Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (8 page)

This concept was revolutionary, and Kant knew it. He called it his own Copernican revolution. At the birth of modern science, Copernicus had moved the sun to the center of the planetary system. Now Kant moved human consciousness to the center of reality. The primary reality is not matter but mind, he said; the world of objects is largely given its shape and character by human consciousness. As philosopher Alvin Plantinga explains, “The fundamental thrust of Kant’s Copernican Revolution is that the things in the world owe their fundamental structure and perhaps their very existence to the noetic activity of our minds.”
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And if the mind imposes even the categories of space and time, then it must itself be
outside
time. Kant called this timeless, changeless mind the transcendental ego. It was not the ordinary, experienced self—your sense of personal identity—but a kind of higher self, a universal mind.

The philosophical label for this view is idealism. The term is not used in the ordinary sense of having high ideals. Instead it means that ultimate reality is the realm of
ideas
—the mental realm. Instead of deifying matter, idealism deifies the mind. Instead of making matter the basis of consciousness, it claims that consciousness structures matter as we know it. It makes consciousness the ultimate explainer.

Kant claimed that his system “rests on a fully secured foundation, established forever.”
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When you hear phrases like
secured foundation
and
established forever
, your idol detector should start beeping. Anything in creation that is proposed as the eternal, unchanging foundation of reality is an idol. Like Bacon and Descartes, Kant was a theist. But what really played the role of the divine in his system was not God but the human mind. The mind itself was granted godlike creative power.

Textbooks often say that Kant’s philosophy combined empiricism and rationalism, so not surprisingly it shares the same major weakness. On its own premises, there is no way to step outside the human mind and test whether our ideas match external reality. The logical consequence is solipsism, the doctrine that the only thing I can know for sure is the existence of my own mind. “Common to both empiricism and idealism is the doctrine that the mind has no direct knowledge of anything but its own contents,” writes philosopher Anthony Kenny. “The history of both movements shows that they lead in the direction of solipsism.”
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They leave us trapped within the mind.

The Artist as God: Idol of the Imagination

Despite the flaws in idealism, it was enthusiastically embraced by the Romantic movement. Many Romantics were artists, and they were attracted to idealism because it deified the mind or creative imagination. If the mind is the power that imposes order on the world—creating order from chaos—then the artist is no longer just an artisan but a creator.

For the Romantics, then, the ultimate foundation for truth was neither the senses (empiricism) nor reason (rationalism) but the creative imagination. They conceived of the imagination as an autonomous power “immune to any outside force,” explains Alan Jacobs of Baylor University; it “generates its own distinctive kind of truth unchallengeable by other kinds of truth.” Words like
autonomous
,
immune
, and
unchallengeable
should set your idol detector beeping. The Romantics were claiming that the imagination generates ultimate truth. It “performs a number of functions formerly reserved for God himself,” Jacobs says.
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It is a God substitute.

Poets began to say that art re-enacts the very work of God in creating a new world from nothing. Samuel Coleridge described artistic creation as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” Johann Gottfried Herder wrote, “The artist is become a creator God.”

Thus was born the now-familiar notion of the artist as a prophet or visionary. William Wordsworth felt that his spirit had been “clothed in priestly robe” and singled out “for holy services.” William Butler Yeats said that art became for him “a new religion, almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition.” A book on Romanticism is titled
The Imagination as a Means of Grace,
reflecting the religious status assigned to the creative imagination.
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It is often said that the two movements that kicked off the modern age were the Enlightenment and Romanticism—and both were built on idols.

Cure for Blind Philosophers

The first chapter of Romans gives us a powerful method that applies to religions as well as philosophies, ancient as well as modern. Principle #1 tells us that the way to cut to the heart of any alternative to Christianity is to identify its idol. Each one carves out some aspect of creation and elevates it to a false absolute—a single, all-defining principle. This tendency to absolutize some part of creation is “the source of all isms,” writes Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd.
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One part of the created order is treated as the whole. One piece of a puzzle is claimed to be the complete picture. One color in the spectrum is declared to be the entire rainbow.

Worldviews are a lot like the characters in the famous poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” The blind man who caught hold of the waving trunk insisted that the entire elephant was like a snake. The blind man who grasped the tusk argued that the whole animal was like a spear. The man who found the tail insisted that the beast was like a rope. And so on. Idol-based worldviews work in much the same way. Each grabs on to a part of reality and declares it to be the whole show. That one part is treated as the set of conceptual categories that explains all of human experience, the key that unlocks the universe. Anything it does
not
explain is either denied, redefined, or dismissed as unreal.

By contrast, Christianity does not start with anything in creation. It begins with the transcendent Creator. Therefore, it is not limited in scope. It does not have to reduce all of reality to a single set of categories. It does not see just the trunk or the tusk or the tail. It is a transcendent point of view that sees the whole elephant—the God’s-eye view that philosophers and mystics have always sought. Though you and I are limited in our individual perspectives, we have access to the perspective of eternity.

The Joy of Critical Thinking

The philosophies you are learning in this book form the backbone of all of Western thought—the ideas that inform every subject area, every academic discipline, every profession. When our son took a college course on the history of psychology, I opened the textbook and could have sworn it was for a philosophy course. It started with the pre-Socratics, went on to Plato and Aristotle, covered empiricism and rationalism and Kant, then continued all the way to the most recent philosophical movements. The textbook was making the point that every
psychological
theory stems from the application of a
philosophy
.
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Other subject areas draw from the same well. Once you master the five principles from Romans 1, you will be equipped to think critically and creatively about any theory in any field of study or work. As one of my students said, using this method “is like the difference between driving around Los Angeles with just a set of directions (turn left, turn right) compared to having a map of the whole city. The map gives you the overall perspective.” The five principles provide a map to navigate any system of ideas.

Students have sometimes told me that the main message they get from reading books on apologetics is “Everyone else is wrong.” A Romans 1 approach offers a refreshing alternative. Because a counterfeit god is something within creation, it leads people to focus on that aspect of creation—which means they are likely to uncover some genuine truths. Consider the idols we have identified:

Materialism
is partly right because God did create a material universe. He even pronounced it “very good” (Gen. 1:31). So we should not be surprised that scientists who embrace materialism can tell us a great deal about the physical universe.

Rationalism
gets something right because God did create the world with a rationally knowable structure. He also created the human mind with a corresponding structure. Good reasoning leads to God. In C. S. Lewis’s
The Screwtape Letters
, the experienced devil warns the younger devil to avoid arguments: “By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason: and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?”
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Empiricism
gets some things right because God did create a world with a sensory dimension, and he equipped humans with their five senses to function in that world. Jesus himself validated the need for empirical evidence. If you don’t believe my words, he told his disciples, then believe “on the evidence of the miracles” (John 14:11
NIV
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). When the Pharisees questioned his authority to forgive the sins of a paralyzed man, Jesus responded, “But that you may
know
that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.…” He left the sentence hanging, turned, and healed the paralytic (Mark 2:9–11). Jesus confirmed his identity by giving empirical evidence that was available to any seeking person.

When the apostles proclaimed the gospel, they treated their message as public truth, based on eyewitness testimony, open to cross-examination and testing—that “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and have touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1). They did not preach “cleverly devised myths” but were “eyewitnesses” of events taking place in time and space (2 Pet. 1:16). What they witnessed were “many convincing proofs” of Christ’s resurrection from the dead (Acts 1:3
NIV
). What’s more, as Paul reminded the Roman rulers, those events were not “done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). They were public events witnessed by many people who were still alive at the time—and who could therefore potentially refute the apostles’ claim, if they had any contrary evidence to present.
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Romanticism
was right to oppose Enlightenment worldviews that reduce humans to complex mechanisms. It was right to assert human freedom and creativity. Because we are made in the image of a Creator, Christians should be more committed than anyone else to supporting the creative arts. The imagination should soar.

A biblical worldview enables Christians to approach every viewpoint with a free and respectful attitude, knowing that virtually every perspective offers something of value. We can glean what is good wherever we find it. We can enjoy the best works of any culture. We can delight in the artistry and beauty found in classic works of art and literature. We can learn from the insights found in science and philosophy. We should refuse to allow good words like
empirical
and
rational
to be taken over by secular worldviews. Instead we should work to fill these terms with balanced biblical content.

All the while, we should be making the case that whatever is genuinely good and true finds its true home within Christianity. Every ism
isolates one strand from the rich fabric of truth. Christianity alone provides what the greatest philosophers and sages have sought all along: a coherent and transcendent framework that encompasses all of human knowledge.

The Good, the True, and the Pagan

In every age, Christians have faced the task of identifying what is good and true in the surrounding culture. The Christian church was born into an intellectual climate shaped by Greek philosophy. The challenge for the church fathers was to design a strategy for addressing that highly literate but pagan culture. Sifting through the prevailing ideas, they found much they had to reject as contrary to the Bible. But they also uncovered much that was good and right, which they could assimilate into a biblical worldview. They coined a phrase that is still in common currency today: “All truth is God’s truth, wherever it is found.”

The church fathers also passed on a phrase they borrowed from the Old Testament. In the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, God urged them to “plunder the Egyptians” (Exod. 12:36). Metaphorically, the phrase came to mean appropriating the best of pagan society, including its art and scholarship.
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Paul himself provides a stunning example when he quotes the literature of his day while speaking to the Greek cultural leaders on Mars Hill in Acts 17. When the text says Paul “reasoned” with the philosophers of Athens, the word in Greek is
dialegomai
, the root of the English word
dialogue
. In other words, Paul’s address was not a one-way street. He starts by acknowledging that his pagan listeners had some insight into truth, even if their groping toward the divine was hazy: “I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23).

Paul then quotes pagan poetry: “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’” (Acts 17:28). Close parallels to these lines are found in several ancient literary sources, which means Paul was tapping into assumptions that were widespread at the time. He was willing to appeal to the valid intuitions and insights of his Greek audience, even as he corrected and transformed those insights by incorporating them into the biblical universe of meaning. Paul was making the astounding claim that Christianity provides the context of meaning for the Greeks to understand
their own
culture.

The biblical worldview is so rich and multi-dimensional that Christians can learn and benefit from what is true in all philosophies of life, while at the same time critiquing their flaws and transcending their limitations.

First, however, we need to help people recognize those limitations. In Principle #2, we will learn how to show how cramped and dehumanizing idol-based worldviews are.