• As you know (maybe too well), I’m always intrigued by arguments from non-believers against the dominant secular worldview. I am more at ease as an evangelist when I know that views opposed to Scripture are seriously flawed, even from the perspective of the non-believer. I find such arguments to be useful tools. They enable me to defend the faith from a posture of peace, gentleness and composure, since even from a purely rationalist perspective (typically the perspective of the person to whom I’m speaking) I know I’m on solid ground. My hope is not to convert people through argument, but to open a door in their hearts and minds that the Lord may use when and how he sees fit.
• So I’ll try to summarize a question asked by Tom Nagel in his wonderful little book, Mind and Cosmos. Nagel is a professor at NYU, and arguably the brightest living philosopher in America at the moment. His question is: can all that we think of as real be accounted for by the physical sciences, extended to include biology (p.13)?
• Think of it this way. You believe that God, a purely spiritual being, hears you when you cry out to him in the night, that your prayers and pleas can take shape wordlessly in your mind, that in those prayers you may speak on behalf of people you love, and the love that you feel is as real as anything in this world. Nagel doesn’t (yet) believe in God, but he does concede that many people have thought lives like this. And his point is that the physical sciences are almost useless in describing what amount to our most deeply felt experiences and convictions.
• In other words, the materialist worldview (physical sciences) paired with evolution (biology) “reduce the true extent of reality” to assumptions “not rich enough” to account for the world that we know (p.14). As one writer said, materialism describes a world that none of us actually lives in. That writer also said (I’m paraphrasing), if my daughter is just a bundle of neurons, why do I feel as though I would lay down my life for her? Evolutionists have tried to answer these questions, but that’s Nagel’s point; the answers are not rich enough to account for the richness of the life we all know.
• You may not always notice this, but Scripture does just the opposite of Materialism. That is, it weaves together material and spiritual reality so that both worlds co-exist in our one. Here’s Isa 45:18 “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!). “I am the Lord, and there is no other.” It’s because of this truth Isaiah is depicting that we can live on earth while our citizenship is in heaven (Php 3:20), that we are at once physical and spiritual beings who live not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit (Rom 8:5ff). And that’s a system that is rich enough to account for the lives we are actually living.