Book Review

Richard Abanes takes a thorough and critical look at Eckhart Tolle’s latest book, in his 2008 Bethany House book, A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller. It’s a study primarily aimed (through most of its length) toward Christian believers, drawing on Christians’ shared trust in the Bible as a trustworthy revelation from God. As such it could well be an invaluable resource for Christians who may find Tolle attractive, like Kelly at the 2:41 point in this YouTube video. Abanes draws 80 discrete statements out of Tolle’s A New Earth and painstakingly shows how they all fall short of truth.

The first chapter differs from the rest in comparing Tolle with Tolle, rather than Tolle with Scripture, providing a point of contact with those who do not adhere to biblical authority. For example, Tolle says, “every belief is an obstacle.” Abanes asks rather sensibly whether that itself is a belief. Later he quotes Tolle,

To be in alignment with what is means to be in a relationship of inner nonresistance with what happens. It means not to label it mentally as good or bad. . . . The Master responds to falsehood and truth, good news and bad news, in exactly the same way: [By merely saying,] “is that so?”

As spiritual as that may sound, Abanes shows that Tolle’s

[B]ooks and lectures are filled with judgments about what is good, bad, right, wrong, true, and false (for example, wars, exclusive religious claims, the witch hunts of Europe, materialism, sickness, addiction).

It is indeed an old deception, wrapped up in soothing spiritual language and propelled by Oprah’s powerful marketing. If you have questions about Tolle, or if you know of someone who thinks it may be a nice addition to Christianity, this short book may provide your best, most accessible set of trustworthy answers.

A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller by Richard Abanes. Bloomington, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2008. 173 pages plus endnotes. Amazon price US$9.59.

Holopupenko has uncovered a gem! It’s John Cleese on what Holopupenko has titled, Scientism - Refuge of Atheism and Other Foolish Ideas

See it at Reasoning Repaired

There’s a growing realization that materialism and the rational, empirical worldview that comes with it has reached its expiration date.

So says Daniel Pinchbeck, in a NY Times Magazine article entitled “The Final Days” by Benjamin Anastas. Pinchbeck wrote an “alternative-culture bestselle4,” 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl. He is part of a movement that looks to the Mayan calendar as an indicator that the world will come to an end—or some kind of major spiritual revolution—on December 21, 2012. Anastas also quotes Chet Snow, who “tracks the impending consciousness shift on his Mass Dreams Newsletter, organizes annual crop-circle and sacred-site tours, and gathers [people] for conferences devoted to ancient mysteries and the paranormal.” Snow says,

The pillars of our expectations about the future in the West have started to crumble. Religion, politics, economics–none of it is working any more. So when you hear about the ancient Maya and this changeover in 2012 involving solar cycles and astronomical events, you say, ‘Huh, maybe I need to connect with that.’

We certainly need to connect with something. The Mayan calendar is hardly likely to be it, but Pinchbeck is right about one thing: materialist philosophy isn’t it either.

I’m about to crack open the book A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller by Richard Abanes. I already know Tolle has run afoul of the most basic reality of our relationship with God, which is that there is one God and we are not him. There is deadly spiritual danger in that error. Yet there’s also something below the surface there that I can appreciate. It’s his rejection of cold stone materialism; his refusal to accept that physical reality is all there is. In that much, at least Tolle is on the right track.

The Renaissance/Rock band Blackmore’s Night sings of what materialism has cost is, in “World of Stone:”

“Once a world of glittering hope
This world is not the world we knew
The only light left to shine
Is between me and you

“On our own In a World of Stone
We are not alone

“I had once believed in angels
They were everywhere I looked
A gentle hand guiding me
To give more than I took

“But I have died a thousand times
Watching all these angels fall
Their lonely eyes haunt me still
We will avenge them all

“On our own In a World of Stone
We are not alone”

To believe that secular materialists (represented by Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Lewontin, Provine, and the like) is to consider our world has become one of stone. The angels have fallen, not as Lucifer fell but as snowflakes fall and die in a lake. They’re gone. Scientistic naturalism has driven out the spiritual, and for this we have died a thousand times. I think this is indeed where the roots of Western New Age religion lie. With the angels’ lonely eyes haunting us, many are willing to avenge their deaths by slaying materialism and even rationality, choosing to rely on Mayan calendars instead.

This is not a necessary war. There is a better way than Tolle’s out of a soulless universe, though I can understand his appeal to those who do not know that.

Part of the beauty of Christianity is that it offers the best of both worlds. Spirituality and rationality coexist, for there really is a God and a spiritual world, and God, the Logos (the Word, John 1:1), is also the author of rationality. There is a most interesting ambiguity in Romans 12:1: our devotion to God can be translated either as a spiritual or as a reasonable act of worship. Both meanings exist in the original Greek word, and both apply.

New Age philosophy is a search on the wrong path, fatally aimed toward considering humans equal with God; yet it is also partly based in a search for the right thing: for a sense of spirituality, of connection to the Source. The author of this spiritual yearning is God himself, who created us in his image for relationship with him. This is, in Blackmore’s Night’s words, “the world we knew,” or at least the one we deeply sense is right for us.

This post is adapted from one originally published July 4, 2007.

There is someone who in the past has commented on this blog, but in more recent private email correspondence said to me, “You’ve succeeded in making me angry, congratulations.” From that auspicious start, that email went on to say that what I had written on a certain post was an “abomination…. BS [repeated twice]…. malicious lie and pure slander…. ”

I have excluded this person from commenting, based on clear guidelines given in the discussion policies, linked from just above the comment box. The response I just now received by email was,

I did not realize that [email] would exclude me from posting to a supposedly open discussion board!

Suit yourself. Don’t be upset if I convey an unfavorable opinion of you to other people.

This is not an unrestricted discussion board, and has never been represented as such. I clarified the spirit of the discussion policies here not long ago. Free-flowing disagreement has characterized this blog since the start, but only within limits of civil discourse. Angry private emails may certainly affect who I want to be in dialogue with, even if they’re sent outside the channels of the blog discussion, just as having someone ream me out at work would affect whether I wanted to sit and have coffee with them afterward.

If the person complains as s/he has threatened, and tells the truth, well, I know that’s what happens when you blog, and that’s just life; so one level I’ll have to say that’s fine. Untrue or unsupportable accusations, on the other hand, are not wise for any person to make in print, on the Internet, or in any public venue. I’m not expecting that sort of thing, but I thought I needed to add that.

Update 9/27/08, 9:30 pm. This post was originally published after 10:00 pm on Sept. 24, but I prefer not to leave it at the top of the page where it would be the first thing one sees, so I changed the time-stamp on it.

At the core of Christianity—at the core of everything—there is God, uniquely revealed in Jesus Christ. From the earth-bound, human perspective, Christianity is primarily about being in a right relationship with God through Christ. This is a many-faceted relationship involving reconciliation with God, experiencing his forgiveness and intimate love, learning his character and living consistently with his ways, studying his works, reflecting his creativity through our own expressiveness, and more.

Wrapped around in all of this is worship.

I suspect that’s a concept that seems foreign, even a little weird, to non-Christian readers. (It’s hard enough for us believers to grasp!) If I could present a good non-religious analogue to worship it would help, but I’m not sure there is one, especially in egalitarian America. The closest parallel I can think of is the historic regard with which kings and queens have been treated by their subjects, but even with that there are problems. First, among American readers there is the instant gut reaction, “But all men are created equal!” (Women too, but I was quoting the Declaration of Independence.) We can’t bring ourselves to believe it’s right to bow the knee to another person. Second, in spite of differences in station, it’s true: we are all of equal worth, so it really isn’t right to bow before another.

So then who is God that we should bow the knee to him? Is he any different? The question seems ludicrous on its face, yet we’ve gotten it wrong. It was the quest to be like God, to be independent of him, that was the downfall of the first humans (Genesis 3; especially Genesis 3:5; see also Ezekiel 28:1-19, which most commentators believe also refers to the fall of Lucifer). It’s a mistake that has been at the core of all our problems since then. The same desire for independence from God runs rampant still.

True worship begins in seeing God for who he is, and ourselves for who we are: the unfathomable distance between Creator and created, Infinite and small, Holy and sinful, Self-existent and contingent (we derive all that we are from him, while he is who he is necessarily and of himself). Worship in other words is a natural response to seeing the Supernatural, recognizing its infinite and personal reality.

It is moreover a love response to a loving God, who gave himself for us so that we could be brought near to him. As we read in Colossians 1:13-14:

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

To worship is to take a stance of submission, of yieldedness to God. A professor I had in college, himself an atheist, related something an Episcopal priest had said to him. It was a cute yet very appropriate twist on a familiar phrase: You worship God your way, and I’ll worship him his. For how could anyone say, “I’ll worship God my way,” and be thinking of anything remotely like real worship? It would be like saying, “God, I acknowledge your great majesty and supremacy, how marvelous and loving and awesome you are; and yet if you don’t mind, sire, I’ll decide for myself how I think I ought to follow you, because I think I can figure you out for myself..”

I’m not saying Christians have it all figured out how to worship God in the way that pleases him most. What I’m saying is that this is our goal, our quest, our intention. We believe God knows himself truly and has revealed himself truly, and that to some extent we can truly know him and grow in that knowledge. We seek to understand God for who he is, not for who we may think him to be. We know that such understanding is given to us not through our wisdom but by his grace.

Worship, then, is based in our relationship with God and in experiential knowledge of who he is. Churches often speak of having a “worship time,” meaning a time of singing and praying together. That’s fine as long as we don’t misunderstand: true worship is expressed through the whole life. We practice it through the gladness of song, yes, but also through the bodily expressions of submission (one word for worship in the Bible means literally “to bend the knee”), the intimacy of prayer, the view we have of God in fellow believers, and the regular disciplines of seeking to know him better and follow him more fully.

Back to the core again, then: God is at the center. Worship is about recognizing that reality, and expressing it through all that we are and all we do.

I’m still thinking about Bradley Monton’s questions, linked from here, about Christians not living up to our beliefs. His observations certainly call for a prophetic response: Christians, wake up! It makes a difference how we live! There is more to it than that, though.

Our inconstancy of practice raises two questions: what does it signify regarding the truth of Christianity (the apologetic question), and what can we do about it (the pastoral question)?

This being a blog and not a book, I can’t answer either of those fully, or even pretend to try. I’m going to suggest just three general areas for us to think about:

• Beliefs
• Habits
• Focus

Beliefs
Not long ago I heard someone praying, “Lord, please help me just live according to what I believe.” I almost interrupted to disagree, but that is not something one often does in a prayer meeting, so I held my peace. (I’m still not sure I shouldn’t have spoken up.) What I was thinking of saying was, “That is the most unnecessary prayer you could pray. You do live according to what you believe!”

I know what she had in mind, and sure, it was commendable. She recognized she wasn’t being consistent in living in according to the truth of the Gospel, and she was asking God for help with that. Understood that way it was a perfectly appropriate prayer.

But on another level, to pray to live according to what one believes is to misunderstand our problem. Nobody’s beliefs line up as a perfectly coherent system. That explains a lot about why our practices aren’t perfectly consistent. I’ll take myself as an example. I’m firmly convinced that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the true source of love, the ultimate guide to good, the foundation of wisdom; yet still at times I catch myself also believing I’ll be happier (at least for the moment) if I do something outside of his good wisdom. Does that make sense? Of course not! Not everything I do makes sense. And although I can see the problem there, I’m not at a point where I have overcome it.

Jennifer at Diary of a Former Atheist sees it too, I think:

Because I’m so entrenched in my role as organizer and leader, whenever I think of setting aside the checklists and the calendar and just prayerfully letting God guide me, I have this absurd gut-reaction thought that’s something along the lines of, “What if God screws it up?”

Absurd, maybe, but also quite understandable in light of being human.

This is a matter for personal and spiritual growth. So how do we go about this? Here’s one way: by examining our own beliefs and challenging them regularly. Some of that we must do on our own, but much of it we cannot do on our own. We need quiet times of prayer, study, reflection, especially with journaling, to understand ourselves. We also need others to help us understand ourselves, to see us and reflect back to us in ways we can’t do for ourselves. In humility, and as fellow learners, we can also do the same for others.

For example: “When you spoke sharply to that person just now, what were you believing about them, and about your relationship with them?” That’s a simple example. More to the core: “You seem anxious about your 401(k) today—what are you believing about God’s provision?”

Habits
Some things, though, we do with hardly any reference to beliefs about them. Beliefs in the cognitive sense are not the full story. We need to practice what we believe; and I mean “practice” in a certain specific sense here. I was a music major as an undergrad. My weaknesses as a trombonist were not cognitive. Non-musicians won’t necessarily understand this, but my weaknesses weren’t necessarily even a matter of skill. What my teachers drilled me on the most was learning to breathe and learning to relax. Look, I was born with those skills! But I had to practice—a lot—to apply them properly in the specific context of blowing a horn.

Writers like Dallas Willard advise us to practice spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, study, and so on. As a musician, practicing was its own reward: I really loved playing trombone (I won’t go into why I later set it aside), even doing drills like long tones, scales, and the like. But much of it was doing something I could do directly, for the sake of indirectly developing the ability to do something I could not do directly.

Did that make sense? I’ll illustrate. For trombones, music in the key of B major can be very difficult, especially if the tempo is fast and the rhythm complicated. To tackle that directly would be pretty overwhelming. Musicians often take a sort of indirect approach instead. In this case, it would be to practice the B major scale until I had it down cold. Then most of the notes would be drilled into me solidly enough that I wouldn’t need to think about what key I was playing in, and I could concentrate on the music’s other challenges. Playing the scales would be an indirect approach to learning music that would be very difficult to approach directly.

In the same way, I won’t love my enemy as Jesus said to do until I’ve practiced loving someone who is just different from me. We have to grow in these things, starting with what we can approach more directly, and we’ll gain skills that will help us with other spiritual practices.

Addictions may be considered under the category of habits, though, with internal reward and punishment structures dug very deep, requiring more than just disciplines to overcome them. I am not prepared to say more about that now, beyond that simply acknowledging the problem.

Focus
It’s one thing to be fully convinced there is a spiritual dimension to reality; it’s another thing to keep aware of all that means. Psychologists speak of salience, referring to what is most present to our conscious awareness, and most likely to influence our behavior. It takes time and focused attention (we’re talking spiritual disciplines again) to stay in touch with all that is real. Prayer, worshiping with other believers, studying God’s word, hearing and reading about God’s work in the world—all of these will help keep God’s reality more salient before us. Without that, we will indeed revert to living as if physical reality were all there is.

The Work of the Holy Spirit
Our beliefs, habits, and focus are all spiritual issues, for which God supplies us equipping and direction through the Holy Spirit. I would be remiss not to include that as a reminder here, even if space does not allow me to expand on it. We depend on God’s work for all of our growth.

The Apologetic Perspective
What do our inconsistent practices say about us and about the faith? They show that we’re human, we have habits, we are not perfectly consistent creatures, we’re influenced by what’s most present to our awareness. They show that we need God and his grace. All of this is entirely consistent with what Scripture says about us.

What do our practices say to others about the truth of the faith? I think John 13:35 is quite clear, as is John 17:20-21. Our message is a lot more convincing when delivered with true Christian character behind it. We have to give ourselves grace for our failures, but we can never stop striving for growth.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

[Link: Look Who's Irrational Now - WSJ.com]

Further:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.

and…

Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn’t.

There are a lot of irrational, unsupported beliefs out there even among educated persons. A long time ago I started saying that certain skeptics’ claims could and should be tested sociologically. For example, it’s been said that belief in religion or Intelligent Design will interfere with scientific curiosity. That’s a theoretical claim of the sort that can be tested sociologically. I don’t know if it ever has. Richard Dawkins’s belief that teaching religion is child abuse can also be checked with the empirical data, and we already know the answer. HIs position on that is thoroughly unscientific. Irrational, even, one might fairly say.

Atheists like Dawkins and Harris have been saying that Christians are less rational than non-believers. I had not thought to call for an empirical study on that, but here it is.

See also Baylor University’s information from the press conference on release of this study, including this:

“We are confident in saying we have a national random sample not skewed in any way and that represents a good cross section of the country,” said Dr. Carson Mencken, professor of sociology and research director for the institute.

I can’t wait to see what certain self-proclaimed bastions of scientific objectivity (Skeptic magazine, for example) will do with this information. My copy of the 200-page report is on the way here; in the meantime I invite your comments. (Please read at least one of the linked articles on the current Baylor report first.)

Hat Tip to Stand to Reason

Bradley Monton has answered my response to his earlier blog entry, including this:

For these people, their behavior is deeply at odds with their professed beliefs, and it makes me wonder if they really believe what they say they believe.

He is especially on the mark when he points to the pattern of Christians’ lives:

But it’s the systematic behavior that concerns me — the systematic lack of evangelism in many Christians’ lives, the systematic acting as if God is not watching and judging their every behavior, the systematic living as if life is not spiritually sacred.

He’s right. I think that’s all I have to say.

For now, that is. I’ve already written some brief thoughts on how this disconnect between belief and action comes about, and what we can do about it. I think, though, that if I wrote that into this post it would weaken the main point, which is this: when a thoughtful, friendly (shall I say?) critic speaks to us like this, we need to pay attention. We need to let it bother us.

Because far more than we would want this to be the case…. he’s right.

Do people really believe in God? That’s the question Bradley Monton asked in a blog entry today. He’s a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, an atheist, and yet somewhat sympathetic toward Intelligent Design. He begins today’s article,

I’ve recently read a couple different pieces arguing that belief in God is less common that it superficially appears — many people who profess belief in God don’t really believe.

The pieces he’s referring to are one by George Rey, who thinks “people who say they believe in God are deceiving themselves,” and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. He quotes Dennett,

some people who consider themselves believers actually just believe in the concept of God. … They … think that their concept of God is so much better than the other concepts of God that they should devote themselves to spreading the Word. But they don’t believe in God in the strong sense. (p. 216)

Of course I’m excerpting from Mr. Monton’s excerpts; I’m counting on you reading his own article to get the full sense of how he represents these two writers. Ultimately he doesn’t agree with either of them.

It leads me to wonder just what they have in mind by “believe.” In the excellent book edited by Ravi Zacharias, Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend, Michael Ramsden writes (p. 138-139),

This conviction is often expressed most politely in the following form: “Michael, I’m so happy that you’re a Christian, and I wish I could believe what you believe, but I can’t.” In my experience, what most people mean by this is: “Michael, I am so happy that you are so happy. There seems to be a joy and completeness in your life that I find attractive. But the reason you are happy is because you are a Christian. In other words, you believe in things that are not true or real.” (Now, what do you call people who believe in things that are not there? The answer is, lunatics.) So what they are saying is, “Michael, you are actually insane. But the main thing is that you are happy and insane. And I am happy that you are happy. As a matter of fact, I’m so desperate to be happy, that I too would embrace insanity just to join you, but I can’t do it. I’ve thought about it, but I just can’t.”

Ramsden’s point here is that faith is not some kind of wishful thinking. To believe in Christ is actually to consider that the message of Christ is really true, that there really is a God, and that Jesus Christ really is his risen Son. It is, moreover (for those who are inclined to look deeply into these matters) to consider it true after having considered the matter from the perspective of evidences and reason in the face of multiple challenges.

It is, in one sense, to consider it the right answer to the question, what is ultimate reality? It is much, much more than this besides. Belief is not merely about considering something the right answer; it is about entering into a trust relationship with a living Person, and arranging one’s life accordingly. Nevertheless it is also not less than what one considers actually to be the right answer to that question.

So the question, “do people really believe in God?” resolves in part to, “do people really, having considered the question as carefully as their abilities permit them to, consider it true that God exists?” The answer of course is yes.

Following a brief discussion on that, Monton moves on to another form of the question that I find very intriguing, because it touches on belief beyond the “right answer” level:

That said, there are real issues about how to reconcile people’s behavior with their professed belief in God, issues that I’ve thought about long before reading Rey and Dennett. For example, people who say they fully believe in God, and fully believe that saved people are going to heaven, are nevertheless really sad when a loved one dies. Why? These theists should believe that the loved one, assuming the loved one is saved too, is in a much better place than Earth. The theists should be happy that the loved one is in a better place — just as I would be happy if my loved one got to go on an amazing vacation.

He could have stopped after just that first clause. How can we Christians reconcile our behavior with our professed belief in God? Are we as loving, as just, as devoted to truth, as worshipful toward God, as humble as our beliefs call for us to be? Of course not. We’re all on a path, at different places and moving at different speeds, and often our behavior is at odds with our beliefs. You could hardly ask for a better short explanation of our problem and the solution than what’s in 1 John 1:8-10 through 1 John 2:1-2:*

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

The truth is, we mess up. Our one hope is the loving grace of God through Jesus Christ.

But what about grieving for the departed? I don’t know how much experience Mr. Monton has with various grieving families. Those with more experience than I say they do see a difference between believers and non-believers, broadly speaking (certainly there are exceptions). The difference is not so much in the degree of sadness but in the degree of hope. My mother died two years ago. I still get a heart-stab thinking about it. It was hard to say good-bye, and it’s still hard. But it’s not a sadness of desperation, and in fact there is joy in it. I am very, very glad for Mom—even though I miss her.

In a few short years my son and daughter will (presumably) be going off to college. I’ll be very happy for them, very pleased and proud—and I’m quite sure I’ll blubber like an idiot, because I know I’ll miss them. That’s the kind of sadness true believers feel when other true believers go to be with the Lord. We’re sad because we miss them. Jesus himself wept when Lazarus died (John 11:28-37, including the shortest verse in the Bible).

So the question of Christian grieving is not so hard to answer after all. Had Monton just stopped after that one clause, “how to reconcile people’s behavior with their professed belief in God,” he would have had his finger pointed at the really tough problem, the one that continually concerns me more than all the logical questions that have ever been thrown at me.

*I’ve split up that reference for the sake of link software that can’t understand it written out as one.

I’m team-teaching Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator at church along with a college biology instructor and an engineer, each of us taking the chapters relating to our own areas of specialty. Chapter Two asks, “Is science—especially evolutionary science—opposed to God? Do we really need God if we can explain the world through science?”

Two-Part Question

Evidences in Nature

There are two parts to the answer to this question. One of them has to do with the actual evidence of science: what do we see in nature, and what’s the best way to interpret it? The definition of Intelligent Design (ID) is this: “ID holds that there are features of nature that are best explained as the product of an intelligent cause.” You’ll see other definitions of ID from opponents or the popular press, for example:

• “ID is creationism dressed up to look as if was science,” or
• “ID is the theory that nature is too complex to have come about by evolution so it must have come from God,” or
• “ID is the God-of-the-gaps, the theory that what we don’t yet understand about evolution must have been God’s doing.”

None of those is correct; all of them are distortions. The class will cover this more later, or you can read more here now.

Philosophical Mindset

There is evidence, and there is interpretation. The second part of the answer to our question has to do with the mindset by which you interpret evidence. People on both sides of the debate are looking at the same “stuff” in nature but they give very different explanations. Why?

Different interpretations are nothing new in science, so there could be a lot of reasons why they happen here. I’m going to focus on one here that’s really quite unique to the Intelligent Design controversy. Lee Strobel uses two very crucial words in Chapter Two without defining them. Actually he does come back to them in Chapter Four, but they are so crucial to this whole issue, I don’t think we ought to wait that long.

These words are “naturalist” (page 22) and “materialist” (page 23 and 25). This is not about an outdoorsman/naturalist like Euell Gibbons, and this materialism is not about trying to satisfy yourself by building up material goods. They have a different meaning in this case. They’re practically synonymous, so we’re going to treat them that way here, and I’ll stick with the word naturalism to cover both of them.* Naturalism is the belief that nothing exists except for matter and energy, and their interactions according to law and chance. That’s the short version. Unpacked it means:

• The cosmos consists of matter and energy (physicists will actually tell you the two are two sides of the same coin). Nothing else exists. Period.
• Everything that happens is caused either by the necessity that we call natural law, or (on a subatomic scale only) by chance.

What does that leave out? God, or in fact any kind of spiritual reality at all. Naturalism is atheistic.

Where Does This Mindset Come From?

Many evolutionary scientists (not all, but many) are naturalists in this sense. Where do they get it from? I’ll speak to some of the more common answers here.

From Science?

Richard Dawkins is a great example of this way of thinking. In a marvelous book (it really is a good read) called The Blind Watchmaker, he sets out to show Why the Evidence of Evolution Proves a Universe Without Design (that’s the book’s subtitle, in fact). He says that since we can (at least in principle) explain all of reality without God, there is no God. Based on that early book of his, it appears that he had come to a scientific conclusion that there is no God. There are only two problems. One is that the evidence he presented is still very controversial, as you’ll see in weeks to come. The other is that no matter what the scientific evidence shows, it can’t show that there’s no God.

Science can investigate physical reality. Can it investigate spiritual reality? No. It’s not in science’s area of competence. Science is about what you can count, weigh, measure, observe with the five senses or with instruments, experiment on, control, repeat, etc. God doesn’t fit any of those categories. “We looked with all of our science and we didn’t find God” is about as relevant as, “We looked all over Australia and we never found Kentucky.”

Spiritual Sources

Naturalism is a belief about spiritual reality, and as such it has spiritual roots: See 1 Corinthians 2:14-15; 2 Corinthians 4:1-6.

For Science?

Some people express a naturalistic attitude for the sake of science. The classic statement is Richard Lewontin’s, from a book review (emphasis added by me):

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

The horrific fear he states here is that “the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.” If there is a God who works in the world, it’s all going to go haywire, science becomes worthless, everything we thought we knew turns out to be wrong, in fact we no longer have any way of learning anything about the world because science can’t be trusted any longer!

We have to take this seriously. There’s a great cartoon that shows how serious the problem is: “And then a miracle occurs.” Clearly this is not science, it’s not responsible, and it’s not acceptable. It’s wrong. It’s bad. Even Christians can agree this is foolish. Physicist Gregory Benford, quoted in a book edited by Ravi Zacharias called Beyond Opinion (page 166) said,

One can imagine a universe in which laws are not truly law-full. Talk of miracles does just this, invoking God to make things work. Physics aims to find the laws instead.

God and Science: Not Enemies

Which is exactly what physics ought to do. Is God so erratic, though? Not at all. We can take this right back to the heart of God. These are not things we made up just so he won’t be an embarrassment to science! These are core attributes of God we relied on long before anybody gave a moment’s thought to what makes science work. God wants to communicate with us, he does it through miracles, he wants us to know him, he wants us to reflect his own image, and it is precisely for those reasons that we know he will let nature run its course

• God wants us to know him. You cannot really get to know someone whose character and behavior are erratic.
• God created us in his image; he wants us to be responsible for what we do in the world. That means he had to design the world to be predictable, so that we could be confident that if we did x, we could count on y being the result. If I brush my teeth they will be cleaner and healthier. If doing x could result in some random set of outcomes a, b, c, … with no predictable connection to x, then how could we be responsible for the results of our actions? One day I brush my teeth and my neighbor is healed of cancer, the next day I brush my teeth and a jet plane crashes, the next day a beagle mutates into a basset hound: how am I ever going to know what brushing my teeth is going to do? And how can I be a responsible person in the world if I can’t find a way to figure out what I’m causing? So God has this reason also to make cause-effect relationships very consistent and regular.
• God wants to communicate with us. In biblical history much of his revelation was through miracles, like the virgin birth or Christ’s resurrection. What if there were no such thing as natural law and regularity, though? What if, say, one in a million births or so were to virgins, kind of on a random basis? What if God more or less on a whim raised people from the dead, once a decade in every country of the world? What would have happened to his communication through Christ? The power of God’s communication through miracles absolutely depends on their being out of the ordinary—way out of the ordinary.
• And God wants us to understand some of what kind of a God he is through nature (Romans 1:19-20; Psalm 19:1-6.

So there’s no reason whatever to think that having a God who runs the world would be the death of science.

Committed Naturalists (Atheists)

Still, I guarantee you that many evolutionary scientists choose to believe in evolution at least partly because it takes God out of the equation forever. Not all, but many. In their case it is a spiritual as well as a scientific issue. Atheists must be evolutionists: If you are committed to atheism, then you are committed to evolution, and no evidence that could ever be brought before you could ever make the slightest difference, because there isn’t any other idea on the table that could even begin to explain where we all came from. If you choose atheism, you have to choose evolution, regardless of the evidence. It’s your only option.

If you choose to believe in God, you’re not so constrained. There are Christian evolutionists. There are Christian young-earth creationists who take a literal 6-day interpretation of Genesis. There are Christians who take Genesis to mean what it says, but who don’t think it actually says a literal 6-day interpretation is necessary.

If you ever hear someone say that being a Christian makes you closed-minded, remind them of this:

• Naturalists must be evolutionists, regardless of the evidence
• Christians can believe in God-directed evolution, young-earth creationism, or old-earth creation, and they can follow the evidence where it leads.
• Which of these is the more closed-minded?

Assumptions or Proof?

This brings us back around to the point of this whole lesson. Is science opposed to God? Yes and no. There is a certain kind of scientist who is opposed to God: the scientist who takes up the position of naturalism, who assumes that nature is the whole show, that science is the one way to learn about reality. Science itself, rightly understood, doesn’t say that at all. There’s plenty of room in science to look at the evidence and draw an open-minded conclusion. When you hear, “science proves there’s no God,” or “science proves God had nothing to do with creation,” or anything of the sort, what they’re really saying is, “my version of science, which assumes there is no God, says there is no God.” Assumptions are not proof.

*There are different accounts of how naturalism and materialism differ. One such account says that materialism is about what the universe is made of (just matter and energy, two sides of the same coin), while naturalism is the belief that everything that happens can (in principle) be explained by natural causes and laws.