Read Online Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes by Nancy Pearcey - Free Book Online Page B
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
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that makes sense of all of life.
The Greek word for foolish reinforces the theme. Its root ( syniēmi ) means to synthesize, to put things together in the mind, and therefore to understand, to be wise. Thus to be foolish is to fail to connect ideas or link them into a meaningful structure, a coherent whole. Scripture is giving a spot-on description of the fragmented, fractured, internally contradictory two-story worldviews that result from embracing idols.
No wonder Paul writes that those who reject the Creator “are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). The phrase means “without a defense,” and it originally referred to a legal defense in a courtroom. In the Greek, the word is anapologétos , which has the same root as the word apologetics . The passage implies that those who adopt Creator substitutes end up with two-story worldviews that are not defensible as logically consistent, coherent, or realistic. Their worldviews do not fit reality as they themselves experience it.
The strength of this approach is that it shows why worldviews fail on their own terms. It is rarely persuasive to criticize other views from within your own perspective. All that really shows is that those other views disagree with you . Instead you must step imaginatively inside other perspectives to show from within why they lack explanatory power.
MIT Prof: My Children Are Machines
When God gives people up to their idols, they experience a growing conflict between their worldview and their lived reality. When I teach these concepts in the classroom, an example my students find especially poignant is Flesh and Machines by Rodney Brooks, professor emeritus at MIT. Brooks writes that a human being is nothing but a machine—a “big bag of skin full of biomolecules” interacting by the laws of physics and chemistry.
In ordinary life, of course, it is difficult to actually see people that way. But, he says, “when I look at my children, I can, when I force myself, … see that they are machines.”
Is that how he treats them, though? Of course not: “That is not how I treat them.… I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis.” Certainly if what counts as “rational” is a materialist worldview in which humans are machines, then loving your children is irrational. It has no basis within Brooks’s worldview. It sticks out of his box.
How does he reconcile such a heart-wrenching cognitive dissonance? He doesn’t. Brooks ends by saying, “I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs.” 30 He has given up on any attempt to reconcile his theory with his experience. He has abandoned all hope for a unified, logically consistent worldview. He has no defense.
This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society—ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children—have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the attic, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain.
The Bible teaches that, without God, people are morally lost. But they are also intellectually lost because they are trying to live within the limits of a worldview that is too cramped and narrow to account for their own humanity . They are forced to place their entire hope for dignity and meaning in an upper-story realm that they themselves regard as irrational and unknowable—nothing but necessary falsehoods.
Tragically, over time those humane ideals will inevitably lose their hold. After all, we are made in God’s image as logical beings; thus we tend to follow the logical consequences of our premises. It is psychologically impossible to accept concepts that we regard as fictions, no matter how useful. If someone like Brooks genuinely thinks his children are just mechanisms operating by whirring gears, that conviction
The Greek word for foolish reinforces the theme. Its root ( syniēmi ) means to synthesize, to put things together in the mind, and therefore to understand, to be wise. Thus to be foolish is to fail to connect ideas or link them into a meaningful structure, a coherent whole. Scripture is giving a spot-on description of the fragmented, fractured, internally contradictory two-story worldviews that result from embracing idols.
No wonder Paul writes that those who reject the Creator “are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). The phrase means “without a defense,” and it originally referred to a legal defense in a courtroom. In the Greek, the word is anapologétos , which has the same root as the word apologetics . The passage implies that those who adopt Creator substitutes end up with two-story worldviews that are not defensible as logically consistent, coherent, or realistic. Their worldviews do not fit reality as they themselves experience it.
The strength of this approach is that it shows why worldviews fail on their own terms. It is rarely persuasive to criticize other views from within your own perspective. All that really shows is that those other views disagree with you . Instead you must step imaginatively inside other perspectives to show from within why they lack explanatory power.
MIT Prof: My Children Are Machines
When God gives people up to their idols, they experience a growing conflict between their worldview and their lived reality. When I teach these concepts in the classroom, an example my students find especially poignant is Flesh and Machines by Rodney Brooks, professor emeritus at MIT. Brooks writes that a human being is nothing but a machine—a “big bag of skin full of biomolecules” interacting by the laws of physics and chemistry.
In ordinary life, of course, it is difficult to actually see people that way. But, he says, “when I look at my children, I can, when I force myself, … see that they are machines.”
Is that how he treats them, though? Of course not: “That is not how I treat them.… I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis.” Certainly if what counts as “rational” is a materialist worldview in which humans are machines, then loving your children is irrational. It has no basis within Brooks’s worldview. It sticks out of his box.
How does he reconcile such a heart-wrenching cognitive dissonance? He doesn’t. Brooks ends by saying, “I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs.” 30 He has given up on any attempt to reconcile his theory with his experience. He has abandoned all hope for a unified, logically consistent worldview. He has no defense.
This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society—ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children—have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the attic, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain.
The Bible teaches that, without God, people are morally lost. But they are also intellectually lost because they are trying to live within the limits of a worldview that is too cramped and narrow to account for their own humanity . They are forced to place their entire hope for dignity and meaning in an upper-story realm that they themselves regard as irrational and unknowable—nothing but necessary falsehoods.
Tragically, over time those humane ideals will inevitably lose their hold. After all, we are made in God’s image as logical beings; thus we tend to follow the logical consequences of our premises. It is psychologically impossible to accept concepts that we regard as fictions, no matter how useful. If someone like Brooks genuinely thinks his children are just mechanisms operating by whirring gears, that conviction
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