Worthen characterizes this [presuppositionalism] as the idea that although all people view the world through inbred preconceptions, only Christians have access to absolute truth. The result, she concludes, is that “if this sounds like the forerunner of modern cultural relativism, in a way, it is.” Rephrased, the evangelical contention that only a biblical worldview affords absolute knowledge about everything from earth science to sexuality, while everyone else is lost in the fog of relativism, has propagated the culture of post-truth retroactively.

In 1957, Albert Einstein warned that, “People who fail to regard the truth seriously in small matters, cannot be trusted in matters that are great.” Sixty years later, Einstein would be dismayed to learn, as Molly Worthen reports that a “post-truth” political climate has now come to America.

Somewhat surprisingly, though, Worthen claims that it is conservative, evangelical Christians who are responsible for creating the shift in truth values. That shift, she explains, happened with their insistence that only through the lens of a “biblical worldview” is life fully understandable.

Deeply engrained in this worldview are two concepts. The first is that only the Bible is infallible in its truth claims. The second concept is called presuppositionalism. Worthen characterizes this as the idea that although all people view the world through inbred preconceptions, only Christians have access to absolute truth.

The result, she concludes, is that “if this sounds like the forerunner of modern cultural relativism, in a way, it is.”

Rephrased, the evangelical contention that only a biblical worldview affords absolute knowledge about everything from earth science to sexuality, while everyone else is lost in the fog of relativism, has propagated the culture of post-truth retroactively. Jane Hong had something similar in mind when she blamed the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, which limited Latino immigration, for the flood of illegal Latino immigration.

The critique of evangelicalism is not without a germ of truth. The syllabus of worldview studies that is central to many Christian Colleges has, in recent years, assumed more and more the nature of dogma. What was once “an overarching approach to understanding God, the world, and man’s relations to God and the world”, as David Noebel explains, has, in many circles, become an easy set of positions proving one’s Christian orthodoxy.

This is not the field of reference Immanuel Kant wanted for philosophy and theology alike when he spoke of an all-embracing “Weltanschauung” (worldview)—that noumenal world where the self, the cosmos, and God remain unattainable by reason.

Although neither Kant nor his overall philosophy were Christian, the limits he set on pure reason bear similarity to Christian thought on at least one level—one that turns the tables on Worthen’s analysis.

At the heart of the Christian worldview is the concept of mystery. God and the world are knowable. But there is also a sense in which they are unknowable. It is not that we need to learn more. It is rather that we can never know anything as God. Imagine being the Creator of the Universe with total knowledge about everything you created and without ever needing to grow in understanding.

This does not mean that knowledge is beyond our grasp. It means that human comprehension of all things is best suited in a relationship with God. So, countering Worthen’s criticism, it is not that evangelicals know so much more than non-Christians. In many cases, we know less. But what we do know, we know genuinely.

In Sunday school, children heard the story of the Garden of Eden. God did not prohibit Adam and Even from eating the fruit because the act would give the couple God-like knowledge. The fruit represents our humanistic effort to know and to make moral judgments independently from God; indeed, to try to be like God.

This is why Christianity has meaning for journalism, statecraft, music, and a host of other endeavors. What distinguishes the Christian builder, for example, is not that he paints John 3:16 on his bricks. It is that he works with a conscious recognition of God as the archetype of all creativity before whom his creativity is the ectype.

This indicates that the Christian worldview is concerned not only with the product of learning, but also with our position in learning. It acts as a constant reminder to the seeker of truth just how small we really are before the marvel of God’s Universe. And that to objectify our gullibility in the notion that the self-ruling mind is sufficient enough to study and to explain the meaning of things is not science. It is to trivialize the depth and complexity of nature.

Carl Sagan was well aware of this complexity. In his book Contact, Dr. Ellie Arroway scathes, “Anything you don’t understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.”

Although Sagan fathomed the grandeur of space, portrayed here is the great error of the secular worldview. For Ellie, mysteries are unexplained facts awaiting human interpretation, which is first and independent of God. But according to the Christian worldview, mysteries exist because God is God and we are not. It is thus his interpretation that is first and ours is derivative of his.

Still, we cannot know everything. Because human reason is finite and God is infinite, and because the Cosmos bears the imprint of his infinite glory, we stand before each with humble amazement.

Perhaps secularists should look to their own camp for originating the idea that facts are passé. When Oxford Dictionaries selected post-truth as 2016’s international word of the year, it defined the term as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

There you have it. “Objective facts are less influential.”

Unless secular scientists, journalists, and cultural pundits think they can move in and out of the very reality they study, here is a question.

How can you read the label when you are inside the jar?

Only God can see the world from outside the jar. Find God. And you will discover objectivity.

John Barber is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America; he lives in Jacksonville, Fla.