faces?” The first thing that struck me was that he had let slip an amazing admission. These scientists and philosophers know that their theories do not fit the real world? In Romans 1, Paul says the testimony of general revelation is knowable by everyone. Was this professor unwittingly confirming what Paul says?

The second thing that struck me about the Harvard professor’s comment was that he characterized an analysis of someone’s worldview as “throwing it in their faces.” The goal of testing worldviews should never to be attack those who hold them but to open their minds to a better alternative.

As we saw in Principle #3, 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.

Egnor’s guiding principle was to follow the evidence wherever it leads. He decided the best explanation for why living things function as if they were designed is that they were designed. “I came to see that Darwinism is a philosophical bias more than coherent science. Darwinian processes may explain some patterns and changes in gene frequency in populations, but the evidence does not even remotely support the claim that chance and necessity fully account for the appearance of complex design in living things.”

the two major ways to test a philosophy or worldview: Does it fit the facts? And is it logically consistent?

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).

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.”

As a tool of critical thinking, a hermeneutics of suspicion can be useful to highlight common human failings—to diagnose the ways our thinking may be distorted by things like economic interests or psychological impulses. 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.

What is unique about the Romans 1 approach is that it explains why the argument works:

because idol-based worldviews are reductionistic. By deifying something lower than the biblical God, they also recast humans in the image of something lower. The process of reductionism includes human cognitive faculties—things like reason, logic, rationality. It reduces human rationality to some non-rational force or process.

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 and our world ...

Biblical epistemology is backed up experientially by general revelation.

Anything we must assume in order to function in the world is part of general revelation.

The upshot is that all worldviews have to borrow a Christian epistemology—at least at the moment they are making their claims. They must tacitly assume the reliability of reason and rationality, which only a biblical worldview supports.

Because humans are whole and integrated beings, we should expect our thoughts to be accompanied by physical events in the brain. But if we reduce thought processes to brain processes, the result is a logical contradiction.

The upshot is that survival is no guarantee of truth. If survival is the only standard, we can never know which ideas are true and which are adaptive but false.

“Is the [evolutionary] hypothesis really compatible with the continued confidence in reason as a source of knowledge?” His answer is no: “I have to be able to believe … that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct—not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so.” Hence, “insofar as the evolutionary hypothesis itself depends on reason, it would be self-undermining.” 20

Darwin’s famous “horrid doubt” passage where he questions whether the human mind can be trustworthy if it is a product of evolution: “With me, the horrid

doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”

“If our cognitive capacities were simply evolved dispositions, there would be no way of knowing which of these capacities lead to true beliefs and which to false ones.” Thus “to view humans as little more than sophisticated animals … undermines confidence in the scientific method.” 23

Only a biblical worldview provides an adequate epistemology for science. First, a rational God created the world with an intelligible structure, and second, he created humans in his image. In the words of historian Richard Cohen, science required the concept of a “rational creator of all things,” along with the corollary that “we

lesser rational beings might, by virtue of that Godlike rationality, be able to decipher the laws of nature.” Theologian Christopher Kaiser states the same idea succinctly: the early scientists assumed that “the same Logos that is responsible for its ordering is also reflected in human reason.” 26

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 epist...

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.” 29

People must first be convinced there is a mathematical order in nature. Otherwise they

will not go searching for it—and science will not get off the ground. What this means is that even today, anyone who wants to pursue science has to adopt an epistemology derived from a biblical worldview—at least in practice. To do science, even the m...

“the death of God implies the disappearance of the author.” 37 For if there is no Creator, then humans do not have the dignity of being sub-creators. They are merely products of social and historical forces.

After World War II, many European thinkers who had suffered under these oppressive regimes decided that the source of totalitarianism lay in “totalizing” metanarratives. By “totalizing” they meant a worldview that focuses on a single dimension of human experience, elevating it to a false absolute and subordinating everything else to its categories. 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.

idols are created when some part of creation is absolutized. The mistake postmodernists made was to think the source of the problem was a commitment to any comprehensive truth.

By rejecting any universal truth, postmodernism undercuts its own claim to truth. Moreover, without some universal standard of justice, there is no way to stand against injustice and oppression—the very things postmodernists were so concerned about. As one philosopher writes, “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.” 39

Lived out consistently, the theory also leads to the coercive suppression of diversity. That may sound ironic at first, because it was postmodernism that made diversity such a potent buzzword in the first place. 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.

Bruno Latour, a sociologist of science, likewise grew concerned about the oppressive impact of the critical theory that he himself helped found. 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. “You are always right!” Latour says. “Their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you alone can see.” 43

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

Moreover, it runs contrary to human experience. Each of us experiences the inescapable, irresistible sense of being a coherent self—an active center of consciousness—not merely a passive locus of colliding social forces. Even as we undergo life changes, we are aware of an enduring core personal identity. The universality of this first-person awareness, even among those whose worldview denies it, is a clue that it is intrinsic to human experience. We are so constituted that we cannot live consistently on the basis of the postmodernists’ radical reductionism. And neither can they. The truths of general revelation cannot ultimately be suppressed.

The problem of how to balance our individual identity with our membership in communities is a perennial question known in philosophy as the one and the many, or unity and diversity. Christianity offers an answer that is surprising and unique. It teaches that the human race was created in the image of a God who is a tri-unity—three Persons so intimately related as to constitute one Godhead. God’s own nature consists in reciprocal love and communication among the Persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Spirit). Both the one and the many, both individuality and relationship, exist within the divine nature. 47

The perfect balance of unity and diversity within the Trinity offers a model for human social life—and a solution to the opposing poles of postmodernism and modernism. Against postmodernism’s dissolution of the self, the Trinity implies the dignity of the individual self. Just as each Person within the Trinity is distinct and plays a unique role in the drama of salvation, so each individual person has a unique identity and purpose.