17 Secular Premises for Theological Arguments
You don’t need to be a believer to believe these.
I wrote last week about whether there is common ground between believers and unbelievers (and any other ideological groups you can think of).
While a broad and general thesis, I was taking aim at a doctrine of presuppositionalism, that there are no premises in an argument for Christianity that are neutral between a Christian and non-Christian worldview. Every argument must begin from specifically Christian premises.
What makes something a Christian premise? It’s a Christian premise if it is unique to a Christian worldview and derived from Scripture.
If I find a non-Christian affirming the premise, does that make it not a Christian premise? Well, no, says the presuppositionalist. It’s possible that that non-Christian is operating on borrowed capital.
However, if an unbeliever holds to one of these premises on empirical grounds, that is, on the basis of the evidence of the world common to all humans, believer and unbeliever (and half-believer, anti-believer, etc., as Dr. Nigel Biggar reminded us), then that is evidence that they are not arriving at their belief by borrowing something from the Christian worldview.
In fact, a Christian might hold the belief also on empirical grounds, in addition to knowing that it is taught in the Bible. If this is the case, one might find the Bible compelling because, through the senses, the world testifies to the truth of what Scripture says.
Here are seventeen (17) secular premises from the empirical world that are not uniquely Christian and are currently being argued by non-believing intellectuals.
1. Sexual Freedom isn’t good for people.
The Sexual Revolution is now sixty years old. We can see the fruit of libertinism. Is it what Freud and Kinsey would have predicted? No. It’s sexual violence, a sexual recession, infertility, physical and chemical castration, terrible situations for children. Read Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
2. Societies that abandon Christianity en masse are susceptible to political ideology.
The arguments of New Atheists have lost a great deal of force because a decade or two on, we do not see people behaving rationally or in ways that lead to human flourishing. We see crazes that are worse than the religious. When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they’ll believe in anything.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
3. Atheistic individualism is a bad way to live.
Part of the appeal of not believing in God is a kind of complete individual freedom. However, many non-Christians are coming to believe that such complete individual freedom is destructive of community and well-being. The fact is, this insight is by no means unique to the Christian worldview. In fact, this form of non-Chritsian belief is itself unique to Christian socities. Most other non-Christian societies are anti-individualistic. Philosophers like Michael Sandel and psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have also argued against individualism on philosophical and psychological grounds.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
4. Christianity seems to have been right about sexual dimorphism.
“The Bible says so” is not the best reason to believe that the human race is divided into two sexes. Rather, contemporary attempts to live as if this were not true provide abundant empirical evidence that sexual dimorphism is true of the human species. Check out psychologist Az Hakeem’s book DeTrans for the testimony of a secular psychologist and many detransitioners. Check out philosopher Alex Byrne’s Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions for the philosophical challenge to gender ideology.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
5. We need an ethic of love that counters internet-age hatred.
In the age of the Internet, hating people as if they were less than human is all the rage. So is rage. We need an ethic of love if we are going to counter this hatred of those who disagree with us. Some of the best expression of this need comes from two non-Christian individuals, secular philosopher Alain de Botton and fashion stylist-cum-philosopher Ayishat Akanbi. The conversation below is remarkable.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
6. Bad desires and behavior do seem to be in-built; there is an empirical basis for original sin.
Louise Perry speaks about the ways in which the contemporary discipline of evolutionary psychology mirrors the Christian doctrine of original sin. Evo-psych presents a dark picture of human psychology as hard-wired to pursue base, animalistic ends, even at our most human heights. Utopian liberals are, it turns out, as resistant to evolutionary-scientific portrayals of human darkness as they ever were to the theological doctrine of original sin. I warrant that this is because the two are the same thing. Those rediscovering human darkness and limitation are rediscovering original sin.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
7. There are tragic conditions of existence and human nature is constrained.
On a similar theme, Thomas Sowell wrote about the constrained view of human nature in A Conflict of Visions. This involves both the in-built propensities of human beings on which evo-psych sheds light and what literary figures have called “the tragic conditions of existence.” Aldous Huxley gave beautiful expression to this feature of human life in chapters 16 and 17 of Brave New World. It’s central to existentialist philosophy, of both Christian and non-Christian varieties. In a world that had almost forgotten about tragedy - by banishing it through technology - Huxley shows that the works of Shakespeare continued to bear witness to it. Theologically, this is called “the misery of our condition,” the effects of the fall, the curse.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
8. It would be better if people acted as if God existed.
While we once commonly heard, “You don’t need to believe in God to be a good person,” we’re now hearing, “It would be better if people acted as if they did believe.” I think that probably both are true. No amount of believing in God (officially) makes one magically righteous. But neither does the thought that one is free of all ultimate accountability really help things. We can make conscience sacrosanct, but thinking that conscience really does give voice to divine imperatives helps. At the very least, treating conscience as if it did have divine authority certainly increase motivation to follow it.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
9. Without religion, people enter a meaning crisis.
John Vervaeke, Jordan Peterson’s colleague, has really popularized the term “meaning crisis.” But it’s not only in his videos that we see this. People are losing purpose; radical ideologies of left and right fill the void. People are falling off the lower rungs of society with broken families, drug overdoses, and isolation.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
10. There is a reality to which our speech and thought must conform to be true.
Not only has the rise of gender ideology revealed the need to return to reality, many in the wake of Trump became very concerned about truth in place of fake news. This means it’s no longer (as if it ever was) only Christians who deny subjectivism and believe in truth.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
11. Children grow up best with two parents in an intact family.
Rob Henderson’s memoir Troubled has been making a powerful secular case for the intact family. Without an intact family, Henderson was shuttled between foster homes, lacked a male father-figure, and did not discover his own academic potential until a male teacher encouraged him and the military instilled discipline in him. It is lower classes that suffer the effects of sexual freedom and family breakdown.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
Here’s a scientific one:
12. Neo-Darwinian Mechanisms don’t explain the arrival of the fittest.
Contra popular voices on evolution, the Neo-Darwinian mechanism of evolution - natural selection operating on random genetic mutations - has come under significant challenge. Biologist Andreas Wagner, a biologist and evolutionist summarizes the challenge in The Arrival of the Fittest. The short of it is that Neo-Darwinism can explain the survival of the fittest. What it cannot explain is the arrival of the fittest. But it is the appearance of new species that needs explanation if evolution is to explain the origin of species.
See my essay, "Darwinism Is Devolution.".
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
Here are some more analytic philosophy ones:
13. The scientistic worldview is narrow.
Many contemporary philosophers dissent from the narrow view of scientism. One great example is John McDowell. McDowell argues that a narrow scientism, on which only scientific knowledge is valid, cannot make sense of the role of reason or mind in the natural world. In Mind and World, he argues for the place of humane self-understanding as distinct from and irreducible to scientific knowledge. In “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” he argues for what he calls a “liberal naturalism,” tolerant of non-scientific modes of knowing nature and especially human nature.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
14. Contemporary naturalistic philosophers treat science like religion.
Descartes felt the need, as a Christian, to deny that God was constrained by the laws of logic. What people of any given time think can transcend logic is a good sign of what they hold in religious regard. But philosopher Jim Conant argues in “The Logical Alien,” that contemporary philosophers tend to hold science in this regard. So W. V. O. Quine held that scientific inquiry might someday force us to change the laws of logic.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
15. There is moral truth.
In analytic philosophy, the majority of philosophers are moral realists, believing that there are moral truths that are not merely subjective. With colleagues of all belief, one hears tales of 18-year old moral relativists insisting on their views and professors having to push back.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
16. Subjectivism is false.
As my dissertation advisor says, subjectivism is the view that “my say-so makes it so.” He disagrees with this strongly. There is a reality, and to say something true, we must conform to it. Our say-so never makes it so.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
17. Non-scientific ways of thinking of ourselves are ineradicable from human thought.
Mid-century philosopher Wilfrid Sellars articulated the problem of modern philosophy as one of attempting to reconcile the manifest image with the scientific image of man. The manifest image is our view of ourselves as possessing choice, a mind, a first-person perspective on the world, and as a personal and biological unity. The scientific image presents us as determined by biological and physical forces and not superior to the rest of nature.
Philosophers like Roger Scruton and Peter Strawson have argued cogently that the manifest image is not going away. We will never be able to conceive of ourselves only in terms of science. This is a sophisticated argument against reductionism.
You don’t need to be a believer to believe this.
None of these premises is a knock-down argument for theism or Christianity, but each is a premise that could play a role in an argument for the Christian faith.
If we want our speech as Christians to be compelling to those outside the fold, we must make arguments from premises that people can accept without already accepting a Christian worldview.
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I think you probably need to be a believer to believe (12). Andreas Wagner believes that certain kinds of changes are particularly hard to explain, but he also believes that he can explain them. In short, he believes in the problem but also believes it has a solution. Other evolutionary biologists think there is less of a problem to begin with.
My guess would be that most non-theistic philosophers who believe in moral truth believe that moral truth is anthropocentric (true given the sorts of creatures we humans happen to be; true in an intersubjective human sense), not objective, like scientific truth. Is that your understanding?