Read Online Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes by Nancy Pearcey - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Nancy Pearcey
Tags: Religión, Non-Fiction, Atheism, Defending Christianity, Faith Defense, False Gods, Finding God, Losing faith, Materialism, Richard Pearcey, Romans 1, Saving Leonardo, Secularism, Soul of Science, Total Truth
Ads: Link
human behavior, he writes. Yet it is still “wrong.” To be precise, it is “not even wrong”—because it “cannot be given any logical interpretation” (at least, not within his worldview). Thus Baum concludes, “The belief is simply mystical.” 26
One group of thinkers has even been labeled “mysterians.” They argue that human intelligence is simply not equipped to solve the mystery of consciousness—that it evolved to solve purely practical problems like obtaining food and making tools. A representative of this group, Colin McGinn, writes, “Consciousness must have evolved from matter somehow but nothing we could contrive or imagine seem[s] to offer the faintest hope for explanation.… We just don’t have the faculties of comprehension that would enable us to remove the sense of mystery.” 27
Francis Schaeffer in The God Who Is There observes that every worldview containing a two-story dualism leads ultimately to “mysticism” in the sense that adherents must affirm truths that their own worldview cannot rationally explain. 28 It is ironic that many thinkers who pride themselves on being champions of rationality have accepted a form of mysticism—driven to that extreme position by the impulse to suppress the facts that contradict their preferred worldview.
Darwinian Psychopaths
Romans 1 says God “gives people up” to pursue their idols ever further, increasing the gap between what they profess and what they practice. We can picture worldviews falling along a continuum: The more consistently people work out the logic of their worldview, the more reductionistic the result will be, the wider the gap, and the further its leap into irrational mysticism. The choice facing them becomes ever clearer: Will they follow the evidence of general revelation? Or will they cling to their theories in the face of the evidence?
Let’s follow a series of examples to watch for ourselves how the gap grows ever wider—and more disturbing.
We began with Slingerland; now let’s see where he ends. As a Darwinist and materialist, he acknowledges that his reductionist view of humans as essentially robots is contrary to ordinary experience. It is “alien and often repugnant, from any sort of normal human perspective.” Gesturing toward his own daughter, Slingerland writes, “At an important and ineradicable level, the idea of my daughter as merely a complex robot carrying my genes into the next generation is both bizarre and repugnant to me.” Such a reductionistic view “inspires in us a kind of emotional resistance and even revulsion.”
Indeed, he writes, if you do not feel that revulsion, something is wrong with you: “There may well be individuals who lack this sense, and who can quite easily and thoroughly conceive of themselves and other people in purely instrumental, mechanistic terms, but we label such people ‘psychopaths,’ and quite rightly try to identify them and put them away somewhere to protect the rest of us.” 29
What can we say when someone urges us to adopt a view of humanity that he himself admits is bizarre and repugnant? A view that ought to inspire revulsion? A view so dangerous that, when acted on, it would justify us in labeling people “psychopaths” and locking them up?
There is a severe clash between what his Darwinian materialism tells him (in the downstairs) and what his lived experience tells him (in the upstairs). Which one will he accept as true?
To describe this clash, we’ve been using the term cognitive dissonance , but that word may be too tame. This is a searing contradiction. Paul writes that those who build their lives on idols become “futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts [are] darkened” (Rom. 1:21). The Greek word for futile means unproductive, ineffectual, failing to achieve its purpose. As this example clearly shows, idol-based worldviews do not produce what a philosophy of life is meant to give us—a coherent, logically satisfying worldview
One group of thinkers has even been labeled “mysterians.” They argue that human intelligence is simply not equipped to solve the mystery of consciousness—that it evolved to solve purely practical problems like obtaining food and making tools. A representative of this group, Colin McGinn, writes, “Consciousness must have evolved from matter somehow but nothing we could contrive or imagine seem[s] to offer the faintest hope for explanation.… We just don’t have the faculties of comprehension that would enable us to remove the sense of mystery.” 27
Francis Schaeffer in The God Who Is There observes that every worldview containing a two-story dualism leads ultimately to “mysticism” in the sense that adherents must affirm truths that their own worldview cannot rationally explain. 28 It is ironic that many thinkers who pride themselves on being champions of rationality have accepted a form of mysticism—driven to that extreme position by the impulse to suppress the facts that contradict their preferred worldview.
Darwinian Psychopaths
Romans 1 says God “gives people up” to pursue their idols ever further, increasing the gap between what they profess and what they practice. We can picture worldviews falling along a continuum: The more consistently people work out the logic of their worldview, the more reductionistic the result will be, the wider the gap, and the further its leap into irrational mysticism. The choice facing them becomes ever clearer: Will they follow the evidence of general revelation? Or will they cling to their theories in the face of the evidence?
Let’s follow a series of examples to watch for ourselves how the gap grows ever wider—and more disturbing.
We began with Slingerland; now let’s see where he ends. As a Darwinist and materialist, he acknowledges that his reductionist view of humans as essentially robots is contrary to ordinary experience. It is “alien and often repugnant, from any sort of normal human perspective.” Gesturing toward his own daughter, Slingerland writes, “At an important and ineradicable level, the idea of my daughter as merely a complex robot carrying my genes into the next generation is both bizarre and repugnant to me.” Such a reductionistic view “inspires in us a kind of emotional resistance and even revulsion.”
Indeed, he writes, if you do not feel that revulsion, something is wrong with you: “There may well be individuals who lack this sense, and who can quite easily and thoroughly conceive of themselves and other people in purely instrumental, mechanistic terms, but we label such people ‘psychopaths,’ and quite rightly try to identify them and put them away somewhere to protect the rest of us.” 29
What can we say when someone urges us to adopt a view of humanity that he himself admits is bizarre and repugnant? A view that ought to inspire revulsion? A view so dangerous that, when acted on, it would justify us in labeling people “psychopaths” and locking them up?
There is a severe clash between what his Darwinian materialism tells him (in the downstairs) and what his lived experience tells him (in the upstairs). Which one will he accept as true?
To describe this clash, we’ve been using the term cognitive dissonance , but that word may be too tame. This is a searing contradiction. Paul writes that those who build their lives on idols become “futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts [are] darkened” (Rom. 1:21). The Greek word for futile means unproductive, ineffectual, failing to achieve its purpose. As this example clearly shows, idol-based worldviews do not produce what a philosophy of life is meant to give us—a coherent, logically satisfying worldview
Similar Books
