Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (32 page)

4.
Czesław Miłosz, “The Discreet Charm of Nihilism,”
New York Review of Books
, November 19, 1998 (italics added).

5.
Greg Koukl, “Suicide: Views That Self-Destruct,” chap. 7 in
Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009.

6.
There is one exception. Idol analysis tells us that every worldview deifies one part of creation and denigrates the rest. Therefore the single worldview that does not denigrate reason is the one that deifies it—namely, rationalism. Of course, rationalism has other problems (e.g., it cannot explain where reason comes from), but it does not self-destruct because it does not reduce reason to something less than reason.

7.
Logical positivism is also called verificationism. Craig continues: “Its downfall meant that philosophers were free once again to tackle traditional problems of philosophy that verificationism had suppressed. Accompanying this resurgence of interest in traditional philosophical questions came something altogether unanticipated: a renaissance of Christian philosophy.” Craig, “God Is Not Dead Yet.”

8.
See the section on Marxism in
Total Truth
, 134–37, and my chapter on Marxism in
How Now Shall We Live?
, chapter 24. Though Marxism has been discredited in the economic realm, neo-Marxist knockoffs are endemic, especially on the university campus. Radical liberation movements of many stripes apply Marxist categories of analysis.

9.
“The origin of the holy lie is the
will to power
.” Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Will to Power
, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), sect. 142.

10.
Skinner rejected the very concept of “conscious intelligence” on the grounds that “evolutionary theorists … have never shown how a
nonphysical
variation could arise to be selected by
physical
contingencies of survival.” “Can Psychology Be a Science of Mind?,”
American Psychologist
, November 1990 (italics added).

11.
Paul Ricoeur dubbed the triumvirate of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud “the masters of suspicion,” and the phrase has stuck. These thinkers practiced a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that treated ordinary statements as expressions of “false consciousness.” See
Freud and Philosophy
, trans. D. Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970).

12.
Alvin Plantinga,
Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 271.

13.
Slingerland,
What Science Offers
, 257.

14.
C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in
The Weight of Glory
(New York: HarperCollins, 1976), 139; and
Case for Christianity
, 32. See also Victor Reppert,
C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003); and Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, “The Argument from Reason,” appendix in
Naturalism
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

15.
Lewis,
Miracles
, 36; and the phrase “angelic observer” is from Charles Taylor,
Hegel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 564.

16.
John Gray,
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 26. Similarly, Edward O. Wilson writes, “All that has been learned empirically about evolution … suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive.”
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
(New York: Vintage, 1998), 105. More recently, John Gray has finally recognized the problem: “If the human mind has evolved in obedience to the imperatives of survival, what reason is there for thinking that it can acquire knowledge of reality, when all that is required in order to reproduce the species is that its errors and illusions are not fatal? A purely naturalistic philosophy cannot account for the knowledge that we believe we possess.” Gray even quotes Arthur Balfour, whom C. S. Lewis credited as a source of his own critique of naturalism as self-defeating. “Balfour’s solution was that naturalism is self-defeating: humans can gain access to the truth only because the human mind has been shaped by a divine mind. Similar arguments can be found in a number of contemporary philosophers, most notably Alvin Plantinga. Again, one does not need to accept Balfour’s theistic solution to see the force of his argument. A rigorously naturalistic account of the human mind entails a much more skeptical view of human knowledge than is commonly acknowledged.” “The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins,”
New Republic
, October 2, 2014.

17.
Francis Crick,
The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul
(New York: Touchstone, 1994), 262. This idea is not new. Back in 1903, philosopher F. C. S. Schiller wrote that human reason is nothing but “a weapon in the struggle for existence and a means of achieving adaptation.” “The Ethical Basis of Metaphysics,” in
Humanism: Philosophical Essays
(London: Macmillan, 1903), 7–8.

18.
Baum,
What Is Thought?
, 226. Steven Pinker,
How the Mind Works
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 305. Again, this idea is not new. Philosopher Charles Peirce wrote, “It is probably of more advantage to the animal to have his mind filled with pleasing and encouraging visions, independently of their truth; and thus … natural selection might occasion a fallacious tendency of thought.” “The Fixation of Belief,”
Popular Science Monthly
12 (November 1877).

19.
Leon Wieseltier, “The God Genome,”
New York Times
, February 19, 2006. Alvin Plantinga writes that “what evolution guarantees is (at most) that we behave in certain ways—in such ways as to promote survival.… It does not guarantee mostly true or verisimilitudinous beliefs.”
Warrant and Proper Function
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 218. Philosopher Roger Trigg writes: For evolution, “it does not matter if a belief is true or false, as long as it is useful, from a genetic point of view.”
Philosophy Matters
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 83. See also Angus Menuge,
Agents under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

20.
Thomas Nagel,
The Last Word
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 135–36 (italics in original). See also Douglas Groothuis, “Thomas Nagel’s ‘Last Word’ on the Metaphysics and Rationality of Morality,”
Philosophia Christi
(series 2) 1, no. 1 (1999).

21.
The context of Darwin’s remarks clearly reveals the selective nature of his skepticism. From a personal letter: “Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” C. R. Darwin to William Graham, July 3, 1881, Darwin Correspondence Project,
www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/entry-13230
.

From Darwin’s
Autobiography
: “Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

“This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the
Origin of Species
; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.” “Recollections of the Development of My Mind and Character,” Darwin Online,
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=116&itemID=CUL-DAR26.1-121&viewtype=side
.

22.
Stephen Jay Gould,
Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History
(New York: Norton, 1977), 12–13.

23.
Kenan Malik, “In Defense of Human Agency,” in
Consciousness, Genetics, and Society
(Stockholm: Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2002).

24.
Cited in Victoria Gill, “Big Bang: Is There Room for God?,”
BBC News
, October 19, 2012. C. S. Lewis described evolution as a “Great Myth” and said, “The Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational—if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel—how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution?” “The Funeral of a Great Myth” in
Christian Reflections
(Grand Rapids: MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 89. Elsewhere Lewis writes that those who describe human thought “as an evolutionary phenomenon” always have to make “a tacit exception” for their own thinking—at least, at the moment they are making the claim.
Miracles
, 36.

25.
Phillip E. Johnson writes, “We still see the reductionists complacently describing religious belief either as a meme or as the product of a ‘God module’ in the brain without realizing that they are sawing off the limb on which they themselves are sitting. If unthinking matter causes the thoughts the materialists
don’t
like, then what causes the thoughts they
do
like?”
The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), 149 (italics in original).

26.
Richard Cohen, “Alternative Interpretations of the History of Science,” in
The Validation of Scientific Theories
, ed. Philipp G. Frank (Boston: Beacon, 1956), 227; and Christopher Kaiser,
Creation and the History of Science
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 10.

27.
Here’s how Johannes Kepler expressed the idea: The same God who founded the world according to mathematical norms “also has endowed man with a mind which can comprehend these norms.” Why? “God wanted us to perceive [those mathematical laws] when he created us in his image in order that we may take part in his own thoughts.” Cited in Robert Nadeau,
Readings from the New Book on Nature
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 28. See also
The Soul of Science
, chapters 3 and 6.

28.
Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in
Mathematics: People, Problems, Results
, vol. 3, ed. Douglas M. Campbell and John C. Higgins (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth International, Brigham Young University, 1984). See my discussion in
The Soul of Science
, 159.

29.
Morris Kline,
Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 35.

30.
The quote is from Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Truth and Method
(New York: Continuum, 1989), 459. Similarly, Roland Barthes writes, “For us, too, it is language which speaks, not the author.” “The Death of the Author,” in
Image—Music—Text
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). Martin Heidegger writes, “Language speaks.… Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”
Poetry, Language, Thought
(New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 194, 144. It was Wittgenstein who redefined questions in philosophy as questions in language, “transforming Kantian questions about reason into ones about language.” Solomon,
Continental Philosophy
, 148.

31.
Jean-François Lyotard,
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, originally published in French in 1979), 36. Lyotard borrows the term
language games
from Wittgenstein and says: “What he means by this term is that each of the various categories of utterance can be defined in terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to which they can be put—in exactly the same way as the game of chess is defined by a set of rules determining the properties of each of the pieces, in other words, the proper way to move them” (10).

32.
The charge that postmodernism “gets caught in a performative contradiction” was made by Jürgen Habermas,
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

33.
Barthes, “Death of the Author”; and Derrida, cited in Solomon,
Continental Philosophy
, 201.

34.
Barthes, “Death of the Author.”

35.
Alan Jacobs, “Deconstruction,”
Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal
, ed. Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 192.

36.
In the words of literature professor John Ellis, “the race-gender-class scholar’s commitment to his or her truths … is as rigid as anything could be.”
Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 191.