Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes by Nancy Pearcey Read Free Book Online

leads to “humbleness.” But it is not humbling; it is dehumanizing. It essentially reduces humans to robots.
    More importantly, it is not true. Its view of humanity runs counter to the data of human experience. All civilizations throughout history have recognized that humans are moral agents capable of making responsible choices. There is no society without some moral code. The testimony of universal human experience is that humans are not merely little robots. 2
    After all, what is a worldview intended to explain? A worldview is meant to give a systematic explanation of those inescapable, unavoidable facts of experience accessible to all people, in all cultures, across all periods of history. In biblical terms, those facts constitute general revelation. Philosophers sometimes refer to them collectively as the life-world, or lived experience, or pre-theoretical experience. 3 The whole point of building theoretical systems is to explain what humans know by pre-theoretical experience. That is the starting point for any philosophy. That is the data it seeks to explain. If it fails to explain the data of experience, then it has failed the test. It has been falsified.
    The Gravity of Fact
    You might think of this as the practical test of a worldview. Just as scientists test a theory by taking it into the lab and mixing chemicals in a test tube to see if the results confirm the theory, so we test a worldview by taking it into the laboratory of ordinary life. Can it be lived out consistently in the real world, without doing violence to human nature? Does life function the way the worldview says it should? Does it fit reality? Does it match what we know about the world?
    We could say that the purpose of a worldview is to explain what we know about the world . If a worldview contradicts our fundamental experience of the world—what we know by general revelation—that is a good sign that it should be scrapped. As Dooyeweerd put it, every philosophy “ought to be confronted with the datum of naive experience in order to test its ability to account for this datum in a satisfying manner.” Any philosophy that “cannot account for this datum in a satisfactory way must be erroneous.” 4
    Philosopher J. P. Moreland says we test worldviews by how well they explain “recalcitrant facts,” those stubborn facts that every theory must explain—or else be considered falsified. 5
    And we can be confident that all idol-centered worldviews will be falsified. All will fail to account for at least some of those stubborn facts. Why? Because, as we learned in Principle #2, they are reductionistic. They try to define the whole in terms of a part. Inevitably their conceptual categories will be too narrow and limited. Some parts of reality will stick out of the box.
    Consider the CNN article that went viral. It proposed a materialist philosophy that reduces humans to machines, determined by material forces. What sticks out of that box? Human freedom. The undeniable fact is that humans do make choices. This fact serves as evidence that a person is not “a very, very small part of a big, big machine.” Instead humans are personal beings capable of willing and choosing—which means their origin must be a personal Being, not the blind forces of nature.
    Recall that in philosophy, personal does not mean warm and friendly; it means a being with the capacity to think, feel, choose, and act, in contrast to a non-thinking substance whose action is automatic. Consider what happens when you combine sodium with chlorine: the atoms react with one another to produce sodium chloride (table salt). The atoms do not make a conscious decision to interact. They do not choose to transfer electrons to form an ionic bond. The process takes place by purely automatic physical forces. Materialism claims that human behavior can likewise be explained solely by physical forces at work in our brain chemistry. The existence of free will counters that theory. It constitutes