Dr Greg Bahnsen - Philosophy of Christianity: Opposing Worldviews (Part 3)

I wonder if we can ask Dr. Kikasola to begin us with church today.

Our Father, we come to you in the name of Jesus Christ, that matchless name by which we must be saved. Thank you for this course and for this hour together. Be with us, Lord, and help us to think through the implications of all of these things for the glory of Jesus Christ and his kingdom. Amen.

Okay, if you're going to do philosophy at all, you must have something of a rationalistic motif to your thinking. You're going to try to give some kind of adequate description of the world, some kind of analysis of what there is. Now, if you're an unbeliever, this attempt to give a description in human language of the world, some way to describe the world, it's going to take one of two courses. You might go in the direction of monism. Now, monism is that motif of explanation that does what anybody. Hundred Kansas parts by the whole. That's right. We take. Okay, we want to explain things. We begin like with every house on this block and explain it in terms of the block and then the block in terms of the community, community in terms of the state, on and on and on until the explanation keeps working out. We're now, we're. Broader and broader context. Now, what happens if you take this approach? Eventually you can't explain things. Why? Anybody remember from last class? Why can't you eventually explain everything? Then you end up at an endpoint with a mystical definition of something that you really can't describe, that you can't. That's right. It's indescribable. And for what reason you're trying to explain the whole universe. Okay? And then every time, every. Every time, every time you give an explanation of the universe, a description, then you expand it a little further than you have to explain. But the description is going to be less than the whole, is the point. Right? Every description is going to be smaller than the whole of which it's trying to describe. It's always explaining the universe under this heading or under that heading, or under this category. There's always a broader category. So if you try to explain parts in terms of wholes, the whole gets too big, if you will. Every human description is something of a way of dividing up the world. And so human description eventually can't give that which is all of the world. So monism in this sense then finally leads to mysticism. One does not describe the whole. One just has some kind of mystical, if you will, encounter or intuitive grasp of the whole. Isn't it interesting. Here's this rationalistic motif through the monist way of explaining things, ends up in mysticism, which is of course a form of irrationalism. Irrationalistic motif admits that the human mind is finite, that it's limited, that it can't be the absolute standard of truth. Okay, well, if you don't take the rationalistic motif of monism, then you're going to take the approach of atomism. Atomism is what? Smaller and smaller? Smaller and smaller. Let's say it with a little more precision. You're right, it's smaller and smaller instead of parts in terms of wholesale. That's right, holes in terms of parts. Okay, now why is it that atomism finally can't explain everything?

The basic standard of reference does not explain itself.

That's right. You keep dividing, dividing until you get an undividable, if you will, an atom, an uncuttable unit. But if explanation is what dividing things up, if you get to something that can't be divided up in the nature of the case, it can't be explained, you can't divide any further. But that's what explanation calls for. Consequently, to know the atom of reality or the atom of truth, that smallest unit by which everything else is accounted for, you have to be mystical about it. You can't explain it analytically by cutting it up further because that is just precisely what that smallest unit is uncomfortable at. Mystic. And so atomism leads to mysticism, the irrationalistic view that we can't explain everything, our minds are limited and not the absolute standard of truth. Now, I have found, at least in my philosophical work, this little diagram on the board, extremely helpful, because you may not know a lot about the philosophical background of the person to whom you're speaking, but I can guarantee you they're going to fall in the chart somewhere. And as soon as you get them onto this chart, then notice how you can get the old cycle going. So you want to be rationalistic about this. You want a philosophical account of reality. Well, okay, you're either going to try to get the broadest principle to explain things, all is water, or you're going to say everything has to be divided up into its parts. Water is H2O, which is hydrogen and oxygen. And they are. And they are. Finally, you get where. So you're going to get back to this rationalistic motif. Well, we don't know everything and our minds are not an absolute standard of truth. But now notice that rationalism and irrationalism are like mixing oil and water. And so you're going to get the unbeliever doing this little dialectical dance that I told you about the other day, running from pole to pole. You spend and try to bring these two together. It's always going to be unsatisfactory. Let me give you another way of looking at the situation. Sure.

I wanted to ask you. The four that you gave us last week or last Wednesday rather seem to fall generally into the problem of the universals and the particulars. And they. I think that's what you're proving here just as a way of just kind of describing it all of kind of putting it all together. If they don't have a. You know, if there's just a secular philosopher who says it's all water, that's his universal. If he's irrational about it and says that it can't be understood, that's his universal or it's atomistic, whatever, but it's one or the other.

That's right.

Okay.

I think it'd be convenient now to diagram this in terms of what is the traditional square of opposition? Logic. Okay, so if you get nothing else out of this course, you're going to get a few diagrams anyway. Has valuable theology. The diagrams. Okay, now on this particular diagram we're going to be contrasting the Christian position over against the non Christian position. Now the Christian position will be represented by this left hand line and the non Christian position by the right hand line. Okay, so that's the non Christian position. That's the Christian position. Now the upper line is going to be the view of transcendence or if you will, irrationalism. The bottom line is going to represent the view of immanence or if you will, rationalism. Okay, so now you can put all this together. This corner here is going to portray the Christian view of transcendence. Down here the Christian view of eminence. Over here the non Christian view of transcendence or irrationality. The non Christian view of rationality or immanence. Everybody with me so far it's just a matter of identifying the map right now you know how it's going to work. Now the non Christian is always saying that whatever the absolute principle is, it is beyond comprehension. Atomistically it can't be divided up further. You can only know it in the mystical way or if you will, monistically to so large that escapes rational description. In human language there's always a sense in which the absolute is beyond knowledge. Now the Christian view of transcendence, the Christian approach to the notion of irrationality is that God and his word. Are absolute or if you will. Lord over creation. Lord over creation. Creation. So we grant the transcendence of God. He is Lord. He is creator of this world. He's not part of this world. His Word is absolute. It's not subject to the contingencies and the vicissitudes of time and human opinion and relativism. Now the non Christian says about eminence or rationality nevertheless that his mind is the standard of truth. And the Christian says that God's word is the standard of truth. You get the general gist of these four corners. I'll say it different ways. This is not a formula sort of thing. We could say it in other words, but this will get the idea. But I want to show you now what kind of contrast we have going here between the Christian and the non Christian view. Notice, the Christian is an irrationalist in a sense. He admits that his mind is not the standard of truth. He says that there are things beyond me. I accept mystery. I've got to bow to the all encompassing mind of God. And so he says, God's word is transcendent. God is beyond me. I submit to him as a servant to a Lord. On the other hand, the Christian says, just because God is Lord, he can come right into our lives. Just because God is sovereign, just because God is all powerful, just because he's the creator and the controller of all things, God can in fact come right into created history, right into the realm of nature and show Himself clearly. He comes right into our lives. In the scriptures of the Old and New Testament, he sends His Son right into our history. He sends his spirit right into our hearts. And there's no ambiguity about this. There's no equivocation about this. There's no lack of absolute quality of it. Just because he's the Lord, he can give us a word that is a standard of truth. The unbeliever says that the absolute is beyond knowledge. You know, that mystical jump. There's his irrationalism. And yet, on the other hand, the unbeliever has to say that nevertheless his mind will be the standard of truth. You notice here you don't have something that's harmonious. The Christian view of God's transcendence is precisely what allows for the Christian view of God's immanence. It's just because he's transcendent that he can become imminent. That's not dialectical thought, that's not paradox. That's just the way the Bible presents it. God is so powerful. The reason he's so powerful is because he's beyond everything. He's not limited by the creation or by history or by time. And, and just for that reason, he can come right into creation history, time, our lives, and show himself clearly. So those two are harmonious. But for the unbeliever, there's always this back and forth, this dialectical tension. These positions are pulling against each other. His thought is always pulling itself apart. On the one hand, he wants to be rationalistic. My mind and my mind only is going to be the standard. On the other hand, he wants to say, but I realize my mind makes mistakes and I can't know everything. And so it's beyond me. I realize that the ultimate principle of explanation, whether it's a universal or a particular, is beyond explanation. The ultimate explanation is beyond explanation. So he has this contradictory approach to his thinking and to his philosophy and his life that's always working that way. Okay, so the first thing. Let me go back. I'm going to recapitulate now. First, I put the square up on board and I gave you the roadmap to what it was going to symbolize. And then I described the four different attitudes that you have here. Christian and non Christian views of transcendence, Christian and non Christian views of eminence. After we've gotten that second step, filling in the different corners, notice that the Christian view of transcendence and eminence is harmonious. The two supplement each other, work together. The non Christian view is always pulling against each other is what I meant by a dialectical tension. It's intention, as I said after class. An ideological tension that's always yes and no. Can you count on your mind? Well, yes, but no. But you see, that's a yes and no that don't work together. Here I can say, do I count on my mind? Yes, to the degree it reflects the thoughts of God. No, to the degree that I'm relying upon myself. So, Christian view, harmonious, non Christian view, dialectical tension. Now I'm going to add one more step to our diagramming here. Notice that there is an absolute diametrical contradiction between the corners, the outside corners. Now, okay, upper left and lower right. Upper right and lower left. Okay. The Christian. The non Christian says, the absolute is beyond knowledge. Nobody knows for sure. Nobody knows for sure. The Christian says no, we do know for sure because the absolutes come right into our lives. Okay. The non Christian view of transcendence is diametrically contradictory to the Christian view of eminence. Or if you will, I'll put it another way. The non Christian view of Irrationalism is the diametric opposite of the Christian view of rationalism. Christian says we can know for sure there's an absolute, inerrant, infallible word right here that tells us non Christians always want to say nobody can know for sure because the absolute is beyond knowledge. And then it works the other way too. This is the second step. Here these two corners are diametrically opposed. The Christian says God and his Word. The standard, the absolute is beyond our mental abilities. God is the Lord. The standard is this transcendence person. Whereas the non Christian is always going to say the standard is going to be his mind. We say that the standard is transcendent, the Absolute is transcendent. The non Christian is always going to say the standard is in some sense eminent in his own mind or something having to do with history. And so you have the harmony, the Christian view of rationalism and irrationalism, the dialectical tension of the non Christian view of rationalism and irrationalism. And then I've added to that. It will turn out that just precisely when we're talking about rationalism, the non Christian's going to want to talk about irrationalism. Just about the time you say God's word is the standard, God's come right into our lives. Here it is. Here's this infallible revelation. The unbeliever is going to say, nobody knows for sure the Absolute is beyond us. He's going to be very mystical. And then when you're mystical in the sense of being irrational, in the sense of admitting your finitude and your dependence upon something that's beyond you, when you're admitting your limitations, right at that time, he's going to get very rationalistic and say no, you see, if it's going to be believed, you got to show it to me, prove to me, and that sort of thing. So you see then the relationship of unbelieving thought and believing thought in very broad strokes what I've been trying to get at in the last hour and then today, yeah, I believe in the transcendent and image of God, but at the same time, somehow you're explaining that I didn't understand how you explained the aspect of God's transcendence becoming image. When we say that God is transcendent, to put it in a word, we mean he's Lord. He's Lord. And as Lord, that means he is absolutely in control of all things. And he's beyond challenge, he's beyond finitude, he's beyond limitation. To say his Lord is that he transcends all of the Limits we know he's beyond us in that sense. You see, part of the problem is many times we think of transcendence and eminence in spatial terms. God is way out there beyond the universe, and yet God is right here in our lives. Well, the Bible never portrays transcendence and spatial terms that way. Metaphorically it might. He's a God, very near to us to be sure. But his transcendence is always a matter of his power and authority. God is not part of creation. Nothing in creation captures God. Nothing in creation limits God. Nothing in creation is an obstacle for God. God is Lord, okay? And in that sense, you see, he transcends all of our boundaries and limits. And yet, just because he's transcendent, he is able to come into history, come into our lives, be very near to us. It's just his all powerful lordship that makes it possible for him to have a personal relationship to us that is not equivocal. When God comes into history, he doesn't lose his absolute character because nothing in history can bind him or live him, or be an obstacle to Him. And that's very helpful. By the way, in this inerrancy controversy that has been going on for a few years in the Evangelical Church, there's a view abroad which says that if God is transcendent, if he uses human agents, then something is lost in the process of revealing his word to finite men. So as they express it in their words, there's some authority in some accuracy lost in the process. Well, that is a view of God's lordship you find in the Old and New Testaments. After all, God's in control of all things. He sovereignly decrees everything. If this person's personality has been determined by the hand of God and by the leading of God and by the providential government of God, then obviously he can use this person to say exactly what he wants. So the very fact that God is sovereign, Lord over all, makes it possible for him to come right in of front our lives. So there is no problem with inerrancy and human language and all that because we have a view of God's lordship or his transcendence. You made a statement that in a sense the Christian position is irrational. Yeah, in a sense we have an irrationalist aspect. We depend upon the mind of God. We say we're not self sufficient. My mind is not the ultimate standard. And so that's irrationalistic in the sense that, that we're not holding everything, all authority, all self sufficiency to ourselves. And on the other hand, we're rationalistic. We say we can know things for sure. Now I don't know what your own personal convictions are on this matter, but my own creedal position, the Westminster Confession of Faith says that the Christian can not that it's essential to salvation or that all do, but nevertheless the Christian can't have and in infallible assurance of his salvation. I think that's true. I think you can have. I think many of us lack it because of the lifestyle that we live and our sin and other reasons. But nevertheless it is possible to have an infallible assurance which means one, you can know what the Bible tells you and promises you infallibly and secondly, you can know how you stand with relationship to that promise. The Bible comes to give us knowledge over and over and over again. You look at Peter's preaching on the day of Pentecost, Let the house of Israel know with assurance. The Greek word there means certainly without doubt, there can be no question but that God has raised up his Son to be Lord in Christ. Let the house of Israel know this. John in this first epistle says, I write these things to you that you might know that you have eternal life. And so the Bible says that we can know things, we can be very rational about it. No doubt about it, there is a God. He has the following character, he has sent his son, etc. Etc. Okay, so we're rationalistic or irrationalistic in the sense that we say it's not because of my knowledge or wisdom, it's because God has revealed it. I depend upon something beyond me. But on the other hand, what I do know, I know for sure. The unbeliever says, well I'm very rationalistic, my mind's the standard of truth. And then he has to be irrationalistic because his mind won't handle the task. So he finally says, well, nobody knows for sure. So you see, it's just this reversal that I'm getting at. It's just these different views of transcendence and eminence that give the rational irrational combination in Christianity a completely different flavor and direction than the rational irrationalism of non Christian philosophy. Well, this is your opportunity to ask some questions before I go on to another major thought. Yeah, Our starting point might be considered irrationality and theirs rationality. Or it can work the other way too. And in that way they could weak we would be crossing. That's right. Or having a head on collision, it's another way of putting it. And the dialectical tension within the non Christian is that often did you call the tension between both of this. Dialectical tension. No, no, no, his is a dialectical tension because there's an internal ripping apart internally and then between Christianity and non Christianity there is, you see, no reconciliation, that's a head on collision. That's not tension, that's just antithesis. So here you see the antithesis, the square of opposition, if you will. And here you see the internal dialectical tension. I'm going to try to add one more thought, I think. Yeah.

I asked you after class privately to define the two senses of dialectical. I think it would help the class if you would do that once again. Dialectical tensions. You mean it in a generic sense. What is that and how is that different from Neo orthodoxy in the sense in which they're using it? The title of this heading that we're doing.

Yeah, well it doesn't differ from Neo orthodoxy because what I'm saying is the unbeliever has to say one thing and contradict himself. He says yes and no. Is your mind the absolute standard? Well, yes it is. Anything that's going to be believed is going to be believed because you prove it to me. Well, is your mind able to comprehend everything? Well, no. So is it the absolute standard? Well, no. So is it the absolute standard? Well, yes, but no. Well, but then of course it is. But it's not. But I mean that's dialectical tension. It's the yes and no philosophically of unbelieving thought. Not. Now on the other hand, I don't want to make this seem like it's just duck soup either. You know that when you go to talk to an unbeliever, you say, now I know that you're a rationalist and an irrationalist. Right. He's going to say, that's right. Oh, shameful, shameful. They don't think it's that way. They think they've got a good thing going. And part of your work as an apologist in defending the faith and evangelizing these people is to get them to see that they've got more problems than they recognizing. So I mean, I'm not trying to talk about the way people will portray themselves, I'm talking about the way things really are. And by dialectical means saying yes and no, it's a tension that is of that sort, contradictory tension.

It's tension, dialogue. It's yes and no. Dialectical is dialogue. Now that's the generic sense. The specific sense of Neo orthodoxy is yes and no in the same sense at the same time with respect to. To what?

Same Question, Same issue. Okay. Other questions. Okay. Now, number five in your outline. I think it should be five we've talked about the dialectical tension and unbelieving plot is. I want to point out the ultimacy of worldviews. The ultimacy of worldviews. Now, what I'm getting at when I say that worldviews are ultimate is that a person has a metaphysical view, A person has an epistemological view, and the two work together. Together, one does not first decide on his epistemology and then, from the standpoint of his epistemology, decide upon his metaphysic. That is, one does not first come to a view of knowledge and then, given his view of knowledge, decide what really is. That is called philosophical methodism. Has nothing to do with John Wesley. Philosophical methodism is one first chooses a method of knowing or a theory of truth or a standard of truth. One first chooses a view of knowledge and then from that view of knowledge decides what really exists. From his epistemology, he moves to his metaphysic. Now, on the other hand, there are people who think that philosophers start with their metaphysic and from what they know to be real, decide upon their theory of knowledge. That's called philosophical dogmatism. Okay? One begins with his view of reality, and then he forces a view of knowledge in conformity to his view of reality. And what I'd like to do here in our remaining moments is point out how impossible both those views are, how one cannot be a philosophical Methodist and one cannot be a philosophical dogmatist. One must rather hold that what is ultimate is a worldview that contains both. Both a metaphysic and an epistemology, if you will. People come to their view philosophically in one stroke. They don't first get an epistemology and then a metaphysic, or first a metaphysic and then an epistemology. They get a combination. But these two are on an axis with one another. I'll try to use a homespun analogy to get this point across. Let's say that you're trying to build the world's best apple sorting machine, okay? You want to sort out good apples from bad apples. That's a method, if you will. That's a standard for apples. You want a machine that's going to apply a standard for apples. That will be like an epistemology. In epistemology, we say, what is the standard of truth? What is our theory of knowledge? And the reason we want to do that is because we want to be able to decide what we do know and what we don't know. Okay? Here are a lot of claims that people make, And those are like apples, if you will. Okay? Now, some of the claims are going to be true and knowledgeable claims, and other claims are going to be false, ignorant claims. Now, how do you know which of these claims are the knowledgeable ones? Well, in order to answer that question, people have devised theories of knowledge, okay? So an empiricist says, we know what is true on the basis of. Of what we can sense. If you can see it with your eyes, feel it with your hands, hear it with your ears, that sort of thing. That's how you know. Rationalists say, well, if it makes sense, if it harmonizes everything else we know, if it's consistent, if it's true to our intuitive concepts, then we know the claim is true and knowledgeable. These are different epistemologies, different theories of truth. One empiricistic, the other rationalistic. Now, I'm using rationalistic in the school sense, not in the motif sense that I have been. So I don't want to mislead you. Now, my point is, you gotta. Here are all these conflicting claims. You gotta have some way of sorting them out. And the sorting process is epistemological. And I've likened that to apples. You have good apples and you have bad apples, and you're trying to find a machine that's gonna sort out the apple, right? Okay, so you advertise in the paper and you say, now whoever will make an alpha sorting machine is going to do the job so that I don't have to worry about eating apples with worms in them. Then I'm going to pay them $10,000 and you have to have to produce your machine by Saturday. Whatever, whatever on whatever month and whatever year it is. Now, come that day, lo and behold, 10 people show up at your place and they have 10 different apple sorting machines. Some guy comes in and he says, now just watch how this machine sorts the apples, okay? And you watch it. And lo and behold, some apples go over in the bad pile, some go over in the good pile. The guy says, it's done. Sorted your apples. The other person's done, well, wait a minute, my machine will do a much better job than that. So you set up his machine and it sorts out apples this way and that way. And the third guy says, no, mine's even better than that. And you go through the whole schmear and you have 10 different machines doing 10 different ways of sorting the apples. What's the problem? No criteria. You got to choose which machine is doing the right job. Now, what are you going to do to test the machine? You're going to look at the apples. What does that presuppose? That you already know what a good apple is. If you have a machine that's going to sort the apples, you can only test the legitimacy of the machine, the accuracy of the machine, if you first know a good apple from a bad apple. What if we had some native from the South Sea island that had never seen an apple and we asked him to choose? Now, which of these machines do you think is best? Bongo? Pongo. And what happens? Well, he has no way of knowing. He couldn't begin to answer that question because he doesn't know anything about apples. And so, lo and behold, in order to sort out claims, one has first got to know some true ones, doesn't it? You have to know what a true claim looks like. You have to know what knowledge is before you can get a machinery by which to distinguish knowledgeable claims from ignorant claims, true from false ones. So what that shows is if you try to have an epistemology, this sorting machine for claims, you're going to have to know something about reality first, so that as everybody proposes a claim to you, you can have some test standards, you know, you can throw some good apples in and some bad apples in and see what happens. So somebody says, we only know things on the basis of our senses. And you say, well, I know this, I know that my wife loves me. Now, can that be proven according to the senses? Well, if it can't, then there's something wrong with this epistemology. There's something wrong because I know this much about reality and your machine won't accommodate it. On the other hand, I know that something is false, and yet your machine makes it appear to be true. If we apply your standards, it comes out looking through. My whole point is, then you cannot have an epistemology without firsthand a metaphysic. You gotta have. You have to know something about reality, something about the world, about way things are before. Something about being, if you will, in existence before you can test the conflicting epistemological schools that are available. So somebody says, well, then what you're saying is you should be a dogmatist, right? You should first have your metaphysic and then you should go to your epistemology. No, no, because that's just as impossible. Just as impossible. Because what if somebody says, well, the world is green cheese. Somebody else says, no, the world is water. Somebody else says, no, the world is matter in spirit. And on and on and on and on. With all the different metaphysical views, what's the natural question? How do you know? How do you know people don't come with their, you know, you just don't wake up some morning and say, oh, lo and behold, it hit me, the world's green cheese. Or somebody is just kind of having lunch one day and all of a sudden, hey, I'm going to be a materialist. No, people come to their metaphysical views not just kind of like it falls out of the sky or just boom and hits them. They come to their metaphysical views by applying an epistemology. Okay, metaphysical view isn't any good unless one wants to claim that his view is true. Consequently, you can't just have apples, you got to have sorted apples if they're going to be any good at all. So which comes first, the apple sorter or the apple? Well, in this world of ours, neither does. You got to start first of all with a knowledge of how you know as well as what you know. Now that isn't to say we have a full blown view of knowledge. You know, I can tell you how many ants there are in Ethiopia right now. But at the most fundamental level, well, what I'm telling you is, you know, the whole menu isn't given in one stroke here, but you do start out with the most fundamental principles of knowledge and reality as being harmonious with each other. You start out with a worldview. You don't start out with a metaphysic and then develop an epistemology. And you don't start out with epistemology and then develop a method. Metaphysic. You start out with a metaphysic and epistemology. I'd like to illustrate that a little bit from the history of philosophy here. And I think time will allow a couple of illustrations anyway.

Yes, trying to get a handle on metaphysical. Here you distinguished how you know from what you know. What you know is a, is a fairly general definition of metaphysical as opposed.

To how you know what you know about the world, about reality and being.

In the case of the apples, what was the metaphysic? What was the metaphysical?

The knowledge of a good apple. You know that this world is, you know that these apples here are good and these over here are bad. And that is like a metaphysician saying, I know spirits exist, but that material objects don't.

Okay? And the epistemology in the apples is.

What the way I know is because it was, went through this sorting machine and came out over Here, this machine proved this apple to be good and that apple to be bad. Okay, I'm going to compare the views of a realist and a nominalist here. Now, you all from church history studied a little bit that controversy, realism and nominalism, right? I'm looking for the nodding heads. I'm not getting it. No hands on this altar call. Okay? Okay. Realism. The view that abstract universals exist. What's a universal? It's a general truth or a general concept. A general truth might be water freezes at 32 degrees. That's a general truth. We're not talking about this glass of water or that bowl of water or this aquarium of water. We're talking about water in general. Water freezes at 32 degrees. Or a universal might be an abstract concept. Man. I'm not talking about this man or that man or that man. I'm talking about man in general. Okay? That's a universal. It's abstract because it's not from particular. It is. Well, here you know what abstract means, right? Stract. What does stract mean? How about in subtract? When you subtract, you're doing what? Taking it out, usually dropping it from under, if you will. Taking it away from. Okay, abstract. What does ab mean? To pull out of? Right. To abstract, something is to pull it away from its concrete particular, okay? Now if I'm looking at a concrete particular man, I may be looking at this man or this man or this man or this man. But if I talk about abstract man, I've got to take. I've got to pull out from all of these particular individuals what they have in common. That's abstract and universal. It's general. Let me put some more words up here to help you. General. Common. Abstract means that it is not something you're going to run into in your experience. It's not a particular, it's abstracted. Now, there is a view of philosophy held by men as famous as Plato or Descartes and Roderick Chisholm. Today it's called realism. It says there are such things as abstract universals. Abstract objects exist. There is such a thing as duckness, not just a way of talking. There actually is duckness, There are ducks, and then there's the concept of the duck. And the concept of duck exists as much as the ducks, okay? Now before we get too humorous about this, I happen to think there's something to be said for that philosophy, okay? But now nominalism, on the other hand, says, nah, that's really quite silly. Abstract universals don't Exist. They're only names. Nominalism. They're only nomina. Name names. Okay, so we speak of man, but the only thing that exists is men. For all the grammatical roughness of that. That gets the point. We speak of man, but the only thing that exists is men. So it's true that there is this man and this man and this man, but it's not true that there is man or mankind or humanity. In that sense, there's just men, just particulars. So instead of abstract, you have concrete. Particulars, not universals, just particulars. And every universal word is nothing but a word. It's only a summary, if you will. It's only a convenient way of speaking. Okay. Abstract universals exist. Realism. Only concrete particulars exist. Nominalism. Yes, sir.

Realism does not deny the existence of the particulars.

No, no, no. But it adds to that universals as well. Particulars exist. And universal. The nominalist has only particulars exist. How does the nominalist handle things like justice? Things like what? Justice. Justice is but a summary word for all of the actions that are taking place in the courtroom. The only thing that exists are the particular decisions. And justice is but a summary word for those decisions. I think it's a rather implausible theory. Beg the question to myself. Yeah, I like to talk about these things. I get off on it for just a minute. Let's watch what happens. Does Taunus exist? Cow nest. Let's say you're anomalous. Nah, cow has been a name, that's all. Okay, well, only particular cows exist then. Right? Right. So we look out in the field, and there we find Betsy. Okay. And buttons. Oh, okay. And. And Elsie. Incarnation. I wanted to change my illustration to milk companies.

Contented.

Contented. Okay. Contented is out there, too. We won't go any further. Okay, here we have four cows, right? Betsy, Buttons, Elsie, and Contented. Somebody says, but what are those? What is Betsy? What is buttons? Somebody says, well, they're particular cows. Hmm. This one's a cow. Yeah, those are nominals. And what's that one? Oh, that one's a cow particular, and that owns a particular cow. Okay. And this one's a cow, you say? Oh, that's what they have in common. They all have the word cow used of them. That's right. Just the name. All right, now put on your thinking gaps and be very analytical. How many words do I have up there on the board on the extreme right column? 4. 1. No, 4. Which is it? 1 or 4? 3. How many words are there up here? If the nominalist says that there is one word up here. What does he grant? That there is a universal, the word cow. But we thought abstract universals didn't exist. What he wants to say is, there's a chalk mark here, a chalk mark here, a chalk mark here, chalk mark here. He can't say they're the same word. To say they're the same word is to say that there's a universal, the word cow. You see how implausible the theory of nominalism is because he has to say these are the same word. They don't even look the same. My handwriting is terrible. But even if they looked the same, what would it mean to look the same? What is sameness of appearance unless there's a universal by which you identify four things as being similar? And so, you see, the nominalist transfers the question to the oneness and manyness of words, away from the oneness and manyness in the world. But he doesn't escape the problem. What's the problem with realism? Well, of course, I think you all feel there's something wrong with reality idea. If I go along this road here and kick every chair, you know, I kick chair one and kick chair two, kick chair three and kick chair four. And now, wham. Oh, I kick chairness. Okay, Plato is arguing with David Hume. Okay, great moments of the past, okay, you kind of reconstruct this thing in your mind, and here's Plato, and how are they going to argue with each other? Okay, David Hume brings forth his argument for the fact that only concrete particulars exist. Now, Plato is going to say, your nominalistic epistemology is wrong. It says you're arguing on the basis that general terms are only names and that's all. They don't denote anything in reality. And that nominalistic epistemology is wrong. Plato's going to say, because there are abstract universals that you're not taking into account. And so then Plato gives his argument right. And then David Hume sits there and he goes, hmm, that can't be right. Because, you see, your argument for realism, for the existence of these things is wrong because only concrete particulars exist. Does your realistic epistemology is wrong because only concrete particulars exist. Plato's epistemology was one of intuition, if I can put it very briefly. Plato says, we intuit the forms we intuit. But you see, this intuitional attention epistemology will not sit well with this empirical epistemology. Hume was an empiricist. He said, anything we know because of our senses, we know it because of our senses. Plato says, it isn't because of my senses. I don't sense duckness. I intuit duckness. Hume. Okay, let's go through the argument. Plato says, I have intuited the form of. Of duckness. Hume says, prove that you've intuited the form of duckness, that there is such a thing as duckness. Plato says, okay, I prove it because I'm now intuiting it. Hume says, well, you're obviously wrong, because to prove it means to give sensible evidence of it. Not reasonable sensible in a sense of tactile. I can touch it, see it, smell it, whatever. Okay, so Plato's metaphysic is challenged by Hume's epistemology. He says, you can't prove that abstract universals exist because you can't touch them. On the other hand, Plato says, you can't prove that only concrete particulars exist because intuition tells us otherwise. Why did Plato hold to an intuitionist epistemology? Because he held to a realistic metaphysic. Plato held to intuition because he believed abstract universals exist. Hume, on the other hand, held to an empirical epistemology because he believed only concrete individuals exist. His metaphysics determined his epistemology and his epistemology determined his metaphysics. And one stroke, you see, these two have to go together. You don't have a combination of these two views. You don't have an intuitionist epistemology when you think only concrete particulars exist. Because if only concrete particulars exist, you haven't got anything to intuit. On the other hand, if you believe that abstract universals exist, you're not going to hold to an empirical standard of truth because there's something that goes beyond our senses. And what am I getting at? Worldviews are ultimate. One's epistemology, his theory of knowledge, and one's theory of reality are going to supplement and support each other. They're going to determine each other. Let me give you another example, maybe one that's a little bit easier to follow than this technical question. In the history of philosophy, you have two general approaches to philosophy. One might be called the outsider approach to philosophy and the other the insider approach, the outsider or objective observer approach to knowledge. And then you have the insider, passionate participant approach to philosophy. Okay, now, on the one hand, you will find in the spectator approach the idea of an objective observer, the stress on being distant from your subject, being neutral about it, being a witness from outside so that you can gain knowledge about it. We're going to be very, if you will, technical and scientific and neutral and objective and emotionless let's, you know, it's. It's the old thing in the movies, right? Let's be scientific about this, right? Put your feelings aside and let's just be very hard nosed and get to the facts. Okay, so now we're going to get knowledge about some subject. The emphasis is on knowledge about it. I'm out here as an observer and I'm kind of casing the situation. Uh huh. That atomic formula does this, does this, does this and this biological reaction. I'm doing it as an observer. Very objective and neutral and distant spectator approach. And that would be somebody like Plato or logical positivism today. The idea is we have to get something apart from us as subjects. Knowledge can't be subjective, it's got to be objective. Plato said it's in the heavens, it's in the realm of eternals and universals, the forms. Duckness. You know, I look at these little ducklings in the pond and there's something really strange about that and I can't be sure. But of duckness there's no question. It doesn't move around, it doesn't get fuzzy, it doesn't get ambiguous. It's objective and plain or logical. Positivism says you want to know things for sure, you have to know them in terms of what is an absolute experience of it. Redness, roundness. Here, now that's an apple. Okay, okay. Very objective about it. On the other side you get the insider, passionate participant approach to reality. So you have like Kierkegaard who says that he doesn't want to be an impartial judge about truth. He doesn't want to trample upon the modes of experience. He is motivated by a subjective commitment to truth. Okay, so here the insider doesn't want knowledge about things, he wants knowledge of things. He wants an experience of things. He wants to be encountering things.

Okay.

On the outsider, objective observer, knowledge about things approach, you're going to get an increasing distrust of reason. I'm sorry, scratch that. Increasing distrust of feeling in favor of reason. Confidence in formal proof, like Descartes, give me a syllogism, give me something that is demonstrative. It follows mathematical certainty. Okay? The objective outsider wants, you see, more and more to get away from feeling and to trust his reason. On the other hand, the insider or passionate participant approach to philosophy shows an increasing derogation of reason. This reason, you see, is always distorting. Reason and analysis distort and falsify what experience really is. You know what it is to go to the dentist and feel Pain. Now read an account of going to the dentist and feeling pain. What a difference, man. There's something distorted about that. Reading about it and experiencing it are really different. There's something unreal about reading about the pain of a dentist chair. Something very real about feeling the pain in the chair. Okay? So the passionate observer, you know, I mean, the passionate participant says, I don't care how you describe it, it's how it feels that counts. Okay? Here the emphasis is upon cold analytical reason, derogation of feelings. They're subjective, they're unreliable, they're relativistic, they're changing all the time. Here the person says, yeah, but reason is distorting. It doesn't really get down to the real nitty gritty of life. The important thing is how we feel about things. So emphasis upon reason, emphasis upon feeling. Yes, sir. There was an advertisement in my home paper last year by a Unitarian church.

Big bold letters.

You know, they're trying to get people to come and their come on was.

Nobody'S going to tell you what to think. Just feel.

Oh, yeah, it feels good. It's right. Yeah, sure. That's what you call the ultimate passionate participant approach for religion. Okay, now let's say we get this Unitarian pastor, if it's fair to call them pastors, in the same room with a cold, analytical philosopher, and they're going to resolve their philosophical differences right now. What's going to happen if they try to resolve their philosophical differences? Okay, here's the cold analytical philosopher who says, you know, what's wrong with your approach to life, Mr. Feeling Oriented Preacher? Premise one, premise two, ergo, you're wrong, okay? Has nothing to do with my feelings about it. I may like you as a man that the fact of the matter is your philosophy stinks, and here's why. One, two, three, boom, boom, boom. Fact, you're out. Okay? And then the Unitarian fellow, or the character guardian, if you will, stands up and with his passionate participants, he says, yeah, what does that have to do with life? Those marks up there on a blackboard. Now I want you to tell me, you people out there in the audience, how many of you have been in a dentist chair, huh? Okay, the philosophers over here going, oh, this guy's appealing to feeling. How wrong could he be? Whereas the other fellow's going, that guy's appealing to cold logic. How wrong could he be? How are they ever going to get these two together? You see, their view of life and the way they argue about life is going to be completely different. Their standards and their conclusions are different. The one guy says, you know, life is to be approached objectively as observer. The other says, no, life is to be approached as somebody who wants to be part of the game and participate in. And there are the twain shall meet to argue with each other. They're going to have to change their worldviews because as long as their worldviews stay the same, the way they argue is going to be different as well. They'll never be able to convince each other because it's not a matter of having done your homework wrong. It isn't as though the philosophers are says, now listen, Mr. Feeling Oriented. If you'll go home and just, you know, recheck your homework, you'll see that I was right and you were wrong. That isn't the problem. The problem is they have different conceptions of the kind of homework they should be doing. The one guy says, now look, don't go home and read a book. Go home and get involved in life. Play with your children, get out in the political world, turn on the tv. The other guy says, nah, don't worry about what you know really makes you feel good or bad. You got to get down the facts, get out an encyclopedia, pull out a book of logic, start, you know, working things out on paper. They're never going to be able to convince each other because their approach to life dictates different ways of arguing. And different ways of arguing are going to lead to different conclusions about life. Their metaphysical, their view of the world and their epistemology, their view of knowledge are determined by each other and not one before the other. They come, if you will, in one stroke. And now that's what I'm getting at when I said worldviews are ultimate. Now, before we run out of time today, I want to go back and just review what we've done this week. This week has been calculated in my notes as a way of preparing you for the. For the particular issues that are going to arise now in the philosophy of religion that we're going to be taking up week by week. This is our orientation, not just to the class, but orientation to the way we should be thinking as Christians. First of all, why should we study philosophy? That's your turn to answer. Why should we study philosophy? What's that? So the death of the faith. Okay, so we can defend the faith. Why else treasure truth? So we can preserve truth, the treasure of truth that Christ has. That we're going to lose critical discernment, that we can have critical discernment for the sake of seeing which Philosophies lead away from Christ and which are honoring to Christ. Very good. Okay, what is philosophy? I don't care if you look at your notes. You don't have to do it from memory. But I would like us to review together before our time gets away. What is philosophy? You know why you should study it. What are you studying? Systematic study of nature. Systematic study of nature. Of nature. That's metaphysics. Okay, what's another? We're on the branches of philosophy. Let's finish that Study of reality, love of knowledge. Knowledge, the study of what is knowledge and truth, epistemology and ethics, human behavior or conduct. Okay, those are the branches of philosophy. What is philosophical study? What do you do when you do philosophy? Remember I said there's kind of. There's a double task in philosophy. Critical task and constructive task. Ah, right. Okay, what's the critical task? Anybody seeking clear thinking by analyzing arguments and examining ultimate presuppositions. What is it that makes this person say what he's saying, analyzing it, being critical about it? Okay, and what the second task is constructive. And what is that? We're just always breaking down, looking at arguments, trying to get down to the nitty gritty of what motivates and justifies this point of view. No, we're doing something constructive too, not just critical. What else? Good, somebody said it over here, but I didn't know. That's right. You're trying to get a unified and overall world and life view. Trying to bring together what is true in the sciences, what is true in art, what is true in religion, what is true in this. Bring it all together in one coherent view. View of our world and our lives. Okay. And then we've already gone through the three tasks or the three areas, metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. So we know why, we know what. And then I said there's a kind of a twofold approach, there's a two fold philosophy. What are the two basic philosophies? True and false. That happens to be the way I put it, by the way. Okay, now let's get a little more detailed and then a little more detailed after that. We can also say what about it Christian? That it's Christian and non Christian. Okay, now say something about the Christian view over against the non Christian view. Characterize them generally Christian attempts to answer those questions of philosophy, be humbly before God and according to God's revelation. Ah, very good, very good. And by contrast, the non Christian approach. That's right. Without reference. That's right. Suppressing the truth and being Self sufficient. That's what you meant?

Yeah.

Okay. And then we said, after we looked at the twofold approach, there's a dialectical tension and unbelieving philosophy. Can somebody just generally characterize that dialectical tension? We know why we're doing this, we know what we're doing. We see there's two ways to go. And now we're trying to say you don't want to go this way because of dialectical tension. What is that tension? Yes and no. Yes and no. Okay. Yes and no to what? What? Rationalism, irrationalism. Okay, what do we mean by rationalism and irrationalism? A little bit louder. My mind is the definite thing. It knows all, but yet it doesn't know everything. Okay, that's right. That's one good way of putting it. How about atomism? Monism, another way of expressing it. Atomism, monism. Two different approaches to explanation. Atomism is the particles that go into the hole. Yeah, okay. Explaining the part. No, explaining the whole by the. And monism is the opposite. That's right. Explaining the parts by the whole. Very good. Both of them lead to what? I have my hand.

I'm not in the.

Let's get the answer to this question. The mysticism. Because as a matter of fact, the whole is too big to characterize, so we have to just know it intuitively or the little atom can't be divided any further, so it can't be explained. So you finally end up in mysticism. And that's just another way of saying a rational irrational tension. First we got to know things by the standard of our mind, but then we have to give up and we have to intuit this differently. Yeah. You had a question?

Yeah.

I was wondering about your approach to the two take home exam.

If.

This is going to help me study. Obviously I was wondering if you were going to give us the questions beforehand or if these were going to be probably questions after the atomistic motif, you know, after one small part of the. Of the whole material.

There'll be both. I'll be asking you questions in detail about your reading and about my lectures. That doesn't mean picky, legalistic, you know, nasty detail. What was the third sentence I spoke? No, probably ask you details like illustrate the dialectical tension. Unbelieving thought in terms of monism and atomism. Detail that way. But then I'll also be asking you, if you will, overall questions of evaluation. Like when we get done here, then you'll have a basis for what is an over. What am I trying to accomplish here? If you look at each unit of thought and say, why did we go over all that? Okay, in one stroke. Let me put the fifth and final thing of our discussion here. The ultimistic worldviews. What was I getting at here? That one begins his philosophy with a general perspective on life, a world and life view. He doesn't begin first with some cold epistemological standard by which he then decides what's real, nor does he begin dogmatically with, I know what's real. And then I'm gonna tell you what epistemology goes with it. You have these two working together.

Why did you leave ethics out of that?

Oh, just for the sake of time. We could have done it. We could have illustrated it more elaborately and with greater complexity by including ethics. As a matter of fact, I think ethics is what most motivates a worldview. It's the ethics of trying to get away from God that makes people believe that only concrete particulars exist. Therefore, since I can't touch God, there must not be a God. So, yeah, I could have illustrated it further with ethics, but it was only for simplicity that I didn't. Okay. A world and life view is one's ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological outlook at its most fundamental, fundamental presuppositional level. But I just didn't happen to have time to go into ethics. In fact, I'm going to run out of time here if I don't hurry on. The ultimacy of worldviews is everyone begins with a combined perspective and not with one moving on to the others. Now, on upper levels of thought, more sophisticated thought, you have refining, going from metaphysics to epistemology, you kind of have this adjusting or cybernetic thing. You know, your philosophy is moving from one to the other and doing fine tuning. But most ultimately, somebody begins, like with a Platonic approach to life or with a human approach to life or a Kierkegaardian approach to life. And that includes fundamentally a basic view of truth, of our knowledge, a basic view of reality, and a basic view of human conduct. So the ultimacy of worldviews. Now, let's put this thing all together. I mean, what is the conclusion of this? Why are we studying it? What we're studying is a twofold approach. One of them has a dialectical tension in it, and there's this ultimacy of worldviews. Well, overall, what I'm trying to get you to do is to see that when you're doing philosophy, as a Christian, let me put it another way. That when we do philosophy, there's a distinctive Christian way to do philosophy, there's a distinctively Christian way to do philosophy, there is a Christian world and life view, and there is a multiplicity of non Christian world and life views. And each of these is ultimate. There is an ultimate metaphysic ethic and epistemology in each one. And these two are in antithesis to each other in principle. Remember I said up here, the two in principle are at deadly odds with each other. In practice, because of the inconsistency of the unbeliever, it doesn't work out that way. But in principle there's this twofold ultimate worldviews that are intentioned and this one is impossible because of the dialectical tension in it. So this gets us back to why we're studying this. So we might be better able to defend the faith once delivered unto the sites. Unless I miss my bet, and I'm not a betting man, I probably have not got this in Sunday school anywhere. But there's no reason under the sun why we couldn't be working toward the day when the people who go to college know very well that when they approach naturalistic evolutionary thought or materialism in their philosophers, if they know why they're going to approach it and the way they're going to the twofold approach, that is, if they know the presuppositions that inform them as Christians, then they're going to be prepared to see to keep mature Christian commitment. That is intelligent, not mature commitment. Because we say, yeah, we learn one thing in the university, but we go over here to the prayer meeting and have different experience. Intelligent, mature Christian commitment. It's not just for the sake of those going to college, it's for our sake too. We need to realize God has to purify our thoughts and help us moment by moment every day, learn to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. And that is the reason we've been studying this, so we can learn to presuppose and to reason in terms of our presuppositions as Christians. Thank you.