Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (7 page)

The
enfant terrible
of empiricism was the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, who declared that if a book contains anything beyond empirical science, it ought to be burned. Scrutinize every book on the library shelf, he wrote. If it covers subjects like metaphysics or moral theory, then “commit it then to the flames! For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
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Is this another idol? Certainly. Empiricism makes an idol of the sensory realm. Whatever is not susceptible to empirical testing is not real. Hume is not a household name, but among the intellectual elites today, he is enormously influential. A few years ago, a survey of philosophers at leading universities asked which nonliving philosopher they most identified with. The clear winner was David Hume.
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Philosophies also spill out of the classroom and into popular culture. In one episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, the plot centers on whether a character named Kahless is the Klingon messiah who has returned from death in fulfillment of prophecy. The
Enterprise
’s Klingon security officer, Lieutenant Worf, has to decide whether the resurrected messiah is real. The android Data asks for empirical evidence supporting the messiah’s claims.

“It is not an empirical matter,” Worf replies. “It is a matter of faith.”

“Faith,” Data responds. “Then you do believe Kahless may have supernatural attributes. As an android, I am unable to accept that which cannot be proven through rational means.”

Which assumptions are laced through this dialogue? That claims about the supernatural “cannot be proven through rational means.” That “a matter of faith” cannot be supported with empirical evidence.
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By contrast, if you asked Christians for empirical evidence that Jesus was the Messiah, they would probably list historical evidence for his resurrection, factual evidence for the claims of the New Testament, manuscript evidence for the reliability of the biblical text, archaeological evidence for the events in Scripture, and so on. The Christian message rests on events that could be “seen … heard … touched” (1 John 1:1).

Yet the
Star Trek
screenwriters have captured a widespread bias—that any statement about the supernatural is by definition “irrational.” You will find the same bias on display in the comments section under virtually any article on the Internet about Christianity. No matter how strong the evidence, any claim that there exists something beyond what can be known by empirical science is attacked as “irrational.”

Yet to define what is rational solely by whether it fits the tenets of your own worldview is an invalid move because it rules out all other truth claims by definition. You do not even have to investigate the evidence. A serious search for truth does not start by stacking the deck.

Inside the Matrix

So far, empiricism sounds like another path to materialism. And often it is just that. If what is real is defined in terms of what can be known by the five senses, then reality seems to include only the material world. But if you track empiricism to its logical conclusion, it takes a surprising turn inward to the mind. It signals an important trend in Western thought from materialism to mentalism—from matter as the primary reality to mind as primary.

Think of it this way: Empiricism says the only source of genuine knowledge is sense impressions—sights and sounds. But how do we know whether our sense impressions are true and accurate? After all, we know that our senses can deceive us. Everyone has been subject to optical illusions. Put a spoon into a glass of water and the handle certainly
looks
bent. How do we test our sense experiences?

The answer is that, for the strict empiricist, we
can’t
test them. It is impossible to step outside my own head to compare my internal images with the external world to see if they match.
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How, then, can I be sure that my senses are telling me the truth?

Empiricist philosophers themselves soon recognized the problem. In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill concluded that we actually know nothing about the external world. If we examine a table, we might see that it is brown, we feel that it is smooth, we knock on the surface and hear that it is solid, and so on. But those are all sensations—color patches and sound pitches in our heads. According to empiricism, our minds construct the concept of a table out of a cluster of sensations. But we cannot step outside our minds to discover what the external world is like in itself. Mill concluded that the material world is nothing but “the permanent possibilities of sensation.”
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In that case, however, how do we know that an external world even exists? The most radical of the empiricists admit that, given their premises, we cannot know. There is no way to rule out the possibility that we are characters in
The Matrix
, plugged into a supercomputer that is creating the illusion of a physical world.
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The bundles of sense perceptions that we interpret as physical objects could be nothing but … bundles of sense perceptions.

Empiricism ends by claiming that the only thing humans are capable of knowing is a succession of sensations—like a filmstrip running through our heads.

As Morpheus says in
The Matrix
, “How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

Hume seems to have accepted this bizarre conclusion. He wrote, “Let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves.” We live in “the universe of the imagination.”
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The same radical conclusion was shared by physicist Ernst Mach (from whom we get the term “Mach 1” for the speed of sound). “The world consists only of sensations,” he wrote. Fundamental physical entities that cannot be observed, like atoms and electrons, he dismissed as nothing but “useful fictions.”
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The upshot is that if we
begin
solely with sense impressions, then we will
end
with sense impressions. Using sensory experience alone, there is no way to build a bridge from internal mental images to the external world. We are trapped in the prison house of our minds. That is the logical outcome of treating sensation as divine—the sole starting point and standard of knowledge.

Sensational Bacon, Dubious Descartes

Historically, the main rival of empiricism was rationalism. But it, too, ends up trapped inside the mind. Rationalism claims that the sole source and standard of knowledge are ideas in the mind known by reason. But it is impossible to step outside our reason to test whether those ideas are accurate. Like empiricism, it lacks a way to bridge the gap from internal ideas to the external world.
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How did so much of Western thought end up trapped in the mind? We must go back imaginatively in history and re-create the intense intellectual chaos at the close of the Middle Ages. The breakup of the medieval church after the Reformation unleashed a century of religious warfare. Thousands of religious refugees fled their homes as Christians literally shed one another’s blood in disagreements over interpretations of biblical doctrine. Taking place around the same time was the Renaissance, spurred by the rediscovery of classical texts—Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, Epicurus. And
they
all disagreed with one another as well.

This clash of ideas erupted in what historians call a “skeptical crisis.”
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The urgent question of day was, How can we be certain
which
of these competing truth claims is really true? Philosophers began to search for some deeper source of truth—
not
in any of the theological authorities denouncing one another, not in any of the sacred books or ancient traditions competing for acceptance, and certainly not in any of the civic institutions engaged in armed warfare with one another.

In fact, not in any external source at all. Their hope was to find a method located solely within the individual, rooted in the immediate data of consciousness. They wanted to start over from scratch and rebuild the entire edifice of knowledge on secure foundations within the individual mind.
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This hope was the motivation behind both empiricism and rationalism. The founder of empiricism was Francis Bacon. He outlined a program designed to purge our minds of all the popular notions picked up from our education and environment, and to “begin anew from the very foundations.”
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What were those foundations? In his view, the simplest, most direct form of knowledge were sense perceptions—sights and sounds. Bacon proposed to rebuild knowledge on the foundation of sensations.

The founder of rationalism was René Descartes. He proposed a system to purge our minds of every fuzzy or half-baked idea, everything that can possibly be doubted, until we reach a foundation that cannot be doubted. What was that foundation? The one thing Descartes could not doubt was, well, his own mental process of doubting. Even if all my ideas are delusions, he argued there is still a self who is experiencing those delusions. This is the meaning of his famous phrase “I think, therefore I am” (
Cogito, ergo sum
). He hoped that clear and distinct ideas in the mind would be the foundation on which to rebuild knowledge.

Both Bacon and Descartes expressed some level of Christian conviction.
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Nevertheless, the philosophies they proposed did not treat God as the final source of truth. Instead they replaced God with the individual consciousness. As one philosopher says, they turned “the first-person standpoint” into the only path to certainty; they set up the “self as the locus and arbiter of knowledge.”
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This is the core of the modernist project: the idea that if we strip away enough cultural debris—received traditions, speculative philosophies, religious claims—in short, anything humans can be mistaken about, we will finally reach something we
cannot
be mistaken about. Why not? Because it is known not by inference or reasoning, but by introspection into the immediate data of consciousness. Thus it would be immune to any external criticism or challenge. Like the foundation of a house, it would provide a solid, infallible foundation to build the edifice of knowledge.

Signposts or Dead Ends

Clearly, Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute. Just as Romans 1 says, they fastened on something within creation to serve in the place of God as their secure and certain source of truth, their ultimate explainer, the fixed foundation of knowledge.

That’s why philosopher Karl Popper speaks of the “religious character” of Enlightenment epistemologies. The authority of divine revelation was merely replaced by another form of authority, he writes. Baconian empiricism appealed to “
the authority of the senses
,” while Cartesian rationalism appealed to “
the authority of the intellect
.”
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Yet both hoped to find a method that would yield a truth that was as certain and universal as divine revelation. Both hoped to find a method by which the individual could transcend his or her limited niche in space and time to arrive at absolute, godlike knowledge—what philosophers call a God’s-eye view of reality. As philosopher John Herman Randall writes, “They were trying to arrive at that complete and perfect understanding and explanation of the universe that only a God could possess.”
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In the end, ironically, that search for godlike knowledge was restricted to the tiny universe of the self.

Most philosophies are born when someone stumbles on one of the undeniable facts of human experience and then claims to have discovered the ultimate, infallible foundation of all knowledge. Bacon recognized that, in practice, no one can deny the testimony of the senses. We cannot function in the world unless we trust the basic reliability of what we see and hear. The entire scientific enterprise is based on the assumption that our sensations provide a reliable picture of reality. But empiricism takes this fact of experience and absolutizes it—tries to make it carry a philosophical weight it is not able to carry. Thus it reaches a dead end. If you begin with sense data alone, you end with sense data—nothing but a filmstrip running through your mind.

Descartes stumbled upon another undeniable experience—our sense of self or personal existence. Even if we can be induced to doubt everything we know, there is still a self that is doing the doubting. Rationalism takes this fact of experience and absolutizes it, seeking to build a full-blown philosophy on it. But if you begin with ideas in the mind, that is where you will end. You will be trapped in the prison house of your own mind.

Every nonbiblical philosophy fastens on something in creation—something known by general revelation—and tries to build a system of truth on that foundation. Inevitably, however, it proves too limited to support such an edifice. Our experiences of the created world are merely data that need to be explained. They are signposts pointing to a transcendent Creator. We misread the signs if we treat them as sources of ultimate truth in themselves. Invariably they turn into dead ends.

Kant’s Mental Prison: Idol of the Mind

If both empiricism and rationalism leave us trapped inside the mind, the next step was to claim that there
is
no external world—instead the mind creates the world. That step was taken by Immanuel Kant. His innovation was to suggest that the mind does not merely
reflect
the structure of the world; instead it actively
imposes
structure and order onto the world. For Kant, reality as we know it is largely a construction of the human mind.

After all, where do we get our knowledge of the material world? According to Kant, the raw materials of knowledge are sense impressions, flooding into the mind through our eyes and ears in a jumbled chaos. And how do those perceptions get organized into a coherent, intelligible whole? By the creative action of the human mind. Kant proposed that the mind supplies the necessary ordering principles, such as before and after, cause and effect, space and time, and so on. The world appears to be lawful and ordered only because the human mind creates that order, like pressing clay into a mold. In Kant’s words, “mind is the law-giver to nature.”
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The human mind took over God’s role as law-giver to creation.