Are Your Beliefs Logical? Three Tests You Can Use to Find Out

How do you know if your beliefs are logical? Three tests of a reasonable worldview can help you find out. Let’s see what these tests are and how we can apply them to compare the rationality of two different worldviews: biblical creation vs. naturalistic evolution. First, a quick refresher on the concept of worldviews is in order.

Worldview Basics

A worldview is the set of beliefs we use to explain the world around us, like a pair of glasses through which we interpret reality. Our worldviews give us the framework for answering questions like, “Who are we? Where did we come from? What is our purpose? How should we live? What happens after we die?” The ultimate authority we use to answer these questions will either be God’s Word or the ideas of fallible humans—man’s word. In other words, there are only two worldviews.

A common variation of the second worldview is secularism. This view rejects God as Creator, typically claiming instead that humans arose through evolution over millions of years. Importantly, as Dr. Terry Mortenson unpacks in this article, we cannot fit these evolutionary ideas into Scripture while keeping God’s Word as our highest authority for truth. In the battle of God’s Word versus evolutionary secularism, which worldview is more logical?

Three Tests of a Logical Worldview

Three tests can help us answer. First, a logical worldview will be consistent with itself. It shouldn’t lead to ideas that contradict themselves, and it can’t borrow ideas from outside itself. Second, the worldview will be consistent with observable reality. Third, consistently living out the worldview should also have positive practical implications for society.

Notably, the third test doesn’t necessarily tell us the truth of a worldview because a message isn’t true or false because of its consequences. But if those consequences are so bad that people need to live as if the message is false, that’s clearly a problem.

With these basics in mind, let’s see how God’s Word and evolutionary secularism stand up to each test.

Test 1: Self-Consistency

To pass the first test, a worldview needs an internal foundation for all the major concepts it assumes are true—including concepts required to argue for the worldview. These concepts include the ideas of truth, logic, knowledge, scientific reasoning, and morality. (After all, we need some sort of moral basis for words like “good” and “ought” before we can say that we “ought” to make logical arguments.1)

A biblical view provides a consistent philosophical foundation for all these concepts, beginning with a Creator God whose character is the authoritative, self-existent source of truth, morality, and logic. As apologists like Dr. Jason Lisle explain, immaterial, unchanging laws of logic that are true and present everywhere are possible and make sense because they’re grounded in an immaterial, unchanging God who is true and present everywhere.2 Our logical God made a logical universe that follows predictable natural laws. He created us with faculties for knowledge, making certainty and scientific reasoning possible.

But if we reject God as Creator, that leaves us with man’s word. If objective truth exists, we can’t know what it is without relying on subjective human perceptions, feelings, and reasoning. But atheism tells us these things are products of chemicals reacting in brains that evolved by unguided processes for no transcendent purpose. And why should unguided, meaningless processes result in reliable, meaningful perceptions and thinking?

Evolutionary processes select for survival and reproductive advantages, not necessarily true thinking. In fact, some researchers argue that faulty reasoning and self-deception can offer evolutionary advantages.3 So as Charles Darwin once said,

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.4

The trouble is that we can’t search out whether human perceptions, feelings, and reasoning are reliable without relying on human perceptions, feelings, and reasoning. We end up in a vicious cycle of uncertainty, without an authoritative foundation for truth to exist and be knowable.5

Similar problems arise for the concept of logic. Immaterial laws of logic could not exist in a strictly material universe.6 And if the laws of logic were only agreed-upon human conventions or by-products of our brains, then those laws wouldn’t be universally true and unchanging.7 In other words, reality wouldn’t necessarily be logical everywhere and at all times. Unfortunately, knowledge and scientific reasoning depend on those concepts of logic and truth, which would be lacking a solid foundation.

Scientific reasoning also assumes we live in an orderly, predictable universe that follows natural laws. But as philosopher Danny Fredrick realizes, “The existence of natural laws . . . seems puzzling because it implies that mindless bits of matter behave in a consistent and co-ordinated way.”8 He ends up concluding that the existence of natural laws is best accounted for only by some kind of theism.

And what about moral laws? Secularists have proposed many creative frameworks for morality, including Kantianism, utilitarianism, contractarianism, intuitionism, and essentialism.9 But as this article unpacks, none of these systems end up being able to provide ultimate, meaningful justification for real, knowable, and enforceable moral standards. Correspondingly, atheist Michael Ruse concludes from his evolutionary perspective,

So how then do I justify my substantive ethical beliefs? I claim simply that there is no justification! I think the substantive ethics, claims like “love your neighbor as yourself,” are simply psychological beliefs put in place by natural selection in order to maintain and improve our reproductive fitness.10

Evolutionary arguments that assume morality, truth, and logic are foundationally real and meaningful must borrow them from outside of evolutionary naturalism. In other words, this worldview fails the test of internal consistency.

Test 2: Consistency with Observable Reality

What about the next test of aligning with observable reality? As it turns out, the observational science even in common arguments for evolution fits well with a biblical view, as these overviews describe:

• Drug-resistant bacteria
• Living things’ similarities
• “Bad designs” in nature
• “Vestigial” organs
• Biogeography (the global distributions of living things)
• The (nearly) universal genetic code
• Nested hierarchies in taxonomy
• Evolutionary “family trees”
• “Transitional” fossils

On the other hand, the observational science even behind mechanisms that are supposed to drive evolution, namely mutation and natural selection, does not support an evolutionary worldview. (For example, mutations do not provide the type of new genetic information evolutionary origins accounts require, and natural selection can only act on preexisting genetic information.11)

It’s also worth repeating that a biblical view gives us a foundation for scientific reasoning in the first place. And because observational science lines up with God’s Word, we can make more scientific progress by starting with a biblical worldview than an evolutionary one, as research by Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson and others powerfully illustrates.12 So a biblical view does the best job of passing the second test.

Test 3: Practical Livability

If the worldview is going to have positive practical implications, it will also need a foundation for human value, justice, and rights. In a biblical view, God’s character is the self-existent source of morality, setting authoritative, knowable, enforceable standards of right vs. wrong. God also created us in His image, which means every human life has meaning, value, and dignity. These concepts, in turn, provide a meaningful basis for understanding justice and human rights.13

But in worldviews without God, it’s up to humans to make up our own rules about what we currently happen to think is right or wrong. Unfortunately, we have no basis for explaining why those rules should value every human life if humans are just meaningless evolutionary by-products.

We might try to pick criteria like sentience or higher reasoning abilities and say that’s what gives humans value. But without a foundation for morality, we cannot ultimately explain why sentience or reasoning abilities are “good” or “valuable” in the first place. Even if we could, different humans meet these criteria to different degrees at different stages of life. So we couldn’t say every human life has value. Instead, some humans would become more valuable than others and more deserving of human rights, which are just a kind of animal right. And we’d still have no final moral basis for explaining why we ought to respect anyone’s rights anyway.

In the end, evolution cannot provide a foundation for human value. And without a foundation for value and morality, there cannot be a foundation for justice. Thankfully, most people who profess to hold an evolutionary worldview don’t live out all its practical implications. But there have been times in history when people did try (and do try) to live more consistently with an evolutionary view—with disastrous consequences.14

Conclusion

The results are in. A biblical worldview, not an evolutionary secular one, passes all three tests. For Test 1, a biblical worldview is more self-consistent because it supplies a basis for truth, logic, and knowledge to make arguments intelligible in the first place. For Test 2, a biblical worldview fits better with observable reality (including observations that appear in evolutionary arguments), allowing creationists to solve research problems that evolutionists cannot. And for Test 3, a biblical worldview translates to better practical outcomes by establishing a foundation for human value, justice, and morality.

Certainly, none of this implies that atheists cannot behave as if concepts like morality, logic, and knowledge exist. The naturalistic evolutionary worldview simply does not provide a philosophical foundation for these concepts, failing the tests of intelligibility from the start.

God’s Word, in contrast, not only passes all three tests of a logical worldview but also offers hope. A biblical view reveals that we are not by-products of microbes, charting meaningless courses through an empty universe. Instead, we are image bearers of the Creator who “so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Further Reading:

What Is Epistemology, and How Does It Point to God?

Is There a Secular Foundation for Morality?

God’s Image as the Foundation for Human Rights

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