I’m planning on writing a book down the road called, There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever: Faith in a Secular Age. One of the most pernicious things secularism has allowed “unbelievers” to get away with is pushing the notion that there is such a thing as an unbeliever, that belief or faith is only for ostensibly religious people. Christians have played into the secularists’ hands by using the biblical word “believer,” a word that should never be used in the modern secular context, but Christians do this all the time. In most modern versions (i.e., not KJV) it’s used about 20 times, but it was unproblematic in a world in which everyone believed in the divine, but in the last two or three hundred years it is very much problematic. This is an unfortunate habit most Christians don’t realize they need to break. I now call people either Christians or non-Christians, or whatever faith they embrace, like atheism or Hinduism, etc., not believer or unbeliever.
Because of the rise of secularism in the period we’ve come to refer to as the Enlightenment, which has in fact brought us suffocating darkness, we must also be very careful about using the word Nature. I recently read a wonderful little book called, History in English Words by Own Barfield. The name sounded vaguely familiar to me, and I recalled he was a friend of C.S. Lewis and part of the Inklings, an informal literary group. Starting at Oxford in the late 1920s, the first three members were Lewis, Barfield, and J.R. Tolkien. That is quite the start to any group. In the book, Barfield discussed how words change their meaning over time depending on cultural circumstances. One such word he discusses is natural or nature, which as the Enlightenment developed in the 17th century completely changed its meaning to how we think of it today. The change of this word indicates a massive worldview shift in what used to be called Christendom:
At the beginning of the seventeenth century we first find the word Nature employed in contexts where medieval writers would certainly have used the word God.
Think about that shift. We might accurately describe it as plate tectonic, the earth literally moving under the feet of the meaning of words affecting how we see and interpret the world. It is a complex symbiotic relationship of life lived among human beings and how their perceptions are formed—how they see reality. There is never a simple one-to-one correlation in the meaning of words and culture as much as we might like to think there is; words and their meaning are as complex as human beings.
The Influence of Newton on the Rise of Secularism
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), one of the most brilliant men in history, and a devout Christian, would be surprised that his physics paved the way for the destruction of Christendom. Needless to say that was not his intention, but the devil is very good at what he does, lying to distort our understanding of God’s perfectly good creation, and everything else. Remember, the fall didn’t make God’s “very good” material world bad, a Platonic gnostic notion, but distorted us in our relationship to it. Thus, Newton developed a cosmology that made creation appear to be like a machine, a clock, and once God set it in motion there was no need for him to be involved. In fact Barfield’s next to last chapter is titled, “Mechanism,” and in it he writes:
[w]e should have to look deeper than all this for the true causes of a change of outlook as rapid and emphatic as that which swept through the last century. If we did so, we should probably discern, as one of the most efficient, that vivid sense of orderliness and arrangement which had grown up during the eighteenth century, the reverence for Reason, and especially for Reason reflected in the impartial laws which govern the working of Nature. To minds thus attuned direct intervention by the divine at any one point in the natural process could only seem like an intolerable liberty; and feeling as well as thought began to revolt at the conjuring-tricks apparently reported in the Gospels.
Newton did not believe this at all because he believed God not only created material reality, but He also sustains it at every moment. Without the “direct intervention by the divine at” every point, the so called “natural process” could not even exist. There is nothing in that sense that is at all “natural” about it.
You’ll notice that Barfield writes reason with a capital R to indicate not merely a God-given mental faculty, but reason having turned into rationalism—big difference. Rationalism gave man the impression that Satan was right, that he could become like God, knowing good and evil. Newton was only a baby when modern philosophy and secularism got is most substantial push with another Christian, French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650). He is most famously known for his phrase in Latin, cogito ergo sum, or I think therefore I am. That, brothers and sisters, gave up the game, even though as a pious Catholic that wasn’t his intention either. We have two choices in the reality God created. We can either start with us, or with God. One leads to disaster, the other to life and flourishing; Jews call it shalom, a kind of ubiquitous peace in which everything works as God intended it to work. Descartes, Newton, and many others, eventually lead to Darwin and the plausibility of a God-less universe in the minds of intellectual elites in the West.
Throughout the 18th century it was far too controversial to come right out with atheism, but in due course materialism became the dominant worldview of Western elites. Initially this was called Deism, the idea that God was a cosmic watchmaker who got it all started and sat back and let it roll. In Aristotle’s phrase, God was the “first mover,” who basically pushed the first domino and forever it goes. Once we get to the middle of the 19th century the intellectual and worldview playing field was set up for Darwin, who made plausible the idea that everything came to be the way it is based on “natural laws.” All we know is that the fittest somehow survive by some inexorable process, or laws, that “science” supposedly shows us is true.
The Doctrine of Creation, Not the Doctrine of Nature
Here is where we come to the contrast between creation and nature, and why as Christians in secular culture we need to always use the former and retire the latter. At least as long as the world remains driven by a secular view of reality. Nature as most people use the word today has the image of something running by itself and coming into existence by chance. Going back to William of Ockham (1285-1347), the Christian West slowly decided that it was a good thing to get rid of the concept of telos, or purpose, in nature. There were convoluted philosophical reasons in the battle over the idea of telos between Plato and Aristotle among Catholic intellectuals, but when Newton came along telos was slowly getting ushered out the back door—Darwin gave it the final kick in the behind to rid the Western intellectual house of it once and for all. Clocks, no matter how complex they are, run just fine without the messy idea of telos having to be introduced. “Nature” like a giant cosmic clock is no different. Creation, however, is an entirely other thing.
In Genesis 1, we are told God created everything according to its kind; the word is used 12 times in the chapter. I think maybe God was trying to make a point. Each kind has its own end, its own purpose, its telos. This is built into the creational order, the way God made things to be. The material world is only “natural” in that it is the nature of the way He created it to exist. But our secular world drenched in Darwinian assumptions sees in nature something that exists independent of God. In effect, nature is a product of chance. The problem with chance, however, is that it cannot create anything. Everyone knows this, of course, but indoctrination and brainwashing are powerful means to delusional ends. Yet we are all given to such secular delusions because secularism is the cultural air we breathe, which is far more dangerous than second hand smoke.
This is why Christians need to consistently remind themselves, their families, friends, and anyone who will listen, that we are not products of chance, not products of mindless, purposeless material processes. We are, as David said, fearfully and wonderfully made, as is everything in creation. We are not merely lucky dirt! But using the word nature or natural allows people, including us, to think we are. Not too many years ago I realized how easy it was for me to be seduced by the lies of secularism, and that some things are “natural.” For Christians, however, there is no distinction between natural and supernatural. C.S. Lewis points out that Mary’s conception by the Holy Spirit was no more miraculous than any other woman’s conception. Sadly, I had never really considered that. Undoubtedly, he’s right! Is not a new being’s creation utterly miraculous? Are we really supposed to believe the process of creating a new life is solely “natural?” Nothing in all of creation is “natural” because all things are created and sustained by the word of God’s power!
Many Christians tend to think of doctrine as dry, boring stuff. But without it all we have is puzzle pieces and no idea how they fit together into the bigger picture. The doctrine of creation is such a big, huge, beautiful picture. It tells us that we are dependent, contingent beings; in every way imaginable creatures who are not self‑sufficient. The rebellious human heart we inherited from Adam and Eve, on the other hand, tempts us to deny that it is God who gives us “life, breath, and everything else.” Grounding our perspective in this essential dependence on God for literally every breath opens us to the significance and wondrous meaning of all things.
The Importance of Wonder and Amazement
We’ve all heard the saying that familiarity breeds contempt. Since we are material beings who swim in a material universe, like fish swimming in water, it is easy to lose the wonder of it all, to get lost in the urgency and intrusion of the now. We must learn and teach others around us to wonder. We must fight the constant tendency to take reality for granted, and lose the amazement at how bizarre life really is. Just contemplate for a moment your existence, your consciousness, the you-ness of you. How weird is that! The ancient Greeks argued that philosophy begins in wonder, and if we are not constantly marveling at the amazing complexity and beauty of nature, and of existence itself, we are doing something wrong. We must have an abiding amazement, even astonishment, at God’s astounding creativity to help us break through the banal and apparent predictability of it all.
A good example in my life is the human body. Two and a half years ago I started a journey learning about health. Listening to very smart and knowledgeable people talk about the human cell, for example, is breathtaking. To think the cell could be a product of “natural” selection and some kind of random merely material process is absurd in the extreme. In Darwin’s day they thought the cell was some kind of blob, and not what in fact it is, an infinitely complex information processing system that allows living things to live. There is only one possible explanation: God! I listen to health oriented podcasts a lot, and often hear people describe “mother nature” as doing such and so, or something “evolving” over millions of years. Baloney! That drives me nuts.
I had a wonderful example recently of someone who in spite of her Darwinian worldview couldn’t help seeing God in the human cell. I had a discussion with a woman who owns a company called Beam Minerals. I discovered her on Dave Asprey’s podcast back in May of 2021, which got me started on my health journey. As she was describing what the cell does to optimize our health or destroy it depending on our lifestyle, she was getting an amazed look and sound at the stunning complexity of it all. I said, God is the only explanation for it. And she got this strange look on her face and said something along the lines of, “I still believe in evolution,” not very convincingly, “but the complexity is just too much to be a coincidence.” Bingo! I wish I could have pushed the conversation toward Jesus, but I put a pebble in her shoe and pray she will be fully opened to God in Creation in due course.
Here’s the lesson and exhortation: Let Creation remind us that we are part of something bigger, much bigger, and more meaningful than our own often petty worries and desires. We are part of God’s grand narrative to redeem all creation!
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