- Introductions: What do you think of when you think of philosophy?
- Restatement of theme:
- “If this issue was the reason a non-believer gave as their obstacle to Christianity, what would we say to them?”
- Theme verse: “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.” (Matthew 13:19)
- Topic for Today: Philosophy and the Christian
- Or, Who Cares About Metaphysics?
- (This is all borrowing heavily from Francis Schaeffer’s book He Is There and He Is Not Silent.)
- Review from last week:
- Philosophy (at least the practical and not purely academic kind) and religion deal with the same kind of questions. Francis Schaeffer would claim that we have the best answers out there to make sense out of reality—so why are we scared of philosophy?
- Basic Areas of Philosophy:
- Logic: How do we reason? What is reason? The study of arguments. (Paul’s example.)
- Epistemology: How do we really know anything? (Lots of overlap with logic, but some people don’t think we can use logic to know anything.)
- Ethics/Morals: What is right and wrong and how do we know?
- Metaphysics: Why the heck is anything here? Jean-Paul Sartre said, according to Schaeffer, that “the basic philosophic question is that something is there rather than nothing being there.”
- Aesthetics: What is beautiful?
- I think you can see that Christianity does have something to say about many of these areas—particularly the “big three” of epistemology, morals, and aesthetics.
- Schaeffer’s Claim of Two Classes of Answers to Such Problems
- There is no logical, rational answer possible.
- Schaeffer’s observation is that they argue rationally until one is stuck, then they claim that they are irrational.
- There are rational answers possible.
- As a side note, this idea of rationalism includes, I think, even those who would make the Hitchhiker’s argument. (I’m thinking of the movie—I’m not sure if this was in the books as much.) I saw the movie, and it really struck me that the entire movie seemed to have such a sense of “life is pointless and meaningless” except in relationships. It is very existential—existence is the root of all meaning. Although that isn’t necessarily that far off base—I think we as Christians know that our meaning comes from God alone. (Ask John if Kierkegaard had other insights into this.) I do start to think that this is the predominant philosophy of today—across almost all sectors of belief (atheism, New Age, Wicca, much of Hinduism, much of Christianity, probably not strict Judaism, Islam, or Christianity so much)
- What do you think of this idea? How does it square with Scripture?
- I’m reminded of Job—life didn’t make sense, and God didn’t explain it—but God was responsible and understood it, apparently in a way rational to Him.
- We’re going to start looking at metaphysics and stuff assuming that things are rational. We couldn’t even have a discussion about it if they weren’t—and it is very difficult to live consistently that way. (I think very few people actually live as if life cannot make sense—we all struggle for life to make sense.)
- The Questions of Metaphysics
- It’s actually really hard to define metaphysics. It is often used as a word to describe a subject that doesn’t have another name, it seems. (That’s especially apparent from one of the dictionary definitions I found: “bewildering discussion.”)
- A working definition: Why is anything here? From a philosophic point of view, how did we get here from there? What did it start like? How does it all fit together?
- Basic possible answers (from Schaeffer):
- It all started with nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not just the black-hole type nothing—but zero, zip. No matter, no energy, no God.
- No one really gets very far in trying to imagine how everything came out of absolutely nothing.
- The second possibility is that it began in what Schaeffer calls an “impersonal” beginning.
- This is like starting with energy, or mass, or motion, or something without personality—something that is a thing rather than a being. This means that everything was starting either by chance or by clockwork—but neither having purpose or direction given to it. There was nothing that started it, and nothing continually directing it.
- Personal is the difference between God & man and the rest of creation.
- Problems?
- If there wasn’t any direction, why did anything come about? It is silly to explain that this inhuman natural did the most inconceivable and inefficient possible thing—why didn’t “the blob” or whatever just stay “the blob?”
- If we really start here, we have to somehow explain the world we have today as the beginning plus time plus chance. This doesn’t rule out life—creation vs. evolution isn’t the point—but it does really start to make one wonder how we ever learned to distinguish between people. How did we learned to have personalities, to have individualism?
- If you are a pantheist—which Schaeffer calls a pan-everything-ist, since there really isn’t a God with personality in it, you are stuck in this spot. You explain how we see ourselves unified with the world—as part of creation, in Christian lingo—but you can’t explain how we are any different from anything else.
- If there isn’t a beginning with something “personal,” then people don’t have any real reason for all of our desire for purpose and meaning—we should be content to be sucked into the borg. But people aren’t really that way. We want to be who we are created to be. (Side note: I wonder if this is a distinctly Western view?)
- We can’t imagine that the product of time and chance added something like meaning and purpose to people. The closest I think you can get is to say that those are simply concepts that are a result of chemical processes trying to continue our species. Fine, but I’d challenge you to really live consistently that way. Besides, is it really good to continue our species?
- The final possible answer is to have a personal beginning—a Creator or Creators.
- Within this answer, there are several discussions: Is there God or Gods? Do we know other characteristics that may be necessary for God?
- God or Gods?
- Having multiple gods does not give one absolutes. Schaeffer uses the example of the Greek gods and the Fates. Sometimes it seems as if the gods controlled the Fates, sometimes it seemed as if the Fates controlled the gods. Why? They really wanted ideals and absolutes—but it was really hard to define absolutes when the gods didn’t agree. So they tried the Fates—but that didn’t work because they weren’t gods. If there is something above your god(s), don’t you need to follow that?
- Bertrand Russell’s famous critique of Christianity is asking if “the difference [between right and wrong] is due to God’s fiat [decision] or is it not?” If there is some idea of good above God, than why do we worship Him? If God just arbitrarily chose what is “good”—then why do we call it “good”? Of course, this overlooks the possibility that God and goodness go together and are inseparable.
- For morality to make sense, it seems that there must be one infinite God in absolute power. Nothing else would suffice to really serve as what Schaeffer calls an “integration point”—something that we can really judge ourselves against, something to be able to determine our goodness by, something to see if we are living purposeful lives.
- This idea of “infinite” God makes the distinction between God and ourselves—He is infinite, no-one and nothing else is.
- What about the Trinity?
- Trinity is mostly unique to Christianity—I’ve heard that some Jews did believe in some Trinity-like ideas, if not well-defined. There does seem to be plenty of evidence for a God with a Spirit and a Son in the OT, especially the Psalms.
- If we did not have the Trinity, we would have had a God who needed to create in order to love and communicate—a God that needed us just as much as we needed Him.
- Conclusions
- Can you prove without a shadow of a doubt that Christianity is true? No. I don’t think you can. I think you can make a very good case to either be agnostic or a Christian, however. I think you can certainly make a very good case for Christianity being a very plausible answer. In the end, though, it comes down to faith. You can reject God pretty easily in your pride.
- Why are we looking at this, then? Two reasons, I guess. One, Christianity has some truly great answers, and we should not be afraid of the darkness but rather light the darkness with Truth. Second, I’ve found it very encouraging in my faith. I want to believe the Truth—not just follow something that I take for granted. And it is immensely encouraging to see that Christianity really does make sense. I think that’s very helpful as we encounter our world.
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