According to JP Moreland and Klaus Issler, there are 7 assumptions we absorb from our culture that make it hard to nurture faith--and there are 4 ways to battle these assumptions (In Search of a Confident Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting in God):
Doubts are unknowingly fed by ideas absorbed from the plausibility structure of the surrounding culture….Even though such assumptions are usually easy to answer, finding such answers does not, by itself, resolve the doubts. This can only be done by making these cultural assumptions explicit, by exposing them for the intellectual frauds they actually are, and by being vigilant in keeping them before one’s mind and spotting their presence in the ordinary reception of input each day from newspapers, magazines, office conversation, television, movies and so on. Said differently, it is not enough to find good answers to these doubts as it is for more specific intellectual problems. The real solution here is the conscious formation of alternative, countercultural ways of seeing, thinking and being present in the world. If this is not done, these background assumptions will bully us Christians to live secular lives, and they will squeeze the spiritual life out of us.
Here are seven of the main doubt-inducing background assumptions of our culture:
1. It is smarter to doubt things than to believe them. Smart people are skeptical. People who find faith easy are simplistic, gullible and poorly educated. The more educated you become, the more you will become a skeptic.
2. University professors are usually unbelievers because they know things unrecognized by average folk that make belief in the Bible a silly thing to have.
3. Religion is a matter of private, personal feelings and should be kept out of debates—political and/or moral—in the public square.
4. Science is the only way to know reality with confidence, or at least it is a vastly superior way of knowing reality than other approaches, e.g., religious ones. And science has made belief in God unnecessary.
5. We can know things only through our five senses. If I can see, touch, taste, hear or smell something, then it’s real and I can know it. But if I can’t sense it in one of these ways, I can’t know it’s real and I must settle for a blind, arbitrary choice to believe in it.
6. If we can’t get the experts to agree on something like the existence and nature of God, abortion, or life after death, then we just can’t know anything about it.
7. Enlightened people are tolerant, nonjudgmental and compassionate. They are unwilling to impose their views on others. Defensive, unenlightened people are the dogmatic, ugly polar opposites of enlightened folk.
These ideas are seldom stated this explicitly, but we absorb them daily through conversation and largely through the media. This is a conspiracy. That would be intentional. It’s far worse than that. With genuine exceptions, these ideas have so permeated our society that media folk govern their work by them without having the lightest idea of this fact. How do we erase the impact of these background assumptions on our confidence in God and the Christian worldview?
Here’s a four-step procedure that will remove this kind of doubt if you internalize it as a habit through conscious repetition:
Step 1: Spot the activating source (e.g., the evening news, TV show, movie, conversation at work) and be alert while being exposed to it.
Step 2: Explicitly state to yourself exactly the doubt-inducing cultural assumption that lies beneath the surface of the activating source (start with the list of seven above).
Step 3: Challenge and question the truth of the cultural assumption. Is that really true? Doubt the doubt!
Step 4: Replace the cultural assumption with a biblical truth—the correct alternative way of seeing reality—and make it your goal grow in God-confidence about the alternative.
(Pages 47-49, In Search of a Confident Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting God, by JP Moreland and Klaus Issler)
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