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

therefore it does not self-destruct. A Christian epistemology (theory of knowledge) starts with the transcendent Creator, who spoke the entire universe into being with his Word: “And God said” (Gen. 1:3). “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). John uses a Greek word, Logos , that means not only Word but also reason or rationality—the underlying principle that unifies the world into an orderly cosmos, as opposed to randomness and chaos. The Greeks who heard John’s gospel understood that he was claiming that Christ is the source of the order and coherence of the universe.
    This biblical view has two crucial implications. First, the intelligible order of the universe reflects the mind of the Creator. Second, because God created humans in his image, our minds correspond with that order as well. There is a congruence between the structure of the world and the structure of human cognition—a correlation between subject and object in the act of knowing. As Plantinga writes, “God created both us and our world in such a way that there is a certain fit or match between the world and our cognitive faculties.” 12
    The medievals used the phrase adaequatio intellectus ad rem , which means the intellect is adequate to reality. Of course, humans are broken, fallen creatures, and as a result our thought processes are darkened and distorted. Nevertheless, even after the fall, we are still human. We still retain the image of God. Throughout history, the Bible has inspired confidence in the essential reliability of human cognitive faculties.
    Biblical epistemology is backed up experientially by general revelation. To function from day to day, humans have to assume that we do know a great many things—that the material world is real (the chair I’m sitting on will hold me up), that the universe works by cause and effect (if I drop this computer, it will fall), that mathematical truths hold universally (5 plus 7 will always equal 12), that our memories are basically reliable (I did eat a sandwich for lunch today), that other people have minds (even though I cannot directly see them), and that the laws of logic are valid (to discredit logic, I have to argue using logic). In our daily actions, we have to assume the basic reliability of human cognition. If we were complete skeptics, we would be paralyzed, unable to act.
    Anything we must assume in order to function in the world is part of general revelation. The undeniable facts of experience reflect the created structure of physical nature or human nature, or both. They are signposts pointing to the biblical God. Only a biblical worldview explains why it is possible for humans to have trustworthy knowledge.
    The upshot is that all worldviews have to borrow a Christian epistemology—at least at the moment they are making their claims. They must tacitly assume the reliability of reason and rationality, which only a biblical worldview supports. They have to function as if Christianity is true, even as they reject it.
    C. S. Lewis Unmasks Materialism
    To practice the skill of detecting self-referential absurdity, let’s dissect a few more examples. Because materialism or naturalism is the unquestioned assumption in much of academia, let’s begin with it. Materialism claims that my thoughts are products of physical events. What does that mean? It means that when I calculate that 5 plus 7 equals 12, or when I perceive a rose as red, or when I judge that torturing people is evil, what is really happening is that my brain is doing physical things, like producing chemical reactions and causing neurons to fire.
    As a case in point, a recent book expounding materialism claims that ideas are “physical states of matter within our brains.” Thus a thought process is “a series of brain states—a series of physical configurations of matter—each causing the next in accordance with the deterministic laws that govern the interactions of physical objects.” 13 In other words, the