The Religion of Unreality

Beware of the cultists who seek to wage war on what is real:

With an interactive website that deals with hot-potato issues all the time, there is never a shortage of comments that come in from all sorts of angry, easily offended, and ideologically unhinged folks who really hate most of what I have to say. Unfortunately, most of their comments are not suitable for public consumption, so they simply go straight into the bin.

One fellow – a typical Trump-hating secular leftist – went through his litany of complaints and agenda items. I was assured that climate change is absolutely real, and only stupid people deny this. Usually such comments are all in capital letters (in other words, they are screaming at me), and they run with so many other loony left nostrums.

Thus they will insist that men can become women, and that men can have babies. And in the same breath they will insist that babies are not real, living beings! Um, why do I find it difficult to take seriously a word these folks have to say? They are so far lost in la-la land, and in the cult of unreality, that trying to have a rational discussion with them is futile.

And of course so many of these folks also insist that science is on their side. Um, when a person actually believes a man can conceive, carry and give birth to a baby, they are so far away from science, biology, and reality, that you best avoid such folks like the plague. Such cultists can’t be reasoned with.

But because all truth is God’s truth, we can have non-Christians declaring truth about reality, at least in particular areas. The obvious example that comes to mind here is J. K. Rowling. Few have stood as bravely and resolutely against the lies and crapolla of the trans cult than her. For this, she has been heavily persecuted and hated on. But she is standing her ground, because she recognises the fundamental truths of human biology, and how sexual reality must trump whacko agendas.

In fact, sometimes non-Christians can even have a better grasp of reality – spiritual and otherwise – than some believers. Consider this immensely profound theological truth uttered by someone who was a pagan prostitute no less (Rahab!): “The Lord your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath” (Joshua 2:11).

That woman was grounded in reality. Indeed, that was no mere trite bumper sticker cliché that she shared, but a deeply rich proclamation of biblical truth. And this from someone raised in a pagan, polytheistic culture.

Reality and truth

That which is true is basically that which is real. This is known as the correspondence theory of truth. Truth is that which corresponds to reality. A useful illustration of this is a good road map – or more likely today, a properly working GPS. If I live in Melbourne, and I want to drive to Sydney, but my map or GPS says I should head due south, I not only will not get to Sydney, but I will end up being baptised in Port Phillip Bay.

Indeed, reality always wins. To use another illustration, if I am chatting with some sceptic and he tries to tell me that everything is relative, or just a social construct, or some such thing, I can pretty easily challenge him. I can ask him to climb a nearby tall tree, and then take a leap of faith. Within seconds he will discover that the law of gravity is no mere human construct but is based in reality.

As Canadian essayist David Solway wrote back in 2017: “Reality is a formidable opponent. It never loses. Sometimes the victory is immediate; in the political, cultural, and economic domains, it may take a while longer. In any human confrontation with the intractable facts of life, physical or historical, the outcome is never in doubt. Ignorance is a serious liability in any transaction with the real world. Denial is ultimately lethal.”

Going back a few years prior to this, Ayn Rand put it this way: “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” Quite so. And going back a bit further, the always quotable G. K. Chesterton said this: “Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.”

All sorts of non-Christian worldviews and belief systems come crashing down when faced with rock-solid reality. Be it materialistic determinism, or rabid relativism, they cannot stand up in the real world. The one who claims that all truth is relative is not someone worth spending time with. As Roger Scruton once put it, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”

The late Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer was quite effective in pointing out the obvious tensions that exist between the real world (God’s world) and the presuppositions of non-Christians. As but one example, consider when he was speaking to a group of young people about universal truth and moral absolutes.

A fellow from India, steeped in his eastern worldview, of course challenged this. He went on about how this world is maya (an illusion), that good and evil are two sides of the same coin (yinyang), and so on. At this point Schaeffer grabbed a kettle of boiling water and held it over the young man’s head. He promptly got up and walked out – his worldview was no match for the real world!

So truth and reality always go together. The converse is also true. When radical secular leftists insist on lies, untruths and deception, they increasingly find themselves living, not in the real world, but in unreality. At least they are forced to try to live in a world of illusion – but reality keeps creeping up and biting them in the backsides.

This is where the Christian can unashamedly stand up for the truth of the gospel, since it is the truth about who we are, the world we live in, and where we are all headed. Several quotes can be shared here on this. In his book Time for Truth, Os Guinness put it this way:

Postmodern forms of relativism, skepticism, cynicism, and the like may appear to shatter traditional convictions to smithereens. But fears that such views are beyond argument are groundless. For no human being lives outside the reality common to us all. Whatever people may say the world is or who they are, it is what it is and they are who they are. Again, no argument is unarguable, but there are thoughts that can be thought but not lived. When all is said and done, reality always has the last word. The truth will always out. Standing up to falsehood, lies, and crazy ideas is never an easy task, but … it is far easier than the hardest task of all, becoming people of truth ourselves.

And again: “In the biblical view, truth is that which is ultimately, finally, and absolutely real, or the ‘way it is,’ and therefore is utterly trustworthy and dependable, being grounded in God’s own reality and truthfulness. . . . Belief in something doesn’t make it true; only truth makes a belief true. But without truth, a belief may be only speculation plus sincerity.”

J. I. Packer in his now classic Knowing God put it this way:

Truth in the Bible is a quality of persons primarily, and of propositions only secondarily: it means stability, reliability, firmness, trustworthiness, the quality of a person who is entirely self-consistent, sincere, realistic, undeceived. God is such a person: truth, in this sense, is His nature, and he has not got it in Him to be anything else. That is why he cannot lie (Titus 1:2; cf. Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29; Heb. 6:18). That is why His words to us are true, and cannot be other than true. They are the index of reality: they show us things as they really are, and as they will be for us in the future according to whether we heed God’s words to us or not.

Or to put it much more succinctly, we can run with how Dallas Willard expressed it: “Truth is what enables us to deal with reality successfully.” The reason why more and more people today – at least in the West – seem unable to cope with life is because they are believing in and living lies – thus they keep crashing headlong into reality. And it hurts.

And when the State, the media, education, and even pop culture are all working overtime in the attempt to dismantle truth and peddle falsehoods, then it can only get worse. Incisive thinkers such as George Orwell were well aware of these sad outcomes.

In his prescient and eerily prophetic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four he discussed how the hero of the book, Winston Smith is being tortured in the ‘Ministry of Love’. His interrogator is trying to ‘cure’ him of his belief that reality is found in anything other than what the State says it is. As he informs Smith:

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

And this: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” We are now living in just such an era, where we are being told we must no longer believe what we see and hear, but simply go along with whatever the State, or the ‘experts,’ or the activists and militants tell us to believe.

They are demanding that we join the cult of unreality – or else. Well, I for one refuse to go along with this game. I know that ultimate truth and reality lie outside of the State or the latest ideology.

As C. S. Lewis put it in The Magician’s Nephew: “For what you see and what you hear depends a good deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.” The person standing on the rock of God’s truth, and committing himself to it, will be the one not easily swept away by lies, and joining the religion of unreality.

That is the sort of person we need to be.

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