Rational and Religious
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek.
We have been talking about the Greeks and ancient Greek religion. We talked about Homer and Hesiod last time, and how Homer kind of made a coherent universe for all the gods to live in, and how he kind of destroyed the concept of the Greek god-head in the process. What comes next, in the immortal words of George III in Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton?
Wow, you snuck that one in there real good. Well, what happens is something that historians and philosophers have labeled the presocratics. It sounds really impressive, and historians tell us all kinds of amazing things about these people. They were the first naturalists, the first scientists, first philosophers, first men to actually look at the world without any regard to God and just ask intelligent questions – that is if you read a history book that was written about 50 years ago, or anytime from the Enlightenment through about 50 years ago. That’s pretty much what you would find out. This is the dawning of secularism, of rationalism.
Just to be a historical nitpicker, anytime somebody is labeled a pre-something you know that this is a historian’s opinion being projected back, because they didn’t know that Socrates was coming up next. They certainly didn’t call themselves the presocratics.
This is true, and this is one of those things that you need to learn to look for. It’s kind of like watching a video taken on someone’s phone apparently, and you watch and you see this great cool thing played out in front of you. But if you’re paying attention you finally ask yourself, “Wait, who was holding the camera and how did they know to turn it on right then?” That kind of changes everything, doesn’t it.
You’re right, presocratic is a name given by men of the Enlightenment and those who followed, because Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are their great heroes. These are the guys who supposedly clear the ground for them, dumped organized religion, the gods, and made it possible for Socrates to do a more thorough wrecking ball job of everything, because of course Socrates was basically a secularist too from their point of view.
That brings us to Plato, who started speculating about the mind, the soul, and such things, and then Aristotle takes it to another level, except that’s a really biased interpretation. We look to find heroes, and we’re all guilty of this at some point or another. We find someone we think is really cool for one reason or another and we then read into them all of our assumptions and presuppositions.
Of what we would have meant by using their words, or what they meant by using those words.
Yes, we do that too. And we make assumptions about things they actually never spoke about at all, but we know what they would have said because we know what we would have said had we been there, and obviously we share more less the same presuppositions.
The Jesuit historian of philosophy, Frederick Copleston, wrote a multi-volume series and it’s actually quite good. It’s from a Roman Catholic point of view but he does a pretty nice job of summing things up. When he comes to talk about some of the presocratics he uses Nietzsche as his mouthpiece. For a Roman Catholic to use the man who said “God is dead” as his way of explaining what went on 2,000 years earlier should stink of fish somehow.
Is that what Nietzsche was talking about? Because I thought we could interpret it differently. I thought it was “God is dead and we have killed him and that’s not a good thing that we’ve secularized society.”
From Nietzsche’s point of view it’s not exactly a happy thing, especially for the sheep of this world, but for those who are ready to take the next step in human evolution and become the Übermensch, the overman, we face this godless world with a spring in our step and a smile on our face, because it’s our world now and if we screw it up it’s all on us. Hmm, I don’t know, is that good or bad?
That’s not really cheerful because I have three guesses and they’re all that we’re not going to do well with this.
Anyway Nietzsche, in analyzing one of the presocratics, Thales, who claimed that all is water, says this, roughly. First of all Nietzsche says that Thales is saying something about the origin of things and he’s doing so without figure or fable. It contains, if only in chrysalis stage, the idea that everything is one. So this is what Nietzsche sees here, and Copleston – a Jesuit Roman Catholic – apparently thinks this is a good summary.
Thales, this pre-Socratic philosopher, we actually know more about than we do many of them, first of all is making a claim about origins. He’s eliminating figures of speech and fables, that is to say myths, and he is making a claim about all of reality – everything is one.
So he’s being more blunt than the people who came before him is what you’re saying?
According to Nietzsche, the mere discussion of origins leaves Thales still in the company of religious and superstitious people.
“Nietzsche, I thought you would like the fact he talked about origins because we’re rationally examining where things came from, but apparently not because that’s something that religious and superstitious people do.”
But by rejecting myths, whether what Nietzsche would consider the myth of Genesis 1 or the myths of Hesiod where the gods sprang out of chaos, that takes him out of the purely religious and makes him a natural philosopher because he’s thinking in natural terms.
Finally, the claim “all is one” makes him first Greek philosopher because he’s making claims about the total of reality, apart from any divine revelation, without involving any kind of personal god.
What a lot of people have said ever since is, “See, that’s what sets these people apart. They got rid of God.” Well, no, they got rid of the gods. That’s not the same thing.
Perhaps if Americans had been a little more acquainted with Hinduism and Buddhism in the 1800s – not that they didn’t know them at all, but it wasn’t something the common man knew much about, or even the common college professor – they might have seen that there are other kinds of religions than polytheism, and that they didn’t belong to some retrograde superstitious morons someplace, that actually very advanced civilizations made claims about a god or God or the divinity that is the universe. They were okay with that and they were nonetheless very religious.
Religion is not confined to either, on the one hand, the God of the Jews or Christians, which most people take to be the same, or the many polytheistic gods that we’re more familiar with in the west – Thor or Ra or Zeus or whatever – that there actually are other options.
Now, if people had taken Emerson and Thoreau seriously, not in terms of their general intent but in terms of what they were actually saying, we might have been a little more alert and the Church might have been a little more alert.
You know the poem by Emerson called Brahma, where Emerson speaks as Brahma. We’re not told that except that the title is Brahma, but he goes on to say, “I am this and I am that. I am hot, I am cold, I am good, I am evil, I’m up, I’m down.”
His daughter came to him and said, “People don’t understand what in the world you’re saying. The Brahma thing is confusing.” His response was, “Oh, just tell them to say Jehovah. It’s the same thing.” No! But it tells you where Emerson was coming from. He understood that there is this thing called pantheism, which is a valid religious option, insofar as all rebellious sinful options are valid for the sinner.
Sinners should not be saying, “My false god is better than your false god.” That’s really not an intelligent way of doing business, but we didn’t get that, and the people who wrote history books sure enough didn’t get that.
So when they saw Greeks abandoning or at least downplaying and not caring a whole lot about the gods of Homer and Hesiod, the gods of the Greek myths, the gods that have been relegated to superheroes in the Marvel and DC universes, they went, “Alright, that’s good. They’re abandoning superstition. They’re abandoning gods. They’re abandoning their religion, and the alternative to abandoning their religion is, of course, embracing no religion, right? Because we know they didn’t embrace Christianity. So that leaves them where we are – rationalists, objective, naturalists, looking for our answers in nature. That must have been exactly what they were all about.” That’s not exactly what they were all about.
One of the problems with assigning ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and presuppositions to people is that sometimes those people actually wrote down what they thought. You can sometimes go read what they thought and find out, “Wait, I wasn’t told this. This is not what the history books say. This is not what the philosophers say.”
Back when I was writing a series a few years ago, we’ve all heard about the unmoved mover and we connect it with Aristotle. He didn’t believe in an umoved mover. He believed in 50 or 60 unmoved movers. What? Why has no one mentioned this? Because it doesn’t fit the story, so those sections are kind of skipped over or thought to be interpolations or something, but they’re in the texts that get printed and it’s there. It's like Socrates saying in effect that he’s demon-possessed and everyone wants to blow that off as, “Oh, he was just joshing them.”
Yeah. I mean I wouldn’t believe in that kind of possibility, so obviously he’s just putting them on.
It’s like you were saying with Emerson and Thoreau. It’s kind of one of the great disservices that we do to those who come after us when we say, “Well, they said this, but they didn’t really mean it.” It’s a disservice to the authors themselves, as well as to anyone who’s listening to us to try and figure out what they meant.
It reminds me very much of the phenomenon that Whittaker Chambers describes of the conservatives of his day being the first to put him down as a conspiracy theorist because they wanted to appear so sophisticated that they didn’t want to admit that there could be a Communist conspiracy. It’s like, “You’re not helping yourself here.”
Yes. “There are categories of thought that are intellectually unacceptable, inappropriate for the polished, refined scholars in our society, so we’re not going to go there.”
Sometimes the scribes of the medieval world have done us a disservice of actually recording what these guys said. Sometimes it’s fragments, sometimes it’s a little more than that, sometimes it’s someone else quoting them and criticizing them. There’s not a lot for most of them. Next time we’ll maybe look at some of the quotes just so it’s not us saying these things. We’ll actually maybe make a list of some of them and say, “Here’s what these guys actually said.”
We don’t know a lot, but they keep talking about God. They keep talking about divinity, and not as something they’re rejecting. Yes, they reject pretty clearly the Homerian myths and such, but not the point of absolutely denying that there’s a Zeus or Athena or such. It’s just that they’ve been horribly misrepresented.
Now to what degree that meant, “Don’t even go there,” or to what degree it meant, “Well, Wisdom’s a god, isn’t she? And the sun’s a god, isn’t it?” – and since the Enlightenment we rush to, “No, of course not. That’s nonsense.” Don’t assume that people back there did that.
It’s so interesting because there’s so much nowadays about multiculturalism and learning about other cultures and things like that, and yet so often we still seem to remain completely ignorant of what they were really doing because we don’t want to talk about the things that we don’t think they should have had.
I was thinking of our discussion the last few episodes of just how thoroughly religious the Greek culture was, starting out with ancestor worship which involved worship of land and agriculture and that, because they all fed into the system. But then as it broadened into a bigger people group, you get more of the forces of nature being deified along with all of that.
I think if we were more consistent with what that culture were doing, these men in their naturalism as they’re called nowadays, we’re really just going back to, “Okay, we know the elements are there. We see some sort of power in them which we call divine. Let’s see if we can find a better explanation than these that have become sort of silly stories of Homer.”
They’re going back to those elements because they see power in what they would call something divine in them, which is what their whole culture would have said. So they’re not outside of the norm, but rather just getting rid of some of the fluff that has been built in with stories and such, it seems like.
Here are some quotes from Philip Wheelwright, who compiled a book called The Presocratics, which guess what, is a collection of what we have from the presocratics, with his own commentary. Some of what he’s pulled together is from Aristotle or whoever happened to actually remember them and quote them and interact with them at some point. You can imagine the problems there.
I suppose it’s fine to read Hodge or Warfield to get an idea of what Arminius said, but probably at some point you actually should read what Arminius wrote if you’re going to accuse him of things. We know well enough what his followers say. We can listen to them on the radio, so that’s easy.
I was amazed to go back and read Finney, read his own words. It was like, “You’ve got to be kidding.” I knew that the Reformed Presbyterians didn’t like him, but this guy was loony tunes. What is going on here?
The criticism is it has to be very tempered; otherwise, it will be dismissed as mere outrage, so often you would get the impression that the original, the thing being criticized, is much more reasonable than it was.
And sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s not. Jacobus Arminius actually appreciated a lot about Calvin and pointed to him as a great preacher and commentator.
Arminianism really got the shaft with Unitarianism, I feel like. Pre-Unitarian Arminianism was a different animal.
Yes, so that’s a side note. Here’s what Philip Wheelwright says a bit here and there. He says the Ionian philosophers first “tried systematically to explain nature in terms of nature, instead of referring to the supposed will and caprices of supernatural beings.” They made a distinction between nature and the beings that might be behind it and move it.
Second, “They gave preference systematically, for perhaps the first time [like we know the writings of the ancient world when nobody left anything for us, but we assume again that this is the first time] to the kinds of observations that can be shared by virtually any interested or unprejudiced observer.”
I know what he’s saying, it’s just so completely wrong that I don’t know what to do with that. The ark is 1-1/2 cubits by 1 cubit. There are all kinds of data in scripture and in other classical sources that’s plain matter-of-fact. Anybody can understand what’s going on here. Now, to understand the whole intent of the author in a passage is something else, but the information imparted, this is not a new thing. The Greeks didn’t suddenly wake up and say, “I will now speak with nouns and verbs.”
“Thirdly, the Milesians began to make a practice of seeing the individual thing or event not as an isolated phenomenon of interest in itself alone, but as representative and symptomatic of a class.”
I again don’t know why he makes that claim. Maybe I should go back and read more of what he said. The leaning here is toward science. “We don’t care about this apple that falls and hits Newton’s head. We care about apples in general and why they fall and hit anybody on the head,” that is generalizing to the natural law.
If that’s what he’s after, some of the Greeks kind of tried to maybe do that, but to say that no one had done it before from the non-evidence that we have – an argument from silence is called a fallacy in anybody’s book, but even if they were the first – no, they weren’t the first. Again the claims here are curious, as Alice would say.
The concept of education relies on cause and effect and the consistency of the world, of God’s faithfulness to govern the world in a consistent way, and we know that education has been around since children have been around.
And stepping behind education – language. I can say, “Billy, bring me the cat,” and Billy understands cat and bring and me. There’s no problem here, and he is able to distinguish this cat from all cats, but he knows what a cat is. If I say, “There’s a strange cat in the backyard. Chase him away,” he doesn’t say, “I do not know strange cats. I only know this cat.” He can generalize beyond the specific.
For those of you who didn’t get it, that’s a reference to something in Francis Schaeffer. You can find it.
I’m sure. Michael Grant has been the modern authority on classical society. He’s not a great writer but he’s pretty clear and he knows a lot, very learned, very well-read. I must have five or six of his books and have found them of great use in just laying out the facts of the development of Greek and Roman culture. He says this about the Milesian philosophers:
“The Milesians insisted on the application of rationally comprehensible, unbreachable regular human criteria to the universal facts of physical existence, and such an endeavor made possible by the spread of illiteracy has been described perhaps without exaggeration at the Greeks’ greatest single claim to fame.”
Again, Professor Grant, I think you’re making some really huge assumptions here. Is there anything that you’ve just attributed to the Greeks that Israel wasn’t doing centuries before and recording in scripture? But of course scripture doesn’t count because it’s a religious book, and what the Milesians were doing wasn’t, right? That’s kind of the whole point.
The funny thing is, Grant himself comes back and says this with regard to Thales, the guy who said “all is water” –
“True, despite the claims that Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes were the founders of these sciences, the time for their inauguration had not yet quite arrived; for they were, in many ways, curious rather than scientific, and despite personal observations, were obliged to base their dogmatic and sometimes naïve conclusions on insufficient evidence.”
There’s a very strong tendency in just that little bit that you read to see history as moving inevitably towards this thing we call science.
Right, and they were on their way, but they weren’t quite there. Notice this is Grant, who has just praised them to the skies saying, “Well, but there were some problems. First of all, they weren’t really scientific in their thinking.” What? They were just curious. In other words, they asked a lot of questions, kind of like a 6-year-old.
“…and despite personal observations, were obliged to base their dogmatic…” That’s a bad word when you talk to Christians. Christians are dogmatic, and that’s not a compliment. It’s saying we’re stubborn, we’re opinionated, and we hold onto things without proof. He’s using that of these guys.
“…and sometimes naïve conclusions…” They were kind of stupid in what they came up with? Yes, they were.
“…on insufficient evidence…” Because they didn’t use anything approaching a scientific method to compile evidence. They looked at a couple things and thought, “Huh! I wonder…yeah, I bet that’s it. Here, everybody, I’ve got a great idea, listen to this.” That’s not science by any stretch of the imagination or by anyone’s definition. They extrapolated from insufficient evidence.
Father Coplestone goes on and says something similar. “As far as strict scientific proof goes, they had not sufficient data to warrant their assertion of unity...” – they hadn’t gone all about the universe; they hadn’t left home – “…still less to warrant the assertion of any particular ultimate principle, whether water fire, or air. The fact is that the early cosmologists [that’s what they’re called since they talked about the nature of the cosmos] leapt beyond the data to the intuition of universal unity [notice: intuition]. They possessed what we might call the power of metaphysical intuition, and this constitutes their glory and their claim to a place in the history of philosophy.”
In other words, they guessed wildly without evidence, and that makes them great scientists.
It’s also assuming that all humans have an innate ability to guess the truth, in a sense. There’s an intuition in all of us that can reach out and find what’s really there. We’re not all blind. It’s all false without the true God.
Apparently these men were the next step in evolution because they were able to have those sorts of intuitions. Now, William Wordsworth or Ralph Waldo Emerson would have understood such intuitions. They wrote about them a good deal, actually.
As did Nietzsche. Emerson and Thoreau are just German Idealism warmed over, right?
Anyway, as I said, we’ll look at some more of what the early Cosmologists said, but kind of moving toward a summation – not that we’ll get there right away – one of you already basically said this. They’re going back to nature and they’re looking at the forces of nature.
As they began to say all is fire, all is water, all is air, all is the great emptiness or unknown or whatever you want to call it, they were appealing to basic entities, principles, dimensions of the natural world, so in a sense not too far removed, as you said earlier, from the first man who looked up at the sun and said, “Ooo, bright, warm, god.” They were looking for something that would leave out the mythology, that would leave out the silly stories.
Not a few secular writers in the early 20th century began to look at this and say, “Huh, that’s odd. Where would they look? Where would they get these ideas?” Strangely enough, after honoring these Greeks as being so original – and again these are the secular historians and philosophers who are making these claims – they don’t consider the possibility that they actually did just invent them out of their own heads. They assume they got the ideas someplace.
Well, that’s a reasonable assumption, knowing the way that man’s mind works, but it’s interesting that your great creative Greeks who created a new heaven and a new earth you are now abandoning, probably because Christianity is no longer a threat in your mind. You no longer have to do battle with people who believe in an absolute God who is distinct from His creation and in terms of whom all things must be understood.
So with God dead – that God sufficiently removed from our thinking processes and from the court of judgement – we can afford to be a little critical of the Greeks now, and we can begin to think, “Well, maybe they weren’t all that. They were curious but not scientific. They had some data but not much.”
It’s always safe for the secularists to look at somebody in the past and say, “They had the right idea, but they didn’t take it far enough,” because it’s fundamentally not that they were wrong.
Oh, does not Darwin come to mind right there. Does anybody actually believe what Darwin wrote? Has anybody actually read what Darwin wrote? Does anyone keep the sub-title of the book intact – The Preservation of Favored Races.
Once the idea was in place, how it was framed and where it went – like today people are willing to say, “Well, Darwin missed a lot.” Yeah, like everything, not simply because he was wrong, but he was wrong. He was wrong in his methods. He was wrong in his logic. He was wrong in his reasoning. He was wrong in the face of evidence that was there.
Mendel had begun his studies in genetics, but he didn’t bother to look at anything like that. He just charged on, and everyone applauded where he ended up. When it became clear that he had been wrong in a lot of areas it was like, “Well, but, you know, he meant well and he got to the right place, so let’s now backfill and try to lay the proper foundations that he would have used had he known about them, if he’d had our brilliance and our science.” It’s the same thing here with the history of philosophy.
So the more modern writers are beginning to look around and they’re looking to the east, because it was about this time that the Greeks came in contact with the Persians. You remember that Alexander the Great would conquer the Persian empire, and Alexander’s teacher was Aristotle. Aristotle’s teacher was Plato. Plato’s teacher was Socrates, and just behind him lie these so-called presocratics, which is to say some of these guys were active and working about the same time that Daniel was standing before Cyrus, that Mordecai was Prime Minister of the Persian empire, that Esther was queen.
So first of all we have the Persian religion with its worship of fire and air and all that, but we also have the possibility of Christian influence, which may account for some of their grasp of monotheism. One of the last of the presocratics – and we’ll save him for next time – actually goes so far as to say, “There’s only one God,” and makes other claims about him that at first blush sound a little like biblical theism. If he would just stop and not say any more, you could easily believe, “Oh, this was one of Lewis’s noble pagans who by his own reason got to monotheism of a Christian flavor.” When you start reading all that he said it’s like, “Oh, no, that’s not really what he’s saying at all.” But even the idea that God is one-ish…
Here I think we need to introduce a new front to the battle. We’ve been talking about men of the Enlightenment and rationalists and all of that, men who fancy themselves sons of Greece. We need to introduce Christians now.
A great many Christians, beginning with the church fathers, look back to some of these people and said, “Ah! God reveals himself in many ways. He speaks in nature. Has not Paul told us that the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen in the things he’s made? So these men were grasping after the true God, and some of them came very close, and some of them [depending which church father you’re reading] may be the equivalent of Old Testament saints, just in their respective cultures. We may meet Plato in heaven.”
“Do you know who Plato really was, and have you actually read what he wrote?” We’re back to that again.
I actually had a pastor ask me whether or not all the criticism of Plato was perhaps overdone, because maybe he was getting too close to Christian theism and maybe what he was actually arguing for was the God of the Bible. No. I don’t remember what I told him, but what I should have said is, “You need to go back and read Plato. Let me find the excerpts for you to read.”
People who are listening to a podcast on history, here’s a lesson. Read the sources insofar as you can, at least in translation. Read the sources. Read what the original people actually said, in context, who they were talking to, what their own critics said at the time, and how people understood them.
For instance, we look at Socrates and we see him as a martyr for teaching gods not taught by the State and corrupting the youth. The problem is he was guilty on both charges.
He thought he should get a pension for it because he was doing such a good job.
Yeah, a pension for violating the laws of the State. People have made a big fuss over him and declared him a hero, but please remember that the citizens of Athens, this metropolis of rationalism you’re so proud of, are the people who condemned him to death. So you can pick one random Greek philosopher who said that he had a demon in his head, or you can side with Athens itself. Either way you’re probably not going to be happy with what you get because there is a fundamental conflict here.
Choose this day whom you will serve. We’ve got many wrong options to choose from.
And when Joshua said that, that’s exactly what he was doing. He had said, “You should be serving Jehovah, but if you will not serve him then choose who you will serve, whether the gods of Egypt or the gods beyond the flood or the gods of this land, but as for me and my house we will serve the Lord.” It was not exactly an altar call. It was, “Go find a god someplace. At least be consistent in your apostasy. That would be nice, so we know what you’re talking about.”
But as you were saying, we’ve talked in the past about how these are kind of dangerous ideas, and we still encourage you to go back and read them. It’s like a kitchen knife. If you don’t know how to work through them, get some knife skills. Work your way up to it. Get some guidance. If we can be a small part of that, great, but also the people in your life who are well-educated and familiar with both the Bible and these dangerous ideas. The solution is not to run away from them and never encounter them, or to hide from them.
Yes, for a number of reasons, and I really appreciate that, Emily. As a Christian school teacher this is something we come up against a great deal. “Why are you reading that book to our children? Why is that book on your reading list? Don’t you know what’s in that book?”
I was asked once why we had Stephen Hawkins’ book, History of Time, on the reading list, and I suspect all the objection came from a student who did it very politely, while his mother was near at hand. I think she was kind of like, “Go ask.” I could see behind it the hand of their pastor, who has been very critical of us having the children read evil books. And before anyone jumps to conclusions, the man considers himself a Puritan or Presbyterian.
I say, “Look, you’re going to encounter these ideas in college. Wouldn’t it be better to face them now, where you can come to your Christian teachers and say, ‘What is this guy talking about?’ or ‘Why is this wrong? It sounds good,’” rather than get it in a physics class when you go to college 1,000 miles from home? There are things you do need to face because they’re out there, and unfortunately sometimes they’re in the church.”
I appreciate the idea, “get some knife skills.” You don’t want to throw an 11-year-old right into Marx, anymore than you want to throw him right into Plato, but you need to help him learn how to think, and some examples from the original sources here or there are not amiss as you do that, whether they be pagan philosophers or whether they be Christian heretics.
You sometimes need to show them, “There are real people out there that think these things. Yeah. I understand why you’re laughing and it’s funny, but it’s not funny that these people actually do believe them and lead their lives in terms of them, and lead other people into these ideas. You have to be prepared, son or daughter. You have to know what’s going on here. You have to be able to think. You have to be able to think through these things.”
There are some things in the kitchen that you can’t do with a butter knife. Sorry, I’m going to nail this analogy as far as it will go. To be bearing witness to Christ in the world, you need to be able to communicate with people and answer them. Be ready to give an answer, and that means hearing what they have to say.
I think it also means we have to address the ongoing issue that we have, that we keep assuming there’s neutrality in there that we can stand on, and that people can basically almost get themselves to God, that they can pretty much find the truth on their own through general revelation, through the creation.
There’s this over-confidence in human reason and ability either for people to get themselves there or for us to argue people there in evidence, that is missing the underlying assumption that without a true knowledge of the God of the Bible you cannot understand anything properly.
So when you go to those sources, part of learning – to have the knife skills, if you will – is learning to see, “Okay, here’s where they’re imaging God and they’re corrupting it,” rather than going, “Wow, look how close they’re getting to God.” No, this is them barely touching God and then messing it all up.
Yeah, rather than glorifying their near-Christian paganism, if that even works.
Schaeffer would say we need to weep for these people, for their sensitivity and their intelligence, but that doesn’t mean we should misread what’s really going on.
In line with what you were saying, speaking of some knife skills, I meant to talk about this and then completely lost my place. Here are some presuppositions that people often bring to the table when discussing God, particularly in a history book or history course. Philosophers are a little more careful and have finer tools to work with, better knives if you will, but when you approach a history book this is the kind of stuff you get:
It’s just a question of, “Well, which god do you worship? Oh, you worship gods, okay, so you worship these gods. They worship those gods. People over here worship Onan and Thor. Here it’s Ra and Isis. Over here it’s Zeus, and a duplicate version over there in Rome with Jupiter. Mohammed is the Muslims, so they worship a single god, as do the Unitarians and the Deists.”
Yeah, they’re all gods, right? Whether it’s polytheism, pantheism, theism. By saying “I’m an atheist,” I’m simply saying, “I don’t go for any of those choices; therefore, I am not religious.” Well, you just made a huge religious claim, that you know for a fact that God doesn’t exist. You just claimed omniscience. Hmm, that’s kind of hard and odd.
It’s funny because I think sometimes people create almost a spectrum, like the level that a religion is close to Christianity, so Islam is better because it’s got more of Christianity than say Hinduism. We lay them out but we still compare all them to Christianity as though they’re on the same spectrum or level.
Isn’t God by nature – I’m using the word nature in two ways so I’m confusing myself. Isn’t God by nature not nature? Isn’t that what we mean by God? He’s not somebody who’s part of nature? There was a time when the West would say, “Well, yes.”
We don’t believe that anymore. God is immersed in nature, imminent in nature, nature is God, and you don’t have to go to India to find this. You can go to Berkeley or to your local bookstore and look under, if it’s still called this, New Age. I don’t know what they call it these days.
Even those people who go out into nature as Christians to be with God, because they’re closer to God there than they are in church, are also finding a greater degree of God in nature than in the places he’s said he’ll be.
I’m going to throw an old favorite hymn under the bus. “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses.” It’s a bad hymn. I make no apology about saying that it’s a bad hymn. I’m a little bit sorry. I feel like somebody out there is going to be like, “Oh, but that’s my favorite.” I’m sorry but it’s a bad hymn. I’m sorry you like a bad hymn.
To the extreme. No one can even duplicate my mystical experience. My mystical experience is better than anyone’s ever.
And it has nothing to do with the Bible, even though it says that it’s Jesus who meets me.
So we talk blithely of gods and we seem to be putting them above nature, but little by little we realize that not all gods are. In fact, most of them aren’t really. Even the polytheistic deities of the West were expressions of natural forces – anthropomorphized, perhaps personalized to an even greater extent – and yet their origin in many cases, where they weren’t actually human beings that people could remember and worshipped – the sun god was the sun. You tick through all of the powers that are represented in Olympus or Asgard and these were initially natural powers that people wanted to put a face on.
They have one called The Bear’s Nature Guide: A Nature Walk through Bear Country.
Copyright 1975. It’s perfectly wholesome, if by that you mean you’re not encouraged to rape or murder your neighbor.
But here’s what the bears tell us. “Nature is all that is and was and ever will be,” which is a quote more or less from Carl Sagan. If gods there be, those gods are encompassed within nature because there’s nothing outside of nature. That doesn’t mean, however, that there can’t be gods within nature. Nature itself can be a plethora of gods, as long as they’re all natural gods.
Yeah. You can begin to bring this to the things that Lewis discussed in That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man. What happens when the apostates virtually worship the forces of nature, not suspecting for a moment that the thing moving the needle is a demon? What do you do then? What happens when sorcery and science meet, because they both give you power? You’ve got some problems.
You can say all you want, “But there’s no religion here.” Lewis argues that’s when the devil wins – the Materialist Magician, when we no longer acknowledge God but we accept hypernatural forces – but that’s okay. We can do that. We just can’t have a God who stands outside of nature as its author, its controller, and its judge. A supernatural God who can intervene in the universe is unacceptable, but gods existing within the system are fine. So what’s the problem then scientifically with naturalism?
As Lewis foresaw, the ‘science’ of parapsychology suggests we can have spirits and have science. We just can’t have the God of the Bible, they think, and have science. Christians would put it the other way. Without a God who maintains order and structure of the universe and gives it meaning, you can’t have science. And having demons crashing about the universe is antithetical to a scientific outlook on the universe. Animists did not create the scientific revolution. That came out of the Reformation.
Then one other thing, to borrow a line from Josephine Tey – “40 million history books couldn’t possibly be wrong.”
“Throw the history books…” – don’t really, keep the history books, they’re good for a laugh sometimes, and sometimes for tracking down obscure information.
I used to have a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica that went back to the beginning of the 20th century, I believe, and it was really cool. Rachel, you would have loved it for teaching church history because all the church fathers had their own detailed lengthy entries.
Which is fascinating from a historical perspective, to say that people valued that information back then.
Yes. At the dawn of the 20th century people still thought those were things worth knowing. Try to find that now even on the internet. You know, you’ve taught the class. You get little sketchy boxes of criticism of saints.
The next thing I suppose we should do on that next time is to look through some of these men with a little more detail, ending with the two that Van Til always comes back to – Heroclitus and Parmenides – because they’re just fun and extreme examples of deifying unity or diversity. In the meantime, I think we’re out of time.
We are, and we’ve been extra sarcastic and salty this week so we should be extra positive and charitable with our recommendations.
I’m going to make an ironic recommendation, in light of everything that we’ve just talked about, of the Disney movie Hercules, which I watched for the first time last night. I think it was a delightful movie. I watched it with some friends and one of them asked me afterwards, “So, what was your analysis?” and I was like, “I had a fun time. I think you are giving me too much credit for an analytical mind.” Honestly, it’s a delightful movie with tons of Christological imagery, ironically. It’s just delightful.
There’s an excellent commentary on it that I did listen to some months ago, so I did have some context going in, and that’s the Popcorn Parenting podcast episode about Hercules, which I think is now on YouTube under the name of Reformed Mythologist. That’s Nate Morgan Locke’s channel. He did the Popcorn Parenting podcast with James Cary, and they no longer do it, but I think it’s still available under the Reformed Mythologist title.
I agree, it was fun. I saw the movie when it first came out and was half-hearted about it. I saw it again not long ago and really enjoyed it because, I think like you, I was like, “I know all the criticisms. Let’s just see if this thing can entertain me.” Who’s the actor who plays Hades?
Yes. He does a fantastic job. He’s worth the price of the movie. Hercules? Okay. But Hades, yeah.
Yes, mine is on a very different train. My husband David just handed me back a book that he used this last year to help him teach a Sunday School class going through the history of Christian worship. It’s called Worshipping with Calvin by Terry Johnson.
Recommendation: Worshipping with CalvinI’m recommending it because a lot of what he does is go back to the sources in the early church and the Reformation church to see how they really worshipped compared to how we’re worshipping, and the difference of our overall approach in presuppositions and things like that, and what we’re looking for in worship as it contrasts between the old and modern. It’s always a good look to realize what we do nowadays in many churches is so historically unusual.
Yes, the 20th century in general, but I think it is very helpful to see more of the sources and what the men of different times of church history had to say about how to worship and why they worship that way.
Excellent. Well, I’m sure I’ve recommended her before but I’m going to recommend her again, Josephine Tey, beginning with The Daughter of Time but working through all of her other detective novels. They’re not quite the Agatha Christie way of, “Let’s put everyone in an English country manor and have them die one by one, and then have the detective come along and with brilliant logic figure out what’s going on.” It’s more of a visit with a friend as he’s facing some sort of crime that maybe is important, maybe not that big a deal.
Starting with Daughter of Time, our hero detective is in a hospital bed and can’t get out, so he ends up researching a historical mystery, the murder of the two princes in London Tower, and finds out the textbooks are not all they’re cracked up to be. That’s where the quote comes in, “40 million textbooks couldn’t possibly be wrong, could they?”
It’s a good introduction to medieval history, to the War of the Roses, and to thinking about thinking about history. So Josephine Tey in general, and particularly The Daughter of Time.
Recommendation: Daughter of TimeWonderful. Thank you so much, both of you, for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join the ranks of our financial supporters, the best way to do that is through our Patreon. You can find that at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
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