Since I teach and talk about mathematics I often get a chance to interact with people about the word “proof.” It is a commonly used word which carries a lot of authority. If some proposition is “proved,” we would say, then all debate ceases; the proposition is true, period. Other claims which have not been proved are open to question or criticism. We tend to think it intellectually dishonest to question something which has been proved, especially with regard to mathematics. Let me give you an example. Suppose I were to ask some random passersby if it is possible that our existence is not what it seems, that we are subject to some grand delusion similar to that portrayed in the movie Matrix or the Harry Potter books. I suspect that many would agree that such a thing is possible. If I were to ask the same passersby if it is possible that a mathematical truth like 1000 + 1000 = 2000 is false, I suspect the vast majority would say no. Why the difference? Why would people be more willing to accept a mathematical truth than a truth about the validity of our everyday experience? Most of us, if pressed, would probably say something like this: mathematical conclusions have been proved by mathematicians while the reality of our experience has not. Not that we have actually done any mathematical proofs, but that is what we have been told. But what, one may ask, is a proof? One answer is that a proof is a deduction using valid logic from a set of first principles. This is the most common notion of proof which implies that the conclusion of a proof is undeniable. However, by this definition, the proof is only as good as its first principles. If the first principles upon which the proof is built are questionable, then so is the proof, and first principles have a long history of being called into question. To avoid this difficulty we might try to find proofs for our first principles. But clearly this is impossible, since to do so, we must use other, prior principles upon which to base the proof, and these principles would suffer the same criticism. Thus we must assume the truth of the first principles, leaving this definition of proof with a bit of a gaping hole, at least with regard to undeniability. Thus a proof is only as good as its first principles. Another answer to the question of what is a proof was suggested to me by a math professor when I was taking an advanced mathematics class as an undergrad: a proof is a convincing argument. At the time, I was taken aback. What if I am convinced of something that is incorrect? Proofs are supposed to be certain, not merely convincing. On the other hand, who but a mathematics professor should know the answer to this question? As I have further explored the issue, I have come to agree with this position: a proof is a convincing argument. Whichever of these notions of proof is adopted, let us return to our original question and ask why people would be more willing to accept a mathematical truth than a truth about the validity of our everyday experience? Are mathematical arguments more convincing? Let us approach this question using both notions of proof. We will start with the first notion of proof. Suppose mathematical proofs are more convincing because they are built upon a solid base of true mathematical first principles, whereas the reality of our experience is just something we believe without an argument from first principles. Now, there has been a great deal of debate about which first principles one should adopt when building a mathematical structure such as arithmetic or geometry. Rather than look at this debate, let us simply choose some basic principle that most mathematicians would accept as one of their first principles, the principle of non-contradiction: a statement cannot be both true and not true at the same time. Seems pretty obvious. If it were wrong, we could not really make arguments at all. No wonder mathematics has such a high level of authority; first principles like this seem pretty strong. With regard to the reality of our experience, are there some foundational principles which could be used to prove we are not deluded? I would suggest, no. Instead, belief in the reality of our experience is a first principle. Why, I would ask, does the truth of the principle of non-contradiction have any greater authority than the reality of our experience? If a person denies either, there is no real recourse to argument. A person may claim to deny either, but the claim goes nowhere. A person can only claim the principle of non-contradiction is false if the principle of non-contradiction is true. Further, if the reality of our experience is a big, undetectable delusion, how do we know if anything we believe is true? Thus for the first notion of proof, it is not clear to me why the first principles of mathematics are to be preferred over the reality of our experience, and thus mathematics has no special standing. Let us next consider the second notion of proof: a proof is a convincing argument. From this perspective, are mathematical arguments more convincing than the reality of our experience? To address this question, let us first consider some possible reasons for believing that 1000 + 1000 = 2000: Education. We all were taught how to add. We were told over and over again that the procedure that we use for addition is the right one. Everyone does it, and no one ever questions it. Thus the overwhelmingly consistent application of this procedure of adding is agreed upon by all. It works. Our knowledge of addition is applied all the time. We apply it; engineers and scientists apply it. One would expect that if there were a problem with addition, it would have shown up. Intuitive obviousness. We have an immediate and clear perception that when one thing is put together with another we get two things. Further, it is intuitively obvious that groups of things add in the same way individual things add; how could they not? Putting these perceptions together, we do not really need much education to realize that the addition statement is true. The culture. Our culture indicates in many ways that mathematics is very sure. It is one of the only disciplines where conclusions are undeniable; to even question mathematics is seen as odd. Our culture tells us that all of these mathematical conclusions have been proven to be true. There is not any culturally plausible scenario where mathematics is not right. Now consider our belief in the validity of everyday experience—that is, the rejection of something like the Matrix as possible. Here are some reasons that might be given for that belief: Education. In this case, the education does not start formally in school but informally at birth. We are taught by our experiences, by our parents, by our peers, and by our teachers. Those around us are teaching us through their words and actions that we must take the physical world around us as existing the way we experience it. It works. We all live our lives every day assuming the reality of our experience is no delusion. In a delusion, usually there is some sort of clue that something is not right. But the physical world is consistent in its operation. We may not understand all of the laws and principles, but every expectation of physical behavior is met in practice. We do not drop a ball and watch it go up. You would think someone would have noticed that things are not what they seemed. Intuitive obviousness. Even if we did not have a lifetime of experiences, it is obvious to our senses and minds that the physical world around us is not a delusion. Our minds are set up to believe the truth of our senses. We can’t help it. Try for even a short while to disbelieve your senses, and you will find it impossible. It is with regard to the fourth reason, culture, that a difference between mathematical arguments and the belief in the reality of our experience appears. On the whole, our culture overwhelmingly supports the validity of experience. However, there are a few culturally ingrained doubts. There have been philosophers who have gained some degree of fame and influence who have questioned the validity of our experience and cast doubt on even the most obvious things. There is a general belief that governments, corporations, aliens, or magical people will go to any end to delude the populace for their dastardly plans. There are lots of science fiction and fantasy stories which make such a possibility plausible. Thus I would suggest to you that the difference between the character of our belief in mathematical conclusions and the character of our belief in the validity of our experience is not because one has been proved in the first sense of proof. Proof doesn’t have anything to do with it since none of us has ever proved either conclusion. Ultimately the basis for belief in both is the same—namely, education, consistency, intuitive obviousness, and culture. However, with regard to culture, there is no support for disbelieving mathematics while there is support for disbelieving the validity of our experience. For the vast majority, cultural influence is the deciding difference, not the strength of the evidence or proof. Nevertheless, you may say, there must be some reason why there is no cultural support for disbelieving mathematics. Mathematics really is sure and certain even if we do not exactly know why. Cultural beliefs are rational, are they not? Undeniably, there is some reason. The question is whether that reason is a good one. To answer such a question would require an in-depth analysis of the nature of mathematics, the nature of knowledge, first principles, the reliability of our senses, and our mental faculties. This question has been hotly debated for thousands of years, and our general cultural beliefs stem directly from this conversation. Such a question is well beyond the scope of this short discussion. My take, however, is that the issue is not cut-and-dried. The fact that my mathematics professor claimed that a proof is a convincing argument supports this. He recognized that the common notion of proof is not tenable. Further, I believe that the common notion of proof is a result of a mistaken set of philosophical ideas developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whatever the case may be, I think we can safely conclude that for most of us, our belief in the certainty in mathematics is based on general cultural trends and not on the first, more common notion of proof. And if I may be so bold, if you are convinced by my argument, then I have proved it! While a mistaken common notion of proof is not something of great significance, I think it illustrates the power that culture has on our ideas. Many ideas weave their way into our thoughts due to cultural influence. To recognize them is a very difficult task, and to weigh them judiciously is even harder. Despite the difficulty, it is worthwhile to stop and ask, on occasion, why do I believe “that” after all.

I recently had the privilege to lead discussions on two vastly different works. The first was the Federalist Papers , a series of articles written in the 1780s by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay designed to convince the voters of New York to approve the proposed Constitution of the United States. The second work, “ A World Split Apart ,” is the transcript of a 1978 commencement address given at Harvard University by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was famous for writing about the abuses in Soviet Russia during the Stalinist era, but this address did not critique Eastern failings; it critiqued the failings of the West. Read together, the two works give an interesting perspective on how our culture has changed over the last two centuries. The meaning and intention of some of the most noble sentiments of the Constitution have been reinterpreted in a way that they have become dangerous to our faith. These ideas are freedom of speech, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, and the pursuit of happiness. My intention in this series of four posts is not to write about politics. I am not offering political solutions or critiquing political problems. I am discussing social and cultural beliefs, beliefs that have become so ingrained in our cultural psyche that we cannot see them for what they are. This subtle infiltration into our consciousness is what makes them dangerous to our faith. Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech In the first amendment to the Constitution, we are guaranteed the freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The intention of this amendment was to prevent the government from clamping down on political dissention and criticism. It was assumed that the press, for instance, would act as a watchdog on corrupt or bad behavior on the part of the government. The press was also to be a source of information through which the electorate could make informed decisions. But the goal of maintaining an informed electorate by insuring a free press has not been accomplished. Instead the press reports only on what is fashionable. This change has occurred largely due to the economic nature of public discourse. The press and the entertainment industry are subject to the economic pressure of financial success. Thus they do not write or show anything that their base subscribers or viewers dislike. If they alienate those subscribers, then the subscribers will stop watching, and revenues will go down. Thus public discourse is subject to fashion. It can inform the electorate only of what the electorate wants to hear. Unfashionable scandals are not scandals at all. An example of the impact of fashion can be found in the news items selected by NPR. Most of the stories, except those dealing with breaking news, fall into an “oppressor vs. oppressed” narrative: some powerful, bad person or organization is causing harm to some powerless, good person or organization. We like to hear these stories because we feel for the underdog and the oppressed. These stories stir our moral outrage and draw us into action. But the world is not like that. Sure, there are powerful entities in the world that abuse their status and should be exposed. But are there not many more of the powerless and disenfranchised who do horrible things? We all know Walmart is supposed to be evil, but how many stories do you hear about people who shoplift from Walmart? I believe that such a story would not be well received. No one wants to hear about that. A powerful man who is racist is news. But a poor person who cheats on his taxes is not. Why do we care about the racist remark but not the tax evasion? I would suggest it is due to the fashion of the times. The censorship provided by such a scheme is much more complete and pervasive than any governmental restriction of speech could ever create. It works on our ideas from the bottom up, not on our words from the top down. Granted, there are voices that can and do offer critiques and alternative views. The impact of these voices on the culture at large, however, is minimal. On the one hand, if the views offered are completely out of fashion, then only a very small sector of the population can or will be willing to listen. Thus the effect will be marginal on society as a whole. On the other hand, some alternative views may be embraced by a large segment of the population, but these represent only a competing fashion. They will only offer debate and dissent on issues over which there is competition, which is of course healthy, but it masks the underlying similarity of opinion on other issues. We feel as if there is free discourse because of the difference of opinion, but we forget that much more is not being discussed because it is not a subject of ideological competition. The left and the right are at each other’s throats, but they both seduce their supporters into accepting ideas on which they agree. How often, for instance, does the press report on the bias of its own economic orientation? How often do you see stories questioning whether higher education is primarily for job preparation? Where are the in-depth stories examining whether high tech helps or hurts society? There is little to no debate on these issues between the left and the right. The development of a fashion in the media blinds us into thinking that we are bravely taking on the most important issues of our times. But instead, our horizons are narrowed to the most fashionable issues of our times. Our ability as a culture to interact in successful ways is limited to those sorts of solutions fashion allows. More importantly, the fashion of our media envelopes us as individuals to such an extent that it is far more difficult to discern God’s view of good and evil. An issue related to the freedom of the press is freedom of speech. Here the danger is even greater since the impact is more pervasive. As with freedom of the press, freedom of speech was designed to ensure political freedom. But the types of speech now included under the rubric of free speech has expanded well beyond freedom of political speech on issues of public concern. Freedom of speech has been reinterpreted as a ticket to spew abuse and verbally manipulate any statement without repercussion. Freedom of speech is now freedom from just about any and all restraint in speech. As a result of our “free for all” speech, modern publications, radio, and video cater to many of our basest human desires in order to continue to titillate and excite the emotions. The strategy is to have the widest possible appeal and to keep the maximum number of readers and watchers engaged. All sorts of damaging ideas and images are thus thrust mercilessly on us, especially on our youth who are least able to resist. But if anyone tries to restrict this onslaught, “freedom of speech” is invoked to silence the naysayers. Not only does free speech degrade our moral sensibilities, it also promotes a base form of legalism. The media, in recognizing the economic advantage of engaging our passions, constantly pushes the limits of the law in that direction. It has substituted internal restraints of goodness with external restraints of legality. Our culture now believes that it is morally acceptable to engage in character assassination, spreading of rumor, distortion of meaning, damaging innuendo, sexual exploitation, and misrepresentation—so long as it does not exceed the legal limits of such behavior. And if those people damaged by such behavior push back, the media reverts to the sacred dictum of the freedom of the press. The danger here comes from the way the culture has demeaned kindness and decency. In the name of political freedom, we have allowed ourselves to believe that evil is OK. We have normalized unkindness in our speech. To the extent that we adopt these perspectives, we have debased ourselves and lost our way. Separation of Church and State The separation of church and state is also established in the first amendment to the Constitution. It grew out of the colonists’ experience with state-run churches. In Europe, the political rulers had authority over the church. Only one church organization was allowed, and people who dissented were subject to legal persecution. Thus the Constitution included the separation-of-church-and-state clause to avoid this sort of heavy handed political repression of religious freedom. Since that time, however, the separation of church and state has been reinterpreted as a separation of religion and state. This has since devolved into a prohibition against any acknowledgement of the spiritual in any governmental entity. Clearly this was not the intention of the original founders. If that were the case, then there would be no mention of God in the founding documents. Appeals to God were, in fact, common in the founding of this country. This change is primarily a response to the growth of a politically powerful atheistic segment in society. The growth of this segment is the result of the slow but steady increase in materialistic and naturalistic philosophy in the West—basically a denial of spiritual realities. Many of the touch points where this battle is being fought are, for the most part, not particularly significant: for example, debates on who can pray in school and when; debates on what sorts of documents can be publicly displayed; and so on. How these particular issues play out do not seem to be too significant for our cultural life, but the general trend and the drive behind the battles are very damaging. Effectively, separation of church and state has restricted the kinds of issues that can be raised in public discourse. Only issues that deal with worldly material needs are allowed. We constantly harangue over taxes and budgets. We debate about fair labor laws and immigration. National security is contrasted with civil liberties. All of these aspects of our public life deal with our mundane interests and needs. Missing is any discussion of the fact that man is not just a material being. Instead, that man is purely material is assumed without debate in the public sphere. The assumption tacitly implies that the things of importance are material: the types of problems that we have are purely material; solutions to problems are to be accomplished through purely material means. The idea that our deepest and most profound problems are spiritual is not even on the table. I am not suggesting that material needs are not in the purview of public life. Nor am I advocating a “Christian political agenda” as a solution to our problems. Instead, I am pointing out how the trends in our culture have devalued and marginalized many of the most important aspects of public discourse. This is perhaps dangerous to our society. But more importantly, to our great loss, it encourages us to devalue the significance of our spiritual nature. One of the main ways that this reinterpretation of church and state has affected our culture is in education. Our goal in education is to pass on the ideas, values, and skills that will help our children live the best lives they can. Spiritual questions—such as right and wrong, what it means to be a human, and whether there is a supreme being—are central to this task. But in the current system, to raise these questions is, in fact, illegal! This sort of restriction on education surely never darkened the worst nightmares of the writers of the Constitution. Another important consequence of this reinterpretation of church and state has to do with how society approaches social services. Federal and state social services can only consider the material well being of those in need. All analyses and researches into our social problems are purposely blind to our most important problems, spiritual problems. Such an approach is bound to lessen the success of these services. The need for the spiritual in social services can be seen in Alcoholics Anonymous. My understanding is that AA promotes the idea of a higher being in its treatment. If AA were restricted from encouraging the attendees to consider a higher power, the program would be significantly less effective, both socially and individually. Man is a spiritual being, and everyone recognizes this whether or not they admit to it. All feel the need for purpose. All feel the need for connection and love. All feel the call to the transcendent. The idea that we should eliminate this aspect of our lives from the public sphere is self-defeating at best and malicious at worst. Rule of Law The United States was founded on a written Constitution. The fact that this document was designed to be the highest law of the land was extremely significant. It put into place the rules by which the country was to be governed, and it restricted the means by which those with power could abuse that power. What the people were responding to was the nature of law in Europe. In most European countries, the decree of the monarch was the law. Granted, the monarchs were severely limited by traditions, representative bodies, and social structures; but in principle, no law could hold the King responsible for his actions. In the United States, it was important to have the laws clearly spelled out and inviolable. No one was above the law. Everyone was subject to it. The system of checks and balances was included specifically to prescribe the laws for the people at the top. But every set of laws, no matter how well written, is incomplete. It cannot take into consideration every method by which people can take advantage of others. For every new law enacted to clamp down on damaging or deceitful activity, other new ways can be invented. The laws of the United States relied heavily on the character of the people. The laws specified the minimum standards of behavior, not the expectations of how people will behave outside of the law. Over the last two centuries, the internal constraints on bad behavior have eroded. Social pressure and expectations had been the primary means to maintain decency. But we have slowly freed ourselves from those norms, and in their stead has come an increasingly bloated set of laws. What has developed is a kind of Phariseeism. We have come to think more and more that whatever is legal is right. The rule of law then becomes a game. Instead of a fixture designed to prevent the injustice of the crown or the aristocracy, the rule of law has become a game in which winners and losers are chosen not according to justice but according to cleverness and availability of resources. Clearly, there have always been those who will manipulate and steer the law to their will. But the prevalence of that attitude has increased. This trend can easily be seen in the business world. As an example, there was a practice in Wall Street in which traders had figured out how to intercept “buy and sell” orders milliseconds prior to an exchange. Because of their physical proximity and the superior speed of their internet connection, traders could place an order microseconds prior to the intercepted transaction. By this means, they were able to legally skim profits off all transactions they intercepted. This was clearly a fraudulent activity. However, since the practice was new and undetected, it was not yet illegal and thus considered fair game. Another obvious example of legalism is in the press, as I mentioned in a part one of this series. The press has a great deal of freedom to publish as it desires. Because of the nature of the laws, outrageous injustices can and are perpetrated by the press, all within a strictly legal framework. Individuals lacking internal constraints feel justified in their actions, especially if it brings greater income or prestige. The legal system itself is a perfect example of the legalism that has developed. I am not directly involved with the law system, so my observations are perhaps not the most accurate. However, it sure seems as if justice takes second place to technical considerations. For instance, if a suspect confesses without the Miranda rights being first administered, the suspect can be acquitted of the charge. The cumulative effect of legalism is to discourage internal moral constraint. To the extent that the law is seen as the criterion for right and wrong, immoral but legal behavior becomes normalized, accepted. This sort of cultural attitude is toxic to our souls. We need to encourage each other to take morality seriously. We need to have standards other than just the law. The rule of law is good, so long as it does not replace a morality based on a transcendent reality. Pursuit of Happiness In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson writes that we are endowed by our Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Of these three, the last one may seem out of place as being rather less high minded. We might see life and liberty as unalienable, but the pursuit of happiness seems a little self absorbed. However, the word happiness when Jefferson used it did not have the same connotations that it has today. The idea of happiness has had a long history. Aristotle, for instance, thought of happiness as the fulfillment of a human being’s goal in life. He distinguished man from all other creatures in the world by man’s rationality and social life. Since these qualities make man unique, then his goal or purpose must be wrapped up in these qualities. Aristotle equated happiness with outstanding moral and intellectual activity in the affairs of the city state. Thomas Aquinas took a similar view, except that for him the goal of human life differed. Aquinas saw the ultimate goal of existence in eternal life. Life on earth, then, could never bring complete happiness (i.e., completion of one’s goal as a human), only partial. These ideas framed the concepts of John Locke. He wrote, The necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action… (Essay Concerning Human Understanding) Here Locke seems to relate happiness with the “highest perfection of the intellectual nature” and “our greatest good.” This idea is clearly reminiscent of Aristotle and Aquinas. What Locke does not mean is that the pursuit of happiness is the license to please our worldly desires. Jefferson, who immortalized the words “pursuit of happiness,” was drawing directly from Locke. In this context, then, it is obvious that the pursuit of happiness belongs with life and liberty in significance. Today the pursuit of happiness has been reinterpreted to mean the right to go after worldly benefits. We have demeaned the original intent so much that it has become diabolical. The idea that God has somehow granted us the inalienable right to obtain worldly goods is about as antithetical to the biblical picture as you can get. One cannot serve both God and mammon. And yet if a person, organization, or government places restrictions on our ability to pursue our base desires, we feel our rights have been trampled on. How dare anyone prevent us from polluting our minds with pornography! This demeaned view of happiness is fraught with danger. We live in a culture that has imbibed this view; it is all around us, and it is difficult not to conform to it. This view of happiness is particularly heinous in that it invites us to see that which is evil as noble. We are taught that rights are good and that infringements of rights are bad. Then we are taught that we have the right to follow our base desires. It is not stated in such stark terms because we would reject it. But it is subtly implied in all that we do and hear and see. An example of this is the battle over sex and nudity in broadcast television. The perception is that the TV censors are infringing on our rights to watch what we want. The freedom to take mind-altering drugs is also becoming a right; it makes us happy . We have a right to health care because health is a part of our pursuit of happiness. The list could go on and on. The pursuit of happiness as it was originally conceived is noble. We should strive to become the best human beings that we can. What makes us human is bound up with our moral and intellectual gifts. To debase this excellent sentiment by making it a pursuit of money, fame, and physical gratification is a tragedy—and dangerous to our souls. Series Conclusion Culture is a powerful force. I think we all recognize that at some level. But knowing we are affected and recognizing how we are affected are very different things. I think the juxtaposition of cultures side by side can sometimes help to open our eyes. It is instructive to have an insightful outsider like Solzhenitsyn look into our failings as a society. It is instructive to compare the thinking of the writers of the Federalist Papers with current thought. Even so, we can never escape the danger of an intensely seductive culture. We live in it; we breath it. We conform to this world despite the warnings of Paul. And it is at this exact spot where the danger lies. We are frogs in a pot of water in need of a thermometer. Ultimately, it is the juxtaposition of our culture with God’s values expressed in the Bible that provides the thermometer. But unlike frogs, we cannot jump out of the pot. We must find a path in the midst of the hot water. We must pray, as Jesus did, that God will sanctify us in the truth of His word (John 17:17)

Skepticism permeates modern culture. The most consistent and popular application of skepticism is religious skepticism. “We cannot prove God exists” is the common refrain. In fact, of the many unwritten social codes enforced by our culture, one of the strongest is the impropriety of claiming that Christianity is objectively true. Such a claim is an affront: a social faux pas at best and a mean spirited attack at worst. After all, agnosticism is cool; truth is not. The pervasiveness of skepticism cannot help but discourage us from truth-seeking at some level. What is the point of working hard to know the truth if we believe our efforts will be rewarded by uncertainty and confusion? Thus the battle is lost before it is even fought. We throw up our hands and leave the task to others; after all, time is short. My purpose here is not to guilt people into becoming scholars. Nor do I want to explore the sources of this malaise (although it is a very fascinating exploration). Instead I would like to propose that contrary to the savants, and contrary to the “cool” agnostics, we are born as truth-detectors, and we are very good at it. The fact that we are good at determining the truth has been obscured by centuries of intellectual criticism. At the heart of these criticisms lies the “apparently” unbridgeable gap between the experiences of our senses on the one hand and the concepts and ideas that we use to understand those experiences on the other. Our concepts and ideas, it is supposed, come only from sense experience, and there is no “guarantee” that those ideas accurately reflect reality. To explore this gap, let us consider the relationship between our experience and our ideas. When we are faced with a new experience (some image or color patterns impinging on our eyes, for instance) we generate an explanatory structure to make sense of that idea or experience. The structure answers for us questions of what and why. What am I experiencing right now, and why am I experiencing it? This explanatory structure can have many different names depending on the context. For simple experiences, the structure is simply a name (with all the meaning associated with that name) that we attach to the object of our vision. In other, more complicated scenarios, we may create an explanatory structure for a broad range of related but complicated experiences, thoughts, and memories. Such a structure may be called a story or a theory or a belief or an idea. But no matter the name, our natural tendency is to generate some sort of explanatory structure, and that process uses the same basic mental faculties in every case. As an example, suppose I am jogging outside and I feel a sensation of coldness on my face. I immediately think “wind.” I quickly justify my conclusion by noting that I am sweating and that the moisture is enhancing the sensation of the wind on my face. I have created an explanatory structure to explain my experience. A different example might have to do with a comment from a friend on Facebook. Suppose I post a picture and my friend subsequently posts “lol.” I am going to recall that these letters represent “laugh out loud” and conclude that my friend was amused by my picture. In this case, it is not so much a physical sensation that I am explaining (although it is true that my eyes are registering a sensation of marks on a screen) but a concept or idea. I am providing an explanatory structure for the word “lol” appearing as it did and when it did on Facebook. With each new experience or set of experiences that we are faced with, we typically make a quick assessment of the truth of our hastily assembled explanatory structure. That assessment depends on whether that structure is consistent with the assumptions we already believe to be true and whether it accurately fits all of the experiences that are available to us. The stronger the consistency and fit, the more confidence we have that the explanatory structure is true. I would argue that we humans are master craftsmen at creating and assessing explanatory structures. Although what I have proposed may seem rather simple and straightforward, there are a few sticky issues that are worth considering. The first such issue is the impression that we are not “creating an explanatory structure” at all but simply experiencing some phenomenon directly. According to this perspective, I do not create the idea of wind to explain a sensation I am having on my face; I just “feel the wind.” I am more of a passive accepter of knowledge rather than a mentally active participant. Some experiences seem so basic that we do not need to engage our brains to know what is happening. However, I do not think this is right. We are fooled by our own lightning fast ability to skillfully create explanations. We are so experienced and talented in making identifications, in coming to snap decisions, that the process is hidden from us. But it is entirely possible either not to engage our minds or to engage them erroneously. If I am concentrating on the ache in my legs or on the car swerving dangerously ahead of me, I will not engage my mind on the feeling on my face and the sensation will not be explained. I will not know that there is wind on my face. If afterwards someone were to ask if there was a cool wind on my face, I would not be able to answer from experience (although I may make a judgment about the question based on other knowledge). Similarly, it is possible, though not probable, that I may create an incorrect explanatory structure; for instance, when I feel a sensation of coldness on my face, I may think the nerves in my cheek are going numb. The point is that with every experience or thought, our judgments and explanations are due to our active mental faculties becoming engaged. A second issue regards whether or not we can clearly articulate the reasons why we have adopted a particular explanatory structure. In some cases, we do not articulate those reasons to ourselves. For instance, with regard to the wind, I am not likely to self-consciously scan through all the reasons why I think there is a cold wind on my face. Maybe I can see leaves flapping on a bush or tree, or I saw something like that earlier and have come to the conclusion it is a windy day. I have a belief that my motion through the air will generate a wind relative to my face. I believe that wind passing my face creates evaporation of moisture that has a cooling effect. I have a backlog of many similar experiences in which I have come to a similar conclusion. Further, I have often interacted with people who have claimed that joggers feel coolness on their face due to wind. That is a lot to think about for a single insignificant experience of feeling wind on my face, and I have probably missed other reasons. Nevertheless, those thoughts or some subset of them must zip through my brain very quickly without any words to bring them to my attention. The knowledge I have gained is no less valuable and true. It is simply unexamined. In other instances, we do articulate the reasons why we believe a particular explanatory structure. These situations arise when there is some question about the veracity of our explanation. Perhaps there are other experiences or assumptions which do not fit with our explanation. In some cases, others have offered a criticism of our explanation. Often we find ourselves juggling many different kinds of evidence and weighing their relevance and truth. Such situations quickly become complex. Whatever the case, we typically will try to explore whether we have made a mistake. To do so means we must do the work of providing reasons for our belief—if not to others, at least to ourselves. Generally, we are pretty good at providing reasons and examining them. Consider the “lol” example from above. If a friend is reading over my shoulder and claims that the “lol” is short for “lollipop,” I can come back quickly and decisively. “You’re nuts,” I would reply, “Ask anyone, and they will tell you that you are wrong. Or even better, Google “lol” and see how many lollipop hits you get!” My reason is that the consensus view of the meaning of “lol” is clearly established and that that view can easily be checked. Sometimes, however, the reasons are more subtle and difficult to come by and require a more nuanced approach. Many questions of great interest do not yield easily to investigation. In these difficult cases, two aspects of knowledge-seeking become increasingly important: skill and will . Skill in the art of knowing is one of the primary goals of education. In school we learn the use of language to understand the thoughts of others and clearly express our own. We learn how to organize those thoughts and craft arguments. We learn how to calculate to find and prove quantitative results. And we learn facts about our world and culture that help to provide a context in which to understand each other. Each of these things hones our skill of discerning the true from the false. This skill allows us to craft more complex, more accurate, and more detailed explanatory structures. Like other skills, the skill of knowing fades into the background of our consciousness if we use it consistently. A dancer, for instance, when first learning how to dance must concentrate on each and every movement. Slowly the dancer learns the moves and no longer needs to concentrate on them. They become part of the dancer’s skill set upon which to build further, more difficult movements. So it is with the skill of knowing. A skilled reader does not need to recall the rules of grammar to understand a paragraph. Those rules are part of the reader’s skill set and are applied unconsciously. Nor does a mathematician need to think about the rules of algebra to use them; they can be called up without effort. For better or for worse, the same process applies to our use of assumptions. The intellectual frameworks that we assume, after they have been vetted and tested by experience and thought, fade into the background of our consciousness. They become part of our skill set that allows us to seek truth. Without such assumptions we could not function. For instance, we all have a framework that tells us about how cars behave on the road. We use this framework constantly as we drive. We do not think about how to respond to a red light, a yellow line, or an oncoming car. Our framework of traffic laws and rules of thumb is instantly available to provide answers. Driving becomes second nature, but that framework, while firmly established in our minds, is not something of which we are conscious. As our assumptions fade into the background, they are rarely brought out into the light for examination. They work well, and we become committed to them. The greater the level of commitment, the less likely we are to abandon them. In many cases, the assumptions also carry along with them personal or emotional content. It is here that will comes into play. “Will” in the art of knowing is the other primary goal of education. A good education focuses not only on intellectual skills, but also on the training of our youth to value what is good and despise what is bad. We are creatures of will, and our will cannot be removed from our thoughts and actions. Thus in the process of judging the validity of an explanatory structure, our commitments, desires, and wants play a huge role. A desire to see our commitments justified influences our ability to judge fairly. A desire to pursue pleasure may turn our eyes from a true understanding of our actions. A fear of a negative outcome can drive us to deny clear evidence. Education should help students to recognize the role of those desires and encourage students toward those which are good in the eyes of God. Driving, doing algebra, interpreting “lol,” and realizing that a wind is blowing on my face are rather simple examples of determining the truth. Many other questions are more difficult, as, for example, those pursued on the forefronts of science. They may be difficult, but the process is the same. Difficult questions are not just the purview of scientists, however. One such question, to which I alluded at the beginning of this article, is whether to follow the God of the Bible. The biblical worldview, and its counterpart unbelief, are complex but important explanatory structures. They are not a result of a single experience but of a multitude of experiences. Those experiences may be events in our lives, conversations, or simply listening to the various voices in our culture. Young people faced with the question consider the beliefs of parents, peers, and teachers. They consider also how parents, peers, and teachers have acted toward them; are they friends or foes? A young person may consider the arguments and claims that are made. To sort it all out, he must make a multitude of judgments, which takes a great deal of skill. Are parents and peers wise, and do their choices on this issue impact them for the good? Are the claims and arguments compelling? Of particular importance when a person faces this question is the role of the will: he must decide whether he wants to live a life subject to God or whether he wants to pursue the enticements of the world. After coming to a tentative conclusion about the question, then, such a person weighs and tests his conclusion to see if it fits with other experience and other beliefs held to be true. He can also examine his conclusion for consistency: Does this developing explanatory structure lead to contradictory conclusions? These difficulties are daunting. No doubt, they can lead to despair of ever finding the truth. But for those who desire to know, the information is available. It is possible to develop the types of skills necessary to decipher this information. It may take time, even a lifetime, but the question is the most important one we face. What is striking about this particular question—whether to follow the God of the Bible—is that everyone does decide. Even the agnostic decides, though he may deny it. For the agnostic lives, and it is impossible to live in a way that both denies and accepts God. Skepticism is, in this important case, not even a possible alternative. We are not allowed to claim ignorance. In fact, I am convinced that the rise of skepticism in our culture is a symptom of the will to unbelief. People do not want to be subject to God; they want autonomy to create their own reality. What better justification for denying one’s dependence on God than to claim that it is impossible to know if the Bible is true? Skepticism is an inadequate general outlook on knowledge. It denies our God-given abilities. It denies our daily experience. No doubt there are some questions that cannot be answered, and there are some questions that are not worth the effort to answer. Everyone acknowledges this. However, the skepticism that has pervaded our culture goes beyond this. It is often used as an excuse for not having to deal with the truth. We Christians, though, desire the truth, and thus we should struggle to resist the pessimism of skepticism.

The ancient Greeks, like other polytheistic cultures around them, looked at the natural world and saw chaos. Nearly everything most critical to their survival was out of their control. Whether it was marauding hordes, fickle weather, elusive game, insect plagues, or just the unpredictability of those in charge, the average Greek lived at the mercy of wild and untamable forces. It is no great wonder, then, that the gods to whom the Greeks attributed these forces were seen as powerful, willful, chaotic beings who created disorder. However, the Greeks were also unique among their polytheistic neighbors because somehow a segment of their population shifted from a perspective of chaos to one of order. These new Greeks looked around them and saw structure. There was a pattern and a purpose to the cosmos. Eternal unchanging principles existed that were not subject to whim and desire. And most importantly, this order was accessible to humanity through the use of our minds. This optimistic attitude and the perceived power that it entailed have resonated with Western thinkers in varying degrees ever since. Optimism has waxed and waned, faced numerous and varied challenges, but a steady underlying belief in order has remained. One of the primary causes of its staying power, I believe, has been the wide adoption of Christianity and thus a worldview based on the Bible, which presents a universe created by a good, purposeful, and orderly God. One of the main cultural consequences of this optimistic attitude has been an attempt to bring the uncontrollable aspects of our life under control. If there is an order to the cosmos, then we have assumed that we can uncover it and use it to our benefit. So, for instance, we have attempted to bring political and economic uncertainty under control through democratic government and economic systems. Scientists and engineers have attempted to bring the uncertainties of the natural world under control through formulas and theories. To some extent we have succeeded; for instance, agricultural and medical technology has overcome many problems. Nevertheless, despite the herculean effort given to the task and our apparent progress, the attitude of the twenty-first-century person seems to be shifting back to the chaotic worldview of the ancient Greeks. As in Greek times, we see forces that are completely out of our control. These forces are impersonal rather than personal, and, as a result, they are even more remote than the polytheistic gods. For us, the impersonal government is a behemoth both in terms of its inertia and its power. The economy seems radically unstable. Our cars and computers break down, and we are powerless to fix them ourselves. Even our health seems to be subject to an infinite variety of dangers from known and unknown sources. The man on the street has been brought up with the expectation that he can control his destiny, but more and more he finds that he cannot. The shift back to an expectation of chaos is not without roots. The philosophical movements of the early twentieth century all promoted this view. In the postmodernism of Foucault and Wittgenstein, order was seen as arbitrary, imposed through language and culture. Their perspective was embraced by the intellectual culture and has slowly trickled into our collective consciousness. One might think, however, that at least in science the optimism and expectation of order is alive and well. And this is true to an extent. Scientists spend their lives looking for patterns and principles to make sense of the myriad of experiences. Yet on a deeper, more philosophical level, scientists see even that order as merely apparent and not real. Let me explain. Modern philosophy suggests that the patterns we see in science are actually just random outgrowths of deeper principles that give rise to those patterns. And those deeper principles are simply the result of other principles that underlie them, and so on. All of the upper principles and patterns are not exact and true; they are approximations of the lower explanatory level. This perspective, often referred to as ‘reductionism’, is so pervasive that even to imagine an alternative is practically impossible for us. But the alternative is staring us in the face. It is the way science is practiced. It is the way science is taught. And it is the way scientists probably think about the world if they are not thinking about philosophy. I will call the view to which I am referring the ‘hierarchical view’. In the hierarchical view, there exists a variety of areas of expertise, or spheres of inquiry, each of which has its own set of concepts, relationships, and standard examples that make sense of a wide range of similar phenomena and experiences. Examples of spheres might be cellular biology, electromagnetism, organic chemistry, atmospheric science, or thermal physics—in which scientists study extensively a range of phenomena to understand a piece of reality. Each of these spheres is, in one sense, independent of the others and, in another sense, intimately connected to them. The independence stems from the fact that any particular sphere examines a particular set of phenomena that are for the most part independent of factors outside the sphere. Thus in the study of cellular biology, electromagnetism is not pertinent. On the other hand, each sphere has borders that abut other spheres of inquiry, and the phenomena studied in one sphere may be subtly influenced by activity in abutting spheres. Thus while the cellular biologist typically does not make reference to, say, molecular biology, the structures of the molecules do have an effect on the cell. Similarly, the structures of the molecules are not entirely independent of their role in a cell. The two spheres, cellular biology and molecular biology, are intertwined along their borders but otherwise studied separately. Consider another example. Within physics, in the sub-sphere of Newtonian mechanics, scientists study the motion of objects such as rockets, baseballs, and pendulums. Generally this motion can be completely described by Newton’s principles, or laws, of motion. However, when objects are moving at speeds approaching the speed of light (as for instance in the particle accelerator searching for the “God particle”), a different set of laws, the relativistic laws of motion, are used. Under these circumstances scientists are operating in the sphere of relativistic mechanics. However, each set of laws, which generally are used in different scientific spheres, applies to a range of speeds that overlap, and so in the border between the two spheres, relativistic laws and Newton’s laws give similar answers. Physicists generally consider the laws of relativistic mechanics more exact, and any calculation using Newtonian mechanics is subject to relativistic corrections. However, these corrections are so minute for motions at ordinary speeds that they can be ignored. In such cases, the much simpler and more intuitive Newtonian laws are used. Thus we see in these two cases, and in innumerable others, that the various spheres of science are essentially self contained but only within certain limits. No sphere promises a perfect description of its phenomena since bordering spheres may have small (sometimes immeasurable) effects. The response of the reductionist at this juncture is clear. He sees each sphere as an approximation of a lower, more fundamental sphere. Thus Newton’s laws, which are associated with the less exact sphere of Newtonian physics, are just handy approximations to the ‘more true’ reality described by the laws of relativity used in the sphere of relativistic physics. Similarly, relativistic laws are only approximations to laws of “general relativity,” used in the sphere of cosmology. The reductionist says that a perfect description of any phenomena can only occur at the very lowest, most fundamental level. All other scientific spheres will then contain handy approximations to this most fundamental level. Ecology reduces to biology, which reduces to biochemistry, which reduces to chemistry, which reduces to quantum physics, which reduces to relativistic field theory, and so on. However, the reductionist perspective fails to account for two important aspects of science: practice and the meaningfulness of definitions. First of all, scientific practice treats the various spheres of inquiry as useful and their findings as true. Each particular sphere arose as a response to specific experiences and problems because each gave a good account of the experience and/or problem. Furthermore, the principles applied within each sphere and the patterns or discoveries each sphere describes are taught to students as if they were true. Thus on a practical day-to-day basis, each sphere, together with the ‘laws’ it employs, is considered as containing some insight into our natural world. Secondly, the reductionist view renders definitions of scientific concepts meaningless. For example, we might believe something is true and meaningful about Newton’s concept of ‘mass’—the concept corresponds to our experience, and it makes sense of that experience—but according to the reductionist, this concept seems illusory. The reductionist would point to relativistic theory, according to which mass is not a fundamental property of matter; it is simply a form of energy. Thus the reductionist redefines mass. The same holds true with many, if not all, of the concepts we employ in the various scientific spheres. Our understanding of the objects and relations in the “upper” spheres are either annihilated or, at best, reinterpreted. In the reductionist view, none of the spheres tells us about reality; the patterns they discover and the principles they employ are simply convenient fictions. But I believe the definitions in each sphere are meaningful. People may err in their understanding of nature, but for the most part scientists are putting their fingers on concepts that are more than illusion. It makes no sense to act, on the one hand, as if these concepts correspond to reality and, on the other hand, to deny their reality due to our philosophy. What has all this to do with order? Whether we accept the reductionist or hierarchical view has huge implications for our belief in the orderliness of the cosmos. To the reductionist, the order of the world is only accidental—the fortuitous result of some fundamental principles that somehow give rise to the findings of a broad range of different spheres of science. The findings of these spheres are intelligible and accessible to us (lucky us!), but they are, in a sense, ultimately illusory. The hierarchical view, on the other hand, is highly compatible with an orderly designer. The findings of the various spheres of inquiry, the patterns they describe, are not the fortuitous result of fundamental principles; rather, they describe a piece of an intended, real structure built into the fabric of the material world. When we look out at the world and see relationships and discover concepts, we are not imposing order but finding it. The fact that so much order exists, that all of these spheres are separate and yet intertwined, is for me a great source of awe. I am amazed at the complexity of creation. I am reminded of how small and finite I am in comparison to a God who can pull off such a feat. It appears that the ancient polytheists’ spirit of chaos is again rising in our cultural consciousness. In fact, it has seeped into our thinking even in science, which should by all accounts be most resistant to it. This spirit of chaos not only promotes hopelessness and despair, but, most importantly, it prevents us from seeing the beauty and awe in the creativity of God. If this is where our culture is going, then I for one am not interested. I cannot help but be impressed by the order in our world and in ourselves. I cannot help but attempt to put my experiences into some sort of order and structure. Humans are order seekers, and we should not let a despairing philosophy darken our search.

As if in a dream, I found myself walking through a wood, earnestly debating with a young man wearing bell-bottoms. He looked strangely familiar, but for some reason I could not remember why. We seemed to have been talking for some time. Me: Tell me, though—Why does Christianity seem like nonsense to you? Him: I've always tried to be a reasonable, rational person. Christians are naïve and gullible; they just believe in this fairy tale about Jesus because they want to. My dad says religion is a crutch, and that's what I think, too. Me: Well, people often do believe things because they want to rather than because such belief is warranted. I wonder, though, how can you be so sure that they are the ones whose desires are leading them astray? What about your own presuppositions and desires? How do you know that you aren't the one ignoring reason and evidence because you don't want to believe? That is, in fact, what the Bible would say. God has made Himself known in many ways, but we each find our own excuses for disbelieving. Him: I don't know why I am telling you this, but you've put your finger on a sore point. I find that every time I get close to thinking that the Bible might be true, I run away in a panic. I have to admit, that doesn't sound very objective. (He scratched his beard as I scratched mine.) Me: No, it doesn't. Him: After all, though, you can't escape the fact that one needs good evidence and reasons to believe. Supposedly the Israelites got to see God part the waters of the Red Sea. If I saw the waters of the Red Sea miraculously part, I would believe, as well. Me: It's funny you should say that. Even though the Israelites went through the Red Sea and saw miracle after miracle, the Bible records that, in fact, they did not believe. They did not trust God, and in the end they voted to kill Moses and go back to Egypt. So much for the power of miracles to induce belief. Him: OK, I'll grant you that a stubborn person can disbelieve even the evidence of his own eyes. But I don't want to be stubborn—at least, I don't think I do. But where is this evidence? Where are the good reasons I should believe in Jesus? Me: Well, I think about it like this. Right now you have a worldview, a way of looking at reality that excludes God. There are really two questions: Does your worldview hold up? And does the Christian worldview hold up better? Him: Of course my worldview holds up. I can make perfectly good sense of the world. Science has explained pretty much everything to us. Heck, Apollo 15 just got back from landing men on the moon a couple of months ago. Human reason is perfectly capable of explaining the world without God. As for the Christian worldview, it can't stand up to scrutiny. It's obvious that there is no God. Where is He? Why doesn't He show Himself? Me: Let's start with your current worldview. It's a funny thing about the modern world—just as man is confidently asserting that science allows him to know everything, philosophers are telling him he has no right to think he knows anything, including his own existence. After all, if mankind is just a product of random forces in the universe, what reason do we have to think there is any relationship between the activity in our minds and the real world—if there is a real world? Something tells me you have thought about this before. Him: Yes, but these questions just get me angry. Obviously our minds get us in touch with reality. We just don't know how. Me: Here, at least, is a place where the Christian worldview has it all over the centuries-old debates of the philosophers. As human beings, we are born with a great confidence that we can know things as they are, and the Bible tells us where that confidence comes from. We are made in the image of God, in the image of the one who made both our minds and the world we are trying to know. Him: You sound just like Francis Schaeffer. My high school philosophy teacher made us read Escape From Reason, and it made me furious. Schaeffer supposedly showed the philosophical problems with all the art that I love—the movies of Fellini and Bergman, the poetry of Eliot, the music of the Beatles, and so on. He berates Juliet of the Spirits because Fellini wants "to prevent the viewer from distinguishing between objective reality and fantasy." But that's exactly what makes the movie so powerful! I just don't think Schaeffer gets it. I love the tragic resignation in a poem like Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach": Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. Despairing, but such a beautiful despair. Me: You're forgetting about the first part of the poem, where Arnold explains where the despair comes from. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. Whether he knew the answer or not, Arnold had the right diagnosis: Christian faith provides us the foundation for knowing who we are and why our lives have meaning. Being created by God does not just explain how we can know the world; it explains why we are personal beings, who we are, and what our purpose is. No philosophy that has tried to build on a non-Christian base has accomplished as much. You are familiar with B. F. Skinner, right? Him: Yes, his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity just came out in 1971. Me: Just came…? Hmmm… Well, anyway, look where his philosophy led: Freedom and dignity… are essential to practices in which a person is held responsible for his conduct and given credit for his achievements. A scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment. (Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity ) In order to preserve his view of man as a randomly assembled machine, Skinner is prepared to throw out everything that we think of as making us distinctively human. Hasn't it occurred to you that tossing God out of our worldview has led to a view of life that is unlivable? You can talk about beautiful despair all you want, but the Christian worldview does not bow in inevitability to despair but decisively answers it: man can know, and his life has a purpose. Have you never felt that you would like an answer to these beautiful, artistic statements of despair? Him: I ought to tell you to get lost, but there is something about this place that makes me want to be honest with you, almost as if you are the one person it is most important I not lie to… strange. Anyway, I do have to admit some odd behavior on my part recently. For the past several summers, I have been going to summer picnic meetings with (gasp) a high school church group. I am their resident atheist, and I take every opportunity to show them what I think of Christianity. What I have been wondering about is why I kept going. I am almost afraid to admit it, but the fact is, I kept going because those kids have something I don't have: they have a meaningful center to their lives. They read C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and then they talk about what those books mean as if it mattered. Me: I know just what you mean. So listen, we've talked about the Christian worldview as providing the only adequate basis for knowledge and meaning. What about morality? Him: I think you have been reading my mind. (How could that be?) In school we had to read The Brother's Karamazov. A theme that comes up a lot in that book is that if there is no God, then everything is lawful. When I read that, I got so mad I threw the book across the room. That can't be true! Me: I am encouraged that you haven't tried to deny right and wrong; you just don't know how to explain it. Modern naturalism is busy trying to fit the round peg of personal morality into the square hole of an impersonal universe. Once again, the Christian worldview has an answer that your worldview does not. If you doubt that the mindset of the modern man is lost on this issue, just look around. Him: Let's change the subject here. You make it sound as if Christianity were a perfectly plausible alternative to the way I look at the world now. But who can believe this supernatural stuff now? Science has showed a new way of looking at the world that doesn't need supernatural explanations. Miracles don't happen. Man came about through evolution. These things are facts, and a modern thinking person can't believe in magic anymore. Me: Science has shown that the supernatural cannot happen? How did it do that? It is true that modern science is uninterested in God as the source of anything. But it did not (and could not) empirically demonstrate His irrelevance. What the modern naturalistic scientist has done is replace one set of religious assumptions with another. The evidence from nature does not compel the scientist to embrace naturalism; indeed, he evaluates the evidence from nature based on his naturalistic religious assumptions. Him: This "Christian worldview" you talk about comes from the Bible, right? Why should I have any confidence in it? I have been looking through the Bible, and I have found a lot of things that don't add up. For example, I found Paul saying that we are justified by faith and not works, while James says that we are justified by works and not by faith alone. If the Bible cannot get its story straight on such an important issue, why should I have any confidence in it? Me: You have a good point. But I have two things to say. First of all, this is not an issue that has gone unnoticed. Let's go all the way back to the Reformation. Luther and Calvin saw the solution (in part) in different definitions of "justified"; Melancthon saw the solution in distinguishing between meritorious and non-meritorious works. Have you considered their explanations? Secondly, does skimming through a book to point out apparent contradictions really have intellectual integrity? If you read any serious and difficult book, apparent contradictions can arise. The question is whether you have read carefully enough to really understand what the authors are doing. My contention is that the biblical message has such congruence with our situation as rational, moral, personal, meaningful beings that it commends itself as worthy of belief. At that point, then, we recognize that some parts of it are more difficult to understand than others. Doesn't it make sense that we would humbly try to understand those harder parts without immediately discarding the whole book? I can, in fact, report that I have thought about the Paul/James problem quite a bit, and I have come to believe that they do not contradict each other at all. I will not explain my conclusions now, but I find them very convincing, and for some reason I think you will one day find them convincing, as well. Him: Well, tell me: what's the bottom line? What is the Bible saying? Me: It's saying something that you ought to find very believable. You are here because God, who is all-powerful, personal, rational, good, and merciful, has created you to be in His image. As you know, however, you and everyone else have turned away from that God and filled your life with selfishness and foolishness. You have failed to love and obey God as you should, and you have failed to do right by your fellow man. By rights God should toss you on the garbage heap of history, but instead He has reached out to you through Jesus Christ to rescue you from your own guilt and your own evil. Jesus came to be your teacher, your rescuer, and ultimately your ruler forever, bringing you life instead of death and a heart filled with goodness instead of evil. The question is… will you believe it? Him: … I'll have to think about it. And with this the scene faded, and I awoke to find myself staring into the mirror at an aged but familiar face.

Unfortunately, a comparison of modern Christianity and ancient pagan idolatry yields far too many similarities. Indeed, the contemporary church may even be said to worship Jesus, the pagan god , instead of Jesus, the almighty God . The Bible is the story not only of God's saving people from His justice but also of His requiring them to reject all other gods and false religions. In the Old Testament, God commanded the Israelites to shun the polytheistic pagan idolatry of their neighbors—the Canaanites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and others. The New Testament repudiates both the pagan idolatry the Roman Empire inherited from the Greeks and the false religion of the Pharisees, the important Jewish leaders of Jesus' day. Every system of religious belief contrary to the Bible has three common characteristics—myth, magic, and ritual—each of which corresponds to a false view of reality. Myth arises from an erroneous foundational religious belief in the nature of God; magic, from a flawed attitude regarding a person's relationship to God; and ritual, from misguided actions intended to demonstrate belief and attitude. In the Old Testament, God abhorred myth and magic, but He actually prescribed certain biblical rituals for the Israelites to perform. The New Testament, while not commanding Christians to perform rituals, allows for rituals according to cultural practices; and yet, like the Old Testament, it rejects both myth and magic. Unfortunately, comparing the polytheistic religions of the ancient Near East with contemporary Christianity reveals the sad fact that our churches are more pagan than Christian. We will examine the three characteristics of false religion to see how this is so. The first characteristic of ancient religions that God despised was their mythology—their belief in many gods and the fabricated stories of conflict, deceit, intrigue, and occasional goodwill between them. For example, the Canaanites believed that the most active god in their pantheon, Baal, the storm god, played a crucial role in a series of cyclical events that caused the seasons. Every year, Baal battled Mot, the god of death, who killed and then imprisoned Baal in the underworld where he could not carry out his storm-god responsibilities: to bring the rain necessary to grow food and thus ensure the survival of the people. And every year, Baal's fierce, warrior-goddess wife, Anath, destroyed Mot in turn, cutting him up like corn. With Mot dead, Baal revived and supplied rain again. Thus the Canaanite's believed their myth that Baal's death brought winter and his resurrection after Mot's death brought spring and its welcome rains. But although the Canaanites believed that the gods' actions impacted the natural world, they also believed that Baal, Anath, Mot, and the other gods were not much different from human beings; the gods were simply more powerful than people, and they inhabited a spiritual rather than a physical realm within the creation. In other words, the pagan gods of the Canaanite myths were superhuman, but they were not transcendent like the God of the Bible. Although the gods were an integral part of the creation, they did not create the creation. Their status as destructible and less-than-almighty beings thus limited the gods' power and influence. The Jesus many contemporary Christians proclaim as "Lord and Savior" is not much greater than Baal; their Jesus is more powerful than they are, but he is essentially a pagan god and not the incarnation of the transcendent God the Bible proclaims Jesus to be. Just as Old Testament authors adopted the name El from the Canaanites to refer to the one, true God, Christians rightly borrow the English term God to refer to Jesus. But many do not understand Jesus to be the God of the Bible; rather, they view Him more like the El of the Canaanites—that is, a being who exists strictly within the universe and is only slightly more influential than humans. In contrast, the Bible proclaims Jesus to be the man whom the true God became; and throughout the Bible, this God declares and demonstrates Himself to be the transcendent and almighty Creator of all reality—definitely not just superhuman. The Bible declares God to be so far beyond human, or even superhuman, that nothing and no one compares to Him (Isaiah 40-46, Job 38-41). Unfortunately, much of modern Christianity removes transcendence from its understanding of God. Jesus, who broke into the cosmos as God incarnate, is not only our savior through His death, but He is also our eternal Creator. Many Christians, however, proclaim His name in the same way that the ancients spoke of Baal—believing him to be powerful but not absolutely sovereign, exalted but not unfathomable, and helpful but not the very source of our existence at every moment. For these Christians, Jesus is only the great superbeing in the sky, not the incarnation of the transcendent Creator beyond the universe. Christians must return to a full understanding of the God of the Bible in order to avoid merely copying the ancient, myth-centered religions and relegating Him to simply a fellow dweller of the cosmos—a notion God loathes. The second characteristic of ancient religions that God detested was belief in magic, which the ancients' attitude toward their gods manifested. The people firmly believed that by their actions they could manipulate and control the gods. In other words, rather than the gods' being sovereignly in control of people, people were in control of the gods. Furthermore, rather than the gods' always initiating relationships with people, the people had to initiate relationships with the gods. Many modern Christians display the same attitude in their relationship with the one, true God. For example, while saying many helpful things in his book The Purpose Driven Life , Rick Warren promotes a magical attitude toward God when he says, "God waits for you to act first" (page 175). God does indeed respond to human beings, but the Bible constantly reminds us that He is always the initiator and the Creator of all reality (Isaiah 45:6,7; Romans 11:36; I Corinthians 8:6, 11:12; Ephesians 1:11). In his books, Dallas Willard also adopts this same magical mentality, even while trying to avoid it. In The Divine Conspiracy, Willard claims to believe that God is the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth; but when he speaks of what we need in order for us to do what is right, he relegates God to the position of standing on the side lines waiting for us to do what is necessary. Thus, in Renovation Of The Heart, Willard states that our choice to obey God " comes from nothing else but us " (page 144, [italics his]) so that our obedience is " up to us " (page 165, [italics his]). But we cannot have our cake and eat it, too. We cannot say that God is the Creator and then claim that He only responds to us, that He is not actually the one producing every aspect of our movements toward Him—or even away from Him. The transcendent God is either the Creator of all reality "bringing about all things according to the counsel of His will" (Ephesians 1:11) or He is just a pagan god who requires that we manipulate Him through magic. The biblical view sees God not only as the one whom we worship but also as the one who always initiates our relationships with Him, even when He responds to our worship. In other words, His response follows His having created our worship in order that He might respond. We cannot, as the Canaanites believed, stir our God to action by magic or any other means; rather, He stirs us to action. Otherwise, God is no more than a superhuman being within the cosmos instead of the sovereign, almighty Creator of the entire cosmos at all times. The third characteristic of the ancient religions—and the only one God incorporated into the prescribed worship of the Israelites—was ritual. The label `ritual' applies to the religious actions worshipers perform. Believing Israelites correctly understood these to be responses to God's love, grace, mercy, and commandments whereas the Canaanites erroneously understood rituals to be the necessary means to stir to action gods who otherwise would remain inactive on the Canaanites' behalf. The Canaanites believed ritual made their magic work. Just as they believed the processes of nature resulted from the interactions between gods and goddesses, they also believed that ritually imitating the gods would stir the gods to action on behalf of the worshipers. If a Canaanite farmer wanted Baal and the goddess of fertility (Astarte, another of Baal's wives) to increase his crops, then he only had to imitate the divine, sexual intercourse between Baal and Astarte that the Canaanites believed produced increased harvests and made cattle more fertile; therefore, to increase his crops, the farmer engaged in sexual intercourse with a sacred prostitute from the temple of Astarte. In effect, then, the Canaanites believed they could manipulate and control Baal's rain production by performing sexual rituals. While modern Christians would never be so crass as to believe that sacred prostitution would motivate God, nevertheless many seem to believe that their relationship with Jesus, God incarnate, works on the basis of magic and ritual. Thus they can manipulate (although they would not use this word) Jesus if they pray to Him, sing to Him, perform a moral act that He will "honor , " have a quiet time, or perform some other spiritual discipline like fasting or solitude ; thus they believe their religious actions can—and must—stir Jesus into action. This mentality can be described in legal terms as quid pro quo —an equal exchange: I do something for Jesus, and then and only then does He do something for me. This description also defines legalism, which Jesus encountered amongst the Pharisees and for which He cursed them (Matthew 23:13-36). This ritualistic, legalistic mentality can be as evil as sacred prostitution if it demonstrates a refusal to believe the truth of God's complete transcendence and sovereign, ongoing creation of all reality. Even Christians who trace their roots to the Protestant Reformation, which sought to repudiate the magical practices of the Roman Catholic Church, have succumbed to this mentality. They characterize the Lord's Supper as a "means of grace," which becomes just ritual magic: if, they say, we perform the Lord's Supper, God will infuse us with His grace— quid pro quo . Thus Christians treat Jesus like a pagan god and not as who He is—the almighty Creator God become flesh to dwell among us (John 1:14). Although rituals are not wrong in and of themselves—after all, God commanded the Israelites to perform all sorts of rituals in their worship of Him—rituals become a problem when we approach them (even the Lord's Supper and baptism) with an attitude of magic, believing that by our religious actions we can get God to work on our behalf. Christians must abandon myth, magic, and ritual and return to the biblical view of God, who needs no ritual in order to respond to us but considers our worship always to be a response to Him. Thus we prevent our viewing Him as just another pagan god and retain instead our view of Him as the almighty Creator who became the man Jesus that He might rescue us from eternal condemnation, move us to a life of belief and obedience, and grant us eternal lifeall three strictly on the basis of His sovereign and constantly initiating grace .

At the end of this century the big questions about reality and being human rise with unexpected power. We ask ever more agonizingly: What does it mean to be human? How do human beings fit into this vast cosmos? Where to from here? We live in a time of great uncertainty--caught in the transition from a bold and passionate optimism about the future to a deep skepticism and spirit of nihilism about finding any universal ways for mankind. We live in a postmodern time. The term "postmodernism" pops up in newspapers, magazines, and other media. What does it mean? And what does it mean for a Christian? My goal in this essay is to describe some primary features underlying postmodernism and to give examples of postmodernism's effects. In the first section, I will focus on postmodernism's philosophical underpinnings. In the second, I will present some examples of how postmodernism manifests itself today. The Underpinnings To characterize post modernism, we must look briefly at what came before: modernism. "Modern" was once used liberally as an adjective to describe many things--from the latest kitchen gadget to a style of art. But "modern" also refers to a specific period of time (roughly 1870 through the mid-1960s) and to the range of cultural ideas, beliefs, and artifacts that people generated during that period. Modernism was grounded in the beliefs of the Enlightenment--a time in western civilization (roughly 1730-1800) in which the "great minds" of the West began to disbelieve in the authority of the Judeo-Christian God as the basis for the truth and the law that undergird society and culture. Replacing traditional beliefs in God, church, and king, they established a new authority centered in man and his rational abilities to create a new, "liberated" social and intellectual framework for human endeavor. The modernist believed that science had shaken the foundations of traditional authorities and truths. (Consider, for example, how three developments--the steam engine, the harnessing of electricity, and Darwin's evolutionary theory--had radically altered the social consciousness of western man.) Modern man could find a new, rational foundation for universal truth; science, particularly, would reveal new truth, which, when applied to modern society and institutions, would literally remake the world. Modernism "... held the extravagant expectation that the arts and sciences would further not only the control of the forces of nature but also the understanding of self and world, moral progress, justice in social institutions, and even human happiness." (Jurgen Habermas, Modernity: An Unfinished Project , pp 162-63.) Modernism presupposed an understanding of human identity and self that was unified, coherent, and autonomous: man was a thinking being capable of rationally perceiving, knowing, and conquering the world--and he would. To be "modern," then, was to embrace the power of scientific rationality, the spirit of progress, a vision of unlimited potential for human society, and an optimism for the future in which man could obtain his two greatest needs: meaning and material security. Looking to man and not God, the optimism of modernism has proven itself ill-founded. The response has been postmodernism. The best Christian book on postmodernism that I have found is A Primer on Postmodernism by Stanley J. Grenz. In this article, however, I will have to describe postmodernism more briefly, which I will do by looking at five presuppositions inherent in the postmodern worldview: (1) The quest for truth is a lost cause. It is a search for a "holy grail" that doesn't exist and never did. Postmodernists argue that objective, universal, knowable truth is mythical; all we have ever found in our agonized search for Truth are "truths" that were compelling only in their own time and culture, but true Truth has never been ours. Furthermore, if we make the mistake of claiming to know the Truth, we are deluded at best and dangerous at worst. (2) A person's sense of identity is a composite constructed by the forces of the surrounding culture. Individual consciousness--a vague, "decentered" collection of unconscious and conscious beliefs, knowledge, and intuitions about oneself and the world--is malleable and arrived at through interaction with the surrounding culture. Postmodernism then, in stark contrast to modernism, is about the dissolving of the self. From the postmodernist perspective, we should not think of ourselves as unique, unified, self-conscious, autonomous persons. (3) The languages of our culture (the verbal and visual signs we use to represent the world to ourselves) literally "construct" what we think of as "real" in our everyday existence. In this sense, reality is a "text" or "composite" of texts, and these texts (rather than the God-created reality) are the only reality we can know. Our sense of self--who we are, how we think of ourselves, as well as how we see and interpret the world and give ourselves meaning in it--is subjectively constructed through language. (4) "Reality" is created by those who have power. One of postmodernism's preeminent theorists, Michel Foucault, combines the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas about how those in power shape the world with a theory of how language is the primary tool for making culture. Foucault argues that whoever dominates or controls the "official" use of language in a society holds the key to social and political power. (Think, for example, of how official political "spin" control of specific words and phrases can alter the public perception of political decisions, policies, and events.) Put simply, Nietzsche said all reality is someone's willful, powerful construction; Foucault says language is the primary tool in that construction. (5) We should neutralize the political power inherent in language by "deconstructing" it. Another leading postmodernist, Jacques Derrida, theorizes that the language we use when we make statements always creates a set of opposite beliefs, a "binary," one of which is "privileged" and the other of which is "marginalized," and the privileged belief is always favored. For example, if one says "Honey is better for you than white sugar," this statement of opinion has "privileged" honey over white sugar. In the arena of morals one might say "Sex should only happen in marriage," in which case the experience of sex in marriage is "privileged" and sex out of wedlock is "marginalized." Derrida argues that all language is made up of these binaries, and they are always socially and politically loaded. "Deconstruction" is the practice of identifying these power-loaded binaries and restructuring them so that the marginalized or "unprivileged" end of the binary can be consciously focused upon and favored. Some Examples The central characteristics of postmodernism present us with a radically different way of looking at life. At this point, however, we need to remember the proverb that says "If you want to know about water, don't ask a fish!" The postmodernist elements of our culture are to us like water to the fish: we live and breathe in them everyday, but we take them so much for granted that it is very difficult for us to see them. Perhaps the most general characteristics of postmodernism are fragmentation and pluralism. Our culture is rapidly reaching the point where we no longer think of ourselves in a universe but rather a multi-verse . In the postmodern worldview, transience, flux, and fragmentation describe our growing sense of how things really are. Where do we see this played out around us? Personal identity. At the level of the individual, there abides a sense of uncertainty about how to understand oneself; most people consciously search for a sense of identity--for who and what they are and for what significance and worth they have. Our media-generated, consumer culture daily offers us a thousand choices for who we should be like, what we should value, and how we can attain worth and significance. And we take these images for what is real. So, for example, tennis pro Andre Agassi can say "Image is everything!" in an advertisement, and we believe him. The recent, wildly successful sitcom "Seinfeld" vaunts itself as a "show about nothing." Isolated, narcissistic, urban, "thirty-something singles" float through their existences trying to make sense out of what they ultimately perceive to be a meaningless, patchwork world. We laugh as we watch these actors portray individuals with no roots, vague identities, and conscious indifference to morals outside their self-determined ones. George riotously works out his "pathetic" life "going with" whatever works for him at the moment in jobs, scams, or relationships. The commercial and critical success of this show is attributable not only to the genius of its script, character development, and acting, but also to the way the audience identifies with the fragmented, ludicrous, pastiche of "moments" which make up the characters' lives. Seinfeld is uniquely postmodern in its presentation of groundless, malleable character identities. It is also postmodern--as are most TV sitcoms today--in its radical, up-front play with "moralities" altered at the characters' whim; there is no one morality. Education and academics. From the modernist perspective, truth was largely relative, but the possibility of universals in knowledge remained conceivable. In the postmodern model, we don't really "know" anything; rather, we "interpret." Postmodernist education says "Pick a worldview," as if only a choice of clothing style were at issue, "and create your interpretations accordingly," since truths are only language constructions put in place by those who have influence and power. The emphasis on multi-cultural education is grounded philosophically in this perspective. After all, says the postmodernist educator, the emphasis in Western education on rationality and the quest for what is ultimately true is only another manifestation of Western "cultural imperialism" motivated by consumer capitalist power. Popular media. Nowhere are the effects of postmodernism more glaring than in pop culture and its media. Image and fiction are promoted as reality in contemporary music, television, and print media by producers who understand the power of visual image to present a fictional reality that we will accept as reality itself. Dissolving the distinction between fiction and truth is justified by the postmodernist, because truth itself is a fiction; all we ever get are the fictions of our language games. The quintessential example of postmodern media production is MTV. From its fast, fragmented production editing to its underlying visions (sexual moral relativism, for example), MTV represents the "cutting edge" of postmodernism applied to consumer media. MTV's editors "collage" the shows together into a jumpy, stream-of-consciousness presentation that leaves older viewers baffled by its pace and apparent incoherence. But to the postmodern "generation-X" crowd who make a steady diet of it, MTV's randomness is normal. MTV's twenty-four-hour parade of images, pseudo-documentaries, hedonistic dating-scenario game shows, music videos, and cutting-edge advertisements relentlessly assault one's visual and auditory senses, leaving viewers feeling fragmented and transient within a decentered plural-reality: the postmodern world. In Conclusion I have tried to characterize the postmodern outlook that increasingly influences our lives at both the individual and social levels. I have focused on the negative aspects of the postmodern theory as it dismantles or "deconstructs" the traditional and modernist paradigms that have preceded. Christians who realize the negative effects of postmodernism should also be aware, however, that postmodernism's attack on the Enlightenment-modernist worldview may have some positive effects as well. Postmodernism may present opportunities for biblical Christians to dialogue more openly with people whose "certainty" about reality has been dismantled. For if the postmodernist is truly "plural" in outlook, there should necessarily be an openness to all "interpretations" of the human situation and condition--including the biblical one. And the biblical interpretation, it turns out, does meet real human needs, because it presents the Reality we all long for.

When I learned I had a worldview, my world didn't change, but my understanding of myself, other human beings, society, and where I am in history and what that means changed enormously. I learned something very useful and important about the way I perceive things and gain knowledge; I learned about things I didn't know I knew. Knowing about worldviews has nothing essential to do with whether I am a child of God, a true believer or not. Understanding what a worldview is, however, can bring vital clarity, not only to what I believe, but how I believe what I believe. And what difference does that make? I think of it this way: God created me to be a creature who knows, learns, makes important life-determining choices. I am a creature whom God will hold accountable for how I interpret the world and myself in it. The more believers understand the intellectual and psychological apparatus with which we believe and what difference it makes, the better off we are, because understanding confirms what we believe, our perspectives on life and human experience. When I understand how a worldview functions in the process of people making sense of their worlds and making choices for living their lives, I realize how people can come to a seemingly straightforward issue such as abortion and end with opposite opinions. The beliefs embedded in one's worldview about when a truly human existence begins will have determined one's perspective. So what is a worldview? It is one way of naming the "grid" for thinking and believing that God built into every human being. It is a set of basic beliefs--about God, the world, human beings, history, death, knowing, as well as much more mundane things--that make up what a person assumes to be true. Out of one's worldview, a person evaluates, makes decisions, and makes meaning and sense of his or her life. James Sire, whose book The Universe Next Door (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1976) is one of the most helpful on the subject of worldviews, defines a worldview as a basic set of beliefs and "concepts that work together to provide a more or less coherent frame of reference for all thought and action." (p. 16) Another definition of the concept of a worldview comes from James Olthuis, a professor at the Toronto Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Canada: A worldview (or vision of life) is a framework or set of fundamental beliefs through which we view the world and our calling and future in it. The vision may be so internalized that it goes largely unquestioned; it may be greatly refined through cultural-historical development; it may not be explicitly developed into a systematic conception of life; it may not be theoretically deepened into a philosophy; it may not even be codified into credal form. Nevertheless, this vision is a channel for the ultimate beliefs which give direction and meaning to life. It is the integrative and interpretive framework by which order and disorder are judged, the standard by which reality is managed and pursued. It is the set of hinges on which all our everyday thinking and doing turns. Although a [worldview] is held only by individuals, it is communal in scope and structure. Since a worldview gives the terms of reference by which the world and our place in it can be structured and illumined, a worldview binds it adherents together into a community. When Jesus told his followers to reflect on the "lilies of the field"--was he not calling them to ponder his metaphor in order to glean the truth he was giving them? If believers in Christ are called to think about themselves, the world, God, and what the true nature of God's promises are in the Gospel, then understanding the concept of a worldview and how a worldview operates in our thinking and believing is an extremely useful bit of understanding. At certain points, knowledge of worldviews can help me not only understand the world and how others think about the world, it can help me understand and be more objective about my own ways of looking at things--to discern the "taken-for-granteds" in my own way of looking at myself and the world which often come from my culture, not the Bible. There are people who like to think and people who don't--with lots of folks somewhere between. Learning about what a worldview is and how it works will undoubtedly be more interesting to some than others. But having a worldview is not open to choice. Every person has one--acknowledged or not. The question might be posed, then, Do I want to understand my own worldview and how it works? Consider a fictitious scenario (one which resembles hundreds of true incidents on university campuses) where knowledge of worldviews and how they work help a young Christian university student: Sally, a freshman majoring in English literature, sits in class the first week only to discover that her professor is aggressively hostile to Christianity and anyone who takes the Bible seriously. She has come from a good Christian family with a solid pre-college public education. She loves literature and writing and is excited about being able to study great English literature. Though frightened, confused, and intimidated by her professor's hostility to her faith, she decides to persevere, hoping that she will find a way to survive the class. Wishing to find help in her academic dilemma, some friends advise her to attend a short course being offered to help Christian students in the secular university. Sally learns about the difficulties of being Christian in a secular university, but she also is given the opportunity to learn about the concept of a worldview and how worldviews work, even in the perspectives of her hostile professor! A new framework for thinking opens for her. She learns in what ways her professor's worldview differs from her own. She learns how to identify the basic beliefs (presuppositions) underlying her professor's way of looking at and thinking about the world and reality. This knowledge of how a worldview works, along with basic information about how to identify people's worldview beliefs, assures Sally of the validity and explanatory power of her own Christian worldview. She feels less intimidated by her professor and the secular university environment because she understands the assumptions "hidden" in his worldview. She can see now how poorly her professor's worldview explains the way the world really works and how human beings really live in that world. In other words, Sally can see and understand much more clearly how her professor's secular "theories-of-choice" emerge from his worldview beliefs. In worldview training, one learns that everyone has a worldview structured around a few basic questions about reality. Every worldview will attempt at some level to answer the following basic questions that I have paraphrased from James Sire's list in The Universe Next Door (p. 18): What is the source and nature of "primary" reality? In some worldviews primary reality is God or spirit. In others it is matter and energy. What is a human being? How do we define the true nature, meaning, and destiny of humankind? On what basis do we establish morality and ethics? How does a person or society decide what is right and wrong, and on what grounds is ethics determined? On what basis do we believe what we know is true? How does a person know? How do we justify or verify our knowledge and our process of knowing what we think we know? What is death? What is the meaning and significance of death? Is there an afterlife of any kind or does man merely return to the basic material elements of which he is obviously made? The answers to these and many other worldview questions indicate what basic worldview or parts of different worldviews a person holds. In The Universe Next Door, James Sire walks the reader through several different worldviews: Theism (his term for historic, biblical Christianity), Deism, Naturalism, Nihilism, Existentialism, Eastern Pantheistic Monism, and The New Age. Today's "culture wars" are, in fact, "worldview wars." Whether in the student's classroom, the neighborhood school board meeting, or the office hallway, dialogues and debates over abortion, gay and lesbian issues, or how the federal budget should be balanced are ultimately grounded in a person's worldview. And because we get our worldviews mostly by absorbing them from our parents, family, and larger surrounding culture, today's generation, unfortunately, is being grounded in whatever worldview dominates the arts and media of popular culture. Television's sitcoms and MTV are doing much of our worldview construction. The believer's task in believing the gospel involves striving to discern good from evil. But in a complex, sophisticated, visually mediated culture barraging its receivers with intimidating and seductive worldly perspectives, this task can be difficult indeed. The believer's challenge is to build a worldview based in the truth found in the Scriptures. But that project begins by first understanding that we all have worldviews, whether we realize it or not.

How did the apostle Paul see his world? If we are to correctly understand Paul's writings in the New Testament, we must determine whether he held the Greek view of the dichotomy of spiritual and material. History reveals that the Hebrew mindset was quite different from the Greek mindset. The Hebrew view of the world was grounded in the earthy, material reality in which they lived, and yet it was overshadowed at every point with spiritual truth. In contrast to the Greek view that the highest human experience was knowledge, to a Hebrew scholar like Paul, moral beauty and righteousness was the highest human experience. There was no need to separate experience into spiritual and material, as everything they did or thought, from their perspective, included both. The process of broken humans being transformed into the glory of holiness, to which we would ultimately be completely conformed in the Kingdom, was the hope of Paul's gospel. When interpreting the Bible, then, the question to ask is this: "What did the author intend for his original audience to hear when he wrote his words?" This is the meaning inspired by God. To understand how the author of the biblical text saw his world is suddenly quite important. Whether he saw a strict dichotomy between the spiritual and material worlds will greatly influence how and why he wrote what he did. If we, two thousand years later, impose a view of the world onto the text that the author did not hold, we are likely to interpret what he was saying incorrectly. For example, Paul quite often writes about the 'flesh' and the 'spirit'. If he held the Greek dualistic world view, Paul might mean by 'flesh' the lower , material side of life: hunger, lust, desire for significance, all the facets of living in the material, fallen world; a place in which God is not interested in dwelling, a place which is thus separated from His presence. And Paul might mean by 'spirit' the higher , spiritual side of life: the loftier pursuit of the knowledge of God and being in His presence; the place where communion and fellowship is possible in a way not possible if we are living in the material world of the flesh. This is in fact how modern evangelicalism interprets much of Paul's writing about flesh and spirit. By contrast, if Paul rejected the competing Greek view of his age, and held to his traditional Hebrew upbringing, perhaps he meant something different when he talked about flesh and spirit. A clue is found in Romans, chapters three and four, where Paul contrasts the approach to God through the Law with God's grace as the basis of salvation. He goes on to use 'flesh' and 'spirit' to describe and to contrast these two approaches to God. In the flesh, we are compelled by our own self-effort toward gaining righteousness based on the Law. In the spirit, faith is reckoned as righteousness, and we are given the free gift of salvation. God's grace in giving us the free gift is the basis of our salvation. For Paul, the flesh and the spirit are not two different realms of knowledge or experience, but rather two different routes by which to attain moral goodness, the highest goal of human experience. The clash in the first century between the Greek and the Hebrew world views was familiar to Paul. He wrote from a strongly held Hebrew world view. Therefore, the Greek separation of the spiritual and the material world, which was imported into Christianity after Paul wrote his epistles, provides an incorrect interpretive grid for understanding Paul's writings. And since much of evangelical Christianity assumes Greek dualism, we bring an incorrect framework to our reading of Paul's epistles. How does the difference between Paul's Hebrew perspective and the Greek dualistic world view impact our view of faith and reason? Is faith intellectual assent to a set of propositions? In today's common view influenced by Greek dualism, faith is a mystical, non-rational thing, not related to reason. It is the act of believing something, of holding to a set of propositions, despite evidence that may contradict it. How "hard" we believe something becomes a measure of the strength of our faith. According to this view, questioning one's beliefs is seen as doubting, and is strongly discouraged. The act of believing something becomes morally virtuous, and to risk rejecting one or more propositions is seen as risking one's faith. The intellectual or mystical knowledge of God becomes the focus of our salvation. Faith, therefore, is seen in opposition to reason. If there is no dichotomy between spiritual and material from Paul's perspective in the Bible, faith and reason are inextricably intertwined; they are not in competition. Instead, faith is a posture of the heart toward God. It may include believing certain things, but it is not primarily that. It is what God changes in me at the very heart of myself that I cannot reach. It is acknowledging the reality of my sin and my need for God's perspective. It is facing God instead of stiff-arming Him. It is an intangible quality of my heart that only God can change. Reason is the gift of thinking, which God gives to validate my faith by making sense of my experience. Faith and reason are different, but they are not opposites. Faith is not asking me to believe something my reason cannot accept. Clarifying this imposed dichotomy between spiritual and material is crucial to clarifying the gospel. If knowledge of God is the ultimate goal of human experience, then the tenets to which we hold are of utmost importance; the facts that I believe, the knowledge that I possess or experience, these are the central issues. But the gospel addresses a different issue altogether. With moral goodness as the highest human experience, my state of moral bankruptcy leads me to the grace of God and the gift of salvation He has promised. It is moral bankruptcy which the gospel addresses. This is the area of my greatest need, and the greatest gift that can be given is to free me from the paralysis of the will that is my sin. Were knowledge my greatest need, then the path to salvation would be altogether different. Given this alternate definition of faith, that it is a posture toward God, it should be said that the heart of the believer will seek knowledge of God at some level. Knowledge is not irrelevant. But it will be an outworking of the heart of faith rather than a prerequisite for it. The primary issue of the gospel is the problem of moral bankruptcy and God's deep grace that reaches into the heart to change its natural posture. And only this change will allow us to seek and to embrace truth. Our moral problem is deeply involved with our willingness (or unwillingness) to seek and embrace the truth about ourselves and about God. This focus of the gospel is altogether different than that of the Greek mindset. There are other, if secondary, implications to assuming Greek dualism. The dualism of the Greeks is, thanks to Augustine, the grid through which many Christians today see their world, mostly unconsciously. In case we are tempted to think that this is a purely academic discussion, and that it really doesn't matter what Augustine believed, let's look at some more ramifications of holding his view. Practically speaking, how does holding a Greek mindset differ in everyday life from holding a Hebrew mindset? I spoke in the beginning of the fragmentation of the college student's world. To separate our experience into spiritual and material, leads us to place value on the pursuit of "spiritual" things over the pursuit of "earthly" things. For the Christian college student, her pursuit of literature and the arts becomes "fleshly," which is "less than" a spiritual pursuit. Since God is not in "the flesh," the most valued vocations for her as a Christian are those involving spiritual things. For the Christian mother, tending to the needs of her children becomes "fleshly," and perhaps frustrating to her, when she would rather pursue loftier, "spiritual" things. She may consider ministry, Bible study, and church activity the "better" things to do; when in reality, loving her children the best she can is the higher task. If instead we carry with us an integrated view of the spiritual and the material worlds, we are free to pursue the plethora of options God has laid before us. If the highest human experience is moral beauty, then it matters less what I do (non-moral) and more how I do it (moral). I can pursue expressing myself in the arts, literature, or science as a joyous expression of the creature God created me to be. The college student can firmly embrace her studies on the campus, while thinking critically about the ideas presented. She can choose the vocation for which God has given her a desire, and see His hand in whatever she chooses to do, without the fear that anything can turn her heart away from the posture she has before God. God is the one holding her heart, and He is faithful. The fragmentation fostered by Greek dualism ultimately breaks down any relevance for Christianity in the post-modern world. Because Christians are called to live "spiritual" lives, our dealings with the material world become less and less relevant to us; we separate ourselves from our neighbors, our co-workers, and our culture at large. And we will have little impact on our world because we have little contact with it. As a Christian sub-culture, we have abandoned the arts, literature, films, music, and science to post-modernism. And we have called this abandonment spiritual. Integrating our view of the spiritual and the material world might have far reaching consequences. Perhaps we can reclaim in the arts and sciences the beauty of creative expression for which God created us. We can cease to frame everything as either/or, and enjoy the many gifts God has given us in our earthly, material world. Perhaps we will value more firmly the creation itself, and become better stewards of the natural resources God has given. We can better see that the material world is imbued with the splendor and majesty of its Creator, and we can rejoice in His presence in all these things. But most of all, perhaps we can have a voice to communicate the relevance of the gospel to this dying generation. Martin Luther put it this way, "If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point."

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The Power of Presuppositions

Argues that presuppositions are central to all thought and action.

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