Nancy Pearcey Reality Quotations

Atheists often denounce Christianity as harsh and negative. But in reality it offers a much more positive view of the human person than any competing religion or worldview. It is so appealing that adherents of other worldviews keep free-loading the parts they like best.

The most consistent versions of materialism deny the reality of anything beyond matter - no soul, no spirit, no will, no mind. This is called reductionism: Humans are reduced to biochemical machines.

When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.

'Biblical worldview'. The term means literally a 'view of the world', a biblically informed perspective on all of reality. A worldview is like a mental map that tells you how to navigate the world effectively. It is the imprint of God's objective truth on our inner life.

The most fundamental decision we all face over the course of our lives is what we will recognize as the ultimate reality, the uncaused source and cause of our existence. Everything else in our worldview depends on that initial decision. The Bible speaks of this foundational choice in terms of who or what we worship. We must all answer the challenge Joshua issued to the Israelites as they were poised to enter the Promised Land: "Choose this day whom you will serve" (Josh. 24:15).

An idol is anything put in the place of God as the ultimate reality - the eternal, self-existent, uncaused cause of everything else.

The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.

A worldview is not the same things a formal philosophy, otherwise it would only be for philosophers. Even ordinary people have a set of convictions about how reality functions and how they should live. Some convictions are conscious while others are unconscious but together they form a consistent picture of reality.

There are unprecedented numbers of movements for human rights and freedoms. But the dominant worldviews in academia, like materialism and naturalism, deny the reality of freedom, reducing humans to robots. So where does the concept of human rights come from?

You don't have to be a Christian to recognize that materialism does not match reality. Materialism is not true to universal human experience - what we all know about ourselves.