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

Finding Truth

5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

Finding Truth

Other Titles...

Finding Truth

5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

Opening Quote“Nearly all that we call human history...[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Chapter One:“I Lost My Faith at an Evangelical College”

• Bill’s story

• The main question: Is it possible to find a single line of inquiry that we can apply universally to all ideas?

• “What I have discovered is that the Bible itself offers a powerful strategy for critical thinking—five principles that cut to the heart of any worldview...The key passage is the first chapter of Romans.” (23-24)


Insights from Romans 1...

Insight #1: We all have access to evidence for God through creation.

• Romans 1:19—What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

• Romans 1:20—His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.



Insight #1: We all have access to evidence for God through creation.

For example...

• Evidence from Life

• Evidence from Personhood



Insight #2: We all suppress the evidence from creation.

• Romans 1:18—[They] suppress the truth.

• Romans 1:21—Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.

• Romans 1:28—They did not see fit to acknowledge God.



Insight #3: We all create idols to take the place of God.

• Romans 1:23—[They] exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

• Romans 1:25—They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.



Insight #4: God gives us up to the consequences of our idols—to a “debased” mind.

• Romans 1:21—Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking.

• Romans 1:28—Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind.



Insight #5: God gives us up to the consequences of our idols—to a “dishonorable” behavior.

• Romans 1:24—God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.

• Romans 1:26—God gave them up do dishonorable passions.

• Romans 1:28—God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.


“They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.” -Romans 1:29-31


Five Strategic Principles:

1) Identify the Idol

2) Identify the Idol’s Reductionism

3) Test the Idol: Does it Contradict What We Know about the World?

4) Test the Idol: Does it Contradict Itself?

5) Replace the Idol: Make the Case For Christianity

Principle #1: Identify the Idol

Principle #2: Identify the Idol’s Reductionism

1) Because we are created in God’s image as rational and responsible beings, we all have a philosophy—not necessarily one learned out of a textbook, but an overall view of life by which we make sense of the world. (58)

Every human personality, community...and culture will be based on some ultimate concern or some ultimate allegiance—either to God or to some God substitute. (61)

2) We often contrast “believers” to “nonbelievers,” but that can be misleading. Everyone believes something, in the sense that they must assume some principle as fundamentally true. Atheists often fail to recognize that they are in the same boat as everyone else. A common mantra on atheist websites goes like this: “Atheism is not a belief. Atheism is merely the lack of belief in God or gods.”

But it is impossible to think without some starting point. If you 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. (62)

3) 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 not get their identity from a transcendent Creator will get it from something within creation.

We could say that every concept of humanity is created in the image of some god. And because divinity will always be lower than the biblical God, its view of humanity will also be lower. Those who dishonor God will dishonor those made in God’s image. Those who create idols eventually “become like them.” (Ps. 115:8) (98)

4) In philosophical terms, this is called reductionism—the process of reducing something from a higher, more complex level of reality to a lower, simpler, less complex level. When an idol absolutizes some part of creation, everything else must be explained in terms of that one limited part—pulled down to that level, measured against that one yardstick, reduced to that lowest common denominator. (98-99)

5) Some idols include:

• Materialism & Empiricism

• Rationalism

• Postmodernism

• Pantheism

• Islam

Finding TruthFive Principles:

1)Identify the Idol

2)Identify the Idol’s Reductionism

•Materialism

• Empiricism & Rationalism

• Postmodernism

• Pantheism

• Islam

Principle #3:

Test the Idol

Does it Contradict What We Know

about the World?

What is a worldview intended to explain? A worldview is meant to give a systematic explanation of those inescapable, unavoidable facts of experience accessible to all people, in all cultures, across all periods of history. In biblical terms, those facts constitute general revelation.

-p. 142

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? Does life function the way the worldview says it should? Does it fit reality? Does it match what we know about the world?

If a worldview contradicts our fundamental experience of the world—what we know by general revelation—that is a good sign that is should be scrapped

p. 143

For instance...

Free Will

Consciousness

Human Value

Purpose & Meaning

1) Albert Einstein, Physicist

2) Immanuel Kant, Philosopher

3) Galen Strawson• Department Chair, Philosophy, University of

Texas, Austin

4) Edward Slingerland• Professor of Asian Studies and Canada

Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia

5) Marvin Minsky• Cognitive scientist in the field of artificial

intelligence (AI), co-founder of the MIT's AI laboratory

6) Saul Smilansky• Department Chair, Philosophy, University of

Haifa

7) Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist“I blame people, I give people credit...“I sort of do, yes. But it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with, otherwise life would be intolerable.”

For instance...

Free Will

Consciousness

Human Value

Purpose and Meaning

The Six Blind Men & the Elephant

Paul in Athens (Acts 17)

A Christian’s motive in apologetics should be a God-inspired grief for the lost. We should be brokenhearted over the dehumanizing reductionisms that dishonor and destroy our fellow human beings. We should weep for people whose dark worldviews deny that their life choices have meaning or moral significance. 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. We should mourn for postmoderns who think that ultimate truths are only in one’s head.

-p. 175

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

-John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

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