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

will eventually erode the “unconditional love” he feels for them. If the leadership classes in a society genuinely think people are machines, that conviction will eventually erode political liberty. Idols have practical consequences. 31
    Chesterton: Christianity “Too Good to Be True”
    Today Christians have an unprecedented opportunity to present the biblical worldview as positive and life affirming. If you begin with matter operating by blind, mechanical forces, then logically humans cannot ultimately be anything but complex mechanisms. Your starting assumptions limit the categories available to you.
    But if you begin with a transcendent personal Agent, then you have a perfectly logical explanation for why humans are likewise personal agents. The cause is adequate to the effect. The very phenomena that are so problematic for scientific materialism—like free will, consciousness, love—can be logically accounted for within a Christian worldview. No part of human experience falls outside its categories. Nothing sticks out of the box. The human person is no longer a misfit in a deterministic world. There is no division into an upper and lower story because you don’t need a mystical attic to stash things that don’t fit in your worldview. Christianity continues to affirm the unity of truth as a coherent, logically consistent whole. In Christ, all things still “hold together” (Col. 1:17).
    G. K. Chesterton wagers that secularists reject Christianity not because it is a bad theory but because it seems “too good to be true.” For the materialist, “the universe is a universal prison.” It shackles humans in an interlocking chain of cause and effect. Thus when a secularist encounters the biblical view, “it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom.”
    If secularists find Christianity “incredible,” Chesterton concludes, that is because it is so incredibly positive in affirming a high view of human freedom and dignity. 32
    Secular thinkers often criticize Christianity for being irrational. Yet ironically, today it is a biblical worldview that coheres in a logically consistent system. It liberates us from cognitive dissonance, imparting a profound inner unity and peace. It accords with the natural human longing for a life of integrity and wholeness. (The word integrity comes from the Latin word for wholeness.) When talking with secular people, we can show them how Christianity fulfills their own highest hopes and ideals.
    Of course, not everyone who accepts materialism or naturalism goes on to accept determinism. But I suggest that’s only because they are not as careful to work out the logical outcome of their premises. Often people accept ideas that sound attractive or sophisticated but do not follow those ideas all the way to their final implications. By giving examples of scientists and philosophers like those we have met in Principle #3, we can provide a reality check. People are more likely to be persuaded when they learn the negative consequences of materialism and atheism from the writings of materialists and atheists themselves.
    Walking Off the Postmodern Map
    So far we have applied the practical test to Enlightenment worldviews. What happens when we apply Principle #3 to the other side of the coin—the continental tradition that stems from the Romantic movement? As we saw earlier, instead of absolutizing the lower story (matter), philosophical idealism absolutizes the upper story (mind). It claims that ultimate reality is the mental realm of ideas. Schopenhauer describes idealism by saying it takes the “eternal truths” that were the foundation of all previous philosophy, “investigates their origin, and then finds this to be in man’s head.” 33
    But if the eternal truths really are “in man’s head,” then the logical conclusion is that they are not eternal after all. They are merely human constructs, relative and changing. In our day, postmodernism has drawn that