Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (23 page)

A commitment to science has even been shown to have psychological effects similar to a religious commitment. The
New Scientist
reports on a study showing that under stress, atheists responded with a higher commitment to a “belief in science.” The article concluded, “It’s well known that religious faith can help believers cope with stress and anxiety, by providing them with a sense of meaning and control at times of uncertainty. It now seems that a ‘belief’ in science and a rationalistic outlook might do the same for the non-religious.”
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Even the theory of evolution, often cited as support for atheism, can function as a substitute religion. In the 1965 introduction to Darwin’s
Origin of Species
, W. R. Thompson observed that, for many biologists, the concept of organic evolution is “an object of genuinely religious devotion, because they regard it as a supreme integrative principle.”
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More recently, Michael Ruse shocked his fellow atheists by pointing out that evolution often functions as a religion: “Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality.”
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And with worship, we might add. A few years ago, a mass was composed titled “Missa Charles Darwin” (
missa
means mass). The piece is based on the five-movement structure of the traditional mass. It sounds very much like Renaissance church music, but the texts from Scripture have been replaced by excerpts from Darwin’s writings, including
On the Origin of Species
and
The Descent of Man
.
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Evolutionary Religion

Darwinism is not the only version of evolution on the market. Yet most alternative theories are even more overtly religious. Biologist Stuart Kauffman is well known for his theory of self-organization. But he does not regard it as merely another scientific theory: It is “a new world view” with “a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself.” In other words, Kauffman treats
God
as a word for the ceaseless flux of the universe. That, he says, is “God enough for me.”

Why retain the word
God
at all, which connotes a transcendent, caring, intelligent Person, when your theory really involves an immanent, non-caring, non-intelligent process? Precisely to smuggle in the emotional power connected to the term. Kauffman is open about his intentions: “What do we gain by using the God word? I suspect a great deal, for the word carries with it awe and reverence. If we can transfer that awe and reverence, not to the transcendental Abrahamic God of my Israelite tribe long ago, but to the stunning reality that confronts us, we will grant permission for a renewed spirituality, and awe, reverence and responsibility for all that lives, for the planet.”
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In short, Kauffman hopes to inspire people to respond emotionally to a purely materialist universe
as if
it were the personal God of the Bible. He is another free-loader.
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Finally, there is economist and futurist Jeremy Rifkin, who promotes a quasi-pantheistic version of evolution. He envisions evolution as a process whereby an immanent “mind” evolves up the ladder of life, the great chain of being: “Evolution is no longer viewed as a mindless affair, quite the opposite. It is mind enlarging its domain up the chain of species.” In those words we hear echoes of Hegel’s concept of an Absolute Mind evolving upward through history. Rifkin goes on: “One eventually winds up with the idea of the universe as a mind that oversees, orchestrates, and gives order and structure to all things.”

What are the implications of this pantheistic model of evolution? Most obviously, it eliminates a transcendent Creator—which Rifkin takes to be a good thing. For it means that “we no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else’s home.” Therefore we no longer feel “obliged to make our behavior conform with a set of preexisting cosmic rules.” Instead we are free to make up our own rules:

It is our creation now. We make the rules. We establish the parameters of reality. We create the world, and because we do, we no longer feel beholden to outside forces. We no longer have to justify our behavior, for we are now the architects of the universe.

We
create the world?
We
are the architects of the universe? Clearly, Rifkin is saying that if there is no transcendent God, then humans take his place. Humans become mini-gods. Rifkin ends with a hymn to evolved humanity: “We are responsible to nothing outside ourselves, for we are the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever.”
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If this is not a theological vision of evolution, I don’t know what is.

Recognizing the religious nature of secular worldviews creates a level playing field. It undermines the pretensions of secularists to religious neutrality, which they use to claim superiority over religion. That is, they claim to be objective and fact-based, while discrediting religions as biased and “faith-based.” Yet no worldview is neutral—not even atheism or secularism.

In relation to the biblical God, secular people may claim to be skeptics. But in relation to their own god substitutes, they are true believers. To adapt an observation from C. S. Lewis, their skepticism is only on the surface. It is for use on
other
people’s beliefs. “They are not nearly skeptical enough” about their
own
beliefs.
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What drives religious variants of evolution is a sense that there must be more to reality than the flat, one-dimensional vision offered by materialism. Evolutionists are reaching out for higher dimensions to answer the human longing for greater meaning to life. Those longings are one more expression of general revelation. They are signposts to the biblical God.

Losing Faith, Finding God

One way to highlight Christianity’s attractive features is to show where secularists borrow from it. Another way is to ask what you lose when you give it up. I first started to appreciate Christianity only after I had left it behind. As a young person growing up in a Christian home, I was like the proverbial fish that does not know what water is. Sometimes losing faith is the path to finding God.

Around the time I turned sixteen, I started asking basic questions: How do we know if Christianity is true? Are there any good reasons for holding it? None of the adults in my life seemed to have any answers. I once asked a university professor why he was a Christian. I hoped that such a highly educated person would offer a thoughtful response. But all he said was, “It works for me!” I thought,
It doesn’t work for me
.

Later I had the opportunity to talk to a seminary dean. I hoped that a person highly trained in theology might have answers. But all he said was, “Don’t worry, we all have doubts sometimes”—as though I were just going through a psychological stage. I thought,
Then why don’t you have answers for my doubts?
Finally I concluded that this pragmatic, psychologized version of Christianity had no serious answers. I rejected it and embarked on an intentional search for truth.

The decision struck me as a matter of intellectual honesty: In principle, if you do not have good
reasons
for holding something, then how can you really say you believe it—whether Christianity or anything else?

Within a short time, I became a thorough-going relativist and skeptic. There may be “happy pagans” who don’t know what they are missing, but I was acutely aware of what I had lost.

As a Christian, I had known that my life had a purpose: to live for God and “enjoy him forever” (in the words of the Westminster Shorter Catechism). But if there is no God, and life is a chance product of blind material forces, what purpose does human life have? Is it just a chemical accident on a rock flying through the cold, empty reaches of space? While still in high school, I started cornering my friends and asking, “What do you think is the purpose of life?” Sadly, many of my classmates were not thinking much beyond the party that weekend.

As a Christian, I had known that my actions had a significance that would last into eternity. But if there is no God, then when we die, we rot. Eventually the universe itself will die a heat death and all human civilizations will turn to dust. The best and highest achievements of the human race will have no lasting significance.

As a Christian, I had known that the final reality behind all temporal realities is Love. The universe is the creation of a personal Agent, who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts. But if there is no personal God, then the final reality is blind mechanistic forces. There is no one “out there” who loves us or cares what happens to us. As Richard Dawkins writes, “There is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
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As a Christian, I had accepted the existence of an objective moral standard. When I made choices, I could be confident that I was building my life on eternally valid truths. But if there is no God, do transcendent moral truths even exist? Was there any way to know that I was constructing my life on things that really matter? I did not know the word
relativism
, but among my high school friends I was the one arguing that we cannot know if anything is genuinely right or wrong. I experienced what Sartre meant when he said we are “condemned to be free”—condemned to act in a moral vacuum, with no way to know if your choices will ultimately prove good or bad, beneficial or harmful.

My angst was intensified by having lived overseas as an adolescent. Our large family could not afford hotels, so we slept in campgrounds while traveling across Europe, gaining a close-up view of diverse cultures and customs. We once drove to Turkey, traversing then-Communist countries like Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. (I have never witnessed such extreme poverty as in rural Bulgaria.) The experience left me with an indelible awareness that many of the things Americans take for granted are culturally relative. I began to wonder: Is there any truth beyond all cultural traditions? Or are we trapped within limited, changing human perspectives?

Finally, as a Christian, I had known that God himself spoke to the human race through Scripture. Many people regard the Bible as a grab bag of works by human authors—a record of spiritual experiences or a set of ancient myths devised to convey moral lessons. But Scripture makes the striking claim that it is a record of communication from God, who acts and speaks into human history. In the Old Testament, the prophets claim to speak the word of God: “Thus says the Lord.” In the New Testament, Paul calls Scripture “the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2). Peter states that the Bible writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. 1:21). Thus classic Christian theology regards Scripture as communication from a personal God. The heavens are open.

When I embraced agnosticism, however, the heavens were closed. I was locked in my own mind, limited to my own tiny slot in the immensity of time and space. It seemed obvious to me that, from that puny perspective, it was impossible to know any transcendent or timeless truths. Indeed, it might be impossible to know any truth at all. After all, I could not step outside my own head to gain an objective stance to verify my ideas. The logical conclusion is not just skepticism but solipsism, the idea that all we really know is the “inside” of our own experience.
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In my high school English notebook, I began doodling cartoons of the entire universe as a thought bubble inside my head.

Bertrand Russell—My Role Model

The years I spent wrestling with moral and intellectual skepticism were a dark and difficult period of my life. When people’s religious beliefs erode, they sometimes stay in the church for the friendships and social support. They retain the Bible’s commitment to an objective morality (at least an objective morality for
other
people, so they won’t rob or cheat you).

But my stance was that if Christianity was not true, then I did not want any of its benefits. I aspired to be like Bertrand Russell, who said atheists must build their lives on the “scaffolding … of unyielding despair.” Why despair? Because atheism holds that there is no higher purpose to life—“that man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.”

If atheism was true, then I did not want to flinch from accepting its pessimistic implications—which Russell went on to describe with poetic gloom: that “all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.”
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William Provine, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, states the conclusion more bluntly: If no God exists, he says, then “no ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth.”
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During my years as an agnostic, I was not just working through questions like these in my mind but living them out in my life. C. S. Lewis said he wrote
Pilgrim’s Regress
to illustrate the impact of worldviews on lived experience. In the story, the main character encounters a variety of God substitutes, including rationalism, materialism, idealism, and Freudianism, on his journey to discover the true God. Lewis wrote that the book illustrated the “
lived
dialectic, and not the merely
argued
dialectic of my philosophical progress.”
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I, too, was engaged in a “lived dialectic”—and every step of the way felt like a life-and-death struggle. While still in high school, I started walking to the library and pulling books off the philosophy shelf. If Christianity had no answers, I thought, maybe philosophy is the place where people discuss the big questions like, What is truth? What is the meaning of life? I was driven to study philosophy not by mere intellectual curiosity but by an anguished search for answers to life.