OUR WORLDVIEW IS THE LENS THROUGH WHICH WE SEE

Our worldview can either bring reality into sharp focus or it can distort and prevent us from seeing what is right in front of our eyes.

Atheist Nobel Laureate, Francis Crick, also approached the evidence with a worldview. However, rather than preventing him from seeing the evidence, it caused him to reject it:

* “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to have been satisfied to get it going."

Why then does he reject the miraculous? Because there is no place for it within his atheistic worldview, which demands a natural answer. Meanwhile, when a theist is confronted with the same evidence, he concludes otherwise.

Former atheist, Sir Fred Hoyle, concluded in favor of an Intelligent Designer:

* "Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shuffling of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed where it is insensibly different from zero." So, there must be "an intelligence, which designed the biochemicals and gave rise to the origin of carbonaceous life." (Norman Geisler is the source of these quotations.)

Why are people unwilling to revise their worldview when confronted with overwhelming evidence against it? Often, they don't want to.

Atheist Aldous Huxley wrote:

* "I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently, assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find reasons for this assumption.... For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom." (Ends and Means, 1937, pp. 270, 273, emp. added).

Not everyone rejects God in favor of sexual freedom. However, Huxley demonstrated, very transparently, that we have reasons for our worldviews that might have nothing to do with the evidence.

Naturalism and its Claim that People of Faith are Biased

People of faith are often accused of “bias.” We are told:

• You have a religious agenda. Your mind is already made up. You are not open to the facts and therefore cannot do science in a responsible way.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Director of the Hayden Planetarium, represents the latest example of this thinking:

• Go think whatever you want. Go ahead. Think that there is one god, two gods, ten gods, or no gods. That is what it means to live in a free country. The problem arises, is if you have a religious philosophy, that is not based in objective realities, that you then want to put in the science classroom. Then I’m going to stand there and say “No, I’m not going to allow you into the science classroom.” I’m not telling you what to think, I’m just telling you the science classroom—you’re not doing science, this is not science, keep it out. That’s when I stand up. 

There are numerous problems with the statement. Having a “religious philosophy” shouldn’t be grounds to exclude anyone from the “science classroom.” For one thing, “religious philosophies” are not the same. One’s philosophy of life might be a help and not a hindrance to doing science. For example, the biblical philosophy enables scientific discovery in a number of ways. It posits that:

1.     God wants to be understood.

2.     Loving God through understanding Him is a necessity.

3.     It is legitimate to understand God through His creation.

4.     His creation is worthy of examination. It is “good,” and not something to merely transcend.

5.     Those created in His image have been given the mandate to tend to His creation. This requires that we understand it.

6.     He rules by the laws He has put in place.

It is therefore not surprising that devout Christians had led the way in re-discovering science. In contrast, some philosophies posit that our thinking is all chemically determined and that we lack the freedom of thought to truly pursue scientific questions. Others posit that this world is illusory. Therefore, it would not be worth our effect to pursue these questions. Even others suggest that our purpose here is to transcend this meaningless, purposeless world – a sure science-stopper.

Tyson also has his own “religious philosophy.” It’s called “naturalism.” It requires that all explanations – all research – are natural, unintelligent, and unpurposeful. For the most part, this works. However, it is also needlessly limited. It’s as if you hired a detective to solve a crime, but he informs you at the start, “I only consider men over six feet tall.” This needlessly narrows the field. The perpetrator might be less than six feet, and so he would be entirely overlooked.

This is one problem with Tyson’s “religious philosophy.” It might arbitrarily narrow the field of causal candidates. Consequently, it assumes that matter, energy, time, life, consciousness, freewill, the fine-tuning of the universe, and the laws of science all have a natural causal explanation. This assumption is not only religious, it is also ludicrous. After all, how can the “natural” laws cause the “natural” laws! Nevertheless, the naturalist is hopeful that science will eventually come up with an explanation. However, such a religious faith blinds itself to the fact that it is a logically impossibility that science will ever have a scientific explanation for science. (Scientifically, the cause must precede the effect. Hence, the scientific explanation/cause for science must precede science itself – a scientific impossibility!)

None of us can do science with a blank slate – total neutrality. We all approach this discipline with our biased languages, paradigms, and philosophies. When Tyson attempts to discredit and reject those with a “religious philosophy,” he pretends that he is neutral and unbiased. If he refuses to recognize his own “religious philosophy,” he is perhaps more biased than the rest of us.

Presuppositions: Our Lens through which we See the World

If you wear a red-tinted lens, the world will appear red. If your lens is faith-in-Christ and in His Word, then, when confronted with an apparent contradiction, you are convinced that there is a resolution, and you seek it out. If your lens is atheism, then this apparent contradiction becomes your confirmation that the Bible is conflicted and not divine. This is called a “confirmation bias.”

One pastor and Oxford professor of New Testament preached that Jesus was only a man. His proof merely consisted in the Biblical “evidence” that Jesus had been mistaken and had changed His mind. The Prof cited the account of a Gentile woman who had asked Jesus to free her demon-possessed daughter. At first, Jesus seemingly refused but then changed His mind after He perceived the woman’s uncanny wisdom.

However, I approach the text with a different lens – one which perhaps elucidates what might have been made blurred to the Prof. After the woman had initially made her request, Jesus remained silent for while, giving His status-conscious disciples an opportunity to verbally hang themselves. Finally they did:

·        Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, "Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us." (Matthew 15:23)

How callous! Even if they thought her beneath them, they could have, at least, asked Jesus to grant her request so that they could move on to other things. However, in their minds, she wasn’t worthy of anything from Jesus, while they certainly were!

Jesus, fully understanding his class-conscious disciples, acted out their presuppositions to show them how they would play out – if this presupposition represented wisdom or not:

·        He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." The woman came and knelt before him. "Lord, help me!" she said. He replied, "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs." (Matthew 15:24-26)

His disciples regarded the Gentiles as dogs and refused to even eat with them. I can hear His disciples cheering, “Yes!” These words represented the Jewish understanding of the day, not Jesus’ understanding. He had reminded the Jewish leadership at Nazareth that the God of Israel had often been particularly gracious to Gentiles:

   

·        I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah's time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed--only Naaman the Syrian." (Luke 4:25-27)

There was nothing prohibiting Jesus from doing likewise, apart from Jewish censure. Interestingly, Jesus’ seeming denial of the woman’s request elicited a revelation of her surpassing wisdom and humility:

·        "Yes, Lord," she said, "but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." (Matthew 15:27)

Jesus received the response that He knew He would get – a response that would contradict the class-ism of His arrogant disciples.

·        Then Jesus answered, "Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted." And her daughter was healed from that very hour. (Matthew 15:28)

Jesus used this as an object lesson to teach His disciples that their faith, wisdom, and humility couldn’t match that of this lowly Gentile woman. Jesus hadn’t at all changed His mind. Instead, this account serves as a revelation of Jesus’ profound wisdom, according to my lens.

Additionally, this interpretation accords with the rest of the Gospels’ portraits of Jesus and not with a confused Jesus who was struggling, like we do, to learn some of God’s lessons.

Our lens is everything. It constitutes such a coercive force that we are unable to merely lay it aside. In most cases, we are even unaware of its presence. No wonder Jesus taught His disciples one step at a time! And no wonder we must be born again with a new lens.

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