Dr Greg Bahnsen - Ancient & Medieval Philosophy: Introduction Part 1 (Part 1)

All right, well, we're going to begin our course on the history of Western philosophy, looking at ancient and medieval philosophy in this particular course. And then later we'll be dealing with modern and recent philosophy. As we get out of the way this morning, let's have a word of prayer. We do come into your holy presence, our Father, and ask that you would receive us for the sake of Christ our Savior and through his mediation. We do not come claiming any sufficiency of our own or any accomplishment accomplishment or any right to stand before you. Our sufficiency is completely by your grace. Our right to stand before you is only through your Son, Jesus Christ. We do ask for your forgiveness for the sake of Christ and his sacrifice. We do pray that you would see his righteousness as our own. We do pray that you would hear us because he intercedes on our behalf. We ask for enlightenment of your spirit, that we might please you, we might think your thoughts after you. We do pray that through this course we would learn to know you better and to know your world better and to know ourselves better. We pray that you would enable us to study these things always with the mind on what you have taught. That we might compare the thinking of the world to the thinking of your holy word, to the truth that is found therein. We pray that you would equip us to defend the Christian faith better. Because we have studied these matters. We ask in all things that you would receive the glory and that we would look for you. For we pray in Jesus name. Alright, we're going to study the Western approach to philosophy. Just real quickly, let's make clear that there is an Eastern approach to philosophy as well. We could be teaching a course on the history of Eastern philosophy. It's just that it would look much different and it wouldn't have near the cultural relevance that the development of our own Western systems of thought would have for us. I have to say that because in our day and age, you know, there's this campaign on to suggest that, you know, there's a Western kind of imperial attitude ideologically or culturally that says the only thing important that ever happened was in the Western world, you know, Northern Europe and you know, the dead white male kind of syndrome, that that's really what's important. And I don't have that perspective. I didn't need the liberals of our day. Enlighten me about that. I know very well that the Chinese and the Korean and all sorts of other cultures developed along with Western thought. It so happens though that in God's providence The development of the Christian church went first to the West. And it does not surprise me, therefore, that you also see in the west the reflection on the nature of man and his place in the universe, how he should live his life, how he knows the things that he knows. And again, since that is most relevant to us in our day and age, we're going to stick to the plan and study Western philosophy, the history of Western philosophy. That's the second thing I need to tell you about. You can study philosophy in two different ways. You can study the history of philosophy as we will do in this course, or you can study the problems of philosophy. The difference being, of course, that by studying the problems of philosophy, you go to the questions to the key issues and you ask, what have people said about them? And what are the different schools of thought? What are the different options or answers for these problems? And I'll be honest with you, that is my preference. I don't know if it's just a personality thing or whether there is in fact more value for Christians to get to. What are the basic issues? I like studying the problems of philosophy, or sometimes called systematic or topical philosophy. Our course, because of your place in college, however, is going to be more historically oriented. We're going to go and look at the different people who have been known as philosophers and look at the questions they addressed and the answers they gave. You'll end up covering the material either way. It's kind of like the way the weave goes. You know, one studies it this way and the other studies it this way. But the point, you're going to be covering the ground. Maybe we'll have another course on the problems of philosophy later, but for now, the history of Western philosophy. So we've studied. I mean, now you know why I'm calling it history in Western. But what about this last word, philosophy? That's the real important one, the history of Western philosophy. Before you can study the history of Western philosophy, you have to know what philosophy is. It won't do you any good to study the history of baseball if you don't know what baseball is. Wouldn't that be a great assignment for somebody? Go write five volumes on the history of baseball. You guys say, that's fine. What's a baseball? Or what is baseball or something like that. So it should be obvious, shouldn't it, that we don't know what we're studying, do we? And we don't have any idea of how to interpret and relate these things. And we don't have some concept of what philosophy Is. And so you might want to stop and think for just a minute here. What do you think philosophy is? When we go to study philosophy, where should we begin? What is philosophy all about? What does philosophy study? I think it would help to understand what philosophy is if we took a few moments and reflected on how philosophy arises. And that means we have to take a few steps back and look at the nature of man and how we develop intellectually. In Genesis 1:26, we read in the Bible that God defined the nature and the task of man. God told our first parents, Adam in particular, that he was to have dominion over all of creation. He was to subdue the created order. That is to say, he was to gain control over his environment. He had to learn what the world was like, what the animals were like. He was to understand the world in which he lived. And he was to use it for the glory of God. Man is, at base, an inquisitive animal or creature. Obviously, there are some people, unfortunately, born with brain damage and other situations that arise that it's not each and every individual that has an inclusive nature. But naturally, without some kind of defect or other problem or obstacle arising, people come into this world as inquisitive. If Adam had not had a curiosity, he would not have been able to go out and learn about the created order and subdue it to God's glory. And we have that same basic human nature that God gave to Adam. We are inquisitive. Babies are inquisitive. If you've been around babies at all, you know that you put a baby in a crib. And why do we have mobiles and colorful things? Because babies take an interest in that. They reach out for things. They come to recognize their mother's face and voice and so forth. And as children grow, we see their inquisitive or curious nature and discretion. You all know it's something of a running joke. You hand something to a baby and it's going to go into his or her mouth. Okay? So they're finding out. They're trying to understand, quote, unquote, the world. They wouldn't call it that. But they're trying to understand their environment. What is this place in which I live and how does it work? Children learn very early that knowledge is power, that the more they know, the better they can get the things they want. Now, sometimes it's very sinful. They know that mother is going to respond if they cry. So they learn to be very bratty and they'll cry to get the things they want. In some cases. Or they learn that jumping out of the crib head first is not the way to have a pleasant day, and so they'll stop doing that kind of thing. I'm being very simple here. My point is our curiosity leads us to learn things about the world and to try to control our environment. The baby is, in a sense, controlling his environment. When he learns not to hit his head on the floor, not to burn his hand on the stove, or not to call his big brother names, that gets him smacked in return, whatever it may be. Knowledge is gained so that we can get along in this world better. We can get the things we want. So children are curious. And curiosity or inquisitiveness is grounded, I think, in the basic nature of man, as God created him to know this world, to subdue it, and to do so for his glory. Okay, so children grow and they learn things. In fact, it's amazing how quickly children learn. They start catching on to things. They amass a great deal of information. But somewhere along the line in school and their educational process, curiosity takes us a step beyond learning what makes us happy, whether we like chocolate milk or orange juice, and how to get along on the playground and things of that nature. Curiosity leads us to ask about patterns that we find in the world, about recurring events or regularities that are observed. And so we start studying specific areas of the created order in a more disciplined way. We don't just take in any information about colors and what tastes good or feels good or what works well on the playground. We start organizing information into categories. Information we have about snails and birds and glass and. And so forth. And we know that that's different than the information we know about mom and dad and how to get along with brother. So we start getting some idea of life being divided into different areas. And as we look at these different areas, our curiosity makes us want to reduce all the particular things we've experienced or learned to more general laws. One of the first general laws, although it's not self consciously seen as a law, one of the first general laws people learn would have to do with what we call gravity. You find out that if you drop the ball, it falls to the floor. But you also find out that if you push the book over the edge of the table, it falls to the floor. And also if you drop your fork, it's dinner. It falls to the floor. And eventually, I mean, you'd have to be pretty dull, wouldn't you, to not catch on. There's a general pattern here. Things fall, okay, we're not Being real sophisticated. But children learn that things fall, and in school they learn about gravity. They learn to look at the physical world and to generalize. There are certain patterns that are there, the pattern of things following, which we call gravity. So when we start delineating an aspect of the world, it may be physical things, and they're the feature of their falling. Or maybe what we would call biological things or things, mechanical things, social. When we start delineating an area of the world and asking about the general laws that help us explain what happens in that area of life, and then systematize those general laws, we are doing science. Now, please don't make the mistake that is so common in our day of hearing the word science and thinking of laboratories. When I use the word science, I mean it in the ancient and Latin sense of gaining knowledge. Science isn't just natural science. Science is the attempt to find systematic and general laws that help explain things or our experience in a delineated aspect of the world. Let me say that again. Science is the systematic attempt of the attempt to find systematic and general laws that will enable us to explain our experience in a delineated aspect of the world. So what I've explained thus far in terms of human cognitive development very simply is we have the level of curiosity. So make sure you have that in your notes. Curiosity is the first step. Curiosity eventually shades into what we'll call the level of scientific thinking. Scientific thinking is marked by three things. It's systematic, it uses general laws to explain, and it's about some delineated aspect of the world. Astronomy or biology or sociology or mechanical drawing or whatever. It may be a delineated aspect of the world. Now a lot of people will think, and that's as far as it has to go. I mean, human cognitive development is just fine. We have the curiosity of childhood, and we have the more scientific, educated approach of our more mature years. And science is just fine as it is. But you know what? Man's curiosity pushes in beyond that and not in some vain and speculative way. I don't want you to think that philosophy starts with somebody having too much time on his hands. And so I sit around saying, why is there air? You know, that's kind of like the comedian's version of philosophy. And I laugh at the jokes like that, too. Philosophers have their own foibles and everything, but that has nothing to do with where philosophy comes from and why people philosophize. When we start thinking about the world and we try to be systematic and have general laws that will help Us explain things? Well, questions arise, and I'm going to give you three kinds of questions in particular that arise. First of all, we have questions about. About the extent of our scientific thinking. The extent of our scientific thinking. That is to say, here's what we know from the study of the world. Trying to systematically and generally have laws that explain our experience. Is what we know thinking scientifically all there is to know? Is this the whole game right here? Is there more to it than what man himself can come up with? That is a question about science, and it's not a question that science itself can answer. No, that's not a scientific question. That's not about some delineated aspect of life where you have some general laws of explanation. There are no general laws to help us answer the nature of science and the extent of science. Can science tell us everything? Maybe yes, maybe no. But even beyond that, even if you think science could tell us everything, I don't. But even if it could, you would still have questions about the nature of science. What are we doing when we study the world? What is the relationship between the person doing the study and that which he is studying? Is science reliable? What justifies science? These are questions having to do in general with the nature of science, not just its extent, but now its nature. And then thirdly, questions arise having to do with. How do we put all that we have learned scientifically together in a coherent package? Why would we have to worry about that? Well, because when we generalize, when we try to get laws that are general that help us explain things in our experience, we run into problems. And not at this early stage of your education, going to bother you with a lot of complicated examples. That's really what I'm very interested in, is the problems of philosophy that arise because we can't bring everything together. Let me just give you one example that I think will be very simple. We start generalizing, I said, about the way the world works. Let's take gravity. Children learn that as a general principle, things fall. There's a law of gravity. And they realize that this pertains to everything. It has nothing to do with your wishes, has nothing to do with your desires. If I take this glass that's on the table here and fold it out over, I can say I want this to fall and then let it go. And it will fall. But you know what? I can also say I want it to stay right here in midair. And when I let it go, it's still going to fall. We realize that what happens out there in the physical world, to put it very simply, has very little to do with our desires. Now, of course, you can say, well, my desire to not have it fall leads me to hold on to it. In that sense, my desire affects the physical world. But you know very well that the character of falling has nothing to do with my desire for it to operate in the. Not to operate. It's not like I can turn on the lights and not turn on the lights. Gravity is going to work whether I like it or not. So there's this impersonal, mechanistic nature of the physical world. But we know that not everything works that way. We know that dad says if you don't rake the leaves, you won't watch TV tonight. But sometimes you watch TV anyway, even though you didn't finish raking the leaves. Now, that may not be a good way to raise children. And I'm not trying to get down on fathers get down on me. I'm not all that consistent as I should be. But you know what I'm getting at? We realize there's an area of freedom in this world, too, and unpredictability. And that unpredictability sometimes kind of frightening. You know, you go out on the playground and you've always played too square the way you've played it before. And lo and behold, you play it this way today and you beat somebody and he punches you in the nose. That never happened before. Okay, again, I'm being very simplistic. But you see, there's a problem. Now we see that the world can be explained mechanically, quote, unquote. Things happen whether we want them to or not. This cup's going to drop to the ground regardless of my desires. And then we know there's an area that's not so predictable. There's an area that's characterized by freedom and choice and desire. Human choices in particular, human character has to be taken into account in social relations and how we speak to people and what we do to them. Now then, how do we relate these two generalizations that the world operates mechanically? The world operates on a principle of freedom. Part of the world, anyway, operates on this choice and desire and personality kind of thing where people make decisions. Part of the world doesn't. Well, how do you bring those two things together? So even if we did science as well as we possibly could, we learned everything about astronomy and biology and sociology and history and how to make chocolate cakes and everything we could learn. We would still have questions about the extent of science, the nature of science, and how to reconcile or bring Together into a coherent picture. All the generalizations or laws that we have picked up on. Now, when we start asking those kinds of questions, and I hope you can see it, I haven't mentioned the word yet. When we ask those kinds of questions, and everyone must ask those kinds of questions, even if just sloppily and implicitly going on with an assumed answer. When we ask those questions, we're no longer doing science. Now we're doing philosophy. Philosophy is the highest level of cognitive development, if you will. I don't say that with a sense of pride, but what I'm getting at is it is the highest level. Looking back upon previous levels. Curiosity, the level of the child, is haphazard. Science becomes more organized and looks for generalizations, but philosophy looks back upon science and asks about it, about its procedures and the character of what it's doing and how it can reconcile the various things of the various conclusions that it comes up with. This leads me then to talk about the nature of a philosophical question. I think you all know what a medical question looks like. If we were to have a whole bunch of English questions on a sheet of paper provided there were some that were medical there, you wouldn't have a hard time picking out the ones that are medical in nature. You know, like, how do you cure malaria? That's a medical question. How do you set a broken bone? That's a medical question. And you wouldn't have have trouble, I think, identifying the historical questions. In what year did Columbus discover America? Or at least the islands? Who invented the steam engine? Things of that nature are historical questions. You would know what sports or athletic questions look like. And on and on. How about this? What if I were to say which of these questions is a philosophical question? You know, and probably given our background in comedy about philosophers, we'd look for the ones that are really dopey, you know, really, you know, nerdy questions that no one really cares about. Why is there air? You know, to go back to that and real abstract and. And ridiculous things, we'd say, well, those are the philosophical questions. I'm going to try to give you a little bit more helpful and accurate description of a philosophical question. What characterizes a philosophical question? I'll give you three things I think I probably should have said before we even began this lecture. Reflecting on the nature of philosophy is, in a sense, a step beyond philosophy itself, isn't it? I mean, science reflects on curiosity, philosophy reflects on science, and what we're doing is reflecting on philosophy. And the funny thing about that is you all are novices. As far as I know, in philosophy, you haven't done a lot of study. I have a PhD and so I'm supposed to be an expert. I say supposed to be an expert in philosophy. So as I introduce philosophy to you, obviously I'm taking for granted, or you need to know, you should take for granted. This is because I've stood back, having studied the field, and I said, oh, this is what's going on as I look at it. Okay? So I'm giving you at the end of, you know, my cognitive development on these things. Looking back on what philosophy is. I'm sharing these results with you. It isn't as though you're going to go somewhere and look up in a book. These are the characteristics of philosophy. This is an ex post facto reflection. And what is it that marks philosophical problems? And I see some of you looking at me like, what is this all about? What I'm getting at is if you want to know how to play baseball, you can go look it up in the rule book. You understand what a pitcher is and what a bat is and so forth and so on. I'm not laying out for you the rules of baseball. I'm not saying, okay, now these are the rules of philosophy. Everybody who studies philosophy knows these rules. And there's umpires and they call you out and give you strikes and so forth. No, I'm saying I've studied philosophy. I've read people. In fact, what I'm giving you right now comes from, in many ways, a book by Halverson on Introduction to Philosophy. You look back at what philosophers are doing and you can kind of get some general characteristics to help the beginning students. So that's what I'm doing with you. What are the three characteristics of a philosophical question? One, it is not straightforwardly answered by any special science. Or to put it ironically, it's a philosophical question because it's not a question in any other field. But apart from the tongue in cheek, it's a question that doesn't fit in anywhere else. What we're getting at here is that you don't have a special science that resolves philosophical questions. There is a special science that resolves geographical questions or quantitative measuring questions or economic questions, although I don't mean by that economics, there's problems with that. But you can go to the store and you can add up what all these groceries are going to, you know, cost. And if somebody says, what does oatmeal cost today at Kroger market, there's a special particular delineated way to answer that question. Or somebody asked a question about is there a cure for the common cold? We know that there's a special science that answers questions like that. We may not like the answer. The answer is no to that one. But the point is we know who to ask. But when a philosophical question comes, one of the things that makes it philosophical is we say, well, we don't know who to ask about this. Do I take this one to the butcher, or do I take it to the doctor or to the lawyer, or to the astronomer or to the historian? And the answer is no. Nobody has any particular special developed way to answer this question. Secondly, the question that is philosophical can be given persuasive but contrary answers. That is, there are alternative answers that have pros and cons for each of them. Philosophical question. It's not like it's so obvious that no one has to ask. You ask it, and then you say, well, one school of thought will say this and well, there's some good reason to believe it. But then another school of thought says something different, and you say, but there's some good reason for that too. Aha. You're saying there are conflicts of opinion in other fields, said Dr. Bronson. Not all doctors agree on whether you should do surgery on this patient at this time, and not all historians agree about Columbus or whatever it may be. So it can't be just that persuasive answers can be given pro and con, that could be true of other schools of thought. The third point, the third characteristic of the philosophic question is that it's not immediately obvious how to resolve the conflict. It's not immediately obvious how to resolve the conflict in other areas of thought. Let's go back to our patient and the doctors arguing whether to operate in that area of thought. It's not as though the doctors wouldn't be able to recognize a resolution if the information were available. It's because they don't have enough information that one set of doctors says, operate now, and the others interpret that limited information different by and say, no, don't operate now. But if they had more information, the doctors would know how to use the information and they would come to a conclusion. But that isn't the way it is with philosophy. It isn't as though, let's gather some more information. Let's send students out on field trips and bring back their research. And then once we have enough data, we'll be able to resolve this philosophical problem. It doesn't work that way in philosophy. Now, I know this sounds frustrating. Some people have heard this and have said, well, then why would anybody want to go into this field? This sounds really frustrating. Now, there's some of us who either enjoy being frustrated or we think the frustration is worth the effort so we can understand the nature of human life and the meaning of life and the character of the world and so forth better. You have to do that, I think. And as a matter of fact, I'll be saying in a few minutes, everybody does do that. It's just not everybody does it well. So back to my point. The mark of a philosophical question. It's not straightforwardly answered by any special science. It has persuasive pros and cons available for alternative answers, and it's not immediately obvious how to resolve the conflict. So let me just do a little drill with you here. I'm going to throw out some questions and I want you to tell me whether they are philosophical or not. I don't expect you to categorize it into anything beyond not philosophical. Okay? So it would be real simple. It's either, yes, it is. No, it's not. So we'll go around this way. If I asked, how far away is San Diego? Is that a philosophical question? No, that's not a philosophical. That's an easy one. How about if I ask, should I Travel faster than 65 miles an hour when I drive to sand? Is that a philosophical question? Yes, it is a philosophical question. And why is it? We might have thought that's just a question for the Department of Motor Vehicles, but actually I'm asking, should I or am I under obligation to obey what the Department of Motor Vehicles tells me? How about this? What is the fine for speeding to San Diego? That's not a philosophical question. You can speak up. No, it's not a philosophical question. Why not? Because you could gather information from all the Department of Water Vehicles. Sure. I mean, it wouldn't be hard to get the answer to that question. And so it's not as though we're going to have alternative schools of thought with persuasive pros and cons, and no one knows quite exactly how to resolve it. How about this if I ask, but are the courts just assessing that fine? Is that a philosophical question? Sure. Because that assumes you know something about the nature of justice, and on that there's no particular school, excuse me, or a scientific method of determining that. Another one who discovered San Diego, is that philosophical? No, it's not. That's historical. And there may be disputes over it, but we know what a Resolution would look like to the dispute if we had enough information. How about this? What motivated his exploration in finding San Diego? Is that philosophical? Yes. No. No, it's not. Let's think about that. Why is that not a philosophical question? It's tricky because it seems like, well, you can have real sloppy, ambiguous answers going different ways on that. But it's not really a question that couldn't be resolved if we had enough information. For instance, what if it is Cortez, right? What if Cortes were still with us and we could interview him and people could even compare his answers and ask whether he's being sincere and all that? That would be more a psychological question, it seems to me, not a philosophical question. How about this? In his choice to explore that region when he found San Diego, was he free in what he did? Not a philosophical question. I would say yes. Philosophical question. And I think you're right. Tell me why. Because it depends what you mean by free. It varies. You don't have any definition for truly free. Well, you could get one. Somebody could give you an arbitrary definition. But the point is, somebody could give an alternative definition and you'd have schools of thoughts that would argue over that. And there's no obvious way to resolve that. Does a government exist in Mexico? Is that a philosophical question? You could make it one if you didn't want to define government as a legislative body. But if you're defining it as a legislative body, then it has a government because it's easy to go down there and find of a lot legislative body. Let's not get frustrated with the way Jay has answered this question. He's got a valuable insight, in a sense. You could make almost any question into a philosophical question. You could push real hard about the analysis of any word and so forth, but taking it in a more common sense way. If I ask, does a government exist in Mexico, are we able to answer that? Well, I'm not asking that the answer is yes or no. I think a person could say no because it's so shoddy that it doesn't come up to the standard of what we call government. But the point is political science studies what government is and can tell you yes or no, it has a government. How about this? Does anything like a government exist? How's that different? Dr. Bonson? Now I'm asking about whether an immaterial thing like a government can be said to exist. The alternative would be, I mean, you might say, well, the answer is yes, because there's a legislative body in Mexico. But somebody might say, well, but all you're saying when you speak of government is you're talking about there are individuals doing particular things, performing certain actions, and that's what you're generalizing as government. But if you mean government in something beyond the particulars of the physical world, no, there's no such thing as a government. That's similar to the question, where is the university? Now, we have a. That would be funny. Applied to Christ College for various reasons. But let's just take a more obvious illustration. Take the University of Virginia. Somebody said, where is the university? That could be taken as a geographical question. It's like, well, it's right here on the map. Take this highway and make a left and so forth. But let's say we got there and somebody said, well, where's the university? Well, look, I mean, it's here, all these buildings. Person could say, no, no, no, the buildings don't make a university. You got buildings over there, too. They don't. There's got to be something more to the university than buildings. You say, oh, okay. Well, yeah, but it's got a student body. See, they're all walking around at lunchtime here. Some are going over there buying books and some reading in the cafeteria and so forth. So, yeah, there's the university. The student body. No, no, no. I mean, you could have other people than these be here and you could still have the university. Well, that's true. So where's the university? Oh, you must mean the administration building, you know, where all the records are kept and people are admitted and so forth. So the university offices are right over there. No, no, I'm not talking about the offices of the university. I'm talking about the university. Well, the university is a place where people are educated. So you must mean the classrooms. Not in the building sense. We've already dismissed that. So we go into the classroom, say, there's the university, there's a professor, there's students. Well, but this can't be the university. This is just one class of the university. Now, when I ask the question, does anything like an immaterial entity, a government exist? That's similar to saying, is there something, the university that goes beyond all the particular manifestations that we associate with universities? Is that a philosophical question? I've given myself away, haven't I? Obviously, that's a philosophical question, because some people would say, well, that's just ridiculous. You don't have to answer that kind of question. Some people would say, it's answered in this way. These functions are the university. Somebody else might say, no, there is a general concept that we all have in our minds that makes the university what it is. So a philosophical question, just to belabor our point, is not straightforwardly answered by any special science. It has persuasive pros and cons available for alternative answers to that question or questions. And it's not immediately obvious how to resolve the conflict here. If we were to look at the sorts of questions that arise in philosophy, could we give a general answer as to the basic concern in all of them? I think we can. And I know that different philosophers would probably do it a little bit differently. But this is my way of putting it. If you look at the philosophical questions that are asked throughout the history of Western thought in one way or another, I think they all come down to being concerned with. I know this is going to be highly abstract, highly general, But I think in one way or another, all of those things that count as philosophical questions are concerned with the presuppositions and conceptual muddles that we find in any field of thought or area of human concern. In the most general sense, philosophical questions are concerned with the presuppositions and the conceptual muddles that we find in any field of thought or area of human concern. Medical science has developed ways of prolonging life. Philosophers are not concerned with the techniques of dealing with comatose patients or saving people that have particular diseases and so forth. But philosophers are concerned with the presuppositions that are utilized by scientists. Like the presupposition that what we've learned in the laboratory five years ago is applicable today. That the world is not so a chaotic place that there's no predictability, that's a presupposition. Doctors don't prove that. They just operate on that assumption. Pardon the pun, operate on that assumption. Philosophers deal with those presuppositions. But then conceptual muddles come up. If nature is uniform and predictable and man is part of nature, obviously his body is. That's why medical doctors can operate on him, Then are all human choices predictable as well? That is because there's no freedom. Everything works mechanically. Man may be very complex, but when all of a sudden that he's not really free, and yet we treat him as though he's free. So now we've got a conceptual model. On the one hand, we think man is not free. That's why doctors can operate on his body. There's predictability. And yet we treat man as though he is free. That's why we hold him accountable in a court of law for what he does. But then Some people would say, well, we really shouldn't hold him accountable. He couldn't help it. He's just a complex organism subject to conditioning and response. The philosopher, how do we deal with that conceptual muddle? Is man free or not free? And it can come up in any field of thought or area of human concern. I happen to pick up on medical science, where questions come up in how should we govern? Who should we vote for for president? What should we think of death? All sorts of areas of thought are ripe for developing philosophical questions that the philosopher deals not with the specific subject matter of biology or astronomy, sociology, medicine, whatever it may be. The philosopher deals with the presuppositions of all these fields of thought. What are the underlying assumptions about the nature of reality, how we know what we know and how we should live our lives? Philosophers deal with the presuppositions and conceptual muddles that arise in any field or field of thought or area of human concern. What are philosophers trying to do? Let's go thirdly then, to the task of philosophy Again, as we look back at the history of what's been called philosophy, I do think it's possible to generalize as to what philosophers were doing. A lot of people would say philosophers have basically wasted our time in a very cynical attitude. And that, of course, doesn't answer the question, what were they doing as they were wasting our time? So even if you are down on philosophy, you still have to ask, what were they trying to do? The answer to our question, whether you have a positive or negative attitude starting out, is really twofold. Philosophers, it seems to me, do two things. We might speak of the critical task of philosophy, and then secondly of the constructive task of philosophy. The critical task of philosophy is what gets many philosophers into trouble socially, not because they go around being critical in the carping sense of always saying, oh, I don't like that, or boy, you could have baked a better cake, or something like that. Not critical in that social sense, but critically minded, trying to be logical, analytical, trying to be clear and cogent in their thinking and to examine others for such logic and cogency and analysis and clarity. Philosophers are critically minded, seeking reliable presuppositions or foundations upon which we can live and think. The philosopher is being critically minded when someone tries to get a murderer off. The philosopher is critically minded when he starts cross examining, not in the court of law, but cross examining this line of thinking. People are not responsible when they are not able to control their body or cross examining, saying, a person could not control his body because his mother didn't treat him well. When you start asking about that and asking about its relevance for moral decisions and for social decisions, whether you punish the person and so forth, you're being critically minded. You're asking, well, what would be just in a situation like this, what is a reliable presupposition upon which we can draw other conclusions or make decisions? The philosopher asks critical questions, cross examines, seeking reliable foundations for thought and life. That's the critical task of philosophy. Socrates, of course, is the best historical example of a philosopher in that mold. Socrates would go around cross examining his fellow Athenians. He'd find somebody who said he knew what beauty was or what justice was or what truth was. And Socrates would say, well, you know, I'm not a very smart man, I hope that you could help me then. So would you explain to me what is justice or what is piety? And then the speaker would give an answer and Socrates would say, well, but then how about this case here? And then noting that there was some kind of tension in the answer given at first. And now to the counter illustration, Socrates would say, well, but you know, what is the underlying principle that binds these together? And pretty soon the people that he talked to would get real frustrated because it would appear they don't really know what justice is or don't really know what beauty is, because the philosopher has kind of tripped them up in their assumptions. And as Socrates said, he was the gadfly of Athens, going around and making these horses that would have ordinarily been at ease have to flip their tails to get rid of this fly. Stop bothering me, stop bothering me. Because he'd ask these pointed questions. Well, apart from the social difficulty that comes up, that when you cross examine people, they tend to get testy. The Athenians executed Socrates for this tendency, although they gave him the opportunity to flee. And for philosophical reasons that were sufficient in his mind, he chose not to. And he drank the hemlock. Now you can all understand what I was getting at earlier. The joke. The last thing Socrates said before he died, I drank what? He knew what he was drinking. He drank the hemlock. He accepted punishment because he thought that was the right thing to do. The philosopher cross examines, like Socrates, looking for reliable presuppositions. What can we count on? Can we count on the fact that man is free and responsible? Or should we say that he's just part of the mechanism of nature? Questions like that trouble the philosopher. And so he wants to be critical and analytical. He wants to gain clarity. But there's a second thing Philosophers do. They don't just cross examine being critically minded. They also are constructive. They try to put together, if you will, a total picture of what the various sciences have taught us. A total picture that integrates and unifies everything we know about human experience, everything we know about life and the world. A philosopher wants to have a way of looking at things so that political science and medical science and poetry and everything tie together somehow, as we're not satisfied, like children, at the level of curiosity, just to have some information about marbles and information about, you know, applesauce and other things we want to know. How do applesauce and marbles and everything come together into a total picture? Well, the child, of course, usually integrates his experience through his home life and then his home life. He sees there are other homes and he builds out with. But nevertheless, you have to have something that puts it all together. And the philosopher tries to have this total picture of man, his place in the universe, how we know what we know and how we should live our lives. That total picture is what we call a world and life view. A world and life view, Or often shortened to worldview. Let me give you a technical definition of worldview, and then we'll look at the definition. A worldview is a network of presuppositions which is not verified by the procedures of natural science, But in terms of which every aspect of man's knowledge and experience is interpreted and interrelated. A worldview is a network of presuppositions which is not verified by the procedures of natural science, but in terms of which every aspect of man's knowledge and experience is interpreted and interrelated. And what I've just said to you is that the constructive task of philosophy is to develop a worldview, to bring together into a network the presuppositions in terms of which man's experience can be interpreted and interrelated. In my definition, I pointed out to you that these presuppositions are not verified by the procedures of natural science. And if you'll hearken back to my comments about how philosophy arises, this will already be obvious to you. Since philosophy reflects back upon the work of science, not just natural science, but all what man can know and how he systematizes it into general laws and so forth. As philosophy looks back at that, obviously the philosopher, then the. The worldview he's putting together is not itself verified by natural science or any science. Rather, the science that people engage in, be it a science of opera or science of how to cure malaria, is itself Interpreted in light of their worldview, their network of presuppositions. We don't go out and get our presuppositions scientifically. Our presuppositions tell us what science is, how it should operate and how its results should be integrated. A worldview is a network of presuppositions. I want you to see that it's not just like one conviction is a person's worldview. A worldview is, as the metaphor might suggest, a picture of the world. It's very rich, it has a lot of information, or certainly if you can reduce it to simple statements. Nevertheless, those simple statements are very pregnant. They cover a lot of ground. It's a network of presuppositions. Now, what do I mean by a presupposition? I mean an elementary assumption or basic commitment or foundational perspective. These are different ways, different synonyms for it. Elementary assumption, basic commitment or foundational perspective. I do not want you to think of presuppositions as precognitive. The Deui Verdian school of thought has emphasized that presuppositions are pre theoretical and understood. In one way I have no problem with that. Understood in another way, I have a great deal of problem with it. If we mean by pre theoretical simply that it is pre scientific, where theory or the theoretical mode of thought is that attempt to systematic about a particular area of life, general laws that help us explain what happens there, then we could say that presuppositions in a sense are pre theoretical only logically. I don't mean that historically, but the presuppositions are that in terms of which we do our science. But it's not our presuppositions are not pre theoretical if understood as somehow non cognitive. Something you can't explicate, something you can't argue about, something which is kind of like a gut gripping feeling within you. It's not pre theoretical in that sense, not in the unrational. I didn't say irrational, although I could have irrational or unrational sense of that which grips you and directs you and that you can't explicate or, or debate. Or reason about. So back to worldview, a network of presuppositions. And these will be foundational perspectives or basic commitments about the nature of reality, how we know what we know and how we should live our lives. And that. What brings me to the next point in my outline, which is the basic divisions or basic questions, kinds of questions that philosophers are interested in studying. What are the key concerns of philosophy or its Basic divisions. What I mean by the key concerns of philosophy are can we kind of organize all those kinds of philosophical questions into divisions? And the answer is yes, they overlap and obviously affect one another. I don't want you to think that you can take one area of philosophy and just study it and you can ignore the other areas. That is not just the passing comment, but a crucial thing for you to be aware of. Because in our day and age, people have these idea that you can study one domain of philosophy as though it stands all by itself, and then you can move on from what you've learned there to another domain of philosophy and so forth. And I would argue strongly that everything that a person does philosophically is tied to their entire philosophy of life. That what they say about how we know what we know is governed by and also affects what they think the nature of reality is. So again, I'm going to give you the divisions of philosophy, but I want you to be aware that they are not watertight compartments. The three basic divisions of philosophy are metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Let me define each one of those. These terms will be heard over and over and over again, so you must master them. First, let me define metaphysics. Metaphysics is the study of the nature, structure and origin of what exists. The study of the nature, structure and origin of what exists. Or if you want one word, just to summarize, the study of reality. What is real? What's it like? The study of the nature, structure and origin of what exists. What is the nature of what exists? What makes things real? If somebody says, well, I think reality is what you can touch and feel and taste and see, and everything else is not real, they. They have taken a metaphysical stance. I'm not going to bother to refute that right now. I just want you to know that is in the domain of metaphysics. Another person says, no, I think angels exist and they watch over my children. That is a metaphysical posture. They're saying something about what exists, the nature, structure and origin of what it is that exists. When people talk about the Big Bang, or creation ex nihilo or the end of the world, they're talking about metaphysics. Specifically, when we talk about the origin of the world, we are studying what's called cosmology. Cosmology is the study of the universe, its origin and process of development. The study of the universe, its origin and process of development. In the Shinto religion, it is taught that the Japanese islands came about because some mighty warrior was once stirring his sword in the brine. The primal ocean, and that when he lifted his sword, certain chunks fell out and became the Japanese islands. Now, nobody that I know literally, well, maybe there are people who believe that literally. I shouldn't have said that. But nevertheless, whether you take that literally or whether you just see that it's a metaphor for something else, that is a cosmological, Cosmological concern or point of view, and as a cosmological one, it is part and parcel of metaphysics. Another word connected with metaphysics in addition to cosmology, you should know, is ontology. O N T O L O G Y. Ontology is a more archaic word. You don't read that very often in philosophical literature. But ontology was the study or the theory of being itself, that is, existence. In the very nature of the case, what is it to exist? That was ontology. And then what kinds of things exist? That would also have become. Came to be known as an ontological question. When you run into the word ontological in literature, not just philosophical, but beyond, that's usually a synonym for metaphysical. Ontological concerns are concerns about the nature, structure and origin of what exists. Okay, so metaphysical and ontological will often be interchangeable in the literature, where ontology is more specific than metaphysics. It's the study of existence itself, the nature of existence, cosmos, cosmology, the study of the origin and process of development of the universe. Okay? One of the key concerns of philosophers then, is what is real? What kinds of things exist? Where did they come from? Those are metaphysical questions. The second area or key concern of philosophy is epistemology. And I will define epistemology as the study of the nature and limits of human knowledge. A study of the nature and limits of human knowledge. What is it to know something? How do we come to know things? How much can we know? Is memory reliable? Can you trust your senses? For something to be true, does it need to be logical and coherent? Questions like those are epistemological questions asking how we know what we know questions. So metaphysics asks, what is reality? Epistemology asks, how do we know? And then the third major area or key concern of philosophy would be ethics, the study of right and wrong actions and attitudes. The study of right and wrong actions and attitudes. Now, some of you have had my ethics course, and you know that I had a much longer definition, and I hope you remember the reason for that, because I think it's important that we see ethics in a Christian light, according to Christian presupposition. So I gave you a longer definition and said, unbelievers would not like that. Definition. But that's because they don't do ethics ethically. That is the very way in which they do. Ethics, we say, is immoral and disobedient to God. But here it is going to be more general, the study of right and wrong, actions and attitudes. Obviously, believers study those things and come up with answers, and so do we. We happen to think theirs are unethical. That's the point of the other class. These are the three major kinds of questions that philosophers ask. What is real? What's the nature of reality? How do you know? And how should we live our lives? You may notice that our one textbook, Francis Schaeffer, has picked up on that ethical direction of philosophy. How should we then live? Why didn't he just name the book How Should We Live? Well, if he said how should we live? He'd be asking in a general way, an ethical question by saying, how should we then live? I believe that the thrust is, well, given your view of the world, given your view of reality and how we know what we know, how then should we live in light of that? So this is what philosophy does. It critically examines what people say. It cross examines theories, looks, looking for reliable presuppositions, and it tries to constructively put them together into a worldview which has a network of presuppositions about reality, knowledge, and human conduct or life. So I hope you see how all these points of the outline tie together. We haven't even got to the history of philosophy yet, because I have to first explain what baseball is before I do a history of baseball. I have to let you know what philosophy is all about before we actually study the history of philosophy. And as a matter of fact, there's going to be one more step in my introduction before we finally get around to the history itself. I think we need to have an introduction to history as well. What is it that we're doing when we study things historically? Remember I told you this is not a problem of philosophy class. This is a history of philosophy class. And as a segue to that part of the outline, let's go back to ask the question, when did philosophy begin? And that's when lead us, of course, to study the nature of history, the meaning of history, and so forth. But from what I told you, when did philosophy begin? Liz, when did philosophy begin? Want to make a guess? When did people start asking questions about the nature of reality, how we know what we know and how we should live our lives? That's right. Philosophy began with humanity, with our first parents, Adam and Eve, I wanted to say, dispelled this idea that philosophers are a professional or especially an elite class of humanity. Philosophers are not different from anybody else. Everybody has to answer these questions. What I'm getting at here is that everybody does philosophy. Everybody has some worldview. Everybody is critically minded to some degree. Everybody has a view of the nature of reality, how we should live our lives, how we know what we know. You know, they may not have gone to college. They may be high school dropouts, they may have never gone to school one day in their lives, but they still have some way of sorting out truth from error, some way of deciding things are real or they're imaginary, some way directing their children how to live their lives. So everyone has a philosophy. The difference between the philosopher and the man on the street, if I can put it that way, is that although everyone does philosophy, not everyone tries to do it well. Not everyone tries to do it self consciously and consistently. Most people that you would meet in the market this afternoon probably don't think they have a philosophy. But when you were, if you were to talk to them and point out to them, well, of course, you do have this belief here, and you do live this way, and so you have a philosophy, they'd say, oh, yeah, okay, big deal. They don't care to be self conscious and well thought out and cogent in their philosophy, but they have one. The philosopher is marked by his attempt to be self conscious and developing his critical presuppositions and his constructive worldview. Okay, not everyone is a philosopher. But in saying that, I only mean not everyone tries to do philosophy. Well, everyone does philosophy. Maybe not self consciously. Now, if everyone does philosophy, then of course, Liz is exactly what. Right. Philosophy began with humanity, which is in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. Why then when we pick up history of philosophy textbooks like the one that we're using in this class, or just about any other one out on the market. Why did they all begin with Thales, this Greek philosopher? Well, because philosophy is always taught from, from a particular perspective. Philosophy itself, the teaching of philosophy has a philosophical presupposition or outlook, doesn't it? And if people think of philosophy, what counts as philosophy, as being secular in its orientation, then they'll tend to think philosophy started with the Greek philosophers like Thales. But that isn't our perspective. We believe that philosophy is part and parcel of being a human being. God made us to be curious and thus to become scientific and then philosophical. And so philosophy began at the very beginning. And that's going to lead after we take a short break here to my lecture then on the meaning of history, so that we have some perspective on studying the history of philosophy. As we continue our lecture introducing the history of Western philosophy, we know something about what philosophy is now and when it began. I want to turn to consider the meaning of history because we're going to be looking at philosophy in a historical perspective. How does one find meaning in order in history? And to get into this subject, first of all, as you see on the board and our outline, I want to rehearse the biblical worldview for you. The basic biblical worldview. We've already had occasion to observe that philosophy began at the beginning, the beginning of human life began with our first parents, Adam and Eve. And so if we're going to do the history of philosophy in a Christian way, we should begin by asking, what is the biblical philosophy? What would it look like? And I'm not going to try to be real complicated with you or sophisticated, but I would like to point out that there is a basic biblical philosophy or worldview. And so that's what number one here is. The biblical worldview. Christianity is unique among all the philosophies and religions of the world. It's unique first of all because it holds forth an infallible verbal revelation from God. It holds forth an infallible verbal revelation from God. Somebody might say, well, there are other religions that have their own religious books. Well, that's true. There's the Bhagavad Gita of the Hindus and so forth. You have the Analects of Confucius. But none of them claim to be an infallible verbal revelation from a personal God. In the Confucian system of reality, there could be no infallible verbal revelation from TN the heavens. And in the Hindu approach to life, there is no personal ultimate reality. There is just the one that everything is. And so Christianity is unique in that it holds forth an infallible verbal revelation from God. Oh, no, no, no. Somebody will say the Muslims have what they consider an inf. Infallible verbal revelation. Yes, but they stole that idea from us. If you know the history of Muslim faith, you know very well they're the Joni Comelatelys in this game. They heard from the Jews and the Christians about a personal monotheistic, absolute God who reveals himself. And so for our purposes, we'll consider Muslim to be Christian heretics. I mean, really, really bad heretics. But the point is, they get their basic idea of religious starting point from us, from Christianity. Okay, so Christianity uniquely holds forth an infallible verbal revelation from God. And Christianity among the religions of the world is uniquely historical in character. As Christians, we take an interest in history. And I know this is going to sound strange at first, but hear me out. Christianity is not an otherworldly religion. Christianity is a disworldly and otherworldly religion. Most people, when they think of religion, think of, well, something that deals with pie in the sky, by and by, things that have no real practical import or relevance for our day to day lives. Certainly not something that pertains to the very flow of history itself. But Christianity is uniquely a historical religion. History is crucial to Christianity. After all, God created the heavens and the earth. He began human history. He defined what human beings are and what their task is, and he controls what they do in this world. He has a plan that he works out in this world, not in another world. He works out his plan in this world. And Christianity is a uniquely historical religion because God's plan for salvation looks to the historical fulfillment of his promise of a savior. God himself came into history in the person of his own son, Jesus Christ. And when Jesus ascended on high, this is very important. He said, I will not leave you alone. I'll send you another comforter. The Holy Spirit comes upon the church on the day of Pentecost. God is intimately involved in human history, the here and now. And his people have a historical task set before them to disciple the nations. And history has a particular end. We're looking for the return of Jesus Christ and the day of Judgment, the inauguration of the new heavens and the new earth. Now, I'm not going to give you a whole course in theology, but that's just to remind you every bit of Christianity from creation to consummation is historical in character. It's not some kind of ethereal heavenly by and by religion. And so it's not surprising that as Christians we would study the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy fits into our general conception of history itself and it has to do with our philosophy of history. And so I'm going to try to bring together your history of philosophy and philosophy of history all in just a few moments here by talking about first, what is the basic biblical worldview? Let's rehearse. When did philosophy begin, Pat? With the first man. And so we should look at the Bible and the account of creation and what Adam and Eve and their children and Abraham and his family and Moses and the nation of Israel learned so that we can understand that we do have a basic biblical worldview or philosophy. You're going to read, if you do any research, you're going to read texts in the history of philosophy that say philosophy didn't begin until. Until people got beyond the theological stage and the immature stage of looking to a God for answers and so forth. Well, that person may think that's crude and primitive and superstitious and all that. He can use all the names he wants. But it's wrong to dismiss it as not being philosophical. They thought philosophically. And I maintain that the philosophy that is presented to us in God's writing revelation, you see, is that against which the history of philosophy develops. What you have through the history of philosophy in the secular or naturalistic approach to things is really borrowing capital, borrowing presuppositions and insights from the true philosophy that God has given to us or fighting against them. In most cases, both a little of both. Borrowing and fighting, borrowing and fighting because people don't want to accept what God has revealed. That's part of the nature of history. That's part of the meaning of history as we understand it. So that's why I'm going to begin with our biblical worldview. What is philosophy concerned with, Jay? Concerned with answering certain questions as to the reality of things. How we know what we know and whether a thing is having to do with the ethics, how we should then live, how we should then live. What is Ria, how do we know and how should we live our lives? Philosophy deals with the presuppositions and conceptual models in any field of thought that leads it to do critical analysis and attempt to construct a worldview made up of a network of presuppositions about reality, knowledge and how we live our lives. I don't expect you all to be able to, you know, reduce it down like that. I teach this a lot, so it's on my mind. But I want. If we're going to compress a lot of information into these three hour sessions, it's going to be important that we keep up because I do try to build on previous things. There's a biblical worldview based on what is unique to Christianity. The divine verbal revelation, the infallible verbal revelation of God. So at the very beginning of history, there was a philosophy, that philosophy we see played out for us in the Bible. By the way, just to give you some dates, we look at Abraham, we're looking at roughly 2,000 years before Christ. I'm not going to try to get into the technical questions of exactly what generation and where in the Bronze Age and so forth, but just so you have this in your mind 2000 years before Christ, Abraham, about 1400 years before Christ. Or if you take a more liberal approach, 1200 years before Christ. You have the Exodus, Moses. Okay, I prefer the 1400 date, but I'm not going to argue that point now. I just want for perspective. If you're at 2,000 years, Abraham, and a little more than a thousand years, 12 to 1400 years, Moses. The Jews had a philosophy of life, a worldview. They had answered questions about metaphysics, epistemology and ethics long before the first Greek is credited with starting philosophy, which is Thales, about 600 B.C. or 580, actually, to back it up a little more, that's when it's assumed that Thales was born. He didn't start doing philosophy the day he was born, or didn't write the things for which he became known the day he was born. You see what I'm getting at? You'll turn to secular textbooks of the history of philosophy. They'll start it at 600 years BC but back at 1400 years, 800 years before that, the Jews already had a philosophy of life. Long before that, at 2,000 years, Abraham had God reveal himself to him. So I just, I just want to put this in perspective. Our philosophy of life is the old philosophy of life. And the secularists come much later. There's the reason why those books begin with Thales is because they see the first step into secular or naturalistic philosophy. And that's of course, what unbelievers want to favor. And so that's where they begin their histories. Well, I favor God's word. I praise him for saving me and enlightening my heart and giving me his revelation. And. And that's where I'm going to begin the history of philosophy. Okay, what is our basic biblical worldview finally? Well, from an epistemological standpoint, two verses, I think summarize very nicely the biblical approach to the theory of knowledge. How do we know what we know? Psalm 36. 9. Psalm 36. 9. In thy light we see light. In thy light we see light. Our biblical epistemology says we must think God's thoughts after him. I'm going to give you a real simple analogy. When you're introduced to something new, you need to get your bearings. You need someone to tell you what's important, how to function, what the order of things is. Imagine going to work for IBM, some big corporation. Unless you're transferring from a similar corporation or had other work experience. If you step into the corporate world of IBM, you Know from the street, as we say. Obviously you need somebody to show you around, right? You need to have somebody explain the lay of the office and what the corporate corporation does and what your function is and how do you act, I mean, how you're supposed to dress. What do you do during break time? Do you even get a break time? You can't step into the corporate world of IBM and understand everything. You need someone to give you your bearings. That's a very limited analogy of what the Bible tells us. In thy light we see light. God gives us our bearings about this world. He's the one who explains who we are, what we're doing here, how we're supposed to live our lives, what we should think, how we should behave, what the nature of the world is, what we can expect from it. And by light we see light. So our theory of knowledge is we must think God's thoughts after Him. He's the one who gives us the framework. He's the one who gives us our worldview in terms of which we understand things. Psalm 36, 9 or Proverbs 1:7. The beginning of knowledge is the fear of the Lord. But fools despise wisdom and instruction. If you would be wise, then you must first of all bow the knee to God. You must fear the Lord. For unbelievers, that fear means terror because of their sin and his judgment. But even for believers, that fear is very important and a strong, gripping part of our personality. We bow in awe and reverence before God, his greatness, his power. The beginning of knowledge and the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. By the way, philosophy, you know what philosophy means? If you break down the two words in Greek, from phileo to love and Sophia, meaning wisdom. And so the love of wisdom is what philosophy is. Well, if wisdom and knowledge begin with the fear of the Lord, where does philosophy begin? With the fear of the Lord. So that's our epistemology, very simply put. What's our metaphysics? What do I mean by metaphysics, Pete? Metaphysics is just give me one. What's it study, what area? Our existence, existence, reality, the nature of the real world, where it came from and so forth. What's our metaphysic? Well, you know, we have a metaphysic at the very beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1:1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We believe there there's a difference between God and the creature. And we believe God is sovereign and he is the origin of all things. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. God is not on the same level with man. It isn't as though we have one way of thinking and one kind of reality, and God just has more of it than we do. He's on a different level than we are. Okay, God is different, unique, transcendent to man because he's the Creator. And we know that God controls all things. In Genesis, chapter six, what does God do in the days of Noah? He destroys the world in a flood, Shows his grace to Noah in saving him and his family. Now, if nothing else, that shows you that God sovereignly disposes. God controls all things. And God's not somewhere far away, unable to be involved in this world. He's actively involved in this world. At the end of the book of Genesis, chapter 50, verse 20. I'm just picking up illustrations. You could do this other ways. But what do we learn when after Joseph's brothers have sold him into slavery and Joseph rises the high command in Egypt and eventually saves his family from the famine and then his father dies, do you remember the terror of his brothers? They figured, well, he's been kind to us for the sake of our Father, whom he loves. But now that Jacob is dead, he's going to get us. And there's this wonderful verse, verse 20 of chapter 50 in Genesis, where after they've come and they've pled their cause, Joseph explains why he could have such equanimity toward them. He said, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. And I'm still striving in my sanctification to get to that level where I can treat people that way. I mean, that's a marvelous, marvelous idea. But what does it tell us about God? In the earliest pages of Scripture, the sovereignty of God is what lies behind Joseph saying that. He said, all things work together for good. God's controlling everything. Even your evil God controls for the sake of good. So at the very beginning of biblical history, we see the metaphysic, the view of reality. God and man are on separate levels. There's two levels of reality, if you will. God is the origin of all things. God controls all things. God is actively involved in this world, and he even works through the evil devices of men to accomplish his will and purpose. So we see creation and providence, to put it very simply, as our view of the nature of reality. Thirdly, there's an ethic right there at the very beginning of the Bible. I think you could summarize that ethic in a lot of ways. I'm going to choose the Levitical pattern. You shall Be holy, for I am holy. To put it in a drop. That's biblical ethics. We are to emulate God's character in our own lives on this lower created level of reality. We are to manifest God's holiness in ourselves. His character is to be ours. And so that means that we are to follow his commandments. We live subject to a Lord who issues orders and commands. That means our hearts are to be right with Him. We're to follow these commandments from the heart, not just externally. We're to be holy as he is holy, so we do it sincerely. And that leads then to loving God with everything that's in us and our neighbor as ourselves. So there's a basic biblical worldview. Anybody who reads the opening chapters of the Bible should be able to get this. There was a philosophy that the Jews had. They had it, you know, 2000 and 1400 years before Christ. And actually they had it all the way back to Adam. But it's hard for us to trace the development of oral thought from Adam down to Moses. We have to pick up with the beginning of it being put in writing. The Bible, very simply put, says man is not self sufficient. He is not autonomous. Our epistemology says we are not autonomous. And by light we see light. Our metaphysics tells us we are not autonomous. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Our ethic tells us we are not autonomous. Be holy as I am holy, says Jehovah. I hope you can catch that and that it's exciting to you. See, that really is in everything we do, philosophically, metaphysically, epistemologically, ethically. All that our thinking is there is in essence saying, man is not a law to himself. He is not self sufficient. Now, that would have been true even if Adam did not fall into sin. We would still have a metaphysic that says God's the Creator, he controls all things. We would still have an epistemology that says we must think his thoughts after him, and an ethic that says we have to emulate his character. But now that man has fallen into sin, that philosophical worldview stays the same, but there's something added to it. And this, of course, is what the secular world wants to resist, and that's the need for redemption.