Five Ways to Cut to the Heart of Non-Christian Ideas

Christianity Today ^ | April 10, 2015 | Richard Weikart

[Heartlander]

While I was reading Nancy Pearcey’s new book, Finding Truth, a professor at the state university where I teach circulated a news item about a politician seeking to alter the university’s goals. Instead of facilitating “the search for truth,” the university under this plan would commit itself to meeting “the state’s work-force needs.” I remarked to this professor and other colleagues that many academics had already eliminated “the search for truth.” In the ensuing e-mail conversation, several professors rejected the idea that there is any universal truth, and one professor even described the whole concept of a “search for truth” as incoherent.

Such is the uphill struggle we Christians face today when confronting various secular ideologies. However, out of love for people deceived by these false worldviews, we need to find ways to convince them of the truth of Christianity. As Pearcey (author of the 2005 classic Total Truth) so ably points out, both explicitly and through poignant real-life stories, “finding truth” is not a dry intellectual exercise. Indeed, it can help determine a person’s spiritual destiny.

[WriteOn]

The endless subdividing of branches of knowledge has divorced education from a sound foundation in metaphysics.

[Do the math]

As a mathematician, I must always search for the truth. Math is either correct or it is garbage. I will never understand the leftist notion that there is no objective truth.

[Boogieman]

“In the ensuing e-mail conversation, several professors rejected the idea that there is any universal truth, and one professor even described the whole concept of a “search for truth” as incoherent.”

This is a natural consequence of moral relativism. You can’t admit there is a universal, objective truth, or you would also have to admit there could be a universal, objective morality. Throw one out, and you eventually have to toss the other.