A person’s worldview is incredibly important. My definition of a “worldview” is how people answer for themselves the big questions of life like, “Why are we here?”, “What if anything happens after death?”, “How did this world come into being?”, and the like. If we have no understanding of these things then we simply plow forward with our existence without any idea if we are being wise or foolish? This is even more a problem if our worldview doesn’t reflect the truth.
So how do we know the answer to these questions? A prominent worldview held by many so-called intellectuals is materialism. Materialism is the view that the only things that are real are those that can be observed. This philosophy has some powerful things to say about you as a person. For instance, it says that you are really just a consequence of mindless physical processes. Your sense of being conscious, really of being a thinking person, are only the results of brain chemistry. Your life has no absolutely purpose. You really have no free will of any sort. Morality is just a social construct and not absolute. And when you die, you just decay. There is no existence for you after death, and all who have preceded you in death are gone. A materialist would appeal to the positive of having no God to answer to (or for that matter to help you). This is a lot of heavy and depressing things to accept about your existence, but they have the weight of proof and that is why they believe it, right?
Materialists love to present their view as proven fact. In fact, to be a materialist takes more faith than I have. Materialists can’t explain how life began or why anything began. They rely on evolution to explain the existence of all the complexity of life, but they must ignore the mathematical improbability of what they are proposing. They cover this with the mysterious so-called power of long periods of time. They look at the vast complexity of life and say it “has the appearance of design” only.
Materialists don’t have a satisfying answer for our consciousness. They can’t explain why some have out of body experiences. They speak of evolution as if it were a thinking and designing intelligence, which by definition it is not. They know their so-called proof is anecdotal, so to maintain their dominance of the academic world they threaten and demean all dissenters. Considering the bitterness of the material worldview, it is a lot to accept about your world based on such sketchy evidence.
If you have had your faith undercut by materialists in universities, in books or in other media, you need to be far more critical. It is easy to give in because these people are intelligent. But being intelligent and wise can be two very different things. Just as perception of the truth and the truth can be different.
Scientific method is excellent for knowing some things. It isn’t much help in answering questions that are a part of our worldview. Religious revelation could also be misleading. How much of it is merely the product of human imagination? For that matter, could even God lie to us? In the next two blog entries, I will offer some thoughts on these questions.
Giving Christ 