1. Finding Truth 5 Principles For Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

3. Principle #1 Identify the Idol

4. Principle #2 Identify the Idol’s Reductionism

5. Principle #3 Test the Idol: Does it Contradict What We Know About the World?

6. Romans 1:19-20 since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what He has made. As a result, people are without excuse.

7. What about free will? At some level we all recognize that humans are moral agents capable of making free choices Edward Slingerland argues that Darwinian materialism leads logically to the conclusion that humans are robots – that our sense of having a will or self or consciousness is an illusion Yet he admits that we can’t help acting like and at some level really feeling that we are free To maintain that worldview one has to create a dual consciousness or mental dichotomy.

8. Romans 1:21 For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense, and their senseless minds were darkened.

9. What do they do? They live in cognitive dissonance between what they teach in their professional lives and what they experience in their personal lives Often they create almost science fiction type realities to deal with this failure of their worldview to adequately make sense of the real world

10. Principle #4 Test the Idol: Does it Contradict Itself?

11. Consistency is required Reductionist theories reduce human rationality to some non-rational force or process But that would also apply to the way they arrived at their conclusions So they have to make exceptions for their own theories, that they have a special ability to rise above the box as it were

12. Is Christianity any different? It starts with a transcendent Creator who spoke the world into existence through his Word (Gen. 1:3, John 1:1) This view has two crucial implications –The intelligible order of the universe reflects the mind of the Creator –Because God created humans in his image, our minds correspond with that order as well

13. Some necessary assumed knowledge That the material world is real That the universe works by cause and effect That mathematical truths hold universally That our memories are basically reliable That other people have minds That the laws of logic are valid The basic reliability of human cognition

14. Our Takeaways John Lennox “the mind that does science…is the end product of a mindless unguided process. Now, if you knew your computer was the product of a mindless unguided process, you wouldn’t trust it. So, to me atheism undermines the rationality I need to do science.” Keep pressing the worldview and eventually it will either contradict what we know to be real in the world or it will contradict its own teaching Authentic Christianity can address those concerns and we will talk about that in two weeks!

16. Announcements James Peoples, president of the Florida Baptist Convention, pastor at Trinity BC in Keystone Heights, and dad to Emily will be our guest next week BCM retreat will be in November 13-14 Penny Wars for Missions North Central’s Mission Retreat Discipleship Sign-up