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

conclusion. It holds that humans have no access to an objective or extra-mental world. In Rorty’s succinct phrase, truth is “made rather than found.” 34
    If materialism keeps its old trunks in the attic, we might say postmodernism keeps its old trunks in the basement, labeled with postmodern jargon like “Logocentric,” “Post-Colonialist,” “Metanarrative,” and “False Consciousness.”
    Let’s ask the same question we posed to Enlightenment worldviews: Does postmodernism account for the facts of universal human experience? Can it be lived without contradiction in the real world? Or does it lead to an untenable dualism?
    The answer is that in practice postmodernists do not live consistently on the basis of their own philosophy. They do not treat all ideas as human constructs. Instead, like every other normal person, they test their mental concepts against extra-mental states of affairs in dozens of ways. They thought the bread was in the refrigerator but found it was on the counter. They thought their keys were on the table but found they were in a pocket. How? By comparing their internal thoughts with a state of affairs in the external world.
    In everyday life, postmodernists are just as concerned about objective truth as anyone else. Dallas Willard comments, “I have noticed that the most emphatic of Postmodernists turn coldly modern when discussing their fringe benefits or other matters that make a great difference to their practical life.” 35 If we use the metaphor that a worldview is a mental map, postmodernists keep walking off their map. It is too small to account for the full geography of who they are.
    As we saw in Principle #2, postmodernism is a form of anti-realism, the view that reality is a social construction. Yet humans cannot help functioning as though the external world is real and our knowledge of it is basically reliable. Those who deny that we have access to an external reality still look both ways before crossing the street. They avoid jumping off balconies. They hold their breath under water. In other words, they know that there is an extra-mental reality to which they must adapt their behavior; otherwise the consequences will be disastrous.
    We all learned this basic truth from the time we were tiny. As toddlers, when we bumped into the wall or tipped over our chair and crashed to the floor, we discovered in a painful way that the universe has an objective structure. When the toy box did not contain the toy we wanted, we discovered that reality does not bend to our subjective desires. Anything that we are compelled to affirm, simply in order to function in the world, is part of general revelation.
    Christianity explains why truth is not merely a human construction. The world is not a creation of my own mind. It is the handiwork of God. The human mind cannot usurp the Creator’s role and function. The biblical concept of creation gives logical grounds to support what humans inescapably conclude by experience from the time we are toddlers.
    Remarkably, Rorty concedes that the very idea of objective truth—a truth that is “out there”—makes sense only on the basis of a Christian worldview. “The suggestion that truth is out there … is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own,” a “nonhuman language” written into the cosmos. 36 Rorty is harkening back to an image that Christians have embraced since the church fathers—the idea that there are two books: the book of God’s word (the Bible) and the book of God’s world (nature). And because the world itself is a kind of book, there is a message and meaning written in the cosmos itself. Humans should be able to “read” certain fundamental truths in creation. We should be able to discern evidence for God in general revelation, just as Romans teaches.
    Don’t Impose Your Facts
    Earlier we learned that all idols lead to a mental dichotomy or dualism—and