Discernment Part 16    Other Religions pt.6  Practical Atheism       2-3-2002

We have looked at all the major world religions that you would find listed in an encyclopedia, but we still have one left – and it’s the dominant religion is the US.  

Practical Atheism
Practical Atheism is any religious view that results in people living and thinking as if there were no God.  Whether or not they claim to believe in God, the existence of God has no significant impact on their thoughts or actions.

This includes atheists, agnostics, as well as countless millions of religious people – anyone who goes through life making decisions without reference to what God wants, and without reference to any concern about divine justice.

The most basic point at which the practical atheist departs from the essentials of the faith is in failing to believe God is active in human affairs.

There are even thousands of people who consider themselves evangelical Christians who are really practical atheists. 

I believe the primary driving force behind most, modern practical atheism is Scientism & Evolutionism.  These two philosophies have had the largest negative effect on Christianity of any false religion.

Scientism

Scientism is the driving force behind Naturalism, Empiricism, Logical Positivism, Philosophical materialism, & Objectivism.

Let’s first define all those terms:

Scientism:
In it’s mild form, scientism is the view that the scientific method (observation, testing, etc.) should be applied to any subject matter.

In it’s more extreme form, Scientism is the view that only scientific claims are meaningful.

Logical Positivism:
Positivism holds that a statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proved true or false by means of experience. 

Naturalism: 
Naturalism holds that everything can be explained mechanistically in terms of natural (as opposed to supernatural) causes. The universe is a vast machine, devoid of general purpose.

Pantheism is really naturalistic.  The world is God.

Naturalism neither denies nor affirms the existence of God, it just makes God an unnecessary hypothesis and essentially superfluous to the pursuit of knowledge.

Philosophical Materialism:
Materialism is the view that only matter exists.  There is no immaterial world.  Even your thoughts and emotions can be explained as mere chemical & electrical movements in the brain and nothing else.  

Objectivism:
Objectivism is the philosophical system of Ayn Rand. 

It’s based on the idea that truth is objective, not subjective.

When you hear the terms “subjective” and “objective” in philosophy, the idea is that you are always the subject, and things outside of you are objects.

If a table has the properties of wood, that is an objective reality.  It has those properties regardless of how I think or feel about, am aware of it or not, or believe it.

Subjective realities are what take place inside me.  Whether or not I like wood tables, etc.

The basic tenets of Objectivism:
1.	Reality exists as an objective absolute, independent of man's feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. 
2.	Reason is man's only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival. 
3.	That which makes something virtuous is whether it is conducive to survival.  Survival is the highest good. 
4.	Each person is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life. 
5.	Objectivism also promotes a libertarian view of economics.   

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Very few people actually identify themselves with these labels.  These are philosophies that pervade every nook and cranny of our education system and the mass media, and as a result parts & pieces of these philosophies have seeped into most American’s belief system at many points.

You won’t meet a lot of people who tell you, “I’m into Logical Positivism.”  But 90% of the time, when you bump into some secular person, the reason he is secular is because he is highly influenced by some combination of these ideas.

In their purist forms, most of these philosophies are self-contradictory.

For example, we would agree with the first two points of objectivism, but then the next two go on to completely violate the first two.

Survival is the highest good?  How can you objectively prove that?  You can’t.  It’s totally subjective.  It arose from Ayn Rand’s inner feelings.  

It’s the same with the next point.  The objectivist believes man must exist for his own sake without any self-sacrifice, and he believes that simply because he wants it to be true.  But he cannot point to any objective proof that it is objective truth.

Unless there is a God who has declared something to be good or bad, there is no objective way to show anything to be good or bad, beautiful or ugly, virtuous or evil, right or wrong.

Materialism
The philosophical believe that only matter exists is a belief that obviously exists.  And that idea is not made out of matter.  So by merely suggesting the idea, you have proved it wrong.

Naturalism
Everything is just a mechanistic process.  But what mechanistic process causes a person to become a naturalist instead of a theist?

Logical Positivism
A statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proved true or false by means of experience.  Is that a statement?  Yes.  Can it be proved true or false through experience?  No.

Therefore, according to the rules of positivism, the idea of positivism has no meaning.

Scientism
Only scientific claims are meaningful.  Is that statement a scientific claim?  No.  Therefore if it is true, it’s not meaningful.  

So scientism, by its own rules, is either false or meaningless.

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But few people hold these ideas in their pure form.  They are just influences that form the backdrop of most people’s subconscious thinking.

There is a sense that imperial, physical, verifiable, observable, testable things are the surest realities.  And spiritual realities either 
•	don’t exist, 
•	exist but have no meaning or significance, or
•	can’t be known with any certainty.

Either way, the result is practical atheism.

So the goal of this class is not to debunk the pure forms of these philosophies.  The goal this morning is to get us started thinking about at which points we should be skeptical of scientists’ claims, and to point out other valid methods for verifying truth other than science.

Skepticism 
Our culture suffers from blind faith in scientists.  There is an over-confidence in what scientists say.

There needs to be some skepticism in science.  How much do we know for sure from science?  Everything?  If not, where are the limits?  At what points of the pursuit of knowledge does our scientific information stop?

We must keep in mind that the issue isn’t really science, but scientists.  

As a Christian, people will try to belittle you by saying you are anti-science, or that science proves you wrong.  Whenever that happens, be sure to correct that error by pointing out that science doesn’t tell us anything.  Only scientists tell us things.

We can all agree that science is a wonderful tool that helps us discover or verify many things that are true, but it isn’t a magic tool that is somehow not subject to human error.

The truth is, just like professional athletes, doctors, philosophers, or theologians, scientists are also capable of making errors.

We know this for sure, because some scientists make claims that contradict those of other scientists.

So when a scientist makes a truth claim, the question isn’t whether science is correct.  Science is just a tool.  

The question should always be, “How much possibility for error is there in this claim?”

People tend to have an over-confidence in the conclusions of scientists, because they have an over-simplified view of science.

They think of science as looking at something in a microscope.  

Scientists tell us that matter is made up of tiny particles.  Anyone can go out and buy a microscope and look at some matter and see the tiny particles.  How can you argue with that?

When a scientific claim is as simple as that, it’s right for us to have a high level of confidence in it, because it doesn’t involve much opportunity for error.

But what people don’t seem to realize is many scientific theories involve enormous possibilities for error.

For example, whenever anyone, including a scientist, draws a conclusion from some data, there is the possibility of logical error.

There are many scientists who have a very poor command of logic.  

One example is a scientist by the name of Alfred Kinsey, who has had an enormous effect on our society.  He’s the one who scientifically “proved” that 10% of all people are homosexuals.

Based on the scientific studies of Kinsey, that 10% figure has been declared a fact by Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times just to name a few.  Numerous laws have been passed based on that figure.

Kinsey's method was to ask a bunch of men if they were homosexuals.  

But they way he got his sample was by soliciting volunteers.  At that time the famous psychologist, Abraham Maslow, suggested to Kinsey that by asking for volunteers, he would skew the results, because generally speaking people who willingly expose their sexual life are more prone to exhibitionism and other sexual deviations.  Kinsey ignored him (Abraham Maslow and James M. Sakoda, Volonteer-Error in the Kinsey Study, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, april 1952, pp. 259-62). 

Kinsey's sample ended up being comprised of 25% prison convicts.  A full 78% were somehow outside the norm of the general population including pediphiles and all kinds of social deviants.  

So if you ask a bunch of convicts how many have ever been involved in homosexual behavior, and 10% say they have, and then assume that represents the general population, that is an error in logic (since convicts may not represent the general population).

Scientists also make errors of fact.  

No human being has all the facts.  And if you draw conclusions about something while being misinformed about some pertinent facts, your conclusions may be in error. 

Ptolomy was a brilliant scientist, but didn’t have access to certain information, and so he convinced the people of his day that the earth was fixed and the sun revolved around it.  He wasn’t an idiot; he just lacked certain information.

Another example is Darwin, who built his theory based on the belief that a cell was an extremely basic, simplistic form of life that could easily come into existence by chance.

Darwin had no way of knowing what we know today – that the cell is complex beyond comprehension.  You can take a graduate level course in which the entire semester is an introduction to the cell.

Even if you ignore the incredible complexity of human cells and just look at the bluegreen algee cells, which evolutionists believe to be among the first cells that came into existence because they are so simple in comparison to other cells – Cells of bluegreen algee contain just a single molecule of DNA and they lack well-defined internal structures such as the nucleus.  Yet a bacterium of bluegreen algee can synthasize some 3000 to 6000 compounds at a rate of about 1,000,000 reactions per second.  

Science has not observed machines with that kind of efficiency organizing themselves spontaneously because a pond of slime gets hit by lightening.  

Had Darwin known some of the basic facts about cells, no doubt he would have made different assumptions.

So scientists are capable of making logical errors, factual errors, and they are also capable of making errors rooted out of bias.

Since scientists are human beings, they have biases.  Some scientists imagine themselves to be above that, but there is no reason to believe all of the rest of us human being are subject to normal biases and scientists are exempt.

In fact, you can demonstrate scientifically that scientists suffer from biases.  

Just like all of the rest of us, scientists really want some things to be true, and don’t want other things to be true.  

For example, if a scientist knows that if he rejects evolutionary theory, he will lose his prestigious position at his university, his writings and research will no longer be taken seriously, he will be mocked by his colleges, and, worst of all, it may put him in a position of having to be answerable to a Creator for his life – with all that motivation, it will be very, very hard for him to be honest with data that opposes evolutionary theory.

So contrary to popular opinion, while science itself is wonderful tool, scientists are subject to error.  They are not omniscient or even infallible, and their findings are not inerrant. 

So the question with any scientific conclusion isn’t “Is it scientific or unscientific?” but, “How much possibility for error is there in this theory?”

If it’s based on a tiny sample, there is a large possibility for error.

If there was a lot of pressure for the scientist to come up with that conclusion, or if it means a huge grant for him, there is a large possibility for error.

If there are lots of unknown factors involved, there is a large possibility for error.

I have always been fascinated with astronomy.  That is one subject that captivates my attention more than almost any other.  I love to read about galaxies, stars, pulsars, anti-matter, black holes, etc.

I read very few newspaper articles, but if there is one about a new discovery in outer space, I read every word.

So I love that realm of scientific study.  However, I tend to hold the things I read about outer space very lightly and tentatively, because there are so many unknowns involved.

For example, a huge amount of what we believe about the universe are things we have figured out based on the speed of light.  If it turned out the speed of light varied in ways we don’t know, all bets would be off on distances and speeds and sizes of everything.

Last year I clipped an AP article from the paper with the headline “Speed of light exceeds own limit.”

Scientists at the NEC institute sent pulses of light into a chamber full of cesium.  The pulse traveled 310 times the distance it would have had it been traveling through a vacuum.  

So light traveling through a chamber of cesium appears to travel at 310 times the speed of light.

So what if the light we see from other galaxies is passing through something that effects it the same way cesium would, or something else that effects it even more drastically?  

The farther away from earth you get, the less we know for sure, the greater the possibility of unknown factors, and therefore the greater the possibility of error in our theories.

When a scientist looks at a rock, and based on what he observes and what he knows about what happens to rocks he forms a theory about what has happened with that rock in the past 6 months, he may be on very solid footing.

There is some possibility for error, but it may very well be there are no errors – especially if there is no motive to arrive at one conclusion or another.

He can even test his theory over the next 6 months.

If he tries to draw a conclusion about 100 years ago from looking at that rock, there are many more unknowns, and much more possibility for error.  Still, he may have some historical information from 100 years ago that will help him verify his theory.

Make it 1000 years and you increase the possibility of error even more, etc.

Once you push something back more than 6000 before there is written history, then you have no way to test the accuracy of the theory, and it becomes so subject to error, that it’s questionable how useful it can be.

Other Avenues for finding truth

Science is useful for things that are observable.  But what about a car accident that happened 2 months ago, or someone’s emotional experience, or the war in Afghanistan?

For those kinds of things we rely on another source of learning truth.

This other source is very similar to science.

Science begins with observation.  The fundamental assumption of science is there is a real world out there, and we can gain information about that real world by means of our senses.  

Most of what scientists believe about the world comes not from experiments they have done themselves, but from things other scientists have observed and have written about.

Ideally, in order to verify something is true, you can reproduce it in a lab.  When that is possible, it gives us a high degree of confidence that it is true.

But not everything can be reproduced.  

For example, a man may get stuck by lightening and survive.  Scientists in the lab can shock people with the same amount of electricity and time after time the people die, and yet we still believe it is possible to survive a lightening strike.

It hasn’t been reproduced in a lab, and I have never seen it, yet I believe it happens.

My being convinced of that is based on the eyewitness testimony of many people.  So many people have seen it that I don’t doubt it happens.

One of the ways we know things that we haven’t observed is from the testimony of others.

That too is subject to error, but, as with scientific studies, the probability of error can be assessed and taken into consideration.

Every one of us, when we hear someone give an account of having seen the Lock Ness monster, make judgments about how reliable that person is.

We try to figure out the likelihood that he is lying, that he misinterpreted what he saw, that his eyes were playing tricks on him, etc.

Just as science is not a foolproof way of learning truth and yet a valid one, so eyewitness accounts are not a foolproof way of learning truth, and yet valid.

Think of how much of what you believe you believe based on what someone else told you.

99.9% of the scientific information you believe, you believe not because you witnessed the experiments yourself, but simply based on the eyewitness accounts of scientists.

You believe the vast majority of everything you are told.

If you come home and your wife says, “Little Jonny was jumping on the couch and knocked the lamp to the floor” you don’t conduct an investigation; you just accept it immediately as fact.

Unless there is a compelling reason to doubt someone, you generally believe what you are told.  When a police officer tells you a road is closed, you believe him.  When they guy at Taco Bell tells you your order comes to $15.83, you believe him.  When someone invites you to church and says “It starts at 9:30” you believe him.

You couldn’t live life if you didn’t assume people are telling the truth unless there is a compelling reason to doubt it.
 
So not only is science not the only way we learn or verify truth, but many times it’s not even the best way.

In some cases, eyewitness testimony is a better source of knowledge than science.

For example, suppose a top scientist exhumed the remains of a body, and applied all his scientific knowledge to the question of what caused his death.  

Since it was decomposed, all that was left was bone.  And suppose this scientist put a bone fragment under a microscope and found evidence that may be explained by the existence of some fatal disease.  He then develops a theory that the person died of that disease.

You may hear his argument, and assume that was probably the case.

Now suppose you discover that the body was that of Abraham Lincoln.  If that happened, would you change your view on how Lincoln died?

Why not?  Because we have a more accurate source of information – history.  We have eyewitness accounts of him getting shot and dying from his wounds.

So we wouldn’t accept the scientist’s theory.  Does that make us unscientific?  Not at all.  Scientists routinely reject theories of other scientists.  Just because a theory is based on scientific observations doesn’t mean the theory is correct, because there is a possibility of error in interpretation.

When there was a car accident, and the judge is trying to find out who was at fault, he could do a scientific analysis of the nature of the damage, calculate speed from skidmarks, analyze the dents and the strength of the metal, etc.  

But a much more reliable method is to just ask the 5 people who were standing there watching it what happened.

So unless there is a reason to doubt, eyewitness testimony is a very good source of information.

What constitutes a compelling reason to believe someone or not to believe someone?

That is a question of great concern, of course, for the law courts, and has been for thousands of years.

So it’s not surprise that there are people who are experts in that very question – the study of legal evidences (evidences admissible in a court of law).

There are basic principles that most of us use intuitively all the time when we listen to people.

For example, history is considered much more reliable when the writer seems unequivocally able to substantiate what he is saying.

Another example: “A truthful witness is artless and disdains effect.”

When a person is just telling you what happened, and some of what he says seems to favor the prosecution, and some seems to favor the defense, and he doesn’t really seem to be concerned with presenting what he is saying in a compelling, persuasive manner, that lends credibility to what he is saying.

When a witness says, “I saw someone leave the building.  I’m pretty sure it’s the defendant.  He looks just like him, except I thought the guy I saw was clean shaven (and the defendant has a beard)…” 

he is much more believable than the witness who says, “I swear that was the guy I saw.  He looks exactly the same.  I swear on my mother’s grave.  I would bet my life on it.  That jerk right there is the moron who was leaving the building that night…”

Those are just two of many principles used in evaluating someone’s credibility.  

We are very sophisticated in our ability to examine the truthfulness of a witness.  And the greater the number of witnesses to an event, the greater our ability to know exactly what happened.

Next week: 
In ages past, people attached unexplainable phenomena to the gods, because they had no other explanation.  Now we understand natural causes for some of those things.  Couldn’t that be the case with the things we point to as divine activity now?

Are we guilty of the “divine fallacy”?

What is the purpose of miracles, and should our response to them be?

Should we be skeptical of miracle reports?

How much evidence should we require?

What about the warnings not to be led astray by miracles performed by Satan?  How do we know which is which?