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Hearing from God and Hearing from God's Word

I recently had a conversation with a man about hearing from God. He referenced Dallas Willard’s book, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God. I’ve benefited greatly from some of Willard’s teaching, but this is one of his books that causes me serious concern. It’s certainly a more thoughtful book on the topic, so if you’re interested in looking at all sides, definitely read it. But here is my primary objection: Willard’s biblical case for the normative discipline of hearing the voice of God is very weak. Now let me just make something very explicit. I certainly think people can experience hearing God’s voice. However, my concern is with the teaching that such experiences should be a regular, normal part of the Christian life, and that your walk with Christ is somehow defective if they are not. So let’s look at some of Willard’s biblical case for this.

First, Willard appeals to the “ministry of Eli,” referencing I Samuel 3:8–9, that he was offered by various Christian writers of the past, stating, “They helped me to identify and respond to experiences of God’s speaking, just as Eli helped Samuel in the biblical story” (p. 17). But this seems to be a misuse of the text. Here a few quick observations:

• Willard assumes that Eli had developed the skill of hearing God and was able to teach others.
• A reading of the first four chapters of I Samuel indicate Eli may have not even been a believer and that Samuel “did not know God.”
• Eli does not even recognize the fact God is speaking to Samuel the first two times.
• Eli does not teach Samuel any skills of recognition, just how Samuel should respond.

The biblical text simply does not support the idea that Eli was someone who had developed the skill of hearing God's voice and was able to help others recognize it too.

Second, Willard offers the idea that the experiences of those in the Bible are not meant to be exceptional (p. 18); rather, we must assume they are the kinds of experiences we should expect today (p. 35). This seems to be a difficult position to justify, without further argument, in light of the historical context of those events and their unique place in the historical narrative of God’s plan to bless the peoples of the world. And does this apply to every single experience recorded in scripture? For example, given this line of reasoning, should I also expect God to regularly communicate to me through a donkey, like Balaam experienced (Numbers 22:21-29)? If not, why not? Just because the biblical narrative describes particular experiences with God, why should we assume they are prescribed for us today and should be a normative part of our Christian experience?

Third, Willard points to I Kings 19:11-12 to support the idea of God’s “still small voice.” However, this is the only reference in the entire Bible where you will find this phrase. If God’s “still small voice” is to play a central role in our daily walk with Him, wouldn’t you expect more than a single Old Testament passage? In addition, even biblical translators seem to be unclear on how to translate the Hebrew here. A check of different translations renders the King James version of “still small voice” very differently:

• Revised Standard Version: “sound of sheer silence”
• New American Standard Version: “sound of gentle blowing”
• New International Version: “a gentle whisper”

And again, I cannot see how this passage commends the discipline of hearing God in a normative sense.

This is a good reminder that we must always go back to the objective word of God to see how various ideas, whether they are related to spiritual formation, or philosophy, or any topic, comport with the Scriptures.

Rich Theology in MacArthur’s Book on Jesus’ Parables

John MacArthur has a new book coming out on Jesus’ parables, and I recommend it. It’s called Parables: The Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Revealed through the Stories Jesus Told, and while it didn’t radically change my understanding of any of the parables, it did deepen it, both theologically and devotionally—more than I was expecting.

MacArthur explains what a parable is in this way:

A parable is an ingeniously simple word picture illuminating a profound spiritual lesson…. Parables are not to be mined for layer upon layer of secret significance. Their lessons are simple, focused, without much embellishment.*

As the parables are designed to teach one particular point, each of the chapters is titled according to the theological lesson taught by the parable (or parables) discussed in that chapter—lessons about receiving the Word, the cost of discipleship, justice and grace, neighborly love, justification by faith, faithfulness, being wise as serpents, Heaven and Hell, and persistence in prayer. 

MacArthur doesn’t just explain the historical and cultural background of each parable, along with the context of each one within the surrounding text; he also brings in quite a bit of theology, gathering relevant verses from other parts of the Bible to round out each lesson Jesus is teaching.

Because of the richness of the theology, it took me longer than usual to read this book. But don’t conclude from this that this was a difficult book to read. It was actually very readable. Rather, I just found myself frequently wanting to pause to meditate on these truths about Jesus and His kingdom. I wanted to slow down and go over every angle of each bit in my mind—to let it shape my view of Jesus and become part of the way I see the world.

We often hear that we should tell stories, like Jesus, because that’s the best way to help people clearly learn and remember significant truths. But when asked by His disciples, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” Jesus responded, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.” In other words, the parables actually obscure truths from people who don’t want hear them. MacArthur explains:

The symbolism hides the truth from anyone without the discipline or desire to seek out Christ’s meaning. That’s why Jesus adopted that style of teaching. It was a divine judgment against those who met His teaching with scorn, unbelief, or apathy….

In short, Jesus’ parables had a clear twofold purpose: They hid the truth from self-righteous or self-satisfied people who fancied themselves too sophisticated to learn from Jesus, while the same parables revealed truth to eager souls with childlike faith—those who were hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

These parables have been given to you “to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven,” and MacArthur’s book will help you understand and appreciate them. Since the book is both readable and theologically rewarding, I especially recommend it for new Christians. What better way for them to see Jesus more clearly and build a theological foundation than by learning from Jesus’ parables?  

___________________________

*All quotes are from the uncorrected proof provided to us for reviewing purposes.

Praying the Bible

Crossway published a terrific little book on prayer that can have a big impact on your prayer life. Donald S. Whitney's book, Praying the Bible, is under 100 pages. It'll take no time to read, but it'll give you plenty of practical, insightful counsel on how to enrich your prayer life by praying through Bible passages. Whitney says that this is how we can learn a biblical way of praying and it provides fresh content for our prayers so that it doesn't become routine and dull. Praying the Psalms is how we learn to pray, he states. The Psalms are the Bible's prayer book so it's a particularly good place to start. Praying Scripture keeps us engaged in prayer in a more meaningful and motivating way than the routines we tend to get into. 

The book (let me say again, it's under 100 pages) walks through the method so it's easy to grasp how it's done. To supplement the book, Crossway has a five-day email series of videos featuring Whitney teaching and modeling how to pray the Bible.

Links Mentioned on the 7/17/15 Show

The following is a rundown of today's podcast, annotated with links that were either mentioned on the show or inspired by it:

Guest Host: J. Warner Wallace 

• reTHINK – STR student apologetics conferences: September 25-26 (CA), October 23-24 (TX)
• STR Cruise to Alaska – August 6-13, 2016

Guest: Abdu Murray – Grand Central Question (0:00)

• Grand Central Question: Answering the Critical Concerns of the Major Worldviews
• Embrace the Truth International
• Abdu Murray: A Muslim Comes to Faith in Christ – Videos on why Abdu became a Christian
• reMind Conference – August 14-15, Michigan

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)

To take part in the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00–7:00 p.m. PT), follow @STRtweets and use the hashtag #STRtalk.

Did Paul Know about Homosexuality?

A comment on the blog this week argued that when the Bible was written, “homosexuality was not a concept,” and that therefore, the behavior the Bible is really against is not the kind of loving relationships between same-sex partners we see today (this is the main argument currently being made by those trying to reconcile homosexuality with Christianity).

If you haven’t yet read Kevin DeYoung’s book on the Bible’s view of homosexuality, I very highly recommend it (you can also listen to Greg’s interview with DeYoung here). Here’s an excerpt from his chapter titled “Not That Kind of Homosexuality” responding to this argument:

Every kind of homosexual relationship was known in the first century, from lesbianism, to orgiastic behavior, to gender-malleable “marriage,” to lifelong same-sex companionship. [Non-Christian classics professor Thomas K.] Hubbard’s summary of early imperial Rome [in Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents] is important:

The coincidence of such severity on the part of moralistic writers with the flagrant and open display of every form of homosexual behavior by Nero and other practitioners indicates a culture in which attitude about this issue increasingly defined one’s ideological and moral position. In other words, homosexuality in this era may have ceased to be merely another practice of personal pleasure and began to be viewed as an essential and central category of personal identity, exclusive of and antithetical to heterosexual orientation.

If the ancient world not only had a category for committed same-sex relationships but also some understanding of homosexual orientation (to use our phrase), there is no reason to think the New Testament’s prohibitions against same-sex behavior were only for pederasty and exploitation….

Nascent ideas about orientation were not unknown in the Greco-Roman era. Consider, for example, Aristophanes’s oration in Plato’s Symposium (ca. 385– 370 BC), a series of speeches on Love (Eros) given by famous men at a drinking party in 416 BC. At this party we meet Pausanias, who was a lover of the host Agathon—both grown men. Pausanias applauds the naturalness and longevity of same-sex love. In the fourth speech we meet the comic poet Aristophanes, who proposes a convoluted theory, including notions of genetic causation, about why some men and women are attracted to persons of the same sex. Even if the speech is meant to be satire, it only works as satire by playing off the positive view of homosexual practice common in antiquity.

Suggesting that the only kinds of homosexual practice known in the ancient world were those we disapprove of today does not take into account all the evidence. Here, for example, is N. T. Wright’s informed conclusion:

As a classicist, I have to say that when I read Plato’s Symposium, or when I read the accounts from the early Roman empire of the practice of homosexuality, then it seems to me they knew just as much about it as we do. In particular, a point which  is often missed, they knew a great deal about what people today would regard as longer-term, reasonably stable relations between two people of the same gender. This is not a modern invention, it’s already there in Plato. The idea that in Paul’s day it was always a matter of exploitation of younger men by older men or whatever . . . of course there was plenty of that then, as there is today, but it was by no means the only thing. They knew about the whole range of options there.

Read more of what Kevin DeYoung had to say on this subject here or in his book.

Finding Truth: How Critical Thinking Saves Faith

This week, we’re discussing the final chapter in Nancy Pearcey’s Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes: “How Critical Thinking Saves Faith” (see links to the previous posts below).

In this last chapter of Finding Truth, Nancy Pearcey stresses the necessity of learning how to examine worldviews:

Some Christians seem to think the way to avoid being “conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2) is by avoiding “worldly” ideas. A better strategy is to learn the skills to critically evaluate them. (p. 254)

Why is evaluating them a better strategy than avoiding them? Partly because we can't avoid them. We’re all exposed to popular culture all the time, and without the ability to recognize the source of the ideas we’re surrounded by, it’s easy to unthinkingly absorb bits of other worldviews:

[M]ost people pick up their ideas about life [through popular culture]…. Worldviews do not typically come with a warning label attached to tell us what we’re getting. They do not ask permission before invading our mental space. Instead there is what we might call a “stealth” secularism that uses images and stories to bypass people’s critical grid and hook them emotionally, sometimes without their even knowing it. That’s why it is imperative to learn the skill of deciphering worldviews when they come to us not in words, where they are easier to recognize, but in the idiom of picture, composition, plot line, and characterization. (p. 258) 

I loved Pearcey’s examples of how worldview ideas have been expressed through art (see her book Saving Leonardo for an in-depth discussion of how the development of philosophy is reflected in literature, art, music, architecture, etc.).

Impressionist art was inspired by empiricism:

Everyone knows what an impressionist painting looks like, with its little dabs and dashes of color. But why did impressionists decide to break up images that way? Because they were influenced by the philosophy of empiricism, which claims that the ultimate foundation of knowledge is sensations. To reach that foundation, empiricism says, we must reach down to the level of sheer sensory input. We must not even interpret sensations in terms of discrete objects standing in three-dimensional space, but only as patches of color filling our field of vision.

That’s why the great impressionist Claude Monet wrote, “When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow.” His goal was to cut through to the level of raw, immediate sense data. Spots. Streaks. Patches of color. (pp. 260-261)

Deconstructionist art came out of postmodernism:

Recall that postmodernism is the claim that there is no “metanarrative” or universal story line valid for all people at all times. Each community has its own story line for making sense of the world. How would an artist give that idea visual expression?

By refusing to give a work of art any coherent overall design. This explains why deconstructionist artists favor the pastiche or collage—a patchwork of disconnected images that defy any attempt at interpretation. For example, the famous collages by Robert Rauschenberg, says one art historian, “juxtaposed images in ways to suggest random incoherence, to which the artist—and viewer—can bring no meaningful order.” What was Rauschenberg saying with these disconnected images? That “life’s random occurrences … cannot be made to fit in any inherent hierarchy of meaning.” (pp. 264-265) 

Abstract art was an expression of pantheism: 

Why did some artists stop painting objects at all? Because they were influenced by pantheism. The first abstract painter was Kandinsky, who embraced a blend of Eastern and Western mysticism. He argued that the way to oppose philosophical materialism was to get rid of material objects. In his words, abstract art would liberate the mind from “the harsh tyranny of the materialistic philosophy,” becoming “one of the most powerful agents of the spiritual life.”

The purpose of an abstract painting, then, is to free the mind from its preoccupation with material objects and draw the viewer up to the spiritual realm. (pp. 263-264) 

If you haven’t yet read Pearcey’s Total Truth and Saving Leonardo, I strongly recommend you do—these three books are best read together. We need to be able to recognize these ideas and where they come from when we see them in our culture. If we don’t carefully develop our own worldview, the culture will develop it for us.

But this doesn’t just matter for our sake. We need to understand the worldviews of our neighbors if we’re going to anticipate their questions and respond in a way that’s meaningful to them.

Thanks for reading with me! What did you think of the book overall? Would you like to do this again with another book? If you didn’t read the book, did you still read and enjoy these posts? I’d love to have your feedback on this book study in the comments below.

Posts in this series:

• Book Club Introduction
• Week One: Foreword
• Week Two: I Lost My Faith at an Evangelical College
• Week Three: Twilight of the Gods
• Week Four: False Worldviews Reduce the Human Person
• Week Five: Secular Leaps of Faith
• Week Six: Why Worldviews Commit Suicide
• Week Seven: Free-Loading Atheists
• Week Eight: How Critical Thinking Saves Faith

Twitter: #STRread, #FindingTruth

Articles mentioned in this chapter:

• Nancy Pearcey: How to Respond to Doubt: “The researchers uncovered the single most significant factor in whether young people stand firm in their Christian convictions or leave them behind…. [T]he most decisive factor is whether students had a safe place to work through their doubts and questions before leaving home…. The study indicates that students actually grow more confident in their Christian commitment when the adults in their life—parents, pastors, teachers—guide them in grappling with the challenges posed by prevailing secular worldviews. In short, the only way teens become truly ‘prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks’ (1 Pet. 3:15) is by wrestling honestly and personally with the questions.”

• “We Engage Culture for Jesus”: An Interview of Christian Artist Lecrae: “What we need to realize is that Christianity is total truth not just religious truth. Because it is total truth, it is relevant and applicable to all areas of life. When we don’t know how to navigate through culture, we miss out on Jesus’ power to shape and transform society. We, as Christians, have the unique privilege of being able to expose how things that this world has taken and intended for evil can be redeemed for their intended purpose, the glory of God.”

Finding Truth: Free-Loading Atheists

This week, we’re discussing the chapter “Free-Loading Atheists” in Nancy Pearcey’s Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes, which covers the fifth of five principles for evaluating worldviews: “Replace the Idol: Make the Case for Christianity” (see links to the previous posts below). 

We’ve come to the final principle in Nancy Pearcey’s Romans-1-based method of apologetics: Make the case for Christianity. After you determine how a person’s worldview doesn’t match reality, and how it contradicts itself, how do you move from there to making a case for Christianity in a way that’s relevant and compelling to that particular individual? Pearcey says, look for ways in which that person is living as if Christianity is true, accepting and acting on ideas his own worldview doesn’t support:

[W]e can get started by identifying those elements that people smuggle in from a Christian worldview. They are showing us where their own worldviews break down and, at the same time, what they find most appealing about Christianity. These provide strategic starting points for framing a biblical worldview attuned to the questions of our day. (p. 221)

As I’ve noted before, Pearcey’s approach leans heavily on the idea that the Christian worldview is appealing, not to mention necessary:

The fact that everyone has to function as though Christianity is true opens a creative opportunity for addressing the secular world. Christianity provides the basis for the way humans can’t help behaving anyway. In making the case for a biblical worldview, a strategic place to start is by showing that it alone gives a basis for the ways we all have to function, no matter which worldview we hold. (p. 224) 

It should give us confidence to know that the words and actions of those we’re trying to reach reveal that they recognize (even if not consciously) that aspects of the Christian worldview are appealing and necessary. Pearcey offered quotes from atheists who “recognize the limitations and failures of their own worldview.” Their limitations are our opportunities to explain how Christianity succeeds where other worldviews fail:

In the summer of 2013, a beer company sparked controversy when it released an advertisement for Independence Day that deleted the crucial words “by their Creator.” The ad said, “They are endowed with certain unalienable rights.” (Endowed by whom?) The advertisement is emblematic of what many secularists do: They borrow ideals like equality and rights from a biblical worldview but cut them off from their source in the Creator. They are free-loaders. Christians should reclaim those noble ideals, making the case that they are logically supported only by a biblical worldview. (p. 226)

It’s this “free-loading” that we have to call them on. They’re living as if the Christian ideas of human rights, the scientific enterprise, consciousness, moral and scientific knowledge, even spirituality, worship services, salvation, and God make sense in a atheistic materialist worldview. We need to help them squarely face the implications of their own worldview and recognize that these things only rightly belong in Christianity. Do they want them? They can’t have them without the God of Christianity; it’s all or nothing. They must choose.

I thought the descriptions of how some scientists have spiritualized evolution (e.g., by postulating an evolving, pantheistic-type mind) were fascinating. This drive on the part of atheists to find other ways to fill what they’ve lost by rejecting Christianity, again, reveals the appeal and necessity of the Christian worldview:

What drives religious variants of evolution is a sense that there must be more to reality than the flat, one-dimensional vision offered by materialism. Evolutionists are reaching out for higher dimensions to answer the human longing for greater meaning to life. Those longings are one more expression of general revelation. They are signposts to the biblical God. (p. 241)

What ideas are people trying to illegitimately borrow from the Christian worldview? What ideas are missed when they’re gone? Pearcey answers this question according to what she experienced after giving up Christianity as a student, saying, “I was acutely aware of what I had lost”:

• I had known that my life had a purpose.
• I had known that my actions had a significance that would last into eternity.
• I had known that the final reality behind all temporal realities is Love.
• I had accepted the existence of an objective moral standard.
• I had known that God himself spoke to the human race through Scripture…. When I embraced agnosticism, however, the heavens were closed. I was locked in my own mind, limited to my own tiny slot in the immensity of time and space…. [I]t was impossible to know any transcendent or timeless truths. Indeed, it might be impossible to know any truth at all.

Pearcey’s personal story explains her whole approach: She has known what it’s like to lose—and then try to live without—aspects of reality that we all need and desire; and knowing the lack of them, she can see their beauty with more clarity. She doesn’t want us to take these things for granted. We need to show people the God from whom they come.

When someone rejects God, Pearcey says to ask the question, “If there is no God, what then? What do you think is true, and how would you support it?” This is what she asked of a student, in order to encourage that student to examine the consequences of her change in worldview:

As she began to study the alternatives, she realized that giving up Christianity was not a matter of merely deleting a few files of doctrine from her mind. Christianity is an entire worldview that undergirds many of the great ideals of Western culture, from justice to equality to universal human rights—ideals that the teenager did not want to give up. (p. 249)

What did you think of this chapter? If you’ve had any conversations as a result of what you’ve learned from this book (or these posts), I’d love to hear about it. Leave your comments below, and read “How Critical Thinking Saves Faith” for next Friday. Next week is the final week!

(In this chapter, Pearcey mentions C.S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress. If you like Finding Truth, you’ll surely like that book, as well. I don’t know how long this deal will last, but today the Kindle version is on sale for $1.99, and you can add the audio version for only $3.99 more.)

Posts in this series:

• Book Club Introduction
• Week One: Foreword
• Week Two: I Lost My Faith at an Evangelical College
• Week Three: Twilight of the Gods
• Week Four: False Worldviews Reduce the Human Person
• Week Five: Secular Leaps of Faith
• Week Six: Why Worldviews Commit Suicide
• Week Seven: Free-Loading Atheists
• Week Eight: How Critical Thinking Saves Faith

Twitter: #STRread, #FindingTruth

Articles mentioned in this chapter (see links in the post above for more): 

• The Atheist Delusion by John Gray – “[T]he idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, [atheist author Philip] Pullman's is a derivative of Christianity…. Nietzsche…did not assume any connection between atheism and liberal values – on the contrary, he viewed liberal values as an offspring of Christianity and condemned them partly for that reason. In contrast, evangelical atheists have positioned themselves as defenders of liberal freedoms – rarely inquiring where these freedoms have come from, and never allowing that religion may have had a part in creating them.

• A Free Man’s Worship by Bertrand Russell – “Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.”

Don’t Let Apologetics Kill Your First Love

I love C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, a novel about people in Hell taking a bus ride to Heaven. They’re allowed to stay in Heaven if they choose to, but they find it unappealing for one reason or another. The book is less about the actual Heaven and Hell than it is about the various reasons why people reject God in this life. 

I was listening to an excellent audio version of The Great Divorce the other day, when I was struck by a dialogue between one resident of Hell (formerly a famous artist on earth—the “Ghost” in the dialogue below), and a “Spirit” of heaven (also formerly an artist). The Spirit was attempting to show the Ghost the beauty of heaven that waited for him, but the Ghost was more interested in something else:

‘I should like to paint this.’

‘I shouldn’t bother about that just at present if I were you.’

‘Look here; isn’t one going to be allowed to go on painting?’

‘Looking comes first…. At present your business is to see. Come and see. He is endless. Come and feed.’

There was a little pause. ‘That will be delightful,’ said the Ghost presently in a rather dull voice.  

‘Come, then,’ said the Spirit, offering it his arm.

‘How soon do you think I could begin painting?’ it asked.

The Spirit broke into laughter. ‘Don’t you see you’ll never paint at all if that’s what you’re thinking about?’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ asked the Ghost.

‘Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you’ll never learn to see the country.’

‘But that’s just how a real artist is interested in the country.’

‘No. You’re forgetting,’ said the Spirit. ‘That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.’

‘Oh, that’s ages ago,’ said the Ghost. ‘One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.’

‘One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.’ (pp. 83-85) 

As people who endeavor to learn how to tell others about the God we love, we all have to guard against being “drawn away from love of the thing we tell, to love of the telling.” There is, indeed, a difference between being interested in God and being interested in what we say about Him.

Today, visit your First Love. Come and see. Come and feed.

Finding Truth: Why Worldviews Commit Suicide

This week, we’re discussing the chapter “Why Worldviews Commit Suicide” in Nancy Pearcey’s Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes, which covers the fourth of five principles for evaluating worldviews: “Test the Idol: Does It Contradict Itself?” (see links to the previous posts below). 

So far, we’ve learned how to identify the idol in a worldview (i.e., its understanding of the nature of ultimate reality), to find where it reduces the view of the human person to something less than human, and to see where that reductionism fails to match reality. This week, Nancy Pearcey explains how to find where a worldview contradicts itself:

[V]irtually all idol-based worldviews are self-refuting. Why? Because they are reductionistic. When reductionism is applied to the human mind, it reduces reason to something less than reason. It says the ideas in our minds are products of natural selection (Darwinism) or economic conditions (Marxism) or electrochemical responses in the brain (contemporary neuroscience). Yet the only way a worldview can build its own case is by using reason. Thus when it discredits reason, it undercuts its own case. It is self-defeating. (pp. 182-183)

Worldviews cause problems for themselves when they say that there’s no real self, that our ideas are the results of physical processes (or products of culture, or mere power plays), that “reason” is really an illusion. You can see the problem: If a person’s worldview states that reason itself isn’t to be trusted, then we ought not take seriously any reason that person gives for his own worldview. When it comes to reductionistic worldviews (other than rationalism, which doesn’t defeat itself in this particular way), Pearcey says “this one fundamental flaw is predictable.“ It’s a bad sign if you can’t make a legitimate case for your worldview from within your own worldview:

[O]nce a theory makes the claim that our ideas are not the product of rational thought, that claim must be applied to all ideas—including the theory itself. (p. 187) 

In order to trust that human beings can discover truth, one needs to know 1) “a rational God created the world with an intelligible structure,” and 2) we were created in the image of that rational being, which enables us to discover that structure. So what are proponents of reductionistic worldviews (who deny these two things) doing every time they make a case for their view?

The upshot is that all worldviews have to borrow a Christian epistemology—at least at the moment they are making their claims. They must tacitly assume the reliability of reason and rationality, which only a biblical worldview supports. They have to function as if Christianity is true, even as they reject it. (p. 190)

In our culture, we’ve been seeing the results of a postmodern loss of confidence in the legitimacy of reason and our ability to find truth. If there’s no truth we can find together—if our reality is merely created for us by our “tribes” through a common use of language, not reason—then there’s no use attempting to “reason” others towards our particular view, which means pressure or force will eventually become the persuasion method of choice. What other option is there? Indeed, we are starting to see power moves take the place of reasoned dialogue (as an antidote, I recommend watching this). As I wrote years ago:

[W]hat is left when separate communities come into conflict and the members believe rational communication and persuasion is impossible? Only the international language of power remains.

As always, Pearcey ends the chapter with a discussion of how Christianity grounds what other worldviews fail to ground. For example, where modernism exalted the individual (at the expense of community) and postmodernism exalted the community (at the expense of individuality), the Trinity provides the basis for both individuality and community in Christianity:

The perfect balance of unity and diversity within the Trinity offers a model for human social life—and a solution to the opposing poles of postmodernism and modernism. Against postmodernism’s dissolution of the self, the Trinity implies the dignity of the individual self. Just as each Person within the Trinity is distinct and plays a unique role in the drama of salvation, so each individual person has a unique identity and purpose.

Yet against modernism and its radical individualism, the Trinity implies that we are not disconnected and autonomous but were created for relationship. Sociality is built into the very essence of human nature. (pp. 209-210)

We’ve had some interesting discussions in the comments so far, so join in! Tell us what you thought about this chapter.

Next week, we’ll cover the fifth principle: “Make the Case for Christianity.” Pearcey has been doing a bit of this in every chapter (see the Trinity example above) as she shows us how Christianity, unlike other worldviews, has the ability to ground every aspect of the reality we experience and depend upon daily. I love her emphasis on the idea that Christianity is appealing—that our job is to reveal it to others in all its intellectual and emotional beauty, so I’m looking forward to the next chapter.

Posts in this series:

• Book Club Introduction
• Week One: Foreword
• Week Two: I Lost My Faith at an Evangelical College
• Week Three: Twilight of the Gods
• Week Four: False Worldviews Reduce the Human Person
• Week Five: Secular Leaps of Faith
• Week Six: Why Worldviews Commit Suicide
• Week Seven: Free-Loading Atheists
• Week Eight: How Critical Thinking Saves Faith

Twitter: #STRread, #FindingTruth

Articles mentioned in this chapter:

• The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins – “Well over a century ago, Balfour identified a problem with the evolutionary thinking that was gaining ascendancy at the time. 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…. 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.”

• Big Bang: Is There Room for God? – “John Lennox, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, is also a self-declared Christian. He thinks the very fact that human beings can do science is evidence for God. ‘If the atheists are right the mind that does science...is the end product of a mindless unguided process. Now, if you knew your computer was the product of a mindless unguided process, you wouldn't trust it. So, to me atheism undermines the rationality I need to do science.’”