Feedback archive → Feedback 2010

Does a worldview have to be livable?

Following Lita Sanders’s reply to Canadian correspondent Samroon R. about his questions concerning Hitler, the Dalai Lama, sin and salvation, Samroon responded:

Lita Sanders answers:

Dear Samroon,

I believe that the ‘livability’ of a worldview is evidence for its truth. For example, there is a worldview that says men are perfect, and only want education or wealth or whatever else to achieve this state. We can see that it is patently false when we see that the most educated and wealthy people, far from being the most benevolent and kindest, are sometimes capable of committing the worst sort of atrocities.

G.K. Chesterton actually used this as one of his main defenses for the truth of the Christian faith. To paraphrase his argument in from Orthodoxy, it’s not that one thing proves that Christianity is true, it is that everything fits when one presupposes Christianity. When one assumes the basic tenets of the Christian faith, everything from the huge philosophical questions concerning where we came from and why we’re here, to the everyday problems of why little Johnny keeps pulling his sister’s hair, come into focus. Any worldview may fit a few truths in it; Islam can explain a few things about the condition of humanity, and the Eastern religions might have a little truth in them too; it’s very hard for anything to be completely wrong at every single point. But this is like a stick fitting a hole in a rock; it is something that could easily happen by accident. Chesterton argues, however, that the way Christianity fits reality is more akin to a key fitting a lock; and when a lock fits a key, we can be sure that it is the right key.

I think there are any number of reasons why people claim that they can’t accept the Gospel; for some, it is the problem of evil. For others, it is that they like living with their girlfriends and they don’t want a moral system that will tell them that it is a sin. For some, they don’t want to be told that there is such a thing as sin. But I think that all these reasons can be described as symptoms of the main problem: the desperate wickedness of the fallen human heart. The unregenerate man is utterly hostile to God and His truth, which is the reason why no one is able to come to Him without the influence of the Holy Spirit. Not only can’t he come, he doesn’t want to, and that is why it is a culpable offense. Not only does he have a fallen nature that will sin and cause him to be hostile to God, he cooperates with it at every stage.

I think that there would have been far better ways for God to teach us submission than to cause us to inherit a trait that makes us utterly hostile to Him and incapable of submission to His will. Rather, our sin nature is something that we inherit by default because we are descended from the first sinner, Adam. We cannot submit to God until He regenerates us with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and even then not fully; we remain sinful as long as we are in the fallen creation, and we have to wait for the Resurrection for the complete defeat of sin.

I hope these further answers have been helpful for you.

Sincerely,

Lita Sanders

Information Officer
Creation Ministries International

• Hitler, the Dalai Lama, sin and salvation; and the religion of North Korea