How are we to evaluate the secular humanism which is quickly bringing about the death of our culture? One of the tenets of secular humanism is that Christian believers are credulous and sentimental, and that one must be a materialist, a scientist, and a humanist to have a skeptical mind. Yet the very opposite is true. Those who retain simple faith in the Scriptures in an environment of secular humanism are not credulous. Rather, they are the careful thinkers. They are the ones who have considered secular humanism and rejected it. They are the ones who have better developed critical faculties. It is the secular humanists who are credulous. Malcolm Muggeridge has written, quite rightly, that the age in which we are now living "will go down in history as one of the most credulous ever."1
Those who have had the courage to think for themselves, not blindly following the leadership of the intelligentsia of the twentieth century, can hardly be considered naive or simplistic. It is precisely because people have not been thinking for themselves that so many of them have fallen into the erroneous world view of twentieth-century scholarship. Let us wake up! Is it not evident by the end results that we in our culture are in serious error?
Who is the naive one: the academician who blindly accepts the Documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch simply because he or she is told that its results are assured, or the one who cares to investigate the theory and subject it to careful scrutiny? The believer in Christ's view of the authorship of the Pentateuch is not credulous. Rather, he or she has the courage to disagree with the consensus because it is found wanting, and because truth is more important than academic respectability.
The same could be said with respect to the theory of evolution, and Malcolm Muggeridge has expressed it elegantly:
I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has. It think I spoke to you before about this age as one of the most credulous in history, and I would include evolution as an example.2
1 Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, But Not of Christ (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 4-5.
2 Ibid., p. 59.
