Thinking to Believe

The Founders created a “context in which religion and politics mixed but church and state did not.  The Founders’ insight was that one might as well try to build a wall between economics and politics as between religion and politics, since both are about what people feel and how they see the world.  Let the religious take their stand in the arena of politics and ideas on their own, and fight for their views on equal footing with all other interests.  American public life is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious but an ever-fluid mix of the two.  History suggest that trouble tends to come when one of these forces grows too powerful in proportion to the other.” [1]—Jon Meacham

---

[1]Jon Meacham, “The End of Christian America,” Newsweek, April 13, 2009 edition, p. 37 (pp. 34-38).

Nancy Pearcey described a worldview as a mental map that helps us effectively navigate our world.  The better our worldview, the more effectively we ought to be able to navigate reality with it.  Faulty worldviews are easy to spot because they always run contrary to our pre-theoretical experience of reality at one point or another.  For example, scientific naturalists claim the material world—working according to natural processes—is all there is to reality.  There is no God, there are no angels, and there are no souls.  All that exists is what we can put in a test-tube.  This creates a problem for the concept of free-will, which in turn creates a problem for the concept of moral responsibility.

If there is no God everything is purely material, including ourselves.  Material things do not make decisions, but respond in determined ways to prior physical events.  They don’t act, but simply react to prior physical factors.  For any particular event there exists a series of prior physical causes that not only results in the event, but necessitates it.  Life, according to scientific naturalism, is like a series of falling dominoes.  When you ask “Why did domino 121 fall?” it will be answered, “Because domino 120 fell.”  Domino 121 could not decide to not fall when acted upon by domino 120.  It must fall.  If man is just physical stuff, then our “choices” and “knowledge” are like falling dominos: nothing but necessary reactions to prior physical processes.  There is no free will.  Scientific naturalists admit as much.  Naturalistic philosopher, John Searle, wrote, “Our conception of physical reality simply does not allow for radical freedom.”^[1] He admitted that there is no hope of reconciling libertarian freedom with naturalism when he wrote:

(more…)