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

needed to look for one that did. It was the beginning of an intellectual turnaround. Christianity began to look considerably more plausible.
    How can we make Christianity more plausible for our own friends and family members who are seekers, agnostics, or skeptics?
    Principle #3
    Test the Idol: Does It Contradict What We Know about the World?
    We have worked through two principles in worldview analysis. First we identify its idol. Second we identify its reductionism. Now we will ask whether idol-centered worldviews fit the real world.
    Let’s stay with the questions of free will because it is so central to human dignity. The ability to choose from among alternatives makes a host of other distinctively human capacities possible—creativity and problem solving, love and relationships (robots do not love), even rationality itself (if our minds are preprogrammed to hold an idea, then it is not a rational decision). “Unless human beings are morally responsible,” says law professor Jerome Hall, “justice is only a mirage.” Unless humans have free will, we will not develop a sense of identity or self-worth (because everything I do is really the work of unconscious, automatic forces). 9
    What is at stake is nothing less than our “ respect for persons ,” says one philosopher. For if determinism is true, then “we are, in the final reckoning, merely playthings of fortune.” 10
    Free will has thus become a stand-in for the whole range of human qualities that depend on it. If you take a course in Philosophy 101, your textbook is almost certain to include a section on free will versus determinism. In recent years, the topic has moved to center stage in philosophy. 11 Therefore it is one of the most salient facts of general revelation that can be used in testing worldviews.
    Why Secularists Can’t Live with Secularism
    Let’s practice applying Principle #3 to several examples, using secularists’ own words and writings. An especially clear example is Galen Strawson, a philosopher who states with great bravado, “The impossibility of free will … can be proved with complete certainty.”
    Yet in an interview, Strawson admits that, in practice, no one accepts his deterministic view. “To be honest, I can’t really accept it myself,” he says. “I can’t really live with this fact from day to day. Can you, really?”
    But if humans “can’t really live with” the implications of a worldview, is it a reliable map to reality? Watch for phrases like this as you read through other examples. Often they are clues that someone is trying to live out a worldview that does not fit the real world—that he or she has bumped up against one of the intractable facts that point to the biblical God.
    Moreover, Strawson insists that he is not alone, that even cognitive scientists who publish books and journal articles favoring determinism do not accept it as a workable theory to live by. They “may accept it in their white coats, but I’m sure they’re just like the rest of us when they’re out in the world—convinced of the reality of radical free will.” 12
    In short, their practice contradicts what they profess . They are trapped in cognitive dissonance.
    Strawson states the conflict in striking terms: “Powerful logical or metaphysical reasons for supposing we can’t have strong free will keep coming up against equally powerful psychological reasons why we can’t help believing that we do have it.… It seems that we cannot live or experience our choices as determined, even if determinism is true.” 13
    What are the telltale phrases here? That there are ideas “we can’t help believing.” That “we cannot live” on the basis of contrary ideas, even if we think they are true. When a concept (like free will) keeps bubbling up inescapably and irresistibly even in the mind of someone who disavows it— whose worldview directly denies it —that’s a good clue that it is a truth of general revelation that is being