How do you judge a worldview? Not by how fashionable it is, or how many clever people hold it, or how confident its spokesmen sound. You judge it the way you judge any serious claim about reality: you test it. I use three tests. They are simple to state and hard to pass.
The three tests
First, is it consistent? A worldview that contradicts itself has disqualified itself before the conversation starts.
Second, does it fit the real world? Does it match the evidence and the data, the way things actually are when we look?
Third, can you actually live by it? A belief that has to be set aside the moment you leave the seminar room is not describing reality. It is describing a game.
Christianity is routinely told to submit to tests like these, and it should. But fairness demands that atheism be run through the same three. When it is, it fails all of them.
Running atheism through the tests
Test one: consistency
Atheism tells you that your thoughts are nothing but chemistry: neurons firing, molecules moving, the output of a physical process with no mind behind it. Then it asks you to trust that very chemistry when it produces the conclusion that atheism is true. If my thoughts are only chemical events, I have no more reason to trust the thought “there is no God” than to trust a headache. The claim saws off the branch it is sitting on. That fails test one.
Test two: the evidence
Atheism tells you that life built itself from dead matter, unaided and unplanned. This is presented as established fact. It is not. Nobody has ever shown dead chemicals organizing themselves into a living thing. The claim is a requirement of the worldview, not a result of the evidence. That strains test two to the breaking point.
Test three: livability
Atheism, followed to its conclusion, tells you there is no purpose, no real good, and no real evil. Only matter in motion. Yet no atheist lives that way for a single day. He is outraged by injustice. He loves his children and believes that love matters. He keeps his promises and expects you to keep yours. Every one of those responses borrows from a world with purpose and moral reality, the very world his philosophy says does not exist. A worldview no one can live by fails test three.
Run Christianity through the same tests
I am not asking for special treatment for my own faith. Put Christianity through all three. Is it consistent? Does it fit the world we actually find, including the world of minds, morals, and meaning? Can a person live by it from Monday through Sunday? It has been passing those tests for two thousand years.
A worldview you cannot live by is not a worldview at all. It is a slogan. Three tests, three failures, and an honest person has to ask why. If you would like to work through questions like these at your own pace, I offer free online courses in my Skool community, Faith on Trial.
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