In college, my wife stayed with another family while she was in grad school. They were very giving to her, very welcoming, very warm. On occasion, they would try to pull her into conversations and playful disagreements. She liked both of them, and she refused to take sides. She said, "I'm Switzerland. I'm neutral." Of course, Switzerland as a country has historically been neutral. They don't take sides in things.

It's often today that we view neutrality as a good thing. “He doesn't take sides. He's not narrow-minded. He's neutral,” People may say. I think this sometimes flows over into how we think about theology and people and ideas and approaches, but in reality, there's no neutral approach from a religious perspective.

You can't evaluate Christianity from a neutral position because you're either going to reason from the idea and a conviction that God exists and the supernatural is possible, or you will reason from the idea that it's not possible. There's not a neutral ground. Either God exists and the supernatural is possible, or he doesn't and it's not. There's no middle ground there.

The presuppositions, the pre-commitments we bring to the evidence when we evaluate it has a lot to do with how compelling we're going to find the evidence. I think this goes without saying in some areas, but when we get to Christianity, we seem to often think that people can be neutral, that they can make value-free judgements, but no judgment is value-free. We all interpret evidence and make statements from inside of a world view. Because of these presuppositions, these pre-commitments, an Atheist and a Christian will interpret the same evidence differently. The same information gets seen differently because we have different lenses.

It's like if one friend has non-polarized sunglasses and another friend has polarized sunglasses. They're out on a boat. They're going to be seeing different things. Not totally different, but different in the details. The friend with the polarized glasses might be able to see the fish under the water, but the other friend might not be able to see it. The friend without the polarized glasses is much more likely to see glare and maybe not natural colors. The guy with the polarized glasses is going to see a more detailed and a more accurate picture. I hope this “lens” approach helps you understand that the lenses we use in terms of our worldviews are the pre-commitments we bring to the evidence and will greatly affect how we view it, but there is no neutral ground with regards to evaluating evidence because our pre-commitments influence how we see everything. More than that, man is not actually a morally neutral creature. Sometimes, people will talk like, "Well, man needs God, yes, but it's not like he's bad in his current state."

Well, the bible doesn't leave that as an option. In fact, Paul says that “the mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God. It does not submit to a God's law, nor can it do so.” This is in Romans eight. Here, he's making the point that the person in the flesh cannot please God. You're either in the flesh, which is not a Christian, or you're in the Spirit, which is someone who's been regenerated, who is a Christian. You'll notice there's no neutral ground there. You're either in the flesh, can't please God, or in the spirit, and you can please God. No neutral ground. One category or the other, but man isn't neutral even when he's not a Christian. He has a mind that is governed by the flesh. Paul says it's hostile to God. Not neutral with regards to God, hostile, because if you take a neutral position, something you might consider neutral with regard to God, God actually views that as hostility. He actually views it as rebellion. There is no middle ground with God.