Foolish Philosophy

8/20/15                                     Roger                                  20’s  

After hundreds of in-depth outreach conversations, I have noticed definite trends among the variety of people I talk with.  For example, a recent conversation with a young man named Roger in a small town northern Minnesota coffee shop showed his beliefs to be typical of other 20-something white men I have talked with in Chicago hipster coffee shops.  Most are from a middle-class, denominational church backgrounds but had abandoned faith in favor of science when they left home, and are now attempting to use post-modern philosophy to fill the gaps that science hasn’t been able to fill.  Roger talked about his preferences of the certainty of science over the faith of religion, so I reminded him that the Bible points to a Creator God who has made science possible:  “Science is based on the assumption that there is order in the universe, that if we conduct experiments by changing only a few variables we can predict or control the outcome because of natural laws.  If there are laws, like the law of gravity or of cause and effect, then there must have been a Lawgiver, in the same way that when we look at a brick house we know there must have been a bricklayer.”  I had asked Roger some questions that can only be answered by revelation from God, such as Where did we come from? Where are we going?  What is our purpose here?  But rather than turn to faith in God’s revealed answers to these questions, Roger and others like him turn to postmodern philosophy, which believes in multiple other universes.  These “multiverses” are not physical locations but planes of existence with whole alternative sets of physical laws.  Places where 1 and 1 does not equal 2, where time does not occur in sequential order, or where something can be created from nothing.  They believe this is makes possible what science deems impossible. For example, I asked him if he believed the newspaper sitting on our table really existed.  “I think so based on my perceptions, but I can’t prove it” he said.  In this way people like Roger try to avoid accountability to God and His revealed truth as found in the Bible, and instead turn to the pseudoscience of postmodernism which claims to be able to answer the questions of faith with science – someday.  I think Paul described people like this accurately in Romans 21:  “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.”