The Virgin Births of Secularism: 10 Impossible Things You Assume Everyday
Is your view of the world trapping you against yourself?
I initially published this article in early 2023, however, the version below contains substantial revisions.
“I don’t believe in anything.”
“Why follow a worldview that incorporates things I can’t see, hear, smell, taste or touch?”
“Everyone should follow the evidence and not to do so is wrong.”
“Backwards people are holding back humanity from moral progress.”
What is behind these assumptions?
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Assumptions
The way we approach the day to day is filled with assumptions we pay little attention to.
This is an issue, sadly, many who hold to a secular worldview that does not incorporate any place for a Transcendent Being completely miss. In fact, even many theists miss it.
In this article, we will make a short case that the assumptions a secularist makes day to day are incoherent and inconsistent with their own worldview.
Here are 10 virgin births of secularism embedded into the very fabric of reality (there’s more but we’ll stick to 10) which cover both logical inconsistencies and historical naivety:
1. Logic
Logic is immaterial, universal, transcendent and unchanging. Yet, according to a materialist, the material world is all there is and that is changing constantly. Transcendent laws exist without a Transcendent Lawgiver.
The material world is changing randomly not in a guided fashion, however, someone from Sweden who evolved differently and is experiencing different random chemical reactions is bound by the law of non-contradiction as much as someone from Japan who is experiencing different random chemical reactions.
Deposit photos
They’re just particles colliding. There is no immaterial truth or universal logical truth, yet we assume there is everyday.
What is rational for a bag of meat filled with random fizzing chemical reactions colliding through the cosmos? We’re just chemicals here by coincidence.
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2. Truth and Reliable Cognitive Faculties
We evolve for survival, not truth. Canadian philosopher, Patricia Churchland ( JP 84, Oct. 87) argues. “Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing (f*ing). The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. … Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”
Nonetheless, we assume we know the truth of many things. In reality, they could be deceptions put in place to help us survive.
We’re not here for truth so let’s not pretend we’re here to find it. Truth and survival are not the same. If a lie helps us survive why not embrace it?
One step further, why even trust our cognitive faculties if ultimately they’re the result of an accidental (everything came from nothing by accident), unguided process with no intent behind it?
Why think we can purposefully guide ourselves towards the truth using such faculties?
3. Mathematics
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity took decades for thorough scientific observation to back it. Yet, the mathematics of it was there all along. It was not as if he created maths to reflect what was observed in the far galaxies as this took decades to verify. We see the Golden Ratio, Fibonacci patterns throughout nature, the mathematical intricacies of quarks, electrons and protons.
Fundamental truths of mathematics are not random. Sure, precision may be added to approximations over time and humans do start with axioms or assumptions.
Regardless, there is a remarkable relevance of mathematical truths to understanding the world and mathematical patterns embedded into nature. Even including the likes of infinity or complex numbers which are physically impossible can be useful to us!
Mathematics is somewhat of an immaterial language of God embedded into nature. We assume it is valid. Don’t forget though, there’s no intent behind anything in this world, there’s nothing immaterial and no real order to things. Can we see, smell, hear, taste or touch the number 2?
4. Consciousness
Mind is fundamental. Consciousness is the building block of existence. We exist. We gain and lose cells all the time. We have many parts of our brain. Yet, we assume we have a unified vision and continuous perception of the world, as if the old and new cells somehow communicate with each other.
We see one picture and remember the past in a continuous fashion, even as many cells have come and gone. Why are we one centre of consciousness and not the countless cells that come and go inside us?
Even in quantum physics, we observe that consciousness is fundamental through the famous double-slit experiment, repeated countless times.
What is an “I”? How is a conscious being any different from a string of grass, cells on a nose, or a chip of wood? It’s all just chemicals and particles at the end of the day. Nothing to it.
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5. Justice and Human Rights
We assume all humans have an intrinsic worth and should be treated fairly. In reality, it’s all about survival of the fittest and the four F’s. There are no objective moral values.
Is a shark eating a seal really different from two humans killing one another? If robots evolve beyond humans and kill humans will it be the same as humans killing a cow today?
Yet, rape and torture are really wrong regardless of if they make 7 billion people happy and ruin one person’s life. Even if the fittest human beings are doing this to unfit humans to boost their own pleasure and flourishing. Objective morals are almost as real as physical objects to us.
Why stress about women’s rights or the Me Too movement in such a world? Different humans evolved differently. They’re not equal. They’re just different bags of meat. Human rights are just a social convention and breaking them is a bit like wearing sandals with socks or football shorts with a tie. Don’t forget atoms are in donuts, wooden desks, cows and babies.
Why seek to look after the oppressed, downtrodden and marginalised when only the fittest should survive?
However, science tells us only what is, not what we ought to do. We can’t derive an ought from an is.
Historically speaking, Tom Holland highlights in Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade The World, “A sexual order rooted in the assumption that any man in a position of power had the right to exploit his inferiors, to use the orifices of a slave or a prostitute to relieve his needs much as he might use a urinal, had been ended. Paul’s insistence that the body of every human being was a holy vessel had triumphed (p.279).”
In other words, the Christian worldview replaced a worldview that previously thought a ruler ejaculating onto his inferiors was no different from him urinating into a hole by the side of the road! It is no wonder, as Holland notes, that the same Latin word ‘meio’ meant both ejaculate and urinate!
For the Roman elites, ejaculating was like urinating, whether on abused slave boys, or inside a prostitute or a mistress, how you treated their body was down to the elite member of society.
Slaves, prostitutes and mistresses were a means of the elites meeting a need. This wasn’t the cultural background of the Me Too movement, rather a Christian worldview provided such a backdrop as Holland argues.
SLAVERY and the Bible: Your Comprehensive Guide
Harari’s Hackable Animals and Fictional Human Rights
6. Meaning- Purpose, Goals and Intentions
We come from an unguided, intentionless, purposeless process. Everything came from nothing by accident.
We have no ultimate purpose, no will, and no intent. There is no transcendent narrative or deeper meaning in life. We are simply responding to unguided chemical reactions in a universe that exists by chance.
Yet, we obsess over personal goals, our life’s purpose, and our own intentions.
Sometimes, we might even make it our purpose to destroy the falsehoods of those who believe in a real purpose or transcendent meaning to life (eg Christians). Or perhaps that’s what the chemicals in our brain trick us into thinking is our purpose. Go figure!
Goodreads
Jordan Peterson on Christianity: Mythic Truth Messages for Muslims, Marxists and Male Christian Atheists
Robert Greene Meets with Andrew Huberman: The Search for God is Real
7. Beauty and Gratitude
An awe-inspiring symphony, a fine piece of art — there’s something more to them than just personal taste or, ultimately, neurons playing tricks.
An appreciation of the finer things in life. Try measuring it in a lab. Why should we be grateful for them, or even expect them to exist?
Are we grateful to our ovens for producing beautiful food, or to our doors for opening properly? Or how about to the wind for rearranging the leaves in our gardens?
Since when do we express gratitude to inanimate objects or forces, rather than to persons or minds?
Do we teach kids to thank the walls for making creaking noises through the night, as much as we teach them to thank a musician who played a beautiful song for them?
The Gratitude Myth: Affirm goodness but forget the Source?
Manifesting the UNIVERSE: Faith with no strings attached
8. Moral Progress and Love
Why is selfless love or sacrifice, which can limit our own survival chances or well-being, considered noble? If there are no objective morals, how can we claim to make moral progress?
Without a benchmark, what would even count as progress? Progress would merely be an illusion for change. How can we discern a straighter line if no straight lines exist?
What is wrong with eugenics or limiting the survival of those deemed ‘unfit,’ or ending the lives of disabled individuals — like the Spartans did? What benefit do those with disabilities offer to long-term human flourishing if they cannot reproduce, or if their offspring are seen as genetically inferior?
Why assume such people have any intrinsic worth as humans anyway? Where does the idea of humans having an intrinsic worth in our society even come from? Surely it has nothing to do with the Christian view that humans are made in the image of God?
I’m not claiming that without the Bible someone will only ever act 100% immorally, but rather that objective morals do exist — and they are inextricably linked to the mind of God whether we claim to believe in God or not.
From a historical perspective, as non-Christian historian Tom Holland articulates in Dominion, “That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident a truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle — as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out — lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible (p.530).”
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9. Guided Processes and Odds Reflecting Probabilities When a Coin Is Flipped
We get on the bus or in the car in the morning, trusting that it’s a guided process — the wheels, the engine, the steering system. There’s intent and design behind it. Did the manufacturer will to make the bus?
Who knows! Perhaps we have no will of any kind! The bus operates smoothly due to the natural laws of physics it was designed for. However, there’s no such thing as intention or guidance in the process itself.
We are dancing and fizzing to random chemistry from rocks, which have no intention. Chance reflects the probability that the bus will run without a fault on the morning trip to work or school, but perhaps for us, chance is the very process that assembles all before us.
Perhaps chance flips the coin and doesn’t reflect the probability of heads when the coin is flipped?
I am not against evolution per se, but against the idea of evolution as a result of sheer chance and no underlying prescribed order or laws.
10. Science
Science assumes things. Yes, science assumes things.
The scientific method, along with other assumptions — such as the speed of light being constant between two points (A to B) in Einstein’s original Theory of Special Relativity — are all foundational presuppositions. We cannot prove logic, math, or assumptions used in experiments; rather, we presuppose them.
Secularists often forget the Christian roots of science. Figures like Peter Abelard, a Christian philosopher who laid the groundwork for the development of universities and the Enlightenment era, or the Franciscan friars Roger Bacon and William of Ockham, who helped lay the foundation for the scientific method, are often overlooked.
By Jan Verhas- Roger Bacon — Britannica upload from a 1867 original, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44315585
Science assumes uniformity — that tomorrow will be similar to today. But where’s the place for this assumption in a random, chaotic, purposeless universe? It assumes the universe is rationally intelligible. Yet, we exist for survival — why think we’re here to rationally comprehend existence? Science also assumes that we can apply logic and mathematics to the scientific method.
Why assume that a bag of meat, dancing to localized chemical reactions, can comprehend the immaterial, universal, transcendent, and unchanging?
As historian Tom Holland notes in Dominion, many secularists hold to the foundational “myths of secularism” — that it emerged as though from a virgin birth, that it owed nothing to Christianity (p. 506).
The Virgin Birth of Secularism: Forgetting Secularism’s Christian Assumptions and Roots
Holland outlines that Richard Dawkins himself “has the instincts of someone brought up in a Christian civilization” (p. 523). What foundational beliefs or “virgin birth” assumptions are we forgetting? Daily, we assume that the immaterial and unchanging exist, and that humans have intentions, a conscious mind, and a sense of justice.
If secular humanism does not derive from reason or science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity’s evolution — a course that, in the opinion of growing numbers in Europe and America, has left God “dead” — then how are its values anything more than the shadow of a corpse? — Tom Holland
The Christian Presuppositions of Science: 1-Minute Case
Which worldview will you choose?
With all this in mind, what worldview makes more sense to live by? One that incorporates a Transcendent Being, or one that does not? If love, truth, and moral progress are important to you, why not start by looking into the One who reshaped the course of history through the cruel death He faced for living in truth and love? Yes, even love toward His enemies.
Which Worldview or Religion Should You Choose? 2 Questions to Help You on Your Journey
Why Did Jesus Come Into The World? Our articles on the Gospels, Jesus’ divinity, death and resurrection
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Robert Greene Meets with Andrew Huberman: The Search for God is Real
The Christian Presuppositions of Science: 1-Minute Case
Pre-40 AD Evidence Jesus Thought He Is God? 1-Minute Case
SLAVERY and the Bible: Your Comprehensive Guide
Two GREAT MISCONCEPTIONS about Christianity
Jordan Peterson on Christianity: Mythic Truth Messages for Muslims, Marxists and Male Christian Atheists
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