Notes for "Christian Civilization is the Only Civilization"
[2] The Twentieth Century was also the occasion of the largest slaughters of human life in the history of the world. Over 100 million people were killed by Communist, officially atheistic, governments. Islamic governments were second in the number of people they killed. (See Twentieth Century Book of the Dead) Atheists respond that Stalin and his partners in crime had a “religious” devotion to communism, that Hitler campaigned as a Christian candidate and followed the teachings of Martin Luther in slaughtering the Jews, and that medieval Christian persecutors would have killed at least as many as the communists if they had had modern technology at their disposal. In other words, the atheists want to claim that they are responsible for all the good stuff (i.e. scientific advances) in the twentieth century and religion is responsible for all the bad stuff. My aim in this essay is, from the philosophical perspective (as opposed to the historical), to show the opposite: Atheism is responsible for the bad stuff, and Christianity is responsible for the good stuff. [3] The historical contribution of Christianity to science is addressed in “The Light Has Come: The History of Christian Contributions to the Progress of Civilization,” and some myths of past Christian suppression of science are addressed in “Myths About Past (Quasi-) Christian Civilization.” [4] Noah’s son Shem was still alive when Abraham was born. The accuracy of Biblical chronology has been accepted by Christians for practically all of church history. In the Nineteenth Century gap thinking (imposing gaps of indeterminable lengths of time into various points in Biblical chronology) became the rage among Evangelical theologians, largely in a misguided attempt to accommodate ancient pagan records. For a defense of the traditional gapless view, see James Jordon, Biblical Chronology, at http://www.freebooks.com/docs/_newsbc.htm. [5] See Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomoy in Christian Ethics. [6] Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar," Following the Equator (Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1897). [7] Frederick Nietzsche, Antichrist: Attempt at a Critique of Christianity (1895). [8] Wolman v. Walter, 433 U.S. 229 (1977) [9] See Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1974), 12-13; and Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith (Texarkana, AR: Covenant Media Foundation, 1996), 193-201. [10] See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo; Civilization and Its Discontents; The Future of an Illusion. [11] The only worldview that might be said to be more rationalistic is a pantheism in which all that exists is the one, absolutely rational God. But then every mind would be eternally omniscient, and there would never be disagrements among people about ethics, philosophy, or which football team was better. According to Christian doctrine, pantheism was once true. Prior to the creation of the world, only God existed—all that existed was God. But this pantheism is not the historic pantheist view, in which the divine being is not an absolutely rational mind but rather an impersonal principle of unity. [12] Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 63. [13] David Hume is a famous example of a philosopher who argued from instances of imperfection to the non-existence of a perfect God. John Stuart Mill argued that God was perfect, but He must be finite, given the imperfection of the world. Hume and Mill were both strict empiricists in their theory of knowledge. They attempted to derive universals from the particulars of sense experience. This theory of knowledge is reflected in their argument against a perfect, absolute God. I show below that their theory of knowledge failed, undermining the very possibility of knowledge. Alleged imperfection in the natural world plays a significant role in the argument for Darwinian evolution. As Cornelius G. Hunter shows in his book Darwin’s God (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), Darwinianism is a theodicy for natural evil. Darwin held a view of God common in the Victorian era in which he lived, that a perfect God would create nature to exhibit perfect efficiency and lack of cruelty. Darwin reasoned like Mill that God’s perfection could be preserved only by limiting God: Natural laws that are put in place by God but that act independently of Him are responsible for the form that nature has taken. The Victorian view is inconsistent with the Biblical view that a perfect, sovereign God ordains an imperfect world: Job 39:13-18, Isa. 45:7, Psalm 50:11, Matt. 6:26. Also see Gary North , Dominion Covenant: Genesis (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), 410. [14] Eckart Förster, "How are Transcendental Arguments Possible?", quoted in The Standard Bearer: A Festschrift for Greg L. Bahnsen, 84. [15] The “ontological Trinity” is God as He is in Himself. This is to be distinguished from the “economical Trinity,” which is God as He relates to the world (such as the role of the 2nd person to die for humanity’s sins, and the role of the 3rd person to bring conviction of sin). As for the charge of contradiction in the doctrine of the ontological Trinity, there is none because God is one and three in different senses (though at the same time). It is true, however, that the Bible does not tell us exactly what properties of each person of the ontological Trinity are unique to that person and which properties are shared. At any rate, the individual persons should not be distinguished in such a way that makes their unity impersonal and God’s knowledge of Himself and the world less than exhaustive. That would put Christianity in the same leaky, irrational boat as atheism, with its ultimately impersonal universe. See Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1974), 229-30. [16] Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 436-37. [17] Ibid., vi. It is true, of course, that the early church did not fully and consistently grasp this view of the relationship between God and nature. The early church endured many major and minor heretical movements. There were Christians who viewed religion as more of an escape from the world than as a presupposition by which to interpret the world, just as there are today. But the view expressed by Cochrane is the one defended in this essay. [18] IST, 20. [19] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, (1974), 102 [20] Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 217. [21] Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 144: "It is all too clear that we cannot well attribute the predicates of white and black to the same immediate subject without reducing human speech to a meaningless series of vocables" [22] Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind (1807), "Preface" [23] Van Til, The Protestant Doctrine of Scripture, Vol. 1 of In Defense of the Faith/Biblical Christianity (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1967), Ch. 2. [24] Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, xii. [25] IST, 167. [26] Van Til, The Case for Calvinism (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1979), 141-42. [27] Critique of Pure Reason, A 51/B 75. [28] Although Kant described his own view as a Copernican Revolution in philosophy, the Christian view I am presenting here is better compared to Copernican’s revolution than Kant’s. Copernicus dethroned man and his earthly habitation as the geographical center of the universe, whereas Kant placed man’s autonomous mind at the rational center. The view I present places God at the rational center and man as a “satellite” around God. [29] David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951; first published in 1739), 269. [30] Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scopes and Limits (New York: Clarion Books, Simon and Schuster, 1948), xv-xvi. Quoted in Greg Bahnsen, “Pragmatism, Prejudice, and Presuppositionalism,” Foundations of Christian Scholarship, Gary North Ed. (Vallicito, CA: Ross House Books, 1976), 243. [31] “Meek” does not mean wimp; it means humble before God, which is the basis for being bold before the world. [32] Van Til, The Protestant Doctrine of Scripture, Ch. 2. [33] Van Til, Christianity in Conflict, Vol. II, Ch.1, sect. 3. [35] Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, Ch.16. [36] See Dr. Greg Bahnsen, tapes __ in the Philosophy of Christianity course lectures at www.cmfnow.com. [37] IST, 102-03. [38] Thomas Aquinas argued for “analogical” reasoning rather than univocal or equivocal reasoning, but in terms of his commitment to the Greek view of the one and the many, his analogical reasoning is just a mixture of univocal and equivocal reasoning. To the extent created things are like God, they are ontologically one with God. To the extent things are different from God, they are independent of God, taking part in matter, the principle of individuation, of which God has none in His being. This contrasts with the Christian view of analogical reasoning, in which both the unity and diversity aspects of created things are ontologically distinct from God, but both aspects, on a finite level, reflect God their Creator, the Ultimate One and Many. [39] Michael Butler says that the transcendental argument for God's existence and the traditional arguments can both be said to deal with "intelligibility," but in two different ways. Using the analogy of a jet engine, he points out that a jet engine can be unintelligible in the sense that a person may not know how a jet engine works, but the jet engine can be intelligible to that same person in the sense that the person knows what a jet engine is and can use the term in communication. The traditional approach assumes that non-Christians can talk intelligibly about the universe, and the traditional argument merely shows who makes the universe work. In contrast, the aim of a transendental argument is to show that we cannot talk intelligibly about the universe unless God exists. Butler says that this analogy applies to Aquinas' cosmological argument. (Michael Butler, "The Transcendental Argument for God's Existence" in The Standard Bearer: A Festschrift for Greg L. Bahnsen, ed. Steven M. Schlissel (Nacogdoches, TX: Covenant Media Foundation, 2002), 81.) I think that Butler accurately describes the arguments of many Christians with a philosophical system less developed than Aquinas', and it may accurately describe Aquinas' five proofs in their immediate context. However, Aquinas' epistemology might be said to be transcendental in requiring God as an abstract universal for the possibility of knowledge. But even if Aquinas' approach can be called transcendental, it is a bad transcendental argument because the Greek form/matter dialectic, in which God is viewed as an abstract universal, undermines the possibility of knowledge. [40] Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 21. [41] Take note what I am not saying about probabilistic arguments: 1) that an argument for the existence of God must prove every attribute of God, 2) that probabilistic arguments are inappropriate for proving things other than the existence of an absolute God, such as whether a particular event was a miracle or the product of natural laws, and 3) that the there will always be certainty that every attempt to state the argument for God's existence was done correctly. Aquinas' arguments are sometimes said to prove God's probable existence, not because the conclusion only probably follows from the premise, but because it doesn't prove every attribute of God, so it could be compatible with some non-biblical views of God. The problem is not that Aquinas doesn't prove every attribute of God' by his arguments, but that the nature of the God he proves — an empty universal — is inconsistent with the nature of the God of the Bible. [42] “The innate and the acquired knowledge of God may, accordingly, be said to be correlative to one another. Neither of them is intelligent by itself. To say that innate knowledge is intelligible by itself is to fall back upon a Cartesian or Platonic basis. To say that the acquired knowledge is intelligible by itself is to fall back upon a non-Christian empiricism. They are mutually interdependent.” Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 197. [43] See James Jordan, The Law of the Covenant: An Exposition of Exodus 21-23 (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1974), 42-45, 50-52. [44] See Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Tranformed Civilization (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 2001) 125-150. [45] Herbert Schossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983). [46] Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 202ff. He says that he defends and defines these attributes in terms of the “originality of God” ( 205), which is equivalent to the terms “absolute” and “concrete universal” as I have defined them. [47] See Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 79-80. [48] See note 15 on the necessity of not denying the exhaustiveness of God’s knowledge in distinguishing the individual persons of the Trinity from each other. [49] Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga describes how he thinks the historical accuracy of the Bible should be empirically evaluated: “First, of course, the case in question couldn’t in any way rely on the thought that the Bible is in some special way inspired by God; for these purposes, we should have to treat it exactly as we would any other ancient volume. We should have to follow the example of those Scripture scholars who try to determine (for example) what actually happened with Jesus – what he preached, whether he arose from the dead – without making any special theological assumptions about the reliability of the Bible or the person of Jesus. They bracket any such theological beliefs they may have and then try to assess the historical case or evidence for such claims as that Jesus actually asserted that he was the divine redeemer, or the claim that he died and came back to life.” Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 272. Plantinga then says that the teachings of the Bible would be difficult to prove by such a method, and he argues that Christians are largely within their epistemic rights to believe “by faith” the truth of the historical events in the Bible despite their lack of proof by means of this “neutral” empirical method (cf. 420-21), but he is saying that any historical proof of the Bible would have to follow this method. But given that God is the precondition for rationality, to suspend belief in God entails suspending belief in the ability to gain knowledge of historical facts, which, of course, would sink the whole project. [50] Rousas John Rushdoony, By What Standard?: An Analysis of the Philosophy of Cornelius Van Til (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1958), 187.
Part II: A Critique of Specific Disciplines and their Christian Reconstruction
Art [1] A Kantian dialectic tension between the one and the many is evident in Nietzsche's philosophy of art. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche described the source of art as a duality between Apollonian thinking and Dionysian thinking. Representational art is under the restrains of Apollinian thinking, which is controlled by attention to the distinctions between appearances, whereas abstract art rejects Apollo in favor of Dionysus, a metaphor for non-rational, primordial unity. The two approaches are in tension, but they both are necessary to produce the greatest art. [2] Gunther Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress (Garden City, New York: Natural History Press, published for the American Museum of Natural History, 1969), 98. Quoted in Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh, 148 n.13. [3] Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 66-67. [4] R.J. Rushdoony, Infallibility: An Inescapable Concept (Vallicito, CA: Ross House Books, 1978), 34-38. |