The Crux of the Problem

W. T. Stace wrote an essay entitled Man Against Darkness. He makes clear his position from the outset by saying, “For my part I believe in no religion at all.” Yet he goes on to make a very significant observation that seem to have escaped most of the Western church. In recent history, there has been a change in the way Western man views the world, in particular due to scientific advances.

With the disappearance of God from the sky all this has changed. Since the world is not ruled by a spiritual being, but rather by blind forces, there cannot be any ideals, moral or otherwise, in the universe outside us. Our ideals, therefore, must proceed only from our own minds; they are our own inventions. Thus the world which surrounds us is nothing but an immense spiritual emptiness. It is a dead universe. We do not live in a universe which is on the side of our values. It is completely indifferent to them.[1]

He goes on to quote Bertrand Russell’s essay A Free Man’s Worship.

Such in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere; our ideals henceforward must find a home. ... Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; ... to worship at the shrine his own hands have built; ... to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.[2]

Stace goes on as follows:

Mr. Russell notes that it is science which has produced this situation. There is no doubt that this is correct. But the way in which it has come about is not generally understood. There is a popular belief that some particular scientific discoveries or theories, such as the Darwinian theory of evolution, or the views of geologists about the age of the earth, or a series of such discoveries, have done the damage. It would be foolish to deny that these discoveries have had a great effect in undermining religious dogmas. But this account does not at all go to the root of the matter. Religion can probably outlive any scientific discoveries which could be made. It can accommodate itself to them.[3]

This we have seen over the centuries. But his point here is quite remarkable. Modern Christians seem to view individual discoveries of science as the main threat – the Theory of Evolution most notably. Yet, Stace believes rightly so that individual discoveries are not the issue – they are only the fruit. He continues:

The root cause of the decay of faith has not been any particular discovery of science, but rather the general spirit of science and certain basic assumptions upon which modern science, from the seventeenth century onwards, has proceeded.[4]

He goes on to say that Galileo and Newton – and he could have gone back to Kepler and maybe even Copernicus – rejected Aristotle’s philosophical notion of “final cause” or purpose. Aristotle believed that everything we observe has some purpose that, in order to properly understand a thing, must be apprehended. Galileo and Newton clearly abandoned this idea in favor of simple, mathematical analysis of a phenomenon. For example, Newton found it sufficient to describe gravitational attraction mathematically. Even though Newton was a man of faith – of some sort – the purpose of gravity was irrelevant to him. In fact, I suspect that the reason for abandoning the notion of purpose was that man cannot know it with a certainty through reason, and God, for some reason, has chosen not to reveal it to us.

But I would take the root of the problem to go back much further. Stace seems to hold to the idea that Aristotle’s “final cause” is something that should have been retained, and that would have sustained man’s faith up to the present.

I disagree. The root of the problem is found in Christians having anything to do with Aristotle and Plato in the first place. The foundational assumptions of modern science that have created this problem go back to them, and yet their ideas alone are not to blame – but that is for another post.

Francis Schaeffer addresses this in Escape from Reason by starting with Thomas Aquinas who essentially welcomed Aristotle into the church and nearly single-handedly made his teaching revered to the level of that of Paul and Augustine of Hippo. In discussing a change in the view of nature that Aquinas put forward, mostly based on Aristotle, Schaeffer writes:

While there were good results from giving nature a better place, it also opened the way for much that was destructive. In Aquinas’s view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the biblical Fall flowed subsequent difficulties. Out of this as time passed, man’s intellect was seen as autonomous. ... From the basis of this autonomous principle, philosophy also became increasingly free, and was separated from revelation. ... Aquinas had opened the way to an autonomous humanism, an autonomous philosophy; and once the movement gained momentum, there was soon a flood.[5]

Schaeffer goes on to trace a downward train of thought in philosophy and art among Christian thinkers of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance (there were few others). This train passed through Galileo and Newton to Russell’s comment cited above, even to the present day.

Carver T. Yu, in his book Being and Relation: A Theological Critique of Western Dualism and Individualism, first expresses the problem Stace addresses, though much more broadly across the arts where it manifests itself most clearly. He then goes into a rather complex analysis of the development of the Western worldview, identifying the crux of the problem as a warped understanding of reality that “had its birth-place in ancient Greece.”[6] He goes on to show that the current Western worldview is a direct consequence of the Greek philosophical foundation upon which it was built. His thinking starts in ancient Greece before his argument merges with Schaeffer’s around the time of Descartes. Yu continues on from there essentially down the same track as Schaeffer to the present.

Yu makes a rather interesting, though, I believe, incomplete comparison between the Western worldview and the Biblical Hebrew worldview, which is also that of the New Testament Church.[7] The difference is due to a very different understanding of reality. The crux of the matter, then, is that our modern worldview is based on the false foundation of ancient Greek philosophy, resulting in a distorted view of reality.

One might ask how there could be any different view of reality than we have? Without any other view to compare to, it’s hard to imagine any other view having any relevance, and this is where the Western Christianity has fallen short. We have bought into a view of reality based on pagan philosophy that even affects dramatically our view of God and ourselves in relation to Him. This, in large part, is what has led to our view of chronic disease discussed in my previous posting. But that’s far from the whole story.

Christians may beg to differ with the above, but that is a matter for my next posting.

Rob

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[1] Stace, W. T., “Man Against Darkness” in Sheridan Baker’s The Essayist (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1972), p. 65.

[2] Stace, p. 65.

[3] Stace, p. 66.

[4] Stace, p. 66.

[5] Schaeffer, Francis A., Escape from Reason in Trilogy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1990), p. 211-212. Escape from Reason was originally published in 1968.

[6] Yu, Carver T., Being and Relation: A Theological Critique of Western Dualism and Individualism (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987), p. 51.

[7] Yu, chapter 6.