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August 8 - August 24, 2023
Kant proposed that the mind supplies the necessary ordering principles, such as before and after, cause and effect, space and time, and so on. The world appears to be lawful and ordered only because the human mind creates that order, like pressing clay into a mold. In Kant’s words, “mind is the law-giver to nature.” 45 The human mind took over God’s role as law-giver to creation.
The philosophical label for this view is idealism. The term is not used in the ordinary sense of having high ideals. Instead it means that ultimate reality is the realm of ideas—the mental realm. Instead of deifying matter, idealism deifies the mind. Instead of making matter the basis of consciousness, it claims that consciousness structures matter as we know it. It makes consciousness the ultimate explainer.
For the Romantics, then, the ultimate foundation for truth was neither the senses (empiricism) nor reason (rationalism) but the creative imagination. They conceived of the imagination as an autonomous power “immune to any outside force,” explains Alan Jacobs of Baylor University; it “generates its own distinctive kind of truth unchallengeable by other kinds of truth.” Words like autonomous, immune, and unchallengeable should set your idol detector beeping. The Romantics were claiming that the imagination generates ultimate truth. It “performs a number of functions formerly reserved for God
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Worldviews are a lot like the characters in the famous poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” The blind man who caught hold of the waving trunk insisted that the entire elephant was like a snake. The blind man who grasped the tusk argued that the whole animal was like a spear. The man who found the tail insisted that the beast was like a rope. And so on. Idol-based worldviews work in much the same way. Each grabs on to a part of reality and declares it to be the whole show. That one part is treated as the set of conceptual categories that explains all of human experience, the key that unlocks
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When the ancient Israelites turned to idols, God said, “So I let them follow their own stubborn desires, living according to their own ideas” (Ps. 81:12 NLT).
God uses these negative experiences to press people to the point of decision: Will they continue worshipping a counterfeit god that is destroying them, or will they repent and turn to the true God?
When a worldview exchanges the Creator for something in creation, it will also exchange a high view of humans made in God’s image for a lower view of humans made in the image of something in creation.
Those who dishonor God will dishonor those made in God’s image. Those who create idols eventually “become like them” (Ps. 115:8).
When we reduce people to anything less than fully human, we will treat them as less than fully human.
When we define God as a something instead of a Someone, we will tend to treat humans as somethings too.
An idol always leads to a reductionistic attitude that dehumanizes others and justifies using them for your own agenda.
Evolutionary psychology reduces all human behavior to masked self-interest.
When we dehumanize people in our thinking, we will eventually mistreat, oppress, abuse, and exploit them in our actions.
When a person accepts materialism as a life philosophy, its effects do not stay neatly contained within the mental realm. It leads to destructive personal behavior and harmful public consequences.
Your worldview affects how you treat others. A reductionistic worldview leads to destructive behavior. Those who dishonor God will end up dishonoring themselves and others.
Recall that human nature is part of general revelation, giving evidence for God. The existence of beings with the capacity to reason, love, plan, and choose is evidence that the first cause that created them must have at least the same capacities.
The origin of personal beings is best explained by a personal Being. How do sinful, fallen humans seek to avoid that conclusion? Paul says they “suppress the truth” (Rom. 1:18). That’s what reductionism accomplishes. It denies one or more dimensions of human nature—so that the evidence from human nature no longer points as clearly to the biblical God.
Idols deify some part of the created order. But no matter which part they choose, a part is always too limited to explain the whole. The universe is too complex and multi-dimensional to fit into a box composed of just one part. Invariably something will stick out. Something will not fit into its restricted conceptual categories.
Idols are popular precisely because they cut reality down to a size that can be stuffed into a box and controlled. They eliminate those dimensions of reality that would falsify the worldview. You can make any worldview appear successful simply by denying anything that does not fit into its box.
eliminative materialism. It goes beyond the traditional materialist claim that material conditions determine the mental world to the more surprising claim that the mental world does not exist—that all of our thoughts, convictions, desires, intentions, perceptions, and decisions are fictions.
And why should we trust the thinking of scientists who tell us there is no such thing as thinking? As one philosopher notes, eliminative materialism “refutes itself since even an illusion is the presence of an experience” within someone’s consciousness.
The eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid argued that such extreme logical consistency in the face of contrary facts is a form of insanity. When you allow yourself to be reasoned out of what you know by common sense, just because some philosophical system requires it, he wrote, “we may call this metaphysical lunacy.”
If the elites hold a materialism that reduces humans to computers, then they will treat people like computers. Thinking will be reduced to computing: the neuroelectrophysiology of the brain. People will be judged solely by how well they perform their assigned functions. And when they stop functioning, they will be tossed in the garbage heap with the other electronic trash.
The Romantics wanted to overthrow the Enlightenment image of the universe as a vast machine and replace it with an organic image—the universe as organism.
The Romantics wanted to knock down the idol of materialism (ultimate reality is material), so they proposed the idol of idealism (ultimate reality is mental). They wanted to counter worldviews that absolutize matter, so they absolutized mind. Novelist Walker Percy says materialism stuffs everything into the “box of things,” while idealism stuffs everything into “the mind box.”
The continental tradition traces its roots to the Romantic movement and seeks to defend mind, meaning, and morality.
The central tenet of neo-Platonism was that the world is an emanation of a spiritual substance called the One or the Absolute. Like a fountain cascading down through multiple levels, the One emanated a descending series that flowed down through several levels: from spiritual entities to human beings, then to sentient creatures (animals), living things (plants), and finally material things (rocks). This was called the ladder of life or the great chain of being. The goal of the spiritual life was to re-ascend the ladder, escape from matter, and reunite with the One.
What Hegel was offering was a spiritualized version of evolution. (Nietzsche even said that “without Hegel, there would have been no Darwin.”) The difference is that Hegel applied the concept of evolution not to biology but to the world of ideas. His claim was that all our ideas—law, morality, religion, art, political ideals—result from the gradual “actualization of the Universal Mind” over the course of history.
As philosopher John Passmore says, you cannot “maintain, as a timeless philosophical truth, that there are no timeless philosophical truths.”
any inconsistency within a system of thought discredits it.
In everyday life, we encounter postmodernism most often in the form of political correctness. Multiculturalism. Identity politics. Speech codes. Rules for politically correct speech have become de rigueur in most social institutions: schools, newspapers, law, politics.
Postmodernism virtually defines a person’s identity in terms of the groups to which he or she belongs.
was the idea that individuals are “unconscious tools” of the Zeitgeist. They are not producers of culture so much as products of a particular culture.
this has led to the extreme conclusion that everyone’s ideas are merely social constructions stitched together by cultural forces. Individuals are little more than mouthpieces for communities based on race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity.
Truth has been redefined as a social construction, so that every community has its own view of truth, based on its experience and perspective, which cannot be judged by anyone outside the community. One postmodern theological makes the claim in these words: “There is no absolute truth: rather truth is relative to the community in which we participate.” Rorty says truth is merely “intersubjective agreement” among people within a particular community. 38
“Reality has now become a mere bunch of disparate and changing interpretations, a shifting loosely-held coalition of points of view in continual debate with each other.”
Romans 1 tells us that when we refuse to acknowledge God, our minds become “futile” and our hearts are “darkened” (Rom. 1:21) Theologians call this the noetic effects of sin, from the Greek word nous, which as we saw earlier means not just the mind but the core of our being. The Protestant Reformers taught that when we turn away from God at the core, then everything we do is affected, including our thinking.
Whenever a philosophy absolutizes something less than God—no matter what it is—the result is reductionism, a lower view of the human person.
the same reasoning that postmodernists use to debunk traditional concepts of truth applies to their own views.
As a Christian, why would I want to commit myself to any idea that is merely a social construction?
The Bible describes idols as human inventions, “the work of human hands” (Ps. 115:4; 135:15). Their “craftsmen are only human” (Isa. 44:11). Those who worship idols “bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made” (Isa. 2:8).
The human heart hungers for a truth that is transcendent and eternal. God has “set eternity in the human heart” (Eccles. 3:11 NIV).
that Scripture is communication from God, giving us information about himself, the cosmos, and history. Even Christians typically take this concept far too much for granted. For it amounts to the astonishing claim that we do have access to a God’s-eye view of the world, a perspective beyond merely human knowledge, a timeless and transcendent truth. Of course, our comprehension of that truth is never complete or exhaustive. Our understanding is filtered through our fallible, fallen human minds, influenced by our culture and circumstances.
A biblical apologetics strategy will equip you to help liberate those who have been taken captive “through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition” (Col. 2:8 NIV). It will teach you how to “unmask the temporal idols” 47 and turn people toward eternal truth.
Pantheism is typically summarized as the doctrine that god is the universe and the universe is god (pan means all; theism means god).
Pantheists typically argue that the biblical teaching of a transcendent God has alienated us from nature—that it has caused Western culture to rape and plunder the earth. If we cultivate a sense of spiritual oneness with nature, they claim, we will have a greater reverence for all life.
pantheism is reductionistic. It leads to a lower view of life.
Another reason pantheism leads to a low view of human life is that the divine is non-personal. In classic pantheism, the concept of the divine is not a personal deity who thinks, wills, feels, and acts. Instead it is a non-personal, non-thinking, non-acting spiritual substratum underlying all things.
Every idol-based worldview seeks to stuff all of reality into a box. Inevitably, however, something will stick out of the box. Something will fail to fit within its conceptual categories. Both materialism and pantheism define ultimate reality in non-personal terms—and therefore both fail to account for human personhood. Thus they end up denying, denigrating, and devaluing the unique features of human persons. Humans are reduced to products of non-personal forces. The individual dissolves into the rock of the mountainside.
The God of Christianity does not erase our individual identity but actually affirms it. He calls us to become ever more fully the unique individuals we were created to be.
