By Lee Dise

Fifth of a seven-part series.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lee Dise is an accomplished trombonist and computer programmer, who also happens to know a great deal about things like philosophy, theology, history and related disciplines. He’s also a born-again Christian and in this multi-installment series appearing each day this week on HillFaith, Lee offers an insightful and provocative analysis of how we got from where we were to where we are today.

Paul wrote in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans that men “suppress the truth by their wickedness… For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — His eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

When God is not at the center of one’s thinking, we are tempted by our fallen nature to minimize Him, trivialize Him, and finally to deny Him.  But without Him, how do we explain the existence of the universe, and the existence and function of life itself?

The medieval scholars made it clear that, to understand anything, we must embrace God as the First Cause.  Because God is the personification of reason, we can expect a reasonable universe.  Because God is the personification of knowledge, we can know that truth exists.  And because God is the personification of good, we can know that there is an ultimate moral standard.

Subtract God from these equations, and we can only become less certain of reason, truth, and goodness.  If we needed proof of this, we need look no further than to the “Age of Reason,” also known as “The Enlightenment,” and also as “Modernism.”

By the end of the Renaissance, Europe’s great thinkers believed we could arrive at reason, truth, and virtue starting from man, from a purely secular perspective.  René Descartes (1596-1650) expressed this attitude perfectly:  “I think, therefore I am.”

Descartes was a Christian, but did not concede the need to place God at the center of his thinking.  According to Francis Schaeffer, Descartes was “supremely confident that by human thought alone one could doubt all notions based on authority and could begin from himself with total sufficiency,” and that math “would provide a factor which would give a unity to all knowledge.”

There, again, is that search for a universal with which to unite all the particulars.  Da Vinci had already concluded that math without God is nothing but a set of particulars.

Schaeffer sums up “the utopian dream of the Enlightenment” with five words:  reason, nature, happiness, progress, liberty.  The end result of this in philosophy was absurdity, and, in history, tears and bloodshed.

• Reason is divested of God and repurposed to become a mere tool for accomplishing desires, but desires may be good or bad.
• Nature is indifferent and, in its indifference, often cruel.
• Happiness arrives sometimes only through costs paid by others.
• Progress is often touted without further specification, as if change, any change at all, is always good in itself.
• Liberty is a balancing act, and what you see as liberty may be someone else’s nightmare.  History provides example after example.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) complained bitterly in the opening of his “The Social Contract” that “Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”  The chains comprised partly the church and partly also the morals, manners, and mores derived from church culture.

He believed liberty would be “perfectly reflected” through his idea of the “social contract” and the “general will.”  But, he added, “In order that the social compact may not be an empty formula … whoever refuses to obey the general will, will be compelled to do so …”

Rousseau never explained why the chains he had in mind were less onerous than anyone else’s.  We call this sort of thinking “Orwellian” because it is brazenly absurd.  The Jacobins during the French Revolution embraced Rousseau’s ideas and that particularly bloody form of the social contract progressed steadily, courtesy of Monsieur Guillotine.  So much for reason.

Rousseau also believed nature was good; that man, being a child of nature, was basically good; and that the best education is therefore no education.  He romanticized “the noble savage” as the perfection of morality.

It’s a romantic mirage.  Believing in this mirage displays a profound ignorance that defies history.  Even a cursory read of American Indian tortures, or the Māori’s enslavement and genocide of the Māori, should dispel any such notion.

Such moral degenerates as the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) opportunistically embraced this line of thinking. “As nature has made [man] the strongest, we can do with [women] whatever we please.”  If nature is moral, then that which is, whatever it is, is moral.  So much for nature.

And so much for happiness as well, if the best nature can do is to allow some to achieve happiness at the cost of those who exist only to be the means toward others’ ends.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) also sought the sort of unity that had eluded the medieval philosophers.  Hegel described intellectual history as thesis (an idea), versus antithesis (a reaction, often at diametrically-opposed odds), yielding synthesis, a melding of both thesis and antithesis.

Is there a problem?  Here’s one:  What if the thesis is already true, right and good?  Or, what if the antithesis is?  Does compromising truth and righteousness yield truth and righteousness?   No. Or does it just water them down?  Yes.  Compromising truth is at best a workaround and is far closer to relativism and convenience.  So much for progress.

Voltaire (1694-1778) has been called “the Father of the Enlightenment.”  He credited the English with achieving political reform through curtailing the absolute power of their monarchy, but may have underestimated the role played in all this by the Reformation.

When similar reforms were sought in France, but without the Reformation’s dim view of man’s purported wisdom, the result was Robespierre’s Reign of Terror — followed by yet another despot, Napoleon Bonaparte, who retained neither the preceding monarchs’ blood nor any remnant of their sense of noblesse oblige.  He proceeded to wreak havoc throughout Europe.  So much for liberty.

Using man’s unbridled wisdom as a launch pad to unify philosophy had failed.  What followed was discouragement and disappointment.

Next: Hume, Kant and Limits to Knowledge

Previously: 

Sunday – “Christian Belief and the Consequences of Ideas”

Monday – “Western Civilization as Cultural Synthesis.”

Tuesday – “From the Fragments of Empire, a New Beginning”

Wednesday – “Late Medieval Philosophy and the Basic Questions”

Thursday – “Renaissance, Reformation and Humanism”

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