“ . . . no system of thought is a product purely of Reason—because Reason is not a repository of infallible, religiously autonomous truths, as Descartes and other rationalists thought. Instead, it is simply a human capacity, the ability to reason from those premises. The important question, then, is what a person accepts as ultimate premises, for they shape everything that follows.
If you press any set of ideas back far enough, eventually you reach some starting point. Something has to be taken as self-existent—the ultimate reality and source of everything else. There’s no reason for it to exist; it just “is.” For the materialist, the ultimate reality is matter, and everything is reduced to material constituents. For the pantheist, the ultimate reality is a spiritual force or substratum, and the goal of meditation is to reconnect with that spiritual oneness. For the doctrinaire Darwinist, biology is ultimate, and everything, even religion and morality, is reduced to a product of Darwinian processes. For the empiricist, all knowledge, is traceable ultimately to sense data, and anything not known by sensation is unreal.
And so on. Every system of thought begins with some ultimate principle. If it does not begin with God, it will begin with some dimension of creation—the material, the spiritual, the biological, the empirical, or whatever. Some aspect of created reality will be “absolutized” or put forth as the ground and source of everything else—the uncaused cause, the self-existent. To use religious language, this ultimate principle functions as the divine, if we define that term to mean the one thing upon which all else depends for existence. This starting assumption has to be accepted by faith, not by prior reasoning. (Otherwise, it is not really the ultimate starting point for all reasoning—something else is, and we have to dig deeper and start there instead).
In this sense, we could say that every alternative to Christianity is a religion. It may not involve ritual or worship services, yet it identifies some principle or force in creation as the self-existent cause of everything else. Even nonbelievers hold to some ultimate ground of existence, which functions as an idol . . . Faith is a universal human function, and if is not directed toward God it will be directed toward something else.” (41-42)
“The implication [of the Bible] is that no part of creation is inherently evil or bad. ‘Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving,’ Paul says (1 Tim. 4:4). Being spiritual cannot be defined simply in terms of roping off and avoiding certain parts of creation—whether movies, cards, dancing, or makeup. Once we understand this, Christians will never come across as negative kill-joys. While hating sin, we should exhibit a deep love for this world as God’s handiwork, seeing through its brokenness and sin to its original created goodness. We should be known as people in love with the beauties of nature and the wonders of human creativity.” (84).
“This ‘secular revolution’ affected every part of American culture—not only higher education but also the public schools, politics, psychology, and the media. In each of these areas, Chrisitianity was privatized as ‘sectarian,’ while secular philosophies like materialism and naturalism were put forth as ‘objective’ and ‘neutral,’ and therefore the only perspectives suitable for the public sphere.
Of course, they were nothing of the sort. There is nothing neutral about the claim that the only way to get at truth is to deny God’s existence. That is a substantive religious claim, just as it is to affirm God’s existence. Yet because of the secular revolution, even many believers came to believe that speaking from a distinctively Christian perspective was biased—that to be truly objective they must bracket their faith and think like nonbelievers in their professional work.” (98-99)I haven't finished it yet, but so far I haven't found anything I outright disagree with. Some of it may be a bit imbalanced, but that is natural, considering she is trying to correct massive errors in Western Christian way of thought.
Find it in a library or amazon page near you.
