HOLLY ORDWAY, ATHEISM, AND PLAYING MAKE-BELIEVE

How do we evaluate a worldview or a theory to determine its viability? One way is to assess how well it agrees with the facts, findings, and even our experiences and perceptions. Related to this is the question, “How completely can it account for the facts within its domain.” 

Holly Ordway, professor of English and Director of the MA in Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, and the author of “Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms” writes that her atheism was unable to do either:

·       “My atheism was eating into my heart like acid…My worldview was entirely negative. I could not have explained the source of my own rationality, nor of my conviction that there were such things as truth, beauty, and goodness. My worldview remained satisfying to me only insofar as I refrained from asking the really tough questions.”

When we ask the tough questions of atheism, we find that it is unable to explain many things. Consequently, it is forced to play make-believe.

FREE WILL - Atheist Daniel Dennett acknowledgeD that the atheistic worldview cannot account for free will, since everything is predetermined by the laws of science:

• free will…is obviously incompatible with naturalism, with determinism, and very likely incoherent against any background, so they cheerfully insist that of course they don't have free will, couldn’t have free will, but so what?  

Consequently, the atheist must play make-believe by treating their children as if they are responsible and that criminals deserve punishment.

HUMAN PRIMACY – Our legal systems give priority to humanity. Therefore, swatting a mosquito or cutting down a tree is still not a criminal offense.

•  “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” (Genesis 9:6)

However, atheism is unable to affirm that the human has more value than the mosquito. This is because there is no way for the materialistic atheist to rationally affirm human value. Judging by its behavior, cows value their lives more than they do our own lives.

Consequently, many claim, “All life has equal value.” However, the atheist usually tries to claim the humans have more value based on their intelligence, creativity,… However, these measures cannot stand against scrutiny.

Why not? The atheistic worldview lacks all objective values, including the value of having a superior intelligence. Therefore, even though intelligence gives us mastery and greater ability to survive, the atheist can provide no objective reason that even survival has value.

Besides, to base human value on our superior intelligence creates inequality among the human race. How? Some are more intelligent than others. Therefore, to apply this criterion of intelligence consistently, it would mean that the intelligent have more value than other humans. This means that the atheist must again play make-believe that all humans are of equal value.

HUMAN EQUALITY – From an atheistic POV, we are unequal according to any possible measure – age, sex, strength, intelligence, societal contributions, likeability… Therefore, abortion and euthanasia and many other social evils have now become rampant. Consequently, the atheist must make-believe that there is such a reality as “human equality.”

“Sanctity of all human Life” (SL) has morphed into a “Quality of Life” (QL) worldview. Consequently, seen through the QL lens, society has determined that some are less valuable and therefore more expendable. As this slide continues, it is inevitable that QL will regard some as having less protection under the law. However, the atheist still plays make-believe that we are all equal under the law.

HUMAN RIGHTS (HR)– Atheism has no adequate objective basis to place human rights above the pig’s rights. Therefore, the State must arbitrarily grant HRs, not God. However, if the State grants these, it can justifiably retract these rights when it no longer sees them as expedient. Instead, the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence reads:

·       "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The founders understood that if our rights depended upon government to grant them, they could never be regarded as “unalienable.” In contrast, the atheist must make-believe that HR have an unalienable objective reality.

JUSTICE – This used to be administered according to the guilt of the individual, but now it is becoming a matter of group-guilt relative to sex, sexual practice, color, race, religion, and to a social appraisal of who has been oppressed. This can only lead to distrust and division.

Atheism has no basis to believe in an objective good and bad, just and unjust, and a right and wrong. These are now regarded as socially evolving ideas, relative to each society. Therefore, we now lack any objective standards to judge anyone or any culture or even a Hitler. In contrast, the Biblical worldview applies justice and punishment only to the wrongdoer:

·       “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” (Ezekiel 18:20)

OBJECTIVE MORAL LAW (and morality) – Once the atheist rejects the Law-Giver, there remains no basis for objective laws or principles. Laws, therefore, must be humanly created, not discovered. This represents a major shift from principled Biblical thinking to a pragmatic cost/benefit analysis. However, human history has shown us that such thinking will inevitably favor those in power, who derive a different cost/benefit analysis. Consequently, here in the States, we find that Congress has been voting for themselves benefits far above those benefits granted to its citizens. In contrast, the Bible place everyone under the laws of God, even the king:

•  “And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment..” (Deuteronomy 17:18-20)

However, atheists find that they are forced to say to their children that, “This is wrong.” They do not say, “This is wrong because it violates our evolving and humanly created laws.” Likewise, the teacher cannot say, “Cheating is wrong because it violates our rules.” Again, they are forced to play make-believe.

MEANING AND PURPOSE OF LIFE – Atheism has no rational basis to believe in the objective existence of theses. Since the cosmos was not created with any purpose in mind, we are left to fend for ourselves to create our own personal meaning and purpose.

Why then are many atheists doing morally good things? Because it produces temporary benefits for them! Once it does not produce those benefits, temptations to do what will produce more benefits will prevail. A pragmatic cost/benefit analysis will then be unable to ward off self-serving temptations. However, the atheistic worldview causes them to hope that their own subjectively-created purposes will produce a meaningful life.

SCIENCE – Instead, of the devotion of science to a search for the truth, science has adopted a narrowly secularized version – the search for a natural understanding to serve their worldview. However, the re-emergence of science had been the product of the Christian West. British scientist Robert Clark summed it up this way: 

·       However we may interpret the fact, scientific development has only occurred in Christian culture. The ancients had brains as good as ours. In all civilizations—Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, India, Rome, Persia, China and so on—science developed to a certain point and then stopped. It is easy to argue speculatively that, perhaps, science might have been able to develop in the absence of Christianity, but in fact, it never did. And no wonder. For the non-Christian world believed that there was something ethically wrong about science. In Greece, this conviction was enshrined in the legend of Prometheus, the fire-bearer and prototype scientist who stole fire from heaven, thus incurring the wrath of the gods. (Christian Belief and Science, quoted by Henry F. Schaefer, 14) 

For the Christian, science and everything else is to conform to truth, God’s truth. When the concept of truth is denigrated, it is inevitable that an inferior product, pragmatic cost/benefit concerns, will fill the vacuum. The search for immediate benefits will dislodge concerns for the truth. This will inevitably mis-guide research along with its “findings.”

All of the above principles find their objective support in the Biblical revelation. However, in the absence of any rational basis for these principles, atheism counsels us to make-believe that they do have an objective existence, because these principles are pragmatically necessary. Consequently, we are supposed to believe in free will, not because it really exists, but because we rationally need it to exist. We also need to make-believe in a right and wrong, a just and unjust, human right, human primacy, and that some behaviors are simply wrong. Outcome – cynicism, nihilism, and alienation!

However, playing make-believe is out-of-sync with reality and how we must live our lives in accordance with reality. Ordway had discovered that atheism did not give her an accurate roadmap by which to navigate her life. If we care about where we are going, we need an accurate roadmap. When our roadmap proves inaccurate, it should be discarded for a better one.

 

A PHILOSOPHY OF SUFFERING

The late British philosopher C.S. Lewis declared that he believed in Christianity for the same reason he believed in the sun. It was not merely because he could see the sun, but, by the sun, he could see everything else.

Does the Bible enable us to see and understand everything else? I will confine myself to one instance of this principle. The Bible enables us to understand and embrace suffering and to live meaningfully within its unavoidable embrace. In contrast to this, secularism regards suffering as a useless encumbrance. Consequently, when the secularist suffers, he experiences a double whammy – a virtual knockout punch:

1. The suffering itself and
2. …the debilitating understanding that suffering is a negative, meaningless and costly burden, lacking any redemptive value.

Secularism deprives suffering of its meaning. This doesn’t mean that secularists don’t talk about meaning. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did:

·       “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” 

Although this is very true, it is not adequate to simply create our own “why.” We have to know that meaning is intrinsic to reality itself and connects us to something higher than merely our changing feelings.

The late American novelist Norman Mailer was cognizant of this problem:

·       “We are healthier if we think there is some importance in what we’re doing…When it seems like my life is meaningless, I feel closer to despair.”

It seems that Mailer realized that he could not merely create his own meaning. Instead, it has to be discovered within the fabric of objective reality.

Without meaning, we shrivel and die in the face of suffering. The late psychiatrist Victor Frankl observed, during his internment in a National Socialist death camp, that:

·       “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future…was doomed.”

Even worse, secularism slams the door on meaning, according to sociologist David Karp:

·       “Cosmopolitan medicine banishes that knowledge [of the necessary purpose for suffering] by insisting that suffering is without meaning and unnecessary… [Suffering is] secularized as mechanical mishaps, and so stripped of their stories, the spiritual ramifications and missing pieces of history that make meaning." (Speaking of Sadness, pg. 191) 

Nevertheless, secularists do find meaning in suffering. They recognize that suffering can aid in producing character and virtue. However, are these observations enough to overcome the pain of suffering, disease, victimization, and death? Hardly! It is little comfort to one who has lost his family to a murderer to think that, maybe, his ordeal might be improving his character.

Faith in the meaning of suffering and of life itself is essential. It is precisely this meaning that the Bible enables us to see and embrace!

We trust in the Bible’s wisdom that in order to become like Christ, we must suffer like Christ (2 Corinthians 4:10-11, 16-18). Besides, knowing that this will last only for a little while enables us to persevere as did Jesus:

·       Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2; ESV)

We need a worldview that serves as a good roadmap, getting us to where we need to go. The Bible’s teachings on suffering enable us to navigate the most horrendous roads.

This same principle pertains to the other teachings of the Bible. The Bible unmasks the detrimental effects of sin. I was never able to put two and two together to see the negative effects of sugar until it was pointed out to me. Now I have become aware of how sugar makes me feel and limit my intake.

Now that I have been made aware of the deleterious impact of sin upon me, I can begin to see its costs, deceptiveness, and how it coerces me to justify and defend it – how it was able to take control of my thinking in a more profound way than any drug could ever do. Now, with my eyes widened by the teachings of Scripture, I can begin to oppose it and not fall prey to its corrupting influences.

Admittedly, I daily struggle against sin. However, when it does take hold, I confess it to my Savior, and He forgives and cleanses me of all of its filth (1 John 1:9).

In the next chapter, I will further try to illustrate how the teachings of the Bible are best able to address the question of “mental health.”

ANOTHER FATAL FLAW OF NATURALISM AND EVOLUTION

Both naturalism and the theory of evolution maintain that, through natural selection, we have evolved a brain that has conferred upon us many survival advantages by enabling us to accurately perceive and to rationally think about our world.

However, there are other forms of our neurological wiring that the naturalist dismisses as irrational, although perhaps adaptive. Theologian and pastor, Timothy Keller, has written about this inconsistency:

·       Evolutionists say that if God makes sense to us, it is not because he is really there, it’s only because that [irrational] belief helped us survive and so we are hard wired for it. However, if we can’t trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science? If our cognitive faculties only tell us what we need to survive, not what is true, why trust them about anything at all?

·       What is not fair is to do what so many evolutionary scientists are doing now. They are applying the scalpel of their skepticism to what our minds tell us about God but not to what our minds are telling us about evolutionary science itself. (The Reason for God, Dutton, 2008, 137-38)

The evolutionist claims that both rationality and irrationality (for example, the belief in God) have enabled us to successful adapt. Keller points to the fact that the evolutionist is not applying his scalpel evenly. If our brains and their beliefs have enabled us to successfully navigate this world and even to understand more abstract things, why not also apply this to our intuition or belief in God? According to the evolutionist, this form of irrationality had once conferred a survival advantage, but how could irrationality – seeing the world through a distorted lens – do so? Perhaps then, their own theories are irrational, serving only a temporary purpose?

Besides, the evolutionist takes his scalpel to many other ideas or intuitions that do not fit into their naturalistic worldview. C.S. Lewis reflects on this tendency in regards to love and music:

·       You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. (141)

According to Lewis, a naturalistic meaningless universe does not accord with our intuitions about it. It is these intuitions that take us beyond what is evolutionarily “rational” and infuse life with meaning and fullness. Are these hot-wired intuitions feeding us a distorted message? Does evolution “win” by tricking us? Are our brains filled with evolutionary distortions? If so, won’t these “distortions” intrude into all other areas of life? And won’t such “irrational” thoughts distort the rational?

Today, based upon the naturalistic worldview, many deny the existence of freewill. In a materialistic world governed entirely by the laws of science, there is just no room or basis for freewill. Instead, although adaptive, believing that we have freewill is just another necessary prank of evolution.

However, we have the intuitive perception that we are freely, at least to some degree, making freewill decisions. Are we mistaken? If so, because these intuitions are so basic, if we doubt our freewill, what then can we not doubt? Should we not also doubt that perhaps we are an individual person rather than part of a corporate consciousness? Should we not also doubt that a physical world exists and that our thoughts and perceptions are all just imaginary?

Consequently, if we are to doubt our freewill, love, the fullness of vision we receive from music, and the existence of God, perhaps we must doubt everything else. But perhaps we should also doubt doubt itself.

Perhaps, instead, these beliefs are not only “necessary,” but they are also an accurate reflection of reality. And to doubt them is also to doubt everything else that we believe in.

This same problem exists in the area of morality. Naturalism instructs us that there are no objective moral laws. Instead, morality is just something that we create, even if largely based on our biochemical intuitions.

Instead, we intuit that when we violate our conscience, we violate objective moral laws, which exist beyond our biochemistry, and deserve punishment. We sense that something or Someone greater than us is condemning us, and that we need to confess our wrongdoing. This sense is so powerful, that when we don’t confess, we find ourselves forced to justify our misbehaviors. We are not able to simply say “who cares!” and walk away. Instead, the sense that we have done something wrong is so vivid and compelling that we have to address it in some way.

Does this sense grant us an accurate picture of reality? According to the naturalist, it might be necessary, but it is also irrational, since there is no Judge, no objective means of judgment, and no ultimate punishment.

The naturalistic worldview forces them to regard these various intuitions as necessary but also as irrational. But how can so many irrational beliefs have survival value? And won’t they permeate into what is “rational,” undermining our entire existence? And if these intuitions are irrational, perhaps also the naturalistic worldview?