The
second negative development set philosophy more immediately off-track. In the absence of a proper recognition of the
Creator, this gift of theoretical thought was soon elevated to divine status. Xenophanes (c.570-475 BC), admiring what he
took to be pure and universal in us, projected consciousness (life, sensitivity
and thought) on to his idea of the One god, supreme above the others. Something that God had made for our good got
turned into an idol (Romans 1:25). This
god is conceived as pure consciousness, “complete he sees, complete he thinks,
complete he hears”.
The notion of “completeness” that Xenophanes uses would set off a
powerful tradition that sees god as a motionless thinking, as a simple (as in
not being made up of parts) spiritual being.
This idea of “divine simplicity” was unfortunately adopted by some early
Christian intellectuals and has since caused havoc in Christian theology,
putting a road block in the way of understanding the reality of the covenanting
God who meets us in the Bible.
Sunday, April 29, 2018
(10) Rational thinking
The
nature and status of human rational thinking is a central theme of philosophy,
and we can certainly agree with the claim that philosophy has to do with
thinking and a special kind of thinking at that. It is correct to see in the birth and development
of philosophy the beginning of science also since we find here the discovery of
the power of theoretical thinking for exploring and explaining the world around
us. Anaximander, for example, attributed
thunder storms to the compression of wind within a dense cloud rather than to
the activity of the gods. If our human
task is to develop and cultivate the potential God laid in creation then the
discovery and development of theoretical thinking was a great achievement. Unfortunately, two less-than-positive
developments are found together with the discovery of theoretical thought. Firstly, the positive ability of theoretical
thought to give us new perspectives on the world by mentally splitting up
reality to permit a focused analysis of specific isolated elements was
uncritically taken to give us a truer picture of the world than that given in
our everyday experience. This signalled
the beginning of a reductionist spirit in which theory becomes the correct way
to make the world comprehensible as it reduces the rich, multifaceted character
of reality to only one or two basic elements.
In consequence, the number and nature of the factors used to explain
reality was severely limited even while there appeared to be a number of
options available; some chose water, some air, some fire etc. While this may not have been so serious at an
early stage of the development of theoretical thought, the prejudice, very much
alive today, that science is necessarily reductive and that physics will soon
give us a single true unified picture of the world, is a serious misconception.
Monday, April 23, 2018
Two links worth checking out
The Faith-in-scholarship blog often has great pieces. A recent one explains the excellent Church Scientific project. It's called could a Christian worldview enhance science?
Jonathan Chaplin has a great piece at the Center for Public Justice
Jonathan Chaplin has a great piece at the Center for Public Justice
Before justice acquired a reactive, corrective inflection due to the fall, it was what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls “primary justice”–a rich relational lattice enabling the development of flourishing human societies in tune with God. It still is. Humans need just familial, neighborly, cultural, geographical, economic, and political relationships if they are to fulfill their original calling to be images of God tending and unfolding creation’s gifts. Justice is constitutive of the Gospel because it is constitutive of being human. Human history testifies to our necessary, stumbling, occasionally impressive, and often oppressive, attempts to build institutions that facilitate the doing of justice in each of these areas.
(9) Criticism and criteria
Philosophy
as a deep kind of thinking, as specialised logical analysis, as an exercise in
wonder, as critical, as a search for wisdom and as rational: what should we
make of all these ideas? A good place to
start is the idea of being critical.
Since we will not be able to agree with all the above ideas and the ways
in which they have been thought through, we will need to be critical
ourselves. Being critical has often been
equated with incessant questioning, with a sceptical attitude that refuses to
be duped. This gives us the image of
philosophy as a kind of thinking that reflects more deeply than usual by
uncovering assumptions and presuppositions that we often take for granted, and
have perhaps never given much attention to.
Or perhaps being critical involves questioning convictions that are held
on to with great passion and are rarely subjected to rational scrutiny. While these certainly have a place, at its
root ‘to be critical’ means to hold something up for judgement according to
some criteria. It is not a mark of being
critical just to question everything.
Instead, we need a firm hold of the basis or principle on which we build
our judgement. This “firm hold” is nothing
other than an element of faith that is inseparable from our thinking; we must
trust and be committed to the criteria we use to make our judgements. So we can see that simply playing off
philosophy as “critical” against religion as “dogmatic,” with the accompanying
claim that philosophy is based on “reason” whereas religion is based on “faith”
is actually a lazy way of understanding things that needs to be critically
questioned!
As
we saw earlier, we learn from God’s word that we are creatures made in the
“image of God”, that we find our home in God’s good creation and that we are
given the task to rule over, to care for, to cultivate and develop creation
(See §2-5). Our definition of philosophy
must therefore reflect this. So as a
first approximation we will take philosophy to be one way in which we can
bear God’s image in caring for and developing creation. Since this is a definition that can serve for
all human activities it may seem of little consequence. However, it will help
us sift through the ideas we enumerated earlier and give us criteria to make
(admittedly fallible) judgements about their worth. In particular we will stress that philosophy
is a human activity that fits into created reality and cannot be understood
apart from the reality in which it is embedded.
As Dooyeweerd notes in the above quote, reality is a coherence of many
interrelated meanings (see also §7) and philosophy is itself part of this
coherence and not something above it. As
a human activity it has no special relationship to God, no privileged role in
guiding life or setting out what is ultimately true. When people divorce themselves from their
true identity as image bearers of God and fail to recognise that meaning and
purpose come from God, the source of true wisdom (Proverbs 1:7, Colossians
2:2-3), that all creation belongs to God and is made by, through and for him
(Romans 11:33-36), then philosophy can become a vehicle of false religious hope
and faith. On these grounds we are
forced to question one of the most important and long-standing convictions to
be found in the history of philosophy.
Again and again we will confront the high esteem given to Reason by many
philosophers: that Reason is the highest
and best in us, that Reason is the key to reality, that Reason is that which is
unchanging and unconditionally reliable, that it is what is most godlike in us,
that it is independent of particular cultures and faith commitments. This veneration of Reason is central to much
western philosophy, which has taken itself to be the exercise of Reason par
excellence. To ask critically whether
assigning such a status to Reason properly helps us understand what is going on
in philosophical thought is not an easy task and we shall have to keep returning
to it.
ContentsDooyeweerd on the nature of philosophy
“The intent of philosophy is to give us a theoretical
insight into the coherence of our temporal world as an inter-modal coherence of
meaning. Philosophic thought is bound to this coherence within which alone it
has meaning.” Dooyeweerd New Critique I, 24
Saturday, April 14, 2018
(8) The question "what is philosophy?"
The
question which we here deal with is clearly important and fundamental when
considering the possibility and outline of a Christian philosophy. Unfortunately, we will not easily find a
satisfactory answer; certainly not one that will satisfy everybody. It has been well said that the question “what
is philosophy?” is itself a philosophical question and one that has received
many different answers.
Let
us at least begin with some common ideas without yet making any judgement about
them. Firstly, philosophy involves and
is about thinking. The twentieth-century
philosopher Martin Heidegger at the end of his career even preferred to speak
of “thinking” rather than philosophy, meaning by it a special and deep kind of
thinking, and provocatively claimed that ‘science does not think’. In this way
he stressed the difference between philosophy and science. Others have seen science as the very pinnacle
of human thought about reality so that philosophy is left with the task of
clarifying the concepts and arguments we use both in science and in everyday
life. In this way philosophy becomes a
specialised kind of thinking related to logical analysis. So called “analytic” philosophy which is the
predominant form of philosophy in universities today tends to follow this
line. The well-known Christian
philosopher Alvin Plantinga is a leading figure in analytic philosophy and once
described philosophical reflection as “not much different from just thinking
hard”. Philosophy has also been said to
start with a feeling of wonder, as Plato has it in the Theaetetus (155d)[1] and as
Aristotle repeated (Metaphysics A 982b10)[2] – and
also to involve reflection that goes deeper than usual thinking. Let’s explore these ideas a bit further.
That people were struck by a feeling of awe at the world around them, and drawn by such a feeling to wonder at the origin of it all, certainly predated the beginnings of philosophy in 6th century BC Ionia. This is clear from the many myths that describe the birth of gods and of human beings. From its inception, usually identified with Thales of Miletus, philosophy had an ambiguous relation to these myths. It is quite possible that the importance of Miletus as the birth of philosophy, being home also to Anaximander and Anaximenes, was due to its importance as a trade-route with the older cultures of Babylon, Egypt, Lydia, and Phoenicia. Contact with such cultures would have confronted the Greeks with creation myths quite different from their own. The early philosophers both drew on these myths for inspiration and ideas, as Thales did in identifying water as the ultimate element, but also showed a critical attitude – as far as we know Thales made no link to the gods and gave a more ‘naturalistic’ and structural account of reality. Often the critical attitude has been emphasised and from this we get the idea that philosophy is in tension with religion as well as the idea that philosophy must be a kind of thinking that is critical.
Then we should consider the term philosophy itself which derives from two Greek words philos and sophia which together mean the “love of wisdom”. Here we can find the notion that philosophy can help us discover the meaning of life and show us how to live a good life. Early on in the history of philosophy, ethics took an important role such that for many it became a kind of alternative religious way of life for intellectuals. We could think of the religious cult that grew up around the legendary Pythagoras or later when Plato spoke of philosophy as a conversion of the soul from darkness to light, from the world of change to reality itself which is understood to be a divine order. As the philosopher comes to know this changeless order he becomes divine so far as is possible for a mortal (Republic 518c-d and 500c-d). While this view became less common with the advent of Christianity, in our increasingly post-Christian age it is experiencing something of a revival as the likes of Luc Ferry and Alain de Botton try to show us how to live a good secular life with the help of philosophy. Finally, and possibly the most important and pervasive idea about philosophy is that it has to do with reason and being rational.
Contents
[1]"I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus
had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher,
for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in
wonder."
[2] “The
fact that this science is not productive is also clear from those who first
engaged in philosophy. For human beings
originally began philosophy, as they do now, because of wonder”
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