Do You Do Philosophy?
by Lindsey C. Ward
If we think about philosophy at all, it is usually in terms of the great thinkers of antiquity like Plato or Aristotle. Or, we might picture one of the world's popular religions, or even a modern "ism" like Marxism, Communism, or Capitalism. Even if we are unaware of it, we all "do" philosophy. Sadly, most of us are careless and take for grated the presuppositions we use to order our lives without thinking them through. Because of our failure to examine our presuppositions, the best most of us can say when faced with ultimate questions such as How did we get here? and How should we live? is to fall back on skepticism and say, "Well, nobody knows for sure." Consider questions so many of us ask: "Does God exist? How did the universe get here? Why am I here? Is there life after death? How should I treat my fellow man?" These questions all break down into three categories of philosophical thought: 1) Metaphysics – the nature of reality; 2) Epistemology – how we know what we know; and, 3) Ethics – how we should live our lives.
All philosophy and religious discipline derives from these three categories of inquiry. The goal of philosophy is to establish reliable presuppositions and weave them into a comprehensive world view that accurately interprets all of human experience and reality. To function at all we must "do" philosophy. Unfortunately, most people have constructed concepts in such a way that, if they were buildings, they would have long since collapsed on us. Life demands that we deal with the nature of reality. We should all come to terms with the process by which we know what we know. We all must make about choice about how we should live life.
The purpose of this tract is multilevel: (a) To consider the contrast between the world view presented by the Bible and the various secular counterparts; (b) To demonstrate that the God of the Bible exists by showing that all other world views fail to comprehensively answer lift's ultimate questions. Relying on the presuppositions of these world views leaves their adherents without coherent answers to these questions, forcing them into irrationality through arbitrariness and conjecture; (c) To point out that living without rationality ends in a life lacking dignity, morality and certainty, leaving us lost in foolishness and without hope. You might think this is an overly ambitious dialogue from a relatively unlettered small businessman, but hear me out.
When we break the world views down to their basic components, there are really only a few possible choices to profess: 1) Spiritual Monism: The nature of reality is one, and that reality is spiritual in nature. New Age philosophy and Hinduism are examples Monism. 2) Dualism: The nature of reality is both spiritual and physical. Dualism is expressed as ideal spirituality and resultant particular forms. 3) Materialism or Secular Humanism: Nature of reality is made up of an infinite number of tiny bits of matter. To quote Carl Sagan, "The universe is all there is." This is the view held by most scientists today. 4) Skepticism/Pragmatism: These "isms" don't really qualify as world views because they are an attempt to avoid the ultimate questions altogether. They are cop-outs, hiding behind the arbitrary statement that "nobody knows for sure," claiming that any presupposition will do...as long as it works. The only standards they acknowledge are those that they concoct themselves. They loudly bray their own opinions and betray their logical inconsistencies every time they open their mouths. Both the skeptic and the pragmatist are unwilling to enter the intellectual arena to defend their position. They lean wholly on their won opinions about what is workable – castles made of sand. National Socialism is an example of pragmatism gone wild. It "worked" for the followers of Hitler, but not so well for the Jews and others the Nazis judged undesirable. C.S. Lewis said it best when he wrote, "We are always prevented from accepting total skepticism because it can be formulated only by making a tacit exception in favor of the thought we thinking at the moment – just as the man who warns the newcomer, 'Don't trust anyone in this office' always expects you to trust him at that moment."
Now let's look at the established world views. First, Spiritual Monism – all is one. The statement may sound religious but it is philosophical incoherent. Hinduism is the best known and most developed example of Monism. Devout Hindus hold that Brahman is the ultimate spiritual reality. Brahman is represented as formless, indescribable, unknowable and impersonal, and yet "he" is supposed to be the sum total of all reality. The physical world is Maya (illusion). The universe is eternal, having no beginning or end. Hindus profess that Man is infused with the divine spark of Brahman and that this spark of divinity is imprisoned in this world of Maya and is in the process of working out its karma through a series of "soul migrations" or reincarnations until he reaches Nirvana, and is absorbed into Brahman. "The single drop will fall into the shore-less ocean." There are some serious logical problems with this line of thinking. First, there are no distinctions. If all really in one, then there can be no difference between Nirvana and Maya. If Brahman is impersonal, who decides how you work out your karma? Who decides when your "migrations" are completed? Who evaluates your progress, and what standard does he apply? Based on these presuppositions, the spiritual monist must give up rationality. Life cannot function or even exist without a system of logic. If all reality is one, we should be able to drink gasoline and run our cars on water. India is the land of fat cows and starving people. It has natural resources very similar to Europe and the United States, but the bulk of its people are crushed under grinding poverty. Finally, consider the concepts of logic, ethics, science and mathematics – if there are no distinctions, there can be no class concepts of different numerical values because these realities conflict with the stated presuppositions of Monism. To function at all, the Monist must use concepts such as logic and moral standards that are inconsistent with his stated world view, thus rendering it invalid.
Next we will consider dualism. Dualism is a world view that, as the name implies, states that reality is made up both of ideals and their material extensions in space. In other words, Huey, Duey and Louie are particular ducks in this world but the idea of "duckness" lies outside this physical reality. Dualism acknowledges both realities but asserts that the ideal reality is eternal and that the reality of sense perception and physical experience is temporal. When asked, "How do we know things?" dualists like Plato state that comprehension is based on one's own intuition, and that the only way to actually know something is to abandon rational processes. Interestingly, Plato was unable to come up with ideals for some of the baser facts of life like warts and excrement. Dualists believe that this world is populated by imperfect, dim copies of particular ideal forms. They have trouble explaining the imperfect forms and are forced to make up stories as they go along. The dualist also holds to an intuitive view of ethics. We simply "intuit" the concepts of good and evil. This presupposition creates a capricious, arbitrary standard and abandons the field of ethics to the subjectivity of each individual's whim or impulse. It is inconsistent to claim, on one hand, that pleasure is the ultimate goal and, on the other hand, to condemn a person for committing an act considered by one or more individuals to be unethical. Dualism fails due to its inconsistencies, its arbitrariness and its dependence on myth and superstition to justify its presuppositions. Plato, the most thorough and rigorous Dualist, was refuted by his brightest student, Aristotle, who demanded that Plato account for his ideals – his other world containing perfect triangles, but no hair, warts or poop. Plato was unable to show any connection between his forms and their extensions in space.
Let us now consider naturalism or materialism – what the Greeks called atomism. As the famous cosmologist Car Sagan asserted, "The universe is all there is." This world view claims that reality consists of an infinite number of tiny bits of matter. This is the view held by most modern scientists and atheistic secular humanists. This view holds that the universe is self-existent but randomly changing and evolving, expanding, moving from a point of cosmic singularity to a "big bang" to solar systems, from non-life to life, from life to self-awareness. To the materialist, all reality is merely the product of time and matter, motion and randomness. With each bold claim, the atomist finds himself more deeply impaled on the horns of a dilemma. When he claims science and reason as his own and the proof of his presuppositions, he must ignore or cover up the fact that science and reason render his position untenable. The postulate "out of nothing comes nothing" goes back at least as far as ancient Rome, whose philosophers stated, "Ex nihilo, nihil fit." This postulate has never been refuted. Even the well-known Scottish skeptic, David Hume, said, "But allow me to tell you that I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause." Multiply a thing times zero and you get zero. Add zero to a thing and it does not change. The atheist materialist cannot justify the use of reason or science because his world view doesn't account for either. He also has a big problem in his epistemology. His attempt to develop a theory of knowledge is bedeviled by his assertion that his mind and his brain are the same thing. His mind is reduced to the random firing of neurons. If this were true, there would be no certainty of knowing anything at all and no reason to assign validity to anyone's thought process. Further, all science is based on the process of induction, that is the assumption that the future will resemble the past. If time and chance, matter and motion, can change all on its own we have no way to know anything for certain. If this were fact, the next time we mix our coke and Mentos we might get a big bang instead of just a big mess! The atomist really gets into trouble when he faces ethical issues. His beliefs give him no grounds on which to account for good or evil. He cannot explain abstract concepts like love, friendship, humanity, law, dignity, rights, ownership and even humor if all he has in his arsenal is matter, motion, time and chance. Armed only with the beliefs of materialism, the atomist has no way to distinguish himself from other life forms. This reduction of man to a mere living creature is devastating to Western culture and is the principle cause of its current climate.
I submit that the reasoning stated above proves that the presuppositions held by non-Christian philosophers are wholly unable to explain reality or to account for all of life and human experience. The non-Christian cannot account for or prove any aspect of reality if he limits himself to the stipulations of his particular world view. The secular attempts at providing a framework have been briefly covered and soundly refuted. The Monist still looks both ways before crossing the street, apparently unwilling to become one with a bus. He also insists on getting the proper change back when he buys groceries, thus making a distinction between his and the store's money. The Dualist can never be sure if his intuition is correct. He simply asserts that a perfect triangle exists somewhere. When asked how his imperfect copies were made and how they escaped out of the "ideal," all the Dualist can do is come up with a metaphor. In the field of ethics, he is unable to cope with the problem of adjudicating between two groups or individuals with conflicting desires or interests, because his premise for ethics is simply that pleasure is the ultimate good. He fails to deal with the fact that the pursuit of pleasure by one individual often causes displeasure in the lives of others. One man's meat is another man's poison. The atheist has no way to account for concepts like love or laws of logic, or right and wrong. The materialist world view lacks the necessary resources to explain these abstractions. Matter and motion cannot produce love, laughter, or laws of logic. Reason and argument are pointless exercises if everything is randomly determined by physical causation, because logic and language are not physical. Based on atheism's profession of absolute physicality, the most damning philosophical position of atheism is its presumption that the only way to "persuade" a person is to control his environment. This is what led to the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges and the "ethnic cleansings" in Africa and Eastern Europe. This is why Marxist dictators try to control the means of productions and to eliminate the concept of personal property.
In summary, to survive at all, the Monist is forced to submit to the laws of logic that his world view denies. The Idealist-Dualist is unable to prove his ideals exist. The Materialist-Atheist, if forced to function only on his professed presuppositions, cannot prove that he knows anything at all. In order to even exist in the real world, the adherents of these world views must rely daily on standards and absolutes that their presuppositions deny. In other words, they lie, first to themselves, then to everyone else.
The truth is that existence is impossible outside of the parameters of Creation as designed and defined by the Creator, the God of the Bible. Without the Christian world view we cannot account for causality, regularity, predictability, order, class concepts, mathematics, laws of logic, moral absolutes, beauty or love. Webster's definition for the word "absolute" supports this claim: perfect in quality or nature, complete; not mixed, pure, unadulterated; not limited by restrictions or exceptions, unconditional; unqualified in extent or degree, total; unrelated to and independent of anything else; not to be doubted or questioned, positive, certain.
In philosophy, the Absolute is something regarded as the ultimate basis of all thought and being, something regarded as independent of and unrelated to anything else. The atheist will immediately assert his position that all is relative, there is no absolute, but there is one question he dare not answer: "Are you absolutely positive about your position?" The concept of the Absolute is essential to existence. It provides the standard that defines good and evil, right and wrong, hope, joy, and love. The transcendental proof of God's existence is that without the Absolute we would be unable to prove anything. Belief in God is a precondition of intelligibility.
The God of the Bible is the only God, a God Who is personal, knowable and relatable, and Who gives life meaning and purpose as well as giving life itself. The truth claims of Christianity are based on the authority and exchangeability of God and His character. His command is that everyone everywhere must repent – to turn away from their empty philosophies that cannot account for or prove anything and only bring foolishness and chaos. Only God can save you. Only God can make you a Christian. He must enable you to believe that when Jesus died on the Cross He did it willingly to pay for your sin, not His own, for He was sinless. All false belief systems have been fabricated by man to provide himself with an excuse for autonomy. Man, in his sinful nature, is predisposed to rebel against God's authority and to justify his rebellion, digging himself deeper into the pit of separation from his Creator. The Bible states that the wages of sin is death. Based on the historical fact of Christ's redemptive death on the Cross, you can receive God's forgiveness of your sins now and forever realize the logic and order of all creation, as well as making sense of human experience.