LESSONS FROM HISTORY (7): Limits to Knowledge; No Limits to Depravity
Which way will you go? Photo by Robert Ruggiero on Unsplash
By Lee Dise
Seventh 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.
Author Lee Dise.
Philosophy completed its long descent, finally hitting bottom in the 19th and 20th centuries — from centered on God, to centered on man with a sidelined God, to “Enlightenment” and God’s irrelevance, and finally all the way to God’s (figurative) obliteration by the deep-thinking folks.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote the succinct epitaph: “God is dead.” Francis Schaeffer said that he believed Nietzsche went insane, not because he was suffering from syphilis (which he was), but because he could not deal with the bleak world his mind perceived. If God is dead, then “everything for which God gives an answer and meaning is dead.”
But there is good news: Man has no power to pronounce God dead. Kant had concluded that man’s moral obligations are derived not from religious authority, but from his own sense of reason. What sense of reason?
Men who followed Rousseau’s reasoning used it to chop off thousands of heads during the French Revolution. Karl Marx (1818-1883), starting with Hegelian dialectical methods, created a deterministic economic theory that left in its wake an astonishing death toll of up to 100 million people, and still counting.
A Socialist intellectual in Italy named Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) synthesized the 19th century’s two most powerful ideologies — Nationalism and Socialism. The result was Fascism, and its body count rivals Marxism’s, at least in terms of productivity, if not in the actual number of dead bodies.
Socialism, in whatever form it appears, always offers Satan’s counsel: “Someone’s holding out on you. You can be like God.” Socialism turns envy into a sacrament.
The final result of the Enlightenment’s project was a conclusion that era’s thinkers had never intended: We can never be sure of anything. And God (if He does exist) is only an abstraction and is thus irrelevant to our lives.
What’s it all about, Alfie? Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash
That is a message that speaks straight to the deceitful heart of man. Nietzsche foretold the coming crisis, namely “[the rejection of] objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning.”
Take morality, for example. Moral nihilism is the idea that nothing is morally wrong. In an article about moral skepticism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows how moral nihilists can use logic to acquit any human act, and includes (as an example) a “proof” that it is not morally wrong to torture a helpless baby.
When someone’s thinking leads to doubting whether it is wrong to torture babies, it’s time to reexamine his thinking. Torturing babies is obviously wrong, and everybody knows it.
Attitudes about science contributed their fair share of all this intellectual carnage. Kant had already concluded that we can’t know things as they really are. If human knowledge is uncertain, human will lives on even shakier ground.
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) believed that everything that will happen has already been determined by physical laws, and so there is no free will. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) derived a theory that we do not need God to explain the origins of species, but only natural selection and the survival instinct.
Concurrently, various other theories were spawned that, more or less, synthesized Darwin’s theory with human cruelty (we can’t blame Darwin for that). Called Social Darwinism, these theories have been used to justify everything from snobbery to genocide.
The rise of science-mindedness has done untold damage to the Lord’s church. When the deep-thinking folks proclaim confidently that only the foolish or superstitious believe in miracles, it takes a bold person to defend the Lord and His Word.
Not everyone can do that. The Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) did, and was hanged for it by the Nazis. But others, some of them deep thinkers themselves, missed out.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a Danish theologian and considered to have been one of the first Existential philosophers. Kierkegaard accepted the idea that religion cannot be objectively certain, and implied that only a leap of faith can take us to God — but, in doing so, we must surrender reason.
Photo by Valentin Salja on Unsplash
Oh, pish-posh. We need only to surrender man’s reason. That won’t be hard. Man has already surrendered it. On its own terms, it is hesitant and uncertain. It cannot tell us whether the truth is anything more than subjective game-playing. This should humble the deep-thinking folks, but instead, they wield their uncertainties as war hammers and try to implicate faith-based certainty as a wellspring of ignorance.
This hubris has no foundation. We cannot even trust man to teach math. If universals don’t exist, then why must 2 + 2 = 4? There are school systems today that teach, or propose to teach, their students to doubt basic arithmetic. Bad math will lead to worse engineering.
The church’s response has been flabbily passive, if not cowardly. Over the course of time, many Protestant denominations have de-emphasized the miracles of the Bible and quietly changed the subject from Jesus our Lord to Jesus the man.
Problem is, the Bible does not support such an emphasis. John said Jesus was there in the beginning, with God, and through Him, all things were made. Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I am.”
Jesus rose from the dead and Paul said if He didn’t, we are the most to be pitied. Christianity’s chips are all in on this. If a clergyman cannot bring himself to proclaim the truth, he should probably get out of the truth-proclaiming business.
Math, logic, objective truth, goodness, and love are all real because they are eternal attributes of the mind of the living God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If the Lord thinks in rational terms, then rationality is part of our reality and we can use it with confidence. Goodness and love describe the eternal relationships between the Persons of the Trinity. God is a personal God, not a mere abstraction.
When Jesus said He is the truth, He was making the most profound philosophical statement of all time. If you believe in Him, you have to believe He is who He said.
Lessons From History: The Complete Series:
Sunday Introduction – “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“
Friday – “Man’s Reason on the Throne”
Saturday – “Hume, Kant and Limits to Knowledge”
Sunday – “Limits to Knowledge; No Limits to Depravity”
“That is a message that speaks straight to the deceitful heart of man. Nietzsche foretold the coming crisis, namely ‘[the rejection of] objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning.’
“Take morality, for example. Moral nihilism is the idea that nothing is morally wrong. In an article about moral skepticism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows how moral nihilists can use logic to acquit any human act, and includes (as an example) a ‘proof’ that it is not morally wrong to torture a helpless baby.
When someone’s thinking leads to doubting whether it is wrong to torture babies, it’s time to reexamine his thinking. Torturing babies is obviously wrong, and everybody knows it.”
Clearly. But you arrived at that point the same way the Hume did.
“We feel sympathy for our fellow man, and from that sympathy we make value judgments as to what is good or bad for him.”
I understand the hill that you are fighting up. How can we know, without an absolute line in the sand, or a stake driven in as a marker, what is right and wrong? Because as the 20th Century demonstrated (and the 21st continues to demonstrate), we can convince ourselves any path is the moral one, regardless of the destruction that ensues. Reason seems to be an unreliable guide to morality, but theology has also resulted in untold destruction, and taken too literally bars the way to understanding.
Jordan Peterson has suggested we use reason to operate in and understand the natural world, but use Judeo-Christian theology as a moral guide. His argument is a practical one, that Western Civilization has done best – and therefore its people benefitted most – when that was the model we used.
A thoughtful response, Michael. Sorry I’m late to respond, though. This past winter, I suffered a rather serious bout with the one-two punch known as COVID/Double Pneumonia. I was totally out of it for about a three-week period from late January to about mid-February, during which time I was on oxygen. The pneumonia had left me with something called pulmonary infiltrate, which robbed me of about a third of my lung capacity.
So I bought a tuba. 🙂 As therapy, it beats the hell out of an incentive spirometer. Now, several months later, I seem to have fully recovered.
> “We feel sympathy for our fellow man, and from that sympathy we make value judgments as to what is good or bad for him.”
I think sympathy can take us but so far, because we also sympathize with ourselves, and our personal agenda may get in the way of addressing the grievances of others. It’s all well and good, for example, to sympathize with a street person and toss five bucks into the Salvation Army kettle. At that level, sympathy is abstract. Abstractions, whether true or not, probably aren’t going to equip us sufficiently for the battle of putting others before ourselves.
Putting others before ourselves is the essence of moral truth. Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” He summarized the Old Testament with, ““Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and then, “Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” In a very literal sense, Jesus practiced what he preached.
What Hume missed — and, granted, what I may have glossed over — is that this kind of love is the essence of morality. When someone puts others first, love is no longer an abstraction, but becomes personal. Abstractions allow us to continue on with our daily lives, sipping our coffee (or in Hume’s case, tea), shake our heads, and say, “Tsk tsk, such a tragedy.” Personal love requires some sort of committed action.
The Greeks gave us some important mental tools, but viewed “the Good” as an abstraction. Their gods were no better, morally speaking, than they were, and not particularly bright. Many are the myths that begin with Zeus coming down from Mt. Olympus to impregnate a woman. The Greeks saw their gods as petty and conniving. But they were also powerful and vindictive, so they made their sacrifices. This is how some if not all of the various polytheistic religions operate. The gods have wrath but not a righteous wrath.
In Buddhism, the Good appears to be a mental state.
In the other monotheistic religions, God is monadic in nature — i.e., one god, one person. In these religions, God is dependent on his creation to experience love. Love can only exist where two or more persons exist and know each other. Ir can’t be eternal because only God is eternal.
Only Christianity shows what love is, and reveals its eternal foundation, in the form of the Trinity. One God in Three Persons, whose perfect love for each other is the model of the love we, as fallen humans, should aspire to.
“I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don’t like it” – Bertrand Russell
For a deeper dive, one might check out the encyclicals “Fides et Ratio” and “Aeterni Patris”, both on faith and reason, by John Paul II and Leo XIII respectively; and John Paul’s “Veritatis Splendor”, on truth and morality.