WHY I AM NOT SECULAR

WHY I AM NOT SECULAR

By: Daniel McMillin

Why am I not secular? Ultimately, it is because I believe that God is the best explanation for our reality. I believe that there is sufficient evidence that suggests that the God of the Bible is real, that He has revealed Himself through the revelation of His inspired Word (the Bible) and incarnate Word (the divine Logos), and that Jesus of Nazareth was/is the Son of God who rose from the dead. I argue that the Christian faith is reasonable based on the evidence for these three truths. Secularism does not best explain the world around us. In this paper, I will address two popular presuppositions in the secular age, where theistic and secular worldviews are pinned against one another. I will argue that the Christian worldview is the best explanation for our reality while also debunking certain myths that the secular age has introduced.

The Best Explanation for the Christian Worldview: Reason vs. Faith

Secularists suggest that the religious have faith while they possess reason. Alternatively, secularists follow the evidence while, as Richard Dawkins says, religious fundamentalists “know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a reasoning process. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book.”[1] Those who follow science allow the evidence to be their guide to truth, while religious people blindly follow a book they deem “holy” that is filled with many mistakes. In sum, secular people follow the evidence because they use reason and science, while religious people have (blind) faith; they believe without evidence.[2]  However, as Tim Keller has noted, “To move from religion to secularism is not so much a loss of faith is a shift into a new set of beliefs and into a new community of faith, one that draws the lines between orthodoxy and heresy in different places.”[3] As Charles Taylor suggests, this conversion to unbelief is not a conversion that is absent of faith but is a conversion to a new faith, namely “faith in science’s ability.”[4]

 One of the grandest mistakes of secularism is, as Keller said, “they assume that belief is mainly a matter of faith while nonbelief is mainly based on reason.”[5] It is a false assumption that is made on the part of the secularist to say that they have reason and the religious do not. In fact, religious people are very thoughtful people who offer reasons or arguments for what they believe to justify or support their claims.

It is fallacious to suggest that religious individuals do not use reason simply because they have faith. Additionally, the common understanding of faith as a sort of “blind belief” that is understood as wishful thinking on the part of the religious individual is not the definition given in Scripture that most Christians would use to define the term “faith.” Hebrews 11:1 offers a description of faith as “The assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The apostle Paul said, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). Faith is not based on our desires but on evidence. As Matthew Sokoloski states, “Faith is not a feeling that you arrive at through wishful thinking, but a conviction that motivates action rooted in God’s word.”[6] In sum, New Testament Christians use faith and reason to explain what they believe and why they believe it.

The Best Explanation for the Origin of God: Science vs. Supernatural

In the secular age, a popular movement is what we may call “deconversion,” where individuals abandon their religious beliefs due to their enlightenment from scientific knowledge. Within this naturalistic framework that flows from secularism, individuals are led to conclude the improbability of the supernatural since only reason and science can only establish truth.[7] Taylor calls this type of narrative the “subtraction story.”[8] In the secular age, one cannot be a responsible, intelligent scientist and be a theist; otherwise, he is a foolish fundamentalist who blindly believes in the existence of God. This is one of the hallmarks of the secular age. As Taylor notes,  “a society is secular insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable (and contested).”[9] It is for that reason that Dawkins would celebrate and embrace the secular age in light of the accomplishments of Charles Darwin when he said, “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”[10]

One of the things that I find most problematic about the secular movement is the appeal to a naturalistic worldview. Secularism is heavily dependent upon naturalism. “Naturalism” is a philosophical position that views all things as most explainable through natural processes. They assume that science is the best source for discovering truth and explaining reality.[11] From a naturalistic viewpoint, God becomes not only irrelevant but improbable. God is, by definition, a being that is beyond the bounds of the natural world and, therefore, cannot exist. This underlying assumption excludes the possibility of a divine being is often tossed aside because it is less believable. However, Taylor suggests that this appeal to science for the cause of their deconversion is not due to the data but the story. “The appeal of scientific materialism is not so much the cogency of its detailed findings as that of the underlying epistemological stance, and that for ethical reasons it is seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality.”[12] Interestingly, some people use naturalism to find out things about nature but realize it has parameters, and they do not discount the supernatural.

Many atheists will argue the origin of theism by proposing the “God-of-the-gaps” theory. This theory suggests that prior to the advancements of the scientific age, certain mysteries were lacking in our knowledge of the universe. [13] Those gaps in scientific knowledge were filled by the presence of what we call “God.” As Dawkins says, “If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, just fill it.”[14] If science cannot explain the gap in our knowledge, then there must be a God. In other words, the unexplained was explained by answering, “God.”

Secularists may argue that Christian theists are blinded by faith and naively attribute things to God that ought to belong to science. Ironically, secular scientists who assume naturalism allow this worldview to keep them from recognizing the possibility of the supernatural and the divine. Patrick Nowll Smith argues that “No matter how strange an event someone reports, the statement that it must have been due to a supernatural agent cannot be a part of that report.”[15] Additionally, he suggests that “no scientist can at present explain certain phenomena. It does not follow that the phenomena are inexplicable by scientific methods, still less that they must be attributed to supernatural agents.”[16] He concludes that whatever the gaps may be in our knowledge, there is still hope that there is a natural explanation for these things. He says, “There is still the possibility that science may be able, in the future, to offer an explanation which, though counted in quite new terms, remains strictly scientific.”[17] The assumption of naturalism provides a reason for denying the possibility of the divine. As Craig Keener notes, “Many scientifically inclined persons who rule out supernatural explanations a priori may do so not because the data in their specialties demand this approach but because their initial plausibility structures reflect philosophic assumptions borrowed from outside their discipline.”[18] Denying this assumption of naturalism is the primary reason why I am not secular, which I will develop in the next point.

The Best Explanation for the Origins of the Universe: Naturalism vs. Christian Theism

A final problem that I have with secularism is its inability to answer Leibitz’s question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”[19] This question cannot be answered based on a purely naturalistic worldview. While it is a philosophical question and not a scientific one, it does raise the question of origin in one sense.[20] Simply pointing to the law of nature explains that a thing is but does not explain why it is.[21] It is clear that the origin of the universe came from nothing. What this means is that there was a beginning to the universe and that nothing physical could have caused it to be anything. Nothing produces nothing. As Leibniz said, “Nothing happens without a sufficient reason.”[22] There cannot be something at one point when there was nothing before.[23]

Why does anything and everything exist? The universe demands a transcendent cause to the universe. Leibniz argues from the principle of sufficient reason that “If there is a reality in essences or possibilities or rather in eternal truths, this reality must needs be founded in something existing and actual, and consequently in the existence of the necessary Being, in whom essence involves existence, or in whom to be possible is to be actual. Thus God alone (or the necessary Being) has this prerogative that He must necessarily exist, if He is possible.”[24] In sum, Leibniz argues that God alone is the sufficient reason for all things in existence. Additionally, he suggests that God is a necessary Being whose existence and essence are only explainable in reference to Himself. “If someone holds a naturalistic worldview, then God can never factor into any of the answers to fundamental questions. If someone holds a Christian worldview, then God’s existence has an influence on the answer to every fundamental question.”[25]

END NOTES

[1] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: First Mariner Books, 2008), 319.

[2] Andrew Dickson White, in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, introduced the idea that Christianity and Science are mutually incompatible. That is, they are opposed to one another. However, this thesis has been

[3] Tim Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 31. See also, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Penguin Books, 2018).

[4] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 366.

[5] Keller, Making Sense of God, 31.

[6] Matthew Sokoloski, Developing a Defense: Christian Apologetics & the Existence of God (Parkersburg, WV: Warren Christian Apologetics Center, 2020), 18.

[7] David Hume’s argument against the supernatural has been highly influential. He says, (1) “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.” (2) “Firm and unalterable experience has established these laws.” (3) “A wise man proportions his belief in the evidence.” (4) “The proof against miracles…is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.” (An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. C.W. Hendel (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), 118-123.

[8] Taylor, A Secular Age, 26-29.

[9] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 21-22.

[10] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (W.W. Norton, 1986), 6.

[11] See John Lennox, Can Science Explain Everything? (The Good Book Company, 2019).

[12] Taylor, The Secular Age, 365.

[13] An example that is often appealed to is Sir Isaac Newton’s statements concerning the ongoing motion of the planets and the related origin of the motions in Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Ed. Alexandre Koyre and I. Bernard Cohen (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

[14] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 151.

[15] Patrick Nowell-Smith, “Miracles,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology. Ed. Anthony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 246. For a response to Nowell-Smith’s arguments see Norman L. Geisler’s “Miracles and the Modern Mind,” in In Defense of Miracles. Ed. R. Douglas Geivett and Gary R. Habermas (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997).

[16] Nowell-Smith, “Miracles,” 247.

[17] Nowell-Smith, “Miracles,” 248.

[18] Craig Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 692.

[19] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Nature and Grace,” in Leibniz Selections. Ed. P. Wiener (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 527.

[20] I would also like to add that I find it intellectually irresponsible on the part of most naturalists to claim that the answer to the origin of the universe remains unanswered within the realm of naturalism, yet it is abundantly clear that we can eliminate God as a viable option for the existence of the universe. Why is it evident that there is a cause to the universe but certainly true that God cannot be the most reasonable explanation for its cause?

[21] Science may explain why a thing is in a natural sense but not in an ethical sense. For example, science can explain that there is a universe and how the universe consists, but it cannot explain the purpose of the universe’s existence.

[22] Leibniz, “Nature and Grace,” 527.

[23] According to the law of thermodynamics, there must be a cause for the universe. The universe must have a cause; it could not have come into being without a sufficient cause. In his Five Ways for the essence and existence of God (Summa Theologica 1.2-3), Thomas Aquinas argues that since every effect demands a cause, the universe, as an effect, must have a cause. He suggests that God is the first cause, and Creation is the effect of that first cause. An alternative argument is offered by William Lane Craig called the “Kalam Cosmological” argument for the existence of God. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause. God is the Unmoved Mover who acts and creates. He is the first cause, and creation is the effect of that First cause (Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics. Wheaton IL: Crossway, 2008).

[24] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “The Argument from sufficient Reason.”

[25] Sokoloski, Developing a Defense, 27.