Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (13 page)

Islam versus Human Dignity

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.

The exceptions to this rule are the other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, which share with Christianity a concept of a transcendent Creator. They also accept at least some of the same scriptures. I am going to leave Judaism aside because of its complex relationship to Christianity. Christians hold that doctrines such as the Trinity are found in the Old Testament, even if taught more explicitly in the New Testament. That’s why the gospel went “to the Jew first” (Rom. 1:16). The term “Judeo-Christian” emphasizes the many continuities and similarities.

What about Islam? Today Islam has become a powerful geopolitical force, and Christians are searching for better ways to understand it. Islam accepts segments of the Christian Scripture as divinely revealed (the Hebrew Torah, the psalms of David, and the Gospels).
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Nevertheless, its concept of God differs in important ways from classic Christian theology—most obviously by rejecting the concept of the Trinity.

The Koran teaches that Jesus is not divine but is “only a messenger of Allah.”
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Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, “The Quran continuously emphasizes the Unity and the Oneness of God, and it can be said that the very raison d’être of Islam is to assert in a final and categorical manner the Oneness of God and the nothingness of all before the Majesty of that One.” Due to Islam’s emphasis on the oneness of God, some scholars even maintain that it is closer to the pantheism of neo-Platonism and Hinduism than to Christianity.
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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.

“All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love,’” writes C. S. Lewis, “But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.”
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(Or if he did have the capacity for love, he had no way to exercise it. To fulfill his nature, he would
need
to create a world—in which case, he would be dependent on creation, which is not the kind of deity taught by either Islam or Christianity.)

Only a God of love is fully personal. Thus the Trinity is crucial for maintaining a fully personal concept of God. As theologian Robert Letham writes, “Only a God who is triune can be personal.… A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person.” Therefore it “has no way to explain or even to maintain human personhood.”
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Astonishingly,
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
reports that Islam does not even have a concept of the person: “There is no conceptual equivalent of the Western philosophical concept of ‘person’ in Arabic and in classic Islamic philosophy.” This fact seems “to confirm the importance of the specifically Christian … origins of the term.”
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If it’s true that Islam lacks even a clear concept of the person, this would explain why it tends to be fatalistic, emphasizing sheer submission to the will of Allah (
islam
means submission). As Udo Middelmann explains, “Islam is a religion of resignation.… Allah made the world, and you must accept the way it interacts with you, even should it kill you. You are allowed no questions, no doubt, no individual responsibility. Negation of self is your salvation.”

This also explains why a great deal of Muslim worship consists of near-mechanical rituals: Worshippers recite the Koran, in unison, word for word, by memory, in the original Arabic. (The word
Koran
means “that which is recited.”) To quote Middelmann again, “Its spirituality is repetitious and impersonal, not a chosen and deliberate love of God with all your heart, mind and soul.”
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Muslims are not even required to understand what they recite. Many are not Arabic and do not speak the language. A book by two Muslim authors says, “It is not uncommon to meet people who know a great deal of the text by heart but have not the slightest understanding of the world view that permeates it.” But this is acceptable, the authors say, because in Islam “understanding is secondary” to recitation and ritual.
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Thus Islam proves the reductionist principle once again—that a lower view of God leads to a lower view of the value, status, and dignity of the human person.

From Secular Idols to Death Camps

One of most powerful ways to engage with seekers and skeptics is to help them identify their own idols. And idols are easier to recognize when lived out in practice—especially when they are incarnated in politics and public policy. We have applied Principle #2 to philosophies and religions; now let’s show the impact of reductionism when fleshed out by two political theories—Nazism and Communism. Both illustrate the dark and destructive power of idols.

Western history is often retold in the form of a religious epic, says anthropologist Richard Schweder. “The Enlightenment story has its own version of Genesis, and the themes are well known: The world woke up from the slumber of the ‘dark ages,’ finally got in touch with the truth and became good about 300 years ago in Northern and Western Europe.” This secular faith offers its own version of salvation: “As people opened their eyes, religion (equated with ignorance and superstition) gave way to science (equated with fact and reason).”

For centuries, this Enlightenment myth was held up as the blueprint for progress and liberty. Yet “as a theory of history,” Schweder comments dryly, the “story has had a predictive utility of approximately zero.”
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For the rise of secularism did
not
lead to ever-increasing liberty. On the contrary, it turned the twentieth century into a bloodbath of death and destruction. Most of the atrocities were perpetrated by regimes devoted to political ideologies such as National Socialism (Nazism) and Marxism (Communism).

Historians have often wondered how such mind-staggering barbarism could emerge in modern civilized Europe. The answer lies in the power of idols. Nazi doctrine was organized around the idol of race. An individual’s race (Aryan or Jewish or Slavic) was said to determine that person’s views, character, and even worth. Communist ideology was organized around the idol of economic class. A person’s economic class (capitalist or proletarian) was held to be the all-determining factor.

As we have seen, in every idol-based worldview, some parts of creation will not fit in its box. Some facts of general revelation will be suppressed. But when idol-centered worldviews are applied in the political realm, there will be some
people
who do not fit in the state’s prescribed box—and who will literally be suppressed and even killed. Under Nazism, those who did not fit in the prescribed box of race included Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians, and others. They were transported to concentration camps where about twenty-five million died or were shot to death. Under Communism, those who did not fit the prescribed box of economic class included capitalists, kulaks, and others. They were subject to forced famines or to hard labor camps where an estimated eighty-five to a hundred million died or were shot to death. (Both regimes rounded up dissenting Christians.)
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In World War II, these same false absolutes led to global conflict. As Gilson observed at the time, “Millions of men are starving and bleeding to death because two or three … deified abstractions are now at war. For when gods fight among themselves, men have to die.”
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The lesson is that idol-based ideologies are invariably dehumanizing, and if unchecked they lead to repression, coercion, oppression, war, and violence. In the twentieth century alone, they have taken far more lives and created more havoc than all the religiously motivated witch hunts, inquisitions, and wars of the previous centuries.

“Materialists are ready to worship their own jerry-built creations as though they were the Absolute,” writes Aldous Huxley. This “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.”
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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.

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”
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—by secret police and death camps.

From Liberators to Despots

The study of worldviews is not merely a theoretical subject to be discussed hypothetically in the classroom. Idols have life-and-death consequences. When Romans 1 says God gives people up to the destructive impact of their idols, that does not mean only personal behavior. Worldviews are also incarnated in the classroom, the boardroom, the courtroom, the legislative chamber, and the theater of war.

Modern totalitarianism illustrates Paul’s teaching that those who do not know God will fall under the yoke of idols. They will be “enslaved to those that by nature are not gods” (Gal. 4:8).
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When a group of famous ex-Communists wrote a book about their disillusionment, they titled it
The God That Failed
.

Historian Isaiah Berlin once observed that every philosophy offers a model of reality that promises to liberate people from error: “But they almost invariably end by enslaving those very same people,
by failing to explain the whole of experience
. They begin as liberators and end in some sort of despotism.”
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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.

More Than Is Dreamed of in Your Philosophy

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.”
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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.

Romans 1 starts its teaching on idols by saying that the “wrath of God” is revealed from heaven. There is probably nothing that modern people hate more about religion than talk of the wrath of God. It suggests a picture of an angry, vengeful deity. But the biblical concept of wrath often refers simply to God’s implacable opposition to evil and injustice. It does not necessarily mean a catastrophic event, like a lightning bolt from heaven. In fact, it does not necessarily mean divine intervention in human affairs at 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.

I cannot think of a better description of reductionistic worldviews.

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.
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Our hearts should break for people whose worldviews are dark, dehumanizing, demeaning, and dishonoring to the human person. An opportunity is wide open to present Christianity as radically positive and humane. A biblical worldview does not divinize any aspect of creation or set up a false absolute. As a consequence, it does not lead to a reductionism that devalues or denies the other dimensions of creation. It does not have to shove the universe into a box and slice off whatever doesn’t fit. It is not exclusive but inclusive, affirming the goodness and reality of all God’s diverse and multi-faceted creation.