Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (28 page)

32.
“There is simply no way to show that humans can gain knowledge of extra-mental realities if we are only directly aware of mental realities. Neither reason nor experience will allow us to bridge the chasm between our minds and the external world that looms if representationalism is true.” C. Stephen Evans,
Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 28.

33.
The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill
, ed. John M. Robson, vol. 9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91), 183. See Clouser,
Myth,
144, 336.

34.
In philosophy, this is often dubbed the brain-in-a-vat problem: How do you know that you’re not really just a brain in a vat that is being stimulated by electrical impulses administered by a mad scientist to make you
think
that you have a body and that you live in a real world of people and objects?

35.
David Hume,
A Treatise of Human Nature
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), 37.

36.
Ernst Mach,
The Analysis of Sensations
, in John T. Blackmore,
Ernst Mach: His Life, Work, and Influence
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 327n14. See the discussion of Mach in Clouser,
Myth
, 149–50.

37.
To read about the impact of empiricism and rationalism on art and literature, see
Saving Leonardo
, chaps. 5 and 6.

38.
See Richard H. Popkin,
History of Skepticism: From Erasmus to Spinoza
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); Harris Harbison, “The Struggle for Power,” chap. 3 in
The Age of Reformation
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1955).

39.
Jeffrey Stout writes, “The crisis of authority made an absolutely radical break with the past seem necessary. Methodical doubt therefore sought complete transcendence of situation. It tried to make the inheritance of tradition irrelevant, to start over again from scratch, to escape history.”
The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 67. See
Total Truth
, appendix 1, “How American Politics Became Secularized”;
Saving Leonardo
, 137–40; and my lecture, “The Creation Myth of Modern Political Philosophy” (respondent to the Sixth Annual Kuyper Lecture, Washington, DC, 2000).

40.
Cited in Michael Oakeshott,
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays
(Indianapolis: Liberty, 1991), 15. See also A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, ed.,
The Cambridge History of English Literature
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), 329.

41.
Bacon is known for his pithy saying that a little philosophy inclines a person toward atheism, but “depth in philosophy” brings a person to religion.
The Essays of Lord Bacon
(London: Longman and Green, 1875), 64. Descartes, a devout Catholic, was so certain that God had revealed to him the irrefutable logic of the cogito that he vowed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto in Italy, which he did. See
Total Truth
, 39.

42.
Robert C. Solomon,
Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 5–6. In one sense, of course, everyone must start with conscious experience—with what we know. But there is a difference between an experiential starting point and a logical starting point. We all begin the search for knowledge from within our own experience. But a logical starting point refers to what we consider most ultimate and foundational—the basis for explaining all of reality.

43.
Karl Popper,
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
(New York: Routledge, 1963, 2002), 20–21 (italics in original).

44.
Randall adds, “Their ideal was still a
system of revelation
, though they had abandoned the
method
of revelation.” John Herman Randall,
The Making of the Modern Mind
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 267 (italics in original). Similarly, Stout writes that the early modern philosophers who gave up traditional authority “merely substituted one class of privileged claims for another.… They were not disputing the epistemological necessity for
something like
sacred authority.” Stout,
Flight
,
75 (italics in original).

45.
Cited in
Saving Leonardo
, 95. For additional background, see
Soul of Science
, 139–40.

46.
Alvin Plantinga, “How to Be an Anti-Realist,”
Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association
56, no. 1. (September 1982): 48. For more on Kant’s Copernican revolution, see
Saving Leonardo
, 181–83.

47.
Immanuel Kant,
Philosophical Correspondence 1759–1799
, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 254.

48.
Anthony Kenny,
An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 377. As Dooyeweerd says, empiricism leads to “epistemological nihilism.”
New Critique
, II:332.

49.
Alan Jacobs, “Psychological Criticism: From the Imagination to Freud and Beyond,”
Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal
, ed. Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 99, 119, 98.

50.
Ernest Lee Tuveson,
The Imagination as a Means of Grace
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960). For sources for the quotations in this section by Coleridge, Herder, Wordsworth, and Yeats, see
Saving Leonardo
, 183.

51.
Herman Dooyeweerd,
A New Critique of Theoretical Thought
(Ontario: Paideia, 1984), I:46.

52.
B. R. Hergenhahn and Tracy B. Henley,
An Introduction to the History of Psychology
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2014). Every educational theory is likewise the application of a philosophy: See George R. Knight,
Philosophy and Education: An Introduction in Christian Perspective
, 4th ed. (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 2006). Even mathematics, supposedly the most objective field of all, has been deeply influenced by philosophy: See
Soul of Science
, chapters 6 and 7; Clouser,
Myth,
chap. 7,
and “Is There a Christian View of Everything, from Soup to Nuts?,”
Pro Rege
, June 2003.

53.
C. S. Lewis,
The Screwtape Letters
(New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 2.

54.
From the 1984 edition.

55.
See Richard Bauckham,
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008). The Old Testament likewise contains events that were public and open to empirical investigation. In Moses’s confrontation with the Egyptian priests, his ability to perform miracles was the authentication that he spoke for the true God. In Elijah’s confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, a highly visible miracle constituted evidence for the true God. See also 2 Peter 1:16–17; Acts 1:21–22; 3:15; 4:20.

In our own day, empirical evidence continues to provide some of the most persuasive arguments for God’s existence, such as the argument from design, arguments for the historicity of the Resurrection, and evidence for the reliability of Scripture from archaeology and the study of ancient manuscripts.

56.
The first quotation comes from Justin Martyr,
Second Apology
, chap. 13. His actual wording was “Whatever things were rightly [or truly] said among all men, are the property of us Christians.” Yet the fullest truth, he said, is found in Christ. The second quotation was coined by Jerome. See E. K. Rand,
The Founders of the Middle Ages
(New York: Dover, 1928), 64.

PRINCIPLE #2: How Nietzsche Wins

1.
The following account is from a personal interview with John R. Erickson, along with an article by Erickson titled “Mugged by Nietzsche” (unpublished) and his memoir,
Small Town Author
(unpublished).

2.
Leil Lowndes, “How Neuroscience Can Help Us Find True Love,”
Wall Street Journal
, February 14, 2013. See also Helen Fisher,
Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
(New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

3.
Richard Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,”
Political Theory
15, no. 4 (November 1987): 564–80.

4.
They also stole more than participants who were assigned to a neutral condition with control statements such as “Sugar cane and sugar beets are grown in 112 countries.” Jesse Bering, “Scientists Say Free Will Probably Doesn’t Exist, but Urge: ‘Don’t Stop Believing!,’”
Scientific American
, April 6, 2010. Another experiment is reported here: “The commonest criticism of reductionism—the idea that we are a pack of neurons and nothing more—is that it will lead us to treat our fellow human beings as if … well, as if they were a pack of neurons and nothing more. John Evans, a sociologist of religion at University of California, San Diego, has set about testing whether the criticism has any merit.… He asked a series of questions designed to elicit their attitudes toward behavior. Were they in favor of allowing experiments on prisoners without their consent? Selling human organs for profit? Allowing suicide in the case of people who wanted to save money? Intervening to stop genocide? Sure enough, he found that people who hold the reductionist view—who deny the special status of the human species in nature, who believe behavior is determined by physical processes alone—were far more likely to agree with the maltreatment of humans. Evans can’t draw conclusions about whether determinism causes those views. But the correlations between them, he said, are unmistakable.” Andrew Ferguson, “The End of Neurononsense,”
Weekly Standard
, October 20, 2014.
See Study Guide

5.
Note that these findings actually offer evidence that free will is real. If I encouraged you to believe that you could fly, you still could not fly. Believing that you have the ability does not make it any easier to fly. By contrast, as these studies show, believing that you have the power not to cheat
does
make it easier not to cheat. Conclusion: Belief makes no difference when you do not have the power to do something anyway. But it does seem to help you exercise a power that you do have. Thus these findings support the reality of free will. (Thanks to Angus Menuge for this insight.)
See Study Guide

6.
Francis Schaeffer analyzed the history of Western thought as a series of dualisms. See
Escape from Reason
and
The God Who Is There
. Schaeffer’s analysis was inspired by Herman Dooyeweerd, who identified three major dualisms in Western thought: the Greek matter/form dualism, medieval nature/grace dualism, and Kantian nature/freedom dualism. (Kant defined nature in terms of a mechanistic, material machine while defining freedom in terms of moral norms that humans choose for themselves.) See Dooyeweerd’s
Roots
and
New Critique
, passim, and
In the Twilight of Western Thought
, chapter 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Paideia, 2012).

7.
Nicholas Humphrey, “Consciousness: The Achilles Heel of Darwinism? Thank God, Not Quite,” in John Brockman, ed.,
Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement
(New York: Vintage, 2006), 58.

8.
Colin McGinn, “All Machine and No Ghost?,”
New Statesman
, February 20, 2012.

9.
Francis Crick,
The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul
(New York: Touchstone, 1994), 3; and Daniel Wegner,
The Illusion of Conscious Will
(Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002). The interview with Wegner is by Dennis Overbye, “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t,”
New York Times
, January 2, 2007.

10.
Steven Pinker,
How the Mind Works
(New York: Norton, 2009), 24, passim; and “Is Science Killing the Soul?,”
Edge.org
, April 7, 1999,
www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins_pinker/debate_p9.html
.

11.
The example is from Teed Rockwell,
Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind,
s.v. “Eliminativism,”
http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/eliminativism.html
.

12.
Emergentism can be thought of as the opposite of reductionism. Instead of claiming that higher-level phenomena can be reduced to lower, less complex levels, it claims that lower levels can give rise to higher, more complex levels. Scientists identify two types of emergence: weak and strong. An example of weak emergence is water. At room temperature, hydrogen and oxygen are gases. If that were all we knew, we might not expect the product of their chemical reaction to be a liquid (H
2
O). Yet the result is completely determined by ordinary laws of nature acting on the initial physical conditions.

By contrast, strong emergence is a claim regarding phenomena that cannot be explained by the ordinary laws of nature, such as mind and consciousness. As philosopher David Chalmers writes, strong emergence would involve “phenomena whose existence is not deducible from the facts about the exact distribution of particles and fields throughout space and time (along with the laws of physics).” This “suggests that new fundamental laws of nature are needed to explain these phenomena.” However, no one has discovered those “new fundamental laws of nature.” (“Strong and Weak Emergence,”
http://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf
.)

13.
See J. P. Moreland, “The Argument from Consciousness,” in
Debating Christian Theism
, ed. J. P. Moreland, Chad Meister, and Khaldoun A. Sweis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Douglas Groothuis,
Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011), chap. 17.