Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (12 page)

The same insight, however, was offered long ago by Christian thinkers. Scripture itself is replete with warnings that idolatry leads to a kind of spiritual and intellectual blindness. Romans 1 tells us that when we refuse to acknowledge God, our minds become “futile” and our hearts are “darkened” (Rom. 1:21) Theologians call this the
noetic
effects of sin, from the Greek word
nous
, which as we saw earlier means not just the mind but the core of our being. 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.

Yet postmodernism typically goes further than this common- sense biblical insight to the much more radical claim that there
is
no extra-mental truth. It reduces truth claims to social constructions. And it reduces individuals to puppets of social forces. The implication is that people hold certain ideas not because they have good reasons but because they are black or white, a man or a woman, Asian or Hispanic, or whatever.

This is radically dehumanizing. It implies that individuals are powerless to rise above the communities to which they belong. It is a form of reductionism that dissolves individual identity into group identity. And the list of group identities keeps growing. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Politics recently announced that all incoming students will be required to take “a mandatory power and privilege training that examines components of race, gender, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, ability, religion, international status, and power differentials.”
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At many universities, liberal arts departments no longer teach the classics but immerse students in contemporary works on racial and sexual politics. And if classic books of literature and philosophy
are
taught, they are likely to include “trigger warnings.” An omnibus edition of Kant’s three
Critiques
includes a warning label on the title page: “This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.” The irony is that Kant had enormous influence on the development of the anti-realist concept of truth. But that’s not what educators are concerned about. They’re worried about Kant’s violations of political correctness.
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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. Whenever a philosophy absolutizes something less than God—no matter what it is—the result is reductionism, a lower view of the human person. Postmodernists themselves label their view “anti-humanism,” by which they mean the human subject has no power to transcend social and historical conditions—the Zeitgeist.

In that case, however, the individual can have no independent stance from which to
critique
the Zeitgeist. As Dallas Willard points out, “postmodernism hardly leaves you a logical leg to stand on to oppose … the spirit of the age.”
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By contrast, Christianity offers a transcendent truth—a perspective not bound by the spirit of the age. It liberates individuals to think critically about the prevailing ethos.

The Fall of Postmodernism

I was speaking at an evangelical college when a student asked, “We live in a postmodern age when no one cares anymore about truth. How do we talk to people who are not persuaded by facts and reasons?” It’s true that postmoderns may not be impressed by fact-based apologetics. But they
can
be reached by arguments using their own conceptual language.

Start with their view of truth. Postmodernists reject any claim to a truth that is universal, objective, or eternal. They insist that everyone’s perspective is “situated” within a context that is particular, local, and historically contingent. But of course, the same critique applies to postmodernists’ own claims—they, too, are “situated” within a particular, historical context. After all, where did postmodernism come from? As we have seen, it is an offshoot of modern European culture. It stems from post-Hegelian continental philosophy with its notion that individuals are socially constituted by their communities and forms of life.

Postmoderns often accuse Christians of being narrow and closed-minded. But postmodernism is itself confined within a particular strand of Western intellectual history. Thus postmodernists are just as restricted by their own historical horizons as the more traditional people whom they tend to look down on. And they are just as exclusive as anyone else in insisting that
their
view captures the way things really are.

In short, the same reasoning that postmodernists use to debunk traditional concepts of truth applies to their own views.

Some postmodernists have updated Hegel’s historicism by linking it to science-based theories of evolution. An example is Rorty, who argues on the basis of Darwinian evolution that there are no eternal truths—that all our ideas are “a product of time and chance.”
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But his conclusion rests on the assumption that Darwinian evolution is true—in precisely the sense he denies that anything can be true.

I was once invited on a radio program to debate a seminary professor who described himself as postmodern. My question was, why would a Christian
want
to embrace postmodernism? Granted, it deflates modernist claims to universal truth by showing that modernism is a limited, historically conditioned point of view. But then, so is postmodernism. As a Christian, why would I want to commit myself to any idea that is merely a social construction?

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. Even Christians typically take this concept far too much for granted. For it amounts to the astonishing claim that we do have access to a God’s-eye view of the world, a perspective beyond merely human knowledge, a timeless and transcendent truth.

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
trans
historical truths because God himself has spoken.

In a striking passage, Rorty admits that the very concept of objective truth is grounded in the Christian conviction that the universe was “created by a person.” The idea of a truth beyond human subjectivity, he writes, “is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation, the work of someone who … Himself spoke some language in which He described His own project.”
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In 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”
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and turn people toward eternal truth.

Pantheism versus You

So far we have traced two very different forms of reductionism, resulting from two widespread philosophies: materialism and postmodernism. A Romans 1 apologetics strategy also gives us tools to diagnose reductionism resulting from religion. Let’s practice applying those tools to Eastern pantheism and Islam.

Earlier we learned that Romantic thinkers embraced a Western version of pantheism. So it is not surprising that they were also open to Eastern versions. In the late nineteenth century, Schopenhauer became the first philosopher to import full-blown Buddhism into the West. In our own day, the New Age movement has elevated Eastern religions to the status of Hollywood chic.

Pantheism is typically summarized as the doctrine that god is the universe and the universe is god (
pan
means all;
theism
means god). God is called the One or the All. The world is seen as a manifestation or emanation of the divine essence.

Is this an idol? Obviously.

Pantheists typically argue that the biblical teaching of a transcendent God has alienated us from nature—that it has caused Western culture to rape and plunder the earth. If we cultivate a sense of spiritual oneness with nature, they claim, we will have a greater reverence for all life.

Is that claim true? Not at all. The reason is that, like all idols, pantheism is reductionistic. It leads to a lower view of life.

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. In pantheism, the divine is an underlying spiritual unity, the One. What slips through the sieve, then, is diversity, difference, individuality. In Hinduism, your individual identity is actually called
maya
, which means illusion. It is regarded as the cause of evil, selfishness, greed, and war. The goal of meditation is to dissolve your sense of being a separate self by merging with the cosmic One, the undifferentiated All, like a drop of water dissipating into the ocean. In Buddhism, the word
nirvana
means literally “to become extinguished.”
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The loss of the self is expressed in a poem by the Chinese poet Li Po. The poem is about the coming of evening, and it ends with these words:

We sit together, the mountain and I

until only the mountain remains.

This poem is often quoted in books on meditation as a moving expression of our oneness with nature. But notice that in this oneness, the “I” is lost—dissolved into the rock of the mountainside. As a contemporary poet explains, the mountain represents the eternal One: “Watching this ‘mountain’ of eternal presence long enough, in deep stillness you find that you are nowhere to be seen. You are surprised to discover that everything you reflexively called ‘me’ was never really there in the first place.”
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The implicit message is that the individual self has so little value that it ought to dissolve into the One. For it “was never really there in the first place.” It was an illusion.

Another reason pantheism leads to a low view of human life is that the divine is non-personal. In classic pantheism, the concept of the divine is not a personal deity who thinks, wills, feels, and acts. Instead it is a non-personal, non-thinking, non-acting spiritual substratum underlying all things. A former Zen Buddhist (who converted to Christianity) explains that, in pantheism, the divine is “an unconscious and impersonal essence, which may be called God, Nature, the Absolute, Oneness.”
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As a result, surprisingly, pantheism is not all that different from materialism. It is the flip side of the same coin. Materialism claims that everything consists of
material
stuff. Pantheism claims that everything consists of
spiritual
stuff. Both are non-personal. Thus both fail to account for the personal dimensions of human nature. And what they cannot account for, they will suppress and ultimately deny.

This is the reductionist pattern. Every idol-based worldview seeks to stuff all of reality into a box. Inevitably, however, something will stick out of the box. Something will fail to fit within its conceptual categories. Both materialism and pantheism define ultimate reality in non-personal terms—and therefore both fail to account for human personhood. Thus they end up denying, denigrating, and devaluing the unique features of human persons. Humans are reduced to products of non-personal forces. The individual dissolves into the rock of the mountainside.
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Any system that begins with non-personal forces will, in the end, suppress human personhood. It will reduce persons to components of a blind, unconscious matrix of being. Water cannot rise above its source.

The puzzling question is why these worldviews are at all popular. After all, what we long for most of all is to be known and loved for who we are as unique persons—a longing that can be met only if the divine is a Person. 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.