Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (27 page)

6.
Norton, “Apologetics.”
See also Troy Anderson, “A New Day for Apologetics: People Young and Old Are Flocking to Hear—and Be Changed by—Winsome Arguments for the Christian Faith,”
Christianity Today
, July 2, 2008.

7.
An idol may also be something mistakenly thought to be in creation—something unreal or imaginary, such as space aliens. The point is that
if it were real
, it would be something less than God, something within the cosmic order.

8.
Terry Eagleton,
Culture and the Death of God
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 119. See also Andrew Brown, “Religion without a Church? Humanism Almost Qualifies,”
Guardian
, August 12, 2014. Herman Dooyeweerd notes that idols result from a “deification of the creature” and “the absolutizing of the relative”
New Critique of Theoretical Thought
(Ontario, Canada: Paideia, 1984), I:58, 61, 176 and II:322, 572. For example, the mechanistic materialism of the Enlightenment resulted from “an absolutization of the mechanical phenomena.”
Roots
, 172–73. Reinhold Niebuhr defined idolatry as the tendency to lift “some finite and contingent element of existence into the eminence of the divine,” treating it “as the ultimate principle of coherence and meaning.”
The Nature and Destiny of Man
, vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 164–65. H. Richard Niebuhr also warned of “the absolutizing of what is relative.”
Christ and Culture
(New York: HarperCollins, 1951), 145. George Steiner notes that many modern philosophies function as “surrogate theologies.” They are propounded by “secular messiahs” and express a “nostalgia for the absolute.”
Nostalgia for the Absolute
(Toronto: House of Anansi, 1974), 49. Chapter 1 is titled “The Secular Messiahs.”

9.
Timothy Keller, “Talking about Idolatry in a Postmodern Age,” Gospel Coalition, April 2007,
http://old.westerfunk.net/archives/theology/Talking%20About%20Idolatry%20in%20a%20Postmodern%20Age/
.

10.
That’s why philosopher David Naugle describes worldviews as “visions of the heart.”
Worldview: The History of a Concept
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 268ff.

11.
“Atheistic religions … include eastern religions like Theravedic Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, and Confucianism.” Eric Steinhart, “On Atheistic Religion,” Patheos, January 8, 2012,
www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2012/01/on-atheistic-religion-2/
. However, “godless faiths are sustained only by small intellectual elites, and the popular forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism abound in Gods.” Rodney Stark, “Why Gods Should Matter in Social Science,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
49, no. 39 (June 6, 2003). In the Supreme Court decision
Torcaso v. Watkins
(1961), Justice Hugo Black stated that “among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others”; and André Comte-Sponville,
The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
(New York: Penguin, 2006), 2.

12.
Hermann Hesse,
Siddhartha
, trans. Hilda Rosner (New York: Bantam, 1951), 144. At the same time, many of these religions do have moral teachings, however difficult that may be to square with their metaphysics. In Hinduism the concept of karma involves a concept of justice—good actions cause good karma and bad actions cause bad karma; what you reap is what you sow. It is a near-mechanical rule, almost like a law in physics (e.g., for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction).

13.
Journalist Arthur Koestler observes that the Eastern view leads to the “denial of a universal moral law” and finally to “passive complicity” with evil. He illustrates the Eastern view with lines from one of the oldest of Zen poems: “Be not concerned with right and wrong / The conflict between right and wrong / Is the sickness of the mind.”
The Lotus and the Robot
(New York: Macmillan, 1960), 272, 270.

14.
Cited in Stark, “Why Gods Should Matter.” Stark offers a great deal of additional evidence: “The founder of British anthropology, Edward Burnett Tylor, and the founder of British sociology, Herbert Spencer, both took pains to point out that only some kinds of religions have moral implications. ‘Savage animism [religion] is almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainspring of practical religion,’ Tylor reported. ‘The lower animism is not immoral, it is unmoral.’ Spencer also noted that many religions ignore morality, and he went even further by suggesting that some religions actively encourage crime and immorality: ‘At the present time in India, we have freebooters like the Domras, among whom a successful theft is always celebrated by a sacrifice to their chief god Gandak.’ … In his distinguished study of the Manus of New Guinea, Reo Franklin Fortune contrasted the moral aspects of their religion with that of the typical tribe, agreeing that ‘Tylor is entirely correct in stating that in most primitive regions of the world, religion and morality maintain themselves independently.’ Ruth Benedict also argued that to generalize the link between religion and morality ‘is to misconceive’ the ‘history of religions.’ She suggested that the linkage probably is typical only of ‘the higher ethical religions.’ Ralph Barton reported that the Ifugaos impute their own unscrupulous exchange practices to their Gods and seize every opportunity to cheat them. Peter Lawrence found that the Garia of New Guinea have no conception whatever of ‘sin,’ and ‘no idea of rewards in the next world for good works.’”

15.
Xenophanes, cited in Adam Drozdek,
Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 15; and Augustine,
City of God
, bk. 3, chap. 3.

16.
The city-state of ancient Carthage was a Phoenician colony located in what is now Tunisia. Phoenician colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, and Malta also practiced child sacrifice, as did ancient Israel, where it was ringingly denounced by several Old Testament prophets (Lev. 20:2–5; Deut. 12:31; 18:10; Jer. 7:31; 19:4–5; 32:35; Ezek. 16:20–21; 20:26, 31; 23:37).

Revisionists (mostly from Tunisia) have denied that Carthage practiced child sacrifice, but a new study seems to have laid that theory to rest. Sarah Griffiths, “Ancient Greek Stories of Ritual Child Sacrifice in Carthage Are True, Study Claims,”
Daily Mail
, January 23, 2014; and Maev Kennedy, “Carthaginians Sacrificed Own Children, Archaeologists Say,”
Guardian
, January 21, 2014.

17.
Clouser,
Myth
, chap. 2. Even a creator god may not be the ultimate reality. Gnosticism taught that within the cosmic order are several levels of spiritual beings from the highest deity down to the lowest deity or sub-god (usually translated as demiurge). It was this subordinate deity who created the material world where humans live. Because this world is the realm of death, decay, and destruction, the demiurge who created it was even said to be evil. To be precise, the demiurge was not even a true creator but merely an architect, because matter was thought to be eternal. He merely gave form to unformed matter.

18.
There is evidence that many ancient cultures held monotheism prior to becoming polytheistic, which supports Paul’s statement in Romans 1 that people reject worship of the Creator and substitute worship of creation. For a recent study, see Winfried Corduan,
In the Beginning: A Fresh Look at the Case for Original Monotheism
(Nashville: B&H, 2013). Some scholars believe that the ancient Chinese worshipped a monotheistic divinity before the rise of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. See Chan Kei Thong and Charlene L. Fu,
Finding God in Ancient China: How the Ancient Chinese Worshiped the God of the Bible
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009). John S. Mbiti studied some three hundred peoples of Africa, concluding, “In all these societies, without a single exception, people have a notion of God” as the Supreme Being and Creator.
African Religions and Philosophy
, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969), 29. Geoffrey Parrinder also argues that the indigenous African culture was monotheistic.
African Mythology
(New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1991). However, even when teaching that one supreme God exists, most traditional religions also teach that there are lower-level spirits or divinities. Often these religions teach that the Supreme God was alienated from his people and withdrew from them, which is why they now have to placate the lower-level spirits.

The finding that many cultures held an original monotheism has discredited the nineteenth-century Hegelian-inspired view that religions evolve from simple to complex (from animism through polytheism, to henotheism, to monotheism). See Gleason L. Archer,
A Survey of Old Testament Introduction
(Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1975). On the implications for missions, see Don Richardson,
Eternity in Their Hearts: Startling Evidence of Belief in the One True God in Hundreds of Cultures throughout the World
, 2nd ed. (Venture, CA: Regal, 1984).

19.
Jonathan Petre, “And after Double Maths It Will Be … Paganism: Schools Told to Put Witchcraft and Druids on RE Syllabus,”
Daily Mail
, April 14, 2012.

20.
“A Definition of Wicca,” Church and School of Wicca,
www.wicca.org/Churchdefine.html
. Another website states, “Wiccans believe that the spirit of the One, Goddess and God, exist in all things … [and] that we must treat all things of the Earth as aspects of the divine.” Herne, “What Is Wicca?,” Celtic Connection,
http://wicca.com/celtic/wicca/wicca.htm
. There are also people today who consider themselves pagans but are completely secular, treating the gods as psychological symbols or Jungian archetypes. They might view the goddess, for example, as a symbol of female empowerment.

21.
G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, M. Schofield,
The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History
, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 150ff.; and Eric Temple Bell,
The Magic of Numbers
(New York: Dover, 1946), 85.

22.
See
Total Truth
, appendix 3, “The Long War between Materialism and Christianity.”

23.
Aristotle,
Metaphysics
, bk. XI, pt. 7; and Plato,
Republic
, bks. VI and VII. In the
Timaeus
, Plato attributes the origin of the material world to a personal deity, but it is a low-level god or sub-deity or demiurge (as in Gnosticism). This low-level deity did not create from nothing; he merely injected reason (rational forms) into reasonless matter. As Reijer Hooykaas writes, this is a creator whose hands are tied in two respects: “He had to follow not his own design but the model of the eternal Ideas [Forms]; and second, he had to put the stamp of the Ideas on a chaotic, recalcitrant matter which he had not created himself.”
Religion and the Rise of Modern Science
(Grand Rapids. MI: Eerdmans, 1972), 3–4.

24.
Brian J. Shanley in Thomas Aquinas,
The Treatise on the Divine Nature
, trans. Brian J. Shanley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 244 (italics added). Irving Singer says, “Aristotle’s ladder of existence starts with
pure matter
and culminates in
pure form
.”
The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther
, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 108 (italics in original). Romano Guardini says the ancients never attained to the Christian understanding of transcendence: “To the man of the ancient world, however, the universe itself was the whole of reality.” Even the philosophers “did not transcend the universe.” “The absolute essences [Forms] of ancient philosophy were enmeshed forever within the totality of being to which they gave stability and eternity.” For example, Plato’s concept of the Good “was not severed from the world; it remained immanent to it as its very eternity, as a ‘beyond’ within the final whole.” Likewise, “the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, itself immobile, brought about all the change in the world. In the final analysis, it only had meaning when related to the whole of the eternally changing universe itself.”
The End of the Modern World
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1998), 1–3, 8. Dooyeweerd calls Aristotle’s deity an “idol.”
New Critique
, I:122.

25.
E. O. Wilson,
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
(New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 291. Wilson also writes on page 60, “Nature is organized by simple universal laws of physics to which all other laws and principles can eventually be reduced”; and Jerry Coyne, “Philosopher Thomas Nagel Goes the Way of Alvin Plantinga, Disses Evolution,”
Why Evolution Is True
(blog), October 13, 2012,
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/philosopher-thomas-nagel-goes-the-way-of-alvin-plantinga-disses-evolution/
.

26.
John R. Searle,
Mind: A Brief Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 48; and Gordy Slack, “What Neo-Creationists Get Right,”
The Scientist
, June 20, 2008, 26. Dallas Willard, “What Significance Has ‘Postmodernism’ for Christian Faith?,”
www.dwillard.org/articles/artviewasp?artID=70
.

27.
“Tysonism,” Facebook,
https://www.facebook.com/Tysonism
.

28.
In Marx’s terms, economic relations form the base, while all other dimensions of society are merely superstructure. See my chapter on Marxism, “Does It Liberate?,” in
How Now Shall We Live?
(Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1999), chap. 24.

29.
David Hume,
Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding
, ed. Charles Hendel (Pearson, 1995), 80.

30.
A report of the survey can be found in Anthony Gottlieb, “What Do Philosophers Believe?,”
Intelligent Life
, spring 2010.

31.
See Donald T. Williams, “Kahless and Christ: On Faith, Fictional and Factual,”
While We’re Paused
(blog), June 11, 2012. Worf is expressing the fact/value split, which is a major theme throughout
Total Truth
.