Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (31 page)

8.
C. S. Lewis invokes the same argument in his argument from morality in
Mere Christianity
. His argument rests on the fact that humans unavoidably, irresistibly make moral judgments—and therefore we had better find a philosophy that accounts for this behavior: In his words, “We are
forced
to believe in a real Right and Wrong” (7). Morality is among those “things we are
bound
to think” (14). “Whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature” (8). “We
can not get rid of
the idea [of the Moral Law], and most of the things we say and think about men would be reduced to nonsense if we did” (20). For example, if we do not acknowledge a real right and wrong, then “all the things we said about the war [i.e., the evils of Nazism] were nonsense” (5). (All italics added.) Lewis’s argument (though he does not explicitly state it) is that there are certain ways of thinking and acting that are intrinsic to human nature, and that this bedrock human experience should inform our philosophy. In short, we had better find a philosophy that makes sense of how humans unavoidably behave.

9.
Cited in Saul Smilansky,
Free Will and Illusion
(Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 169. Fundamentally, the power of choice is simply the ability to redirect the course of events. The entire world of human artifacts—cities and buildings, technology and computers, books and films—gives eloquent testimony to the human ability to use natural forces to create things that nature acting on its own would not create. Dooyeweerd notes that the concept of human culture “means essentially the free forming of matter.”
Roots
, 21.

10.
Smilansky,
Free Will
, 284, 166.

11.
Rick Lewis says, “The nature of consciousness is a philosophical problem which has come to centre stage mainly in the last few years.” “Consciousness,”
Philosophy Now
, July/August 2014. A third position, which is common among philosophers, is called compatibilism. It accepts determinism while claiming that humans nevertheless have free will. What kind of free will? The compatibilists’ definition of a free action is one that is driven from within by one’s own desires and reasons, with no external constraints. But those internal desires and reasons are themselves held to be determined. All of our mental states arise from other states outside of our minds and thus outside of our control. This is not what ordinary people mean by free will. For example, in discussing the compatibilism of Daniel Dennett, Michael Norwitz writes, “There is a sacrifice in that he loses track of our ordinary, common-sense views of what mind and free will are. Dennett claims he is doing ordinary language philosophy but I suspect he has been an academic so long he has forgotten what ‘ordinary people’ are concerned with.” Dennett’s compatibilism comes “at the cost of not really approaching what we worry about when we worry whether we have free will, or responsibility.” “Free Will and Determinism,”
Philosophy Now
, July/August 2014.

12.
Galen Strawson, interview by Tamler Sommers, “You Cannot Make Yourself the Way You Are,”
The Believer
, March 2003. By “radical free will,” Strawson says he means the ordinary use of the term: “I mean what nearly everyone means. Almost all human beings believe that they are free to choose what to do in such a way that they can be truly, genuinely responsible for their actions in the strongest possible sense … and so ultimately morally responsible when moral matters are at issue.”

13.
Galen Strawson, “On Free Will,”
Richmond Journal of Philosophy
4, summer, 2003.

14.
Johnson,
First Step
, 11.

15.
Edward Slingerland,
What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 6, 218, 289–95 (italics in original).

16.
The term
dualism
is sometimes used to describe the biblical teaching of body and soul, but the crucial difference is that in the biblical view these two things are complementary, not contradictory. In Paul’s words, the body is the “outer self,” the means by which we interact with the material world, while the soul is the “inner self” (2 Cor. 4:16). At death humans do undergo a temporary splitting of body and soul, but that’s why death is called “the last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26)—because it separates what God intended to be unified. And in the new creation, they will be reunified, eternally.

17.
Julie Reuben,
The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17.

18.
Marvin Minsky,
The Society of Mind
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 307 (italics in original in the first part of the quote, italics added in the last part of the quote).

19.
An “existentialist leap” means holding that, on rational grounds, life has no meaning, yet asserting—without rational grounds—that it does. “On the one hand, the existentialist seeks to remain true to his original vision of the meaninglessness and futility of everything …; on the other hand, his stark personal reality is that he finds himself unable to appropriate the truth of nihilism existentially, unable to affirm it as his personal truth,…: it is at this point that he clutches at the artifice of commitment, hoping to save himself from nihilistic despair by a desperate leap towards a faith that will restore purpose and meaning to his shattered world.” R. W. K. Paterson,
The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner
(Oxford: 1971), 238.

20.
Smilansky,
Free Will
, 6, 145, 187. For what Smilansky means by “morally necessary,” see 7–8, 153, 158, 278. We “cannot live” on the basis of determinism: 154, 170, 246, 296. We “ought” to foster the illusion of free will: 187–88 (italics in original).

21.
The review is by Tom Clark, “The Viability of Naturalism,”
Naturalism.org
,
www.naturalism.org/resource.htm
. Similarly, Matt Ridley writes in his bestselling book
Genome
, “Full responsibility for one’s actions is a necessary fiction without which the law would flounder, but it is a fiction all the same.”
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
(New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 309.

22.
Richard Dawkins, “Let’s All Stop Beating Basil’s Car,”
Edge,
http://edge.org/response-detail/11416
.

23.
Dawkins’s remarks were made in a question-and-answer session at a bookstore in the Washington, DC, area. They are described in
Saving Leonardo
, 152–53. Of course, even the concept of a machine malfunctioning has no place in Dawkins’s materialist philosophy because it implies teleology—that something has a purpose or standard that it is failing to meet. Dawkins is trying to avoid the moral language of good and evil, but the concept of malfunctioning requires some standard of right functioning.
See Study Guide

24.
Cited in Walter Isaacson,
Einstein: His Life and Universe
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 391, 392 (italics added). What Einstein overlooked is that even his scientific work depends on free will: “If Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity—it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options.” George Ellis, interview by John Horgan, “Physicist George Ellis Knocks Physicists for Knocking Philosophy, Falsification, Free Will,”
Scientific American
, July 22, 2014.

25.
Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason
, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), A811. Additional examples of Kant’s
as if
reasoning: In theology, we can never know whether God is the cause of the world, but we can view “all objects
as if
they drew their origin from such an archetype” (
CPR
A673/B701). In cosmology, we can never know whether the world has a beginning or an end, but we are able to function “
as if
it had an absolute beginning, through an intelligible cause” (
CPR
A685/B713). We cannot know whether there is a Creator, but we can “consider every connection in the world according to principles of a systematic unity, hence
as if
they had all arisen from one single all-encompassing being, as supreme and all-sufficient cause” (
CPR
A686/B714). In psychology, we can not explain the soul or the self, but we can “connect all the appearances, all the actions and receptivity of our mind,
as if
the mind were a simple substance which persists with personal identity” (
CPR
A672/B700). See Howard Caygill, ed.,
A Kant Dictionary
, s.v. “As-if” (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1995), 86. Kant labels
as if
reasoning “regulative principles.”

Chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi denounces
as if
thinking as a form of prevarication—the “modern intellectual prevarication first systematized by Kant in his regulative principles.” He explains why: “Knowledge that we hold to be true and also vital to us, is made light of, because we cannot account for its acceptance in terms of a critical philosophy. We then feel entitled to continue using that knowledge, even while flattering our sense of intellectual superiority by disparaging it. And we actually go on, firmly relying on this despised knowledge to guide and lend meaning to our more exact enquiries, while pretending that these alone come up to our standards of scientific stringency.”
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
(New York: Routledge, 1962), 354.

26.
Eric Baum,
What Is Thought?
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 433–34. “Not even wrong” is a phrase coined by physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Once when reading a paper by a young physicist, Pauli remarked, “This paper is so bad, it’s not even wrong.” In other words, it is not even in the ballpark of possible answers.

27.
McGinn, “All Machine and No Ghost?” (italics added).

28.
Francis Schaeffer,
The God Who Is There
, in the
Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy
(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1990), sect. 2, chaps. 2–4.

29.
Slingerland,
What Science Offers
, 255, 289. Slingerland, “Mind-Body Dualism and the Two Cultures,” in
Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities
, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 83, 84.

30.
Rodney Brooks,
Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us
(New York: Pantheon, 2002), 174. For more on the themes in this chapter, see
Total Truth
, study guide edition, and my article “Intelligent Design and the Defense of Reason,” in
Darwin’s Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement
, ed. William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006).

31.
On the way idols lead to dualisms and disharmonies, Dooyeweerd says, “The cosmic order passes an internal judgment on the theoretical absolutizations” of idol-based philosophies. “The Divine world-order … avenges itself on every deification” of the temporal creation.
New Critique
, II:334, 363. That is, as God gives people up to their idols, their philosophies increasingly contradict the cosmic order itself.

32.
G. K. Chesterton,
The Everlasting Man
(San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993), 143, 141. Yet, ironically, these same secularists claim to be “free thinkers.” Nonsense, Chesterton responds. We must vigorously protest when secularists “close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought.”

33.
Schopenhauer,
The World as Will and Representation
, 421.

34.
Rorty,
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
, 3.

35.
Dallas Willard, “Truth in the Fire,” presented at the C. S. Lewis Centennial, Oxford, July 21, 1998,
www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp
?artID=68.

36.
Rorty,
Contingency
, 5.

37.
William Lane Craig, “God Is Not Dead Yet,”
Christianity Today
, July 3, 2008 (italics in original). Explaining this dichotomy between facts and values is a major theme of
Total Truth
.

38.
Ernest Gellner,
Legitimation of Belief
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 193–95.

39.
“Seeking Christian Interiority: An Interview with Louis Dupré,”
Christian Century
, July 16–23, 1997.

40.
Derek Parfit, “Reductionism and Personal Identity,” in
Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings
, ed. David J. Chalmers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 661 (italics added).

41.
Karsten Harries, “The Theory of Double Truth Revisited,” in
Politics of Practical Reasoning: Integrating Action, Discourse, and Argument
, ed. Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012), (italics added).

42.
Francis Crick, interview by Roger Highfield, “Do Our Genes Reveal the Hand of God?,”
Telegraph
, March 20, 2003.

43.
Francis Schaeffer called this strategy “taking the roof off”—removing the shield of denial that people erect to protect themselves from the dangerous and unsettling implications of their own worldview. See
The God Who Is There
, 140–42.

PRINCIPLE #4: Why Worldviews Commit Suicide

1.
The following account is from a personal interview with Michael Egnor, along with an article by Egnor, “A Neurosurgeon, Not a Darwinist,”
Forbes,
Feb 5, 2009.

2.
Michael Ruse,
Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?
(Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2003), 268 (italics added).

3.
Darwin proposed the mechanism of variation plus natural selection as the means by which material forces might mimic the effects of design. As historian Neal C. Gillespie writes, Darwin hoped to show “how blind and gradual adaptation could counterfeit the apparently purposeful design” of living things, which on the surface seem so obviously “a function of mind.”
Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 83–85.