07 - The crucial truth

None of the worldviews mentioned in Chapter 5 can prove what is true in religion and morals and provide a solid foundation for just, civilized society. All of them leave their believers with truth and justice that are no more than personal opinion or brute force, which is no truth or justice at all.

There is, however, one worldview that can prove what is true and just and make it possible to create a civilized society. Only the Christian worldview can make sense out of the concepts of justice, morality, and human rights. Only the Christian worldview can point to provable facts to validate what it says is true and just.

In fact, the powerful idea of human rights – that people have “inalienable” rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – arose out of the Christian worldview. The American Declaration of Independence, written by Christian men for a fledgling country that accepted Christianity as God’s truth, says mankind was endowed with those rights by the Creator.

Apart from the truth that mankind is created in the image of God, the ideas of justice and human rights make no sense. If man is just an animal in an accidental universe, what sense is there in talking about human rights? What place does justice have in the law of the jungle?

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that mankind has certain inalienable rights, yet it never explains how that august body knows those rights exist or can prove what they are.

In fact, the idea of human rights is left over from a time when people believed in a God who created humanity in his image – a God the UN denies. If God is not real, why do we still talk about human rights?

The second president of the United States, John Adams, observed that the country’s constitution “was written for a religious and moral people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He might well have said the constitution was written for a Christian people, because no other religion or moral system would ever have given birth to such a vision of human dignity, freedom, and justice.

The truth is that apart from one specific religion – Christianity – there is no such thing as justice at all, much less any reason to think people have inalienable rights.

Christianity’s ability to stand for those rights, however, was crippled when Christians were deceived into believing existentialism’s lie: “There is no truth, but truth for me.” That deception reduced truth to personal opinion and undermined the confidence Christians had in their worldview, a confidence based on two key facts – one scientific, the other historical.

We will examine those two facts, but only after we identify a second deception, this one perpetrated by skepticism, that keeps Christians and others from understanding that the Christian worldview – and only the Christian worldview – stands on the solid foundation of provable fact.

Think about it!
What is the “crucial truth” referred to in this chapter’s title?

Get involved!
Read the Declaration of Independence at http://www.archives.gov. Write in your own words what it says about human rights.

Next installment
08 - The double standard

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