In my series on Intelligent Design, I suggested that there is a central core of beliefs that help make each person what he is. In every day life, these are the beliefs that are taken for granted, but form the basis for every decision a person takes. It is possible to come to doubt those core beliefs. However, if a person does stop believing, then they will have to deal with a great crisis. A woman who deeply believes in God and then comes to doubt it must question hundreds of decisions that she has made.
Individuals have this happen to them every once in a while. Sometimes the doubts are about internal first principles. Other times deeply held ideas about the visible world are assaulted from the outside. Either sort of doubt can disorient and confuse a person.
Cultural shifts can leave some people unable to cope with rapid change. A person in the middle of such a shift feels attacked to the very core of his being. If he survives such change, it deeply scars him for the rest of his life. Modern times can be characterized as having an unusual number of sustained assaults on traditional views about first principles and the visible world. Traditionally, most foundational beliefs were held to be self-evident or in need of little active defense. For Platonists, core principles were immutable divine ideas. Shifting a thing that was thought immovable can be radically traumatic if a man is not intellectually flexible.
Cultures can also suffer such breakdowns. The Western world has become ignorant of its Greek cultural heritage. Sometimes this ignorance has been encouraged intentionally by those who despise the West. Sometimes the ignorance is a result of laziness. In the church it can be the result of both or from a deep suspicion that the pagan Greeks have nothing to teach the Christian. This ignorance has allowed core beliefs to be attacked and changed. Christians often feel lost in Western cultures where they should feel at home. Often when the assault is made on Greek and Roman ideas, on Plato or on Aristotle, and the church has not recognized a common foe. Since Christianity is also a product of the ancient world, the modern foes of the Greeks are our foes.
There is also another crisis: a problem of evidence. Science seems to dispute the connections that the classical and Christian West made to the world around them. Supported by core or foundational beliefs are other beliefs that get support from the internal belief structure. These also influence the way persons look at the world. Built on these ideas are even more beliefs—until one reaches the superficial beliefs humans held lightly that change very easily. There are layers, or a web, of belief.
However, a rational person does not just need beliefs that fit together in his own head, but beliefs that fit with and explain his experience of the world. As a set of beliefs, a world view, stops being connected to the real world or as the connections grow smaller and smaller, it becomes more and more irrational.
The Heaven’s Gate cult is a good example. In 1997 all the members of this California religious group committed suicide in the mistaken notion that the comet Hale-Bopp was a sign that it was time to die and go to heaven. Sadly, there was no connection between what they believed and the real world. Their beliefs were perfectly consistent and if any of them had been true it might have been interesting to listen to them. Consistency in the web of belief is not good enough. A person also has to ask, “Are my beliefs connected to reality?”
Some Christians will say, “I know in my heart that my beliefs are true!” This is not good enough. Any number of foolish things can be justified in the human heart. There has to be a connection between beliefs and the outside world. This has become more difficult for Christians in the last two hundred years. Most mainstream science has rejected important components of a Biblical world view. Traditional Christianity believed God worked in the visible world. Science is no longer allowed to see that action, even if it exists. It feels free to ignore divine action as being either non-existent or so rare and unimportant that it can be safely ignored. For most of church history, Christians felt comfortable with science. It supported their view of the world. Now for many Christians there exists a tension, or at least a worry, that their beliefs are not so different from Heaven’s Gate.
Modern culture is afflicted with one of two problems. Scientific types have strong connections to the external world, and they can make sense of a lot of it, but the inner Biblical core which makes science possible has been ripped out. This leaves disconnected pieces of beliefs hanging in ruins within the scientific culture. Put another way, these people are connected to the visible world, but not to their own souls.
Other people give up on reality. They replace the old Western core beliefs with a new eastern mystical set. They give up on gaining external “truth” altogether. The main goal is to live lives that make sense to the individual within his own frame of reference. In a sophisticated way, many in the humanities have also given up on rationality. They no longer try to unify science and their own beliefs. Truth is a power game to them.
A Two-fold Christian Response
Traditional Christianity has begun to respond appropriately to these challenges. First, movements like Intelligent Design are asserting that science can be done in a manner that is open to Mind as a cause. Scientists like Michael Behe and philosophers like Paul Nelson are very important to the Church. They are attempting to reconnect ancient beliefs to the visible world. Though science can never find the Truth, it does find truths. If the Church is not telling the best, most likely, stories about the visible world, it will lose power and influence in the culture. Fewer folk will be open to the claims of the Gospel as Christianity becomes stereotyped as an older Heaven’s Gate.
The second such counter-attack is classical education movement which is the reclamation of the older Western intellectual cultural heritage. Classical education is a rejection of those from the Enlightenment forward who despised the ancients and their Christian Medieval counterparts. Without rejecting science, this classical movement argues for the importance of basic philosophical and theological concepts that hold Christianity together. Souls exist. The Trinity is a vital theological truth. Study of the Greeks can help Christians understand the issues and vocabulary appropriated by the Church in doing her work. This book is a small piece of this re-education.
The marriage of intelligent design, a more classical science, and the traditional philosophy and theology that created it is the most exciting intellectual project in the twenty-first century. It does not seek to go back to the failed details of the medieval experiment, though a new examination of the world may confirm more of them than one might suspect, but forward to new theories built on a philosophy common to both medieval and Modern. It seeks to reconnect the web of Christian belief to the outside world while making sure that the vital strands of the internal structure of Christian belief remain intact.
Some people might hesitate to join this intellectual project. The investment of time and energy to read books of classical philosophy and to study nature seems daunting. “I know that Jesus loves me so why do I have to worry?” There is truth to this impulse. Jesus Christ is a real person, the Second Person of the Trinity. Because He is real, knowing Him is most important thing a man can do. However, knowing Him is an intellectual activity. It is not only an intellectual activity, but there is thought and history involved. Jesus Christ connects to history. He was a wise teacher. His teachings contain propositions which either cohere or do not cohere with other alternative teachings. If we say that we love Jesus, but do not desire to examine his place in history or his teachings, then we lie.
Christians must love a real God passionately enough to crave knowledge of him. The must love His Word enough to find that the Bible itself does, as a whole, connect to the visible world. Christians must have faith, but this faith should be consistent with reason which is not a mere religious rationalization. The Heaven’s Gate cult is alleged to have bought a telescope to look at the comet Hale-Bopp. When their view through the telescope did not confirm their beliefs, they returned the telescope on the assumption it was defective. This is the path of madness that leads to death.
Luke chapter two begins with Augustus Caesar issuing a decree that the Roman world be taxed. This decree went forth when? It was given when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Here is a detail of no theological or philosophical interest. Luke will tell of other events for which only Christians can now acts as witnesses. How credible are those Christian testimonies? It will depend in part on how firmly connected they are to other facts known about the visible world. Was there a Caesar Augustus? Was there a Quirinius who was governor of Syria? Was there a Herod who was king in Jerusalem? This close association with history is almost unique in the religious literature of the ancient world. Science and the study of the visible world are essential to Biblical Christianity. Christians try to ignore science, but do so at risk to their own mental health.
Having avoided this error, Christian scientists, even those in the Intelligent Design movement often fall into the opposite trap. If they can account for the visible world, then they rest content. Study of the classics, required of all the first scientists in places like Victorian England, is viewed as a waste of time. Sadly, the education of those working in science has not kept pace in the area of humanities. The philosophers we have studied in this book used to be the common intellectual property of all college graduates. This is no longer the case, but scientists do not know what they are missing. Even Christian scientists too often assume the philosophy of the Bible is somehow self-authenticating and that only scientific authentication is important. Fortunately, parallel to the Intelligent Design movement has been resurgence in the practice of classical philosophy and apologetics led by scholars such as J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Craig Hazen.
This leads to a radical unification in fields of learning for Christianity cares about and makes claims about the visible and invisible worlds. Christians are not religious neo-Platonists. This is a philosophy the best of the Fathers rejected as sub-Christian after serious consideration. On the other hand, Christians are not mystical Epicureans. The Fathers believe in an invisible world even more important than the visible. Traditional Christianity must unite the sciences and the humanities.
One Danger of Classical Education
Of course the classically educated person runs the risk of producing a Christianity that is simply paganism with a Biblical veneer. Some alleged Christian thinkers became so enamored with pagan philosophers like Plato that they viewed traditional Christianity as Platonism for non-intellectuals. Neo-Platonism was the real truth. However, sophisticated persons like Augustine or A.E. Taylor are able to differentiate between the two. After all, pagan philosophies often made claims about the material world and about philosophical truth that were directly contrary to those of Christianity. What one does with those claims is a good indicator of whether a bad sort of syncretism has developed.
Classical Christianity faced many such tests. Rationalistic pagan philosophy taught that the universe was infinitely old. These thinkers did not want to start with chaos and so started with an eternally existing, orderly cosmos. This is even one way of reading Timaeus. Christianity almost always found the Bible as teaching an actual creation event. The cosmos was not eternal, but an artifact of a Mind at the start of time or in the beginning. Some Christians reacted to this difference between the two traditions by accommodating their theology to the preferred classical philosophy. However, the majority of the Fathers defended the Greek thinkers who argued for a first moment of creation. They read the Timaeus for good or bad through their theological lenses. They avoided a bad syncretism.
Some of the best classical science taught that women were defective men. Aristotle asserted women were passive wombs for holding the seed of the male. Babies were made by men and merely nourished by women when the man’s seed made contact with the menstrual fluid. The only importance of the menstrual fluid the woman provided was as the matter out of which the semen shaped a human. The semen provided the form, the shape, the intelligence, and the structure of the baby. Women were reduced in importance. This was a perverse belief with theological implications. In this case, good theology saved the Church from much of the bad biology.
How can Jesus be fully God and fully man? If Aristotle is correct, God provided the form and all Mary provided was the matter. According to orthodox Christianity, Jesus has two wills- a human will and a divine will- that work in perfect synergy with each other. If Jesus only had a divine will, he could not be fully human, and he couldn’t have died for human sins. If Aristotelian science were true, where did Jesus get a human will? This was a horrible problem for the early church. However, they were able to react appropriately and argue that Mary was not just a womb for God she was also the mother of the God-man in an active way.
Dorothy Sayers once asked the twentieth century, “Are women human?” Christian Britain should not have needed that question. In Biblical Christianity, women are created in the image of God. Eve was not a defective Adam. Genesis presents a view of humanity as being in the image of God which is seen in both men and women. The historic church often did not do a good job escaping this part of their culture. To Christianity’s everlasting shame, Aristotelian sexism often crept into Christian assumptions.
Any revival of classical education must be careful to be Biblical first and then use the classical.
