“What is our problem? The newborn infant experiences the external world as a place of discomfort. Warmth and security have been shattered by a forced move into a colder, insecure world. The child cannot help but ask, what’s wrong? One constant feature of human thought and civilization has been the unshakable impression that something is amiss in the human universe. Thus, we ask, What is our problem? What is wrong with us as human beings, and how can it be solved? What is wrong with the world, and how can it be solved? Every person and every worldview acknowledges that there is something wrong with both the world and with each person as an individual in the world. Things are not the way they ought to be. What is wrong with all human beings? Is it sinful rebellion against our Divine Maker? Is it ignorance, religious superstition, or lack of education? Is it the illusion of personal desires? Is it corrupting social, political, and economic structures? Furthermore, after identifying the problem, how can we go about fixing it?”

— An Introduction to Christian Worldview: Pursuing God's Perspective in a Pluralistic World by Tawa J Anderson, W. Michael Clark, et al.

“What is our end? The Greek word telos (τέλος) carries connotations of purpose, end, goal, and destination. This final worldview question is best understood in the multifaceted light of telos. What is our end? Worldview addresses our origins: What is our nature as human beings, and where did we come from? Worldview must also address our end: Where are we going? Is there any meaning and purpose in life, or are we random creatures in a purposeless, meaningless universe? Do we create our own purpose and meaning? Or do we rightly seek to fulfill some purpose for which we were created? In addition to questions of meaning and purpose in this life, human beings also ponder their postmortem fate. What happens to us after we die? Is physical death the end of human existence? Are we absorbed into an infinite, impersonal ultimate reality? Are we judged at the throne of God Almighty for an eternity with him in heaven or an eternity without him in hell? The answers we give to these four worldview questions compose our worldview.”

— An Introduction to Christian Worldview: Pursuing God's Perspective in a Pluralistic World by Tawa J Anderson, W. Michael Clark, et al.

In contrast to this, humanism has no final way of saying certain things are right and other things are wrong. For a humanist, the final thing which exists—that is, the impersonal universe—is neutral and silent about right and wrong, cruelty and non-cruelty. Humanism has no way to provide absolutes. Thus, as a consistent result of humanism’s position, humanism in private morals and political life is left with that which is arbitrary.
A good illustration is that at first in Russia, on the basis of Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) teaching in the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, marriage was considered a part of capitalism (private prostitution, as he expressed it) and the family was thus minimized. Later, the state decreed a code of strict family laws. This was simply an “arbitrary absolute” imposed because it worked better. There is no base for right or wrong, and the arbitrary absolutes can be reversed for totally opposite ones at any time. For the Communists, laws always have a ground only in the changing historic situation brought about by the ongoing of history.
On the biblical basis, there are absolutes, and therefore we can say that certain things are right or wrong, including racial discrimination and social injustice. Consider Jesus standing in front of the tomb of Lazarus. The New Testament records that Jesus not only wept but was angry. The one who claimed to be God could be angry at the abnormality of death without being angry at himself. To a Christian on the basis of what the Bible teaches, not only is death abnormal, so is the cruelty of man to man. These things did not exist as God made the world. A Christian can fight the abnormality which has resulted from man’s rebellion against God without fighting the final reality of what is—that is, without fighting God. Therefore, because God exists and there are absolutes, justice can be seen as absolutely good and not as just expedient.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

not all the scientists to be considered in this section were individually consistent Christians. Many of them were, but they were all living within the thought forms brought forth by Christianity. And in this setting man’s creative stirring had a base on which to continue and develop. To quote Whitehead once more, the Christian thought form of the early scientists gave them “the faith in the possibility of science.”
Living within the concept that the world was created by a reasonable God, scientists could move with confidence, expecting to be able to find out about the world by observation and experimentation. This was their epistemological base—the philosophical foundation with which they were sure they could know. (Epistemology is the theory of knowledge—how we know, or how we know we can know.) Since the world had been created by a reasonable God, they were not surprised to find a correlation between themselves as observers and the thing observed—that is, between subject and object. This base is normative to one functioning in the Christian framework, whether he is observing a chair or the molecules which make up the chair. Without this foundation, Western modern science would not have been born.
Here one must consider an important question: Did the work of the Renaissance play a part in the birth of modern science? Of course it did. More than that, the gradual intellectual and cultural awakenings in the Middle Ages also exerted their influence. The increased knowledge of Greek thought—at Padua University, for example—opened new doors. Certainly, Renaissance elements and those of the Greek intellectual traditions were involved in the scientific awakening. But to say theoretically that the Greek tradition would have been in itself a sufficient stimulus for the Scientific Revolution comes up against the fact that it was not. It was the Christian factor that made the difference. Whitehead and Oppenheimer are right. Christianity is the mother of modern science because it insists that the God who created the universe has revealed himself in the Bible to be the kind of God he is. Consequently, there is a sufficient basis for science to study the universe. Later, when the Christian base was lost, a tradition and momentum had been set in motion, and the pragmatic necessity of technology, and even control by the state, drives science on, but, as we shall see, with a subtle yet important change in emphasis.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

The Difference Between Confidence and Certainty | Apologetics Book Club Essay #6

To defend the faith faithfully, we must learn how to answer bad arguments. And there's no shortage of those.

https://thethinkinstitute.substack.com/p/the-difference-between-confidence

The principle of indeterminacy has to do with a certain area of observation, namely, the location of an object and its velocity. For example, if we try to establish the exact position and speed of two atomic particles which are going to collide, we will never be able to determine exactly how they will rebound. The physicist cannot have an accurate observation of both their location and their velocity simultaneously. The quantum theory of either light or particles does not lead to the concept of chance or random universe either. For example, whether viewed as a wave or a particle, light does not function at random and it is an effect which brings forth causes. Even the far-out theoretical existence of “black holes” in space, as set forth by John G. Taylor (1931–), is based on the concept of an orderly universe and calculations resting on that concept.
If an airplane is to fly, it must be constructed to fit the order of the universe that exists. People, no matter what they have come to believe, still look for the explanation of any happening in terms of other earlier happenings. If this were not possible, not only would explanations cease, but science could not be used reliably in technology. It is possible to so function in our universe that, because there is a uniformity of natural causes, a man may travel hundreds of thousands of miles to the moon and land within a few feet of his planned destination, or he may aim an atomic weapon at a target on the other side of our planet and land it within ten feet of that target. We know we live in a universe that is much more complex than people, including scientists, once thought it to be, but that is much different from the concept of a random universe.
On the Christian base, one could expect to find out something true about the universe by reason. There were certain other results of the Christian world view. For example, there was the certainty of something “there”—an objective reality—for science to examine. What we seem to observe is not just an extension of the essence of God, as Hindu and Buddhist thinking would have it. The Christian world view gives us a real world which is there to study objectively. Another result of the Christian base was that the world was worth finding out about, for in doing so one was investigating God’s creation. And people were free to investigate nature, for nature was not seen as full of gods and therefore taboo. All things were created by God and are open for people’s investigation. God himself had told mankind to have dominion over nature, and as we saw from the quotation from Francis Bacon, to him science had a part in this. There was a reason for continuing one’s interest and pressing on.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

A Closer Look at TAG

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re7sZxwPBYU

“That’s Serial Killer Logic.” Presup TKO in 5 Minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8mTYnno_20

Alfred North Whitehead has remarked that the entire history of European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. That goes too far. Nevertheless, Plato did understand something crucial—not only in theoretical thought but in practical life. He saw that if there are no absolutes, then the individual things (the particulars, the details) have no meaning. By particulars we mean the individual things which are about us. The individual stones on a beach are particulars. The molecules that make up the stones are particulars. The total beach is a particular. I am made up of molecules and the molecules are particulars. And I as an individual and you as an individual are particulars.
Plato understood that regardless of what kind of particulars one talks about, if there are no absolutes—no universal—then particulars have no meaning. The universal or absolute is that under which all the particulars fit—that which gives unity and meaning to the whole. We can apply this in language. Apples come in many varieties, but we do not verbalize each time by running through the names of all the varieties of apples. We sum them up by the word apples. Likewise, there are many kinds of pears, and we sum them up with the word pears. On a higher level of generality there are many other varieties of fruit. But again we do not run through all these, we simply say fruit.
The problem, however, is not only in language but in reality: What will unify and give meaning to everything there is? Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–), the French existential philosopher, emphasized this problem in our own generation. His concept was that a finite point is absurd if it has no infinite reference point. This concept is most easily understood in the area of morals. If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.
But it is not only that we need absolutes in morals and values; we need absolutes if our existence is to have meaning—my existence, your existence, Man’s existence. Even more profoundly, we must have absolutes if we are to have a solid epistemology (a theory of knowing—how we know, or how we know we know). How can we be sure that what we think we know of the world outside ourselves really corresponds to what is there? And in all these layers, each more profound than the other, unless there is an absolute these things are lost to us: morals, values, the meaning of existence (including the meaning of man), and a basis for knowing.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

Non-Christian philosophers from the time of the Greeks until just before our modern period had three things in common. First, they were rationalists. That is, they assumed that man (though he is finite and limited) can begin from himself and gather enough particulars to make his own universals. Rationalism rejects any knowledge outside of man himself, especially any knowledge from God.
The second point they had in common was that they took reason seriously. They accepted the validity of reason—that the mind thinks in terms of antithesis. That is, with their minds people can come to the conclusion that certain things are true while certain other things are not true, that certain things are right in contrast to other things that are wrong. The first lessons in classical logic were: A is A and A is not non-A.
Third, in addition to being rationalists who believed in the validity of reason, non-Christian philosophers prior to the eighteenth century also were optimistic. They thought they could and would succeed in their quest to establish by reason alone a unified and true knowledge of what reality is. When that happened, satisfying explanations would be on hand for everything people encountered in the universe and for all that people are and all that they think. They hoped for something which would unify all knowledge and all of life.
But three shifts came, and it was these shifts that made modern man what he is and our modern societies what they are. First, we will look at the shift in science, then the shift in philosophy, and later at the shift in theology. We have already seen that the Scientific Revolution rested on a Christian base. The early modern scientists believed in the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in an open system. God and man were outside the cause-and-effect machine of the cosmos, and therefore they both could influence the machine. To them all that exists is not one big cosmic machine which includes everything. The shift from modern science to what I call modern modern science was a shift from the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in an open system to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. In the latter view nothing is outside a total cosmic machine; everything which exists is a part of it.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

Scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to use the word God, but pushed God more and more to the edges of their systems. Finally, scientists in this stream of thought moved to the idea of a completely closed system. That left no place for God. But equally it left no place for man. Man disappears, to be viewed as some form of determined or behavioristic machine. Everything is a part of the cosmic machine, including people. To say this another way: Prior to the rise of modern modern science (that is, naturalistic science, or materialistic science), the laws of cause and effect were applied to physics, astronomy, and chemistry. Today the mechanical cause-and-effect perspective is applied equally to psychology and sociology.
Notice especially that the scientists who gave birth to the earlier great breakthroughs of science would not have accepted this concept. It arose not because of that which could be demonstrated by science, but because the scientists who took this new view had accepted a different philosophic base. The findings of science, as such, did not bring them to accept this view; rather, their world view brought them to this place. They became naturalistic or materialistic in their presuppositions.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

Consider the dilemma faced by Rousseau’s follower Gauguin (1848–1903), the French painter who, in his hunt for total freedom, deserted his family and went to Tahiti where he tried to find it in the noble savage. After he had lived in Tahiti for a while, he found that the ideal of the noble savage was illusory. In his last great painting—Whence Come We? What Are We? Whither Do We Go? (1897 and 1898), which hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—he showed that man in himself has no answer to the ultimate questions—and this applies as much to primitive man as to civilized man. He painted the title directly on this painting so that no one could miss its meaning. He wrote about this painting as he was working on it, and he called it a philosophical work, comparable to the Gospel.
But what a “gospel”! In the picture is a primitive old woman dying. And Gauguin himself writes in a letter to Daniel de Montfreid, “Whither? Close to the death of an old woman, a strange stupid bird concludes: What? O sorrow, thou art my master. Fate how cruel thou art, and always vanquished. I revolt.” What he found in Tahiti (where he went to find the uninhibited freedom of man, which to Rousseau and Gauguin was the “ought”) turned out to be death and cruelty. When he finished this painting, he tried to commit suicide, though he did not succeed.
Or, to illustrate in another way the problem of taking nature as the moral standard, we can consider Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), who well understood the logical conclusion of this deification of nature. He knew that if nature is all, then what is is right, and nothing more can be said. The natural result of this was his “sadism,” his cruelty, especially to women. He wrote in La Nouvelle Justine (1791–1797): “As nature has made us [the men] the strongest, we can do with her [the woman] whatever we please.” There are no moral distinctions, no value system. What is is right. Thus there is no basis for either morals or law.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

You will remember that in the High Renaissance, humanistic man, starting only from himself, had problems concerning the meaning or value of things and of absolutes for morals. With Rousseau it became an autonomous freedom/autonomous nature problem. With Kant it was noumenal world/phenomenal world. With Kierkegaardianism it went a step further and now became:
non-reason = faith-optimism
reason = pessimism
So optimism will now always be in the area of non-reason.
Modern man is a man of dichotomy. By dichotomy we mean a total separation into two reciprocally exclusive orders, with no unity or relationship between them. The dichotomy here is the total separation between the area of meaning and values, and the area of reason. Reason leading to despair must be kept totally separate from the blind optimism of non-reason. This makes a lower and an upper story, with the lower story of reason leading to pessimism and men trying to find optimism in an upper story devoid of reason. At this point the older rationalistic thinkers (with their optimistic hope of maintaining unity between the world of reason and that of meaning and values) were left behind. This is the mark of modern man.
In our day, humanistic reason affirms that there is only the cosmic machine, which encompasses everything, including people. To those who hold this view everything people are or do is explained by some form of determinism, some type of behaviorism, some kind of reductionism. The terms determinism or behaviorism indicate that everything people think or do is determined in a machinelike way and that any sense of freedom or choice is an illusion. In one form of reductionism, man is explained by reducing him to the smallest particles which make up his body. Man is seen as being only the molecule or the energy particle, more complex but not intrinsically different.
I have never heard this expressed more clearly than when I was lecturing in Acapulco, Mexico. George Wald (1906–), a chemistry professor from Harvard University, was also there lecturing to the same group. He expressed with great force the modern concept that all things, including man, are merely the product of chance. After he had stressed over and over again that all things, beginning from the molecule and ending with man, are only a product of chance, he said, “Four hundred years ago there was a collection of molecules named Shakespeare which produced Hamlet.” According to these theories, that is all that man can be. Man beginning with his proud, proud humanism, tried to make himself autonomous, but rather than becoming great, he had found himself ending up as only a collection of molecules—and nothing more.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

All this is related to the question of origins: What was the beginning of everything? Ultimately, there are not many possible answers to this question. First, we could say that everything came from nothing—that is, from really nothing, what 1 call nothing-nothing. This means that once there was no mass, no energy, no motion, and no personality. This is theoretically a possibility, but I have never heard anyone hold this view, for it seems to be unthinkable. It follows that if we do not hold that everything has come of nothing-nothing, then something has always existed.
Second, there is the possibility of a personal beginning—that everything else was made by a personality who could bring forth the universe (the space-time continuum) when it had not existed previously in any form. This is not out of nothing-nothing, for the personality would have existed previously.
Third, there is the possibility of an impersonal beginning—that some form of the impersonal has existed forever, even if in a form vastly different from that which we now know. This idea of an impersonal beginning has many variations, including the use of the word God to mean the ultimate impersonal, as in the case of pantheism. A more accurate word than pantheism to describe this position is pan-everythingism. The word pantheism slips in the connotation of personality, even though, by definition, the concept excludes it. In much modern thought, all begins with the impersonality of the atom or the molecule or the energy particle, and then everything—including life and man—comes forth by chance from that.
This is really very curious because Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), the French chemist, demonstrated the impossibility of the then-accepted concept of the spontaneous generation of life—that is, life springing from nonliving things. Pasteur showed in 1864 that if the nonliving things were pasteurized, then life could not come forth. In other words, what was previously considered spontaneous generation of life from nonliving things was mistaken—life always came from living things. When pasteurization killed all the elements of life, life never came forth from the nonliving things. But then the men of that same era returned to the concept of the spontaneous generation of life by adding a new factor: long reaches of time.
This equation of the impersonal plus time plus chance producing the total configuration of the universe and all that is in it, modern people hold by faith. And if one does in faith accept this, with what final value is he left? In his lecture at Acapulco, George Wald finished with only one final value. It was the same one with which English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was left. For Wald and Russell and for many other modern thinkers, the final value is the biological continuity of the human race. If this is the only final value, one is left wondering why this then has importance.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

Now having travelled from the pride of man in the High Renaissance and the Enlightenment down to the present despair, we can understand where modern people are. They have no place for a personal God. But equally they have no place for man as man, or for love, or for freedom, or for significance. This brings a crucial problem. Beginning only from man himself, people affirm that man is only a machine. But those who hold this position cannot live like machines! If they could, there would have been no tensions in their intellectual position or in their lives. But even people who believe they are machines cannot live like machines, and thus they must “leap upstairs” against their reason and try to find something which gives meaning to life, even though to do so they have to deny their reason.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.
I know well the beautiful village of Sils Maria in the Swiss Engadine, where Nietzsche spent his summers and did much work from 1881 to 1888. His house is still there. And on the lovely peninsula of Chasté a quotation from Nietzsche is inscribed on a plaque on a great rock. The following is an English translation from the German (by Udo Middelmann):

Oh man! Take heed
of what the dark midnight says: I slept, I slept—from deep dreams I awoke:
The world is deep—and more profound than day
would have thought.
Profound in her pain—
Pleasure—more profound than pain of heart, Woe speaks; pass on. But all pleasure seeks eternity— a deep and profound eternity.

Surrounded by some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, Nietzsche knew the tension and despair of modern man. With no personal God, all is dead. Yet man, being truly man (no matter what he says he is), cries out for a meaning that can only be found in the existence of the infinite-personal God, who has not been silent but has spoken, and in the existence of a personal life continuing into eternity. Thus Nietzsche’s words are profound: “But all pleasure seeks eternity—a deep and profound eternity.”
Without the infinite-personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make “systems.” In today’s speech we would call them “game plans.” A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame, in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it. This game plan can be one of a number of things. It can sound high and noble, such as talking in an idealistic way about the greatest good for the greatest number. Or it can be a scientist concentrating on some small point of science so that he does not have to think of any of the big questions, such as why things exist at all. It can be a skier concentrating for years on knocking one-tenth of a second from a downhill run. Or it can as easily be a theological word game within the structure of the existential methodology. That is where modern people, building only on themselves, have come, and that is where they are now.

Schaeffer, Francis A. 2005. How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 50th L’Abri Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.