Martin Heidegger, the noted German philosopher, observed truly that we are placed in a world not of our own making, that we are regularly called to make responsible choices in situations that tempt us to expediency, and that our ultimate limit is death, which profoundly affects everything we think, say, and do.<\/p>\n
Heidegger\u2019s perspective, however, is entirely secular, and so what is the point of teaching us things that are obvious, with no foundation or hope to guide us?\u00a0 Heidegger sees us as \u2018thrown\u2019 into the world, which suggests chance and leaves God out of it all.\u00a0 A Christian, on the other hand, sees himself as created, not thrown.\u00a0 His call to responsible choices is made on the basis of Biblical principles, rooted in an absolute morality tied to man as image-bearer, bound to treat other image-bearers graciously.\u00a0 The Christian knows that death is ahead, with the perspective that sin is the cause, yet has an assured hope that replaces fear, a hope based on grace, salvation, and a certain resurrection.<\/p>\n
Heidegger, like many secular philosophers, addresses the biggest, hardest questions of our existence, attempting to do so rationally with many words and apparently sophisticated arguments.\u00a0 But his rationalism is built on nothing, since secularism \/ atheism \/ naturalism is constrained by the periodic table of elements and the laws of physics . . . everything is just molecules in motion and so responsibility, morality, and even personhood have no real existence, and death is just a slightly different configuration of the molecules in your body.\u00a0 There is no point, no hope, no answers.\u00a0 To try to find answers in naturalism is genuinely irrational.<\/p>\n
The above is my summary of John Frame\u2019s assessment of Heidegger\u2019s philosophy, from Frame\u2019s 2015 book, A History of Western Philosophy and Theology.<\/em>\u00a0 It\u2019s a big book and extremely well-written, but I recommend it only if you are determined to tackle the subject.\u00a0 On a number of occasions in my life I have fantasized that it might be \u2018fun\u2019 to go deep into philosophy, but always realized that to do so would entail pain, sweat, and tears equivalent to what I experienced between my freshman course in physics and my eventual Ph.D.\u00a0 In fact, more pain, because secular philosophers generate gazillions of words, often obtusely and sometimes incoherently.\u00a0 What I\u2019ve really wanted was a serious summary of the field from a Christian perspective.\u00a0 When I found Frame\u2019s book, I had the \u2018Eureka!\u2019 moment.\u00a0 Now, I am NOT going to try to summarize Frame\u2019s book.\u00a0 That would be silly.\u00a0 As usual, I\u2019ll just pull out a few points I think noteworthy.\u00a0 To get an overview of the actual history of philosophy and theology in the West, buy the book.<\/p>\n Ultimately, for the Christian . . . the ontological realist . . . all philosophies can and must be evaluated from a Biblical perspective.\u00a0 Frame does that, except for those moments when he loses his rationality because of his Calvinist upbringing.<\/p>\n Why study philosophy?\u00a0 There aren\u2019t a lot of jobs out there that will pay you for expounding on the differences between the ideas of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard.\u00a0 But then life isn\u2019t primarily about money, is it?\u00a0 Aristotle observed, \u201cAll men by nature desire to know.\u201d\u00a0 God built that into us.\u00a0 Socrates:\u00a0 \u201cThe unexamined life is not worth living.\u201d<\/p>\n I see the history of philosophy . . . and theology . . . as important because it informs how we and others fall into error in both Biblical interpretation and the practice of the Christian life.\u00a0 There are serious Christians who insist that the Bible is their only rule for faith and practice, yet fall into fundamental errors that can be traced to man\u2019s anti-God philosophies.\u00a0 I know Christians who disagree with me profoundly on doctrinal matters and would be offended for me to insist that my position is that of \u201cBiblicist.\u201d\u00a0 After all, aren\u2019t they Biblicists too?<\/p>\n Theology \u2013 Biblical theology \u2013 is properly the foundation for Christian philosophy, which is the set of principles by which we understand God and creation (metaphysics), how we know what we know (epistemology), and who we are and how we should interact with God and with others (ethics).<\/p>\n All systems of thought include a belief in something self-sufficient, something independent of all else.\u00a0 For us it\u2019s the Biblical God.\u00a0 For Islam it\u2019s Allah.\u00a0 For Hinduism, it\u2019s Brahma.\u00a0 The Greek gods are different, since they inhabit an already existing universe; they are part of it, dependent on their environment.\u00a0 Frame says that the Greeks believed in a \u2018flux\u2019 from which all things derive, called Chaos or Okeanos, which is the true deity of their religion.\u00a0 Atheists believe that our universe sprang from a \u2018Void,\u2019 an ultimate \u2018Nothingness.\u2019\u00a0 Buddhists call this independent nothingness \u2018Nirvana.\u2019\u00a0 Yes, there is nothing new under the sun.\u00a0 Of course, with the help of sci-fi fantasies, some atheists now imagine that a multiverse can replace the Void from which the Big Bang sprung.\u00a0 Regardless of the details of the fantasy, it\u2019s clear that the famously public atheists, like Carl Sagan of a generation ago or Neil deGrasse Tyson today, worship the stuff of creation, occasionally waxing poetic . . . Isn\u2019t it marvelous to think that we are star stuff? . . . and other such pagan nonsense.<\/p>\n Frame echoes Cornelius Van Til in affirming the Biblical perspective:\u00a0 \u201cThe great division in mankind is not that some worship a god and others do not.\u00a0 Rather, it is between those who worship the true God and those who worship false gods, idols.\u201d\u00a0 Any denial of the true God, whether atheism or Roman Catholicism or Buddhism, is unbelief.\u00a0 Unbelief is rebellion and rebellion condemns.\u00a0 Only the true God offers salvation.\u00a0 If your rebellion lands you in Hell, does it really matter that your false religion was somehow \u2018superior\u2019 to atheism?\u00a0 In God\u2019s eyes, there are only two camps, not a vast diversity of fascinatingly nuanced religions.<\/p>\n So Frame argues properly that all the basic questions of philosophy are religious in character.\u00a0 Whether it\u2019s metaphysics (God and the world), epistemology (what is truth and how do you know), or ethics \/ values (how should we live), it all starts with God\u2019s word . . . and if you do start there,<\/em> then everything makes sense.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t start there, <\/em>you simply cannot make sense of the world.\u00a0 What is the \u2018sum of all philosophy\u2019?\u00a0 Biblical truth.\u00a0 (That doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s always easy, though.)<\/p>\n One of the fundamental questions of metaphysics<\/strong> . . . Is the universe one or many?\u00a0 Parmenides, Spinoza, and Hegel insisted that despite the apparent plurality of things in the world, there is a oneness<\/em>.\u00a0 If that\u2019s your position you are a monist.<\/em>\u00a0 Others, like Democritus and Leibniz, see the world as a huge collection of tiny components, distinct from each other and irreducible . . . atoms, in a sense.\u00a0 If that\u2019s your perspective you are a pluralist.<\/em><\/p>\n Dualists <\/em>(like Zoroastrians) hold that there are two ultimate competing realities, good and evil, for example.\u00a0 Aristotle and Locke held the commonsense view that there are a lot of individual things in the world, but you can lump them into general categories.\u00a0 Therefore the universe exhibits both unity and plurality.\u00a0 This commonsense view is, not surprisingly, also the Biblical view.\u00a0 Yet the Biblical position goes beyond \u2018common sense\u2019 in that we see unity and plurality as the very foundation of existence because of the nature of the Godhead, the Trinity displaying fundamental unity and plurality.\u00a0 Van Til\u2019s view was that because God is both one and many, he made the world both one and many, no unity without particulars, and no particulars without unity.<\/p>\n For example, you can think of an oak tree as simply a collection of particulars . . . atoms.\u00a0 But we recognize a unity among that collection of atoms and we call that unity an oak tree.\u00a0 Indeed, we recognize an entire category we call \u201coak trees,\u201d despite the fact that no oak tree is exactly like any other.\u00a0 And so for dogs, poplars, and people, not to mention good deeds and bad deeds, beautiful and ugly.\u00a0 In a truly mechanistic universe, where does the \u2018one\u2019 come from?\u00a0 Who decides the categories? We do, but only because God does, which fact derives from his Trinitarian nature.<\/p>\n In epistemology<\/strong>, we ask questions like, \u201cWhat is knowledge?\u201d,\u00a0 \u201cHow is knowledge possible?\u201d,\u00a0 \u201cHow do we distinguish truth from falsity, reality from appearance?\u201d\u00a0 Epistemology involves a subject <\/em>of knowledge, a person, an object <\/em>of knowledge, what he knows, and a rule that determines whether the subject knows the object.\u00a0 If you\u2019re an optimist about whether you, on your own initiative, autonomously<\/em>, can know the truth, you can call yourself a rationalist.\u00a0 <\/em>For you, human reason is the ultimate judge of the true and the false.\u00a0 On the other hand, irrationalists <\/em>or skeptics <\/em>don\u2019t have much confidence in reason.\u00a0 John Locke and David Hume were empiricists,<\/em> believing that sense experience is the ground of human knowledge and reason must be based on that ground.\u00a0 Finally, subjectivists, <\/em>which include the ancient Sophists and modern existentialists, believe that meaning and knowledge can be found within ourselves.<\/p>\n Value theory<\/strong> includes ethics and aesthetics, asking \u201cWhat should we value most highly?\u201d, \u201cWhat is the highest good?\u201d, \u201cHow should we make value judgments?\u201d, \u201cWhat\u2019s right and what\u2019s wrong?\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s obvious to the Christian that value theory is entirely dependent on whether God is there, God as revealed in the Bible.\u00a0 If so, His word is the ground of ethics.\u00a0 If not, anything goes.<\/p>\n Frame points out that a novice might imagine that he should start his study of philosophy with metaphysics, learning as much as possible of the structure of the world (universe), and then turn to epistemology and ethics.\u00a0 But how can you gain knowledge of metaphysics if you don\u2019t understand what knowing means?\u00a0 Furthermore, if you have no ground for ethics, no sense of right and wrong, you can easily go astray in your study of the world and whether you should count something as true and accurate or false and misleading.\u00a0 A scientist, for example, ought <\/em>to make his measurements carefully, report them truly, and interpret them honestly, right?\u00a0 <\/em>In short, the three disciplines are tightly intertwined.\u00a0 A philosopher (all humans belong to that category to some degree), must build his entire system as a system, not as disjointed pieces.<\/p>\n Frame\u00a0 uses simple models to evaluate various philosophies.\u00a0 In epistemology from a Christian viewpoint, he takes account of God\u2019s involvement with His creation and with history via a 3-fold perspective.\u00a0 He draws a triangle, the top vertex labeled \u201cNormative Perspective,\u201d the lower left vertex \u201cSituational Perspective,\u201d and the lower right vertex \u201cExistential Perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n In the normative perspective we see God\u2019s authority expressed by Biblical revelation.\u00a0 We learn in Romans 1, for example, that all of creation reveals God and that we have no excuse but to recognize His handiwork.\u00a0 In the situational, we study creation and history and our personal place therein.\u00a0 In the existential, we see the world as the locus of God\u2019s presence, both outside us and indwelling.<\/p>\n Here, too, the three perspectives are intertwined.\u00a0 We won\u2019t do historical (situational) studies properly unless we fit them into Biblical history.\u00a0 How can anyone properly see the history of Israel, including the perpetual conflicts in the Middle East, other than by Biblical prophecy? \u00a0If you don\u2019t, and you\u2019re a Western political leader, you will make hopelessly ineffective policy. \u00a0To understand God\u2019s norms (laws) properly, we must apply them to ourselves and to others.\u00a0 To have hope and meaning in life, we must have the existential understanding of God\u2019s presence and active care in our lives.\u00a0 Otherwise, what\u2019s the point of anything, including science and history?<\/p>\n I like Frame\u2019s analysis, but I find it startlingly ironic that it doesn\u2019t work from his own perspective of Calvinist sovereignty.\u00a0 Here is where he loses his rationality.\u00a0 Under Calvinist sovereignty, wherein everything, every interaction of atoms and molecules, every thought, word, and deed of every man, woman, and child, every virtuous and every heinous act in history is foreordained and executed by the sovereign plan of God from eternity past . . . Frame\u2019s triangle collapses.<\/p>\n Norms have no meaning because they cannot be obeyed by sentient, choosing persons.\u00a0 The norms just are <\/em>and what we call persons (us) either are or aren\u2019t acting in accord, every act dictated by eternal plan. \u00a0Thus, when someone acts against <\/em>God\u2019s norms, that is actually in accord <\/em>with the overarching norm of God\u2019s sovereign plan. \u00a0God cannot even act <\/em>in specific ways in history, because all acts, all interactions of particles and people and God, just are.\u00a0 You could argue that God continually acts on particles and what I might call metaparticles <\/em>\u2013 minds, souls, spirits \u2013 but God would be utterly constrained by His plan.\u00a0 Yet even His plan was never constructed, because God is eternal, residing past, present, and future, not tied to the linear time line like we are.\u00a0 His plan just is, <\/em>just another way to describe the all-determined particle-interaction events of world history.\u00a0 Therefore, there are no divine interventionist acts like what occurred on Sinai or at Pentecost, or on the Cross, or the Second Coming.\u00a0 In short, Calvinist sovereignty is antithetical to Scripture.\u00a0 It\u2019s nothing but pre-determined particulars, one atom bouncing into another and then another, in the Calvinist\u2019s case according to divine plan, in the atheist\u2019s case according to the laws of physics, wherever they came from.<\/p>\n The existential <\/em>is empty, too, because we as persons <\/em>don\u2019t exist.\u00a0 We\u2019re just collections of particles in motion . . . which is the same as the atheistic perspective.<\/p>\n In short, Frame\u2019s models are just fine, as long as he discards Calvinism.<\/p>\n Frame properly makes the case that the sin of the secularist begins in epistemology, in the area of knowledge, because the unbeliever sees himself as autonomous, able to judge himself, others, the world, and God based on his own alleged rationality.\u00a0 And so he gets metaphysics wrong, not recognizing the authority of God and the Bible, and he gets ethics wrong, which must be based on Biblical principles.\u00a0 \u201cSinners do not want to live in God\u2019s world, though they have no choice about it.\u00a0 They recognize the truth to some extent, because they need to get along and to make a living.\u00a0 But they would very much like the world to be different or pretend that it is.\u201d<\/p>\n Accordingly, unbelieving politicians imagine that socialism will bring utopia, fornicators and adulterers and drunkards and drug users imagine that there should be no consequences for doing what they feel like doing, yet reality happens . . . God\u2019s laws are woven into the reality of this world and into the mind and heart of every human being.\u00a0 Life works only when you\u2019re in sync with God\u2019s reality.\u00a0 We are not autonomous; to think so is to live in fantasy.<\/p>\n In the real world we see the one and the many, things that are the same and things that are different.\u00a0 \u201cFor the general realities \u2013 apple, tree, man, woman, solar system, law of gravitation, virtue \u2013 are what they are because of the particulars that constitute them.\u00a0 And we can identify the particulars only with the use of general concepts.\u00a0 To identify the bump two inches from the stem of the apple requires us to think of the general concepts apple, stem, <\/em>and bump.<\/em>\u00a0 Particulars are collections of generalities, and generalities are collections of things.\u00a0 Universals and particulars define one another.\u201d<\/p>\n So philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel cannot understand the world by reducing it to pure generalities, and Democritus, Epicurus, and Occam cannot construct coherent philosophies by dividing the world into ultimate particulars.\u00a0 \u201cThere is no ultimate universal or particular that explains everything.\u00a0 Exhaustive knowledge is the prerogative of God alone.\u201d<\/p>\n Non-Christian philosophers are always seeking alternatives to God . . . this is idolatry.<\/p>\n For example, Plato believed that perfect forms <\/em>exist that are foundational to the world.\u00a0 No one can draw a perfect square, but we somehow know what a perfect square is.\u00a0 Similarly, we have concepts of treeness, horseness, justice, goodness, and so on.\u00a0 Plato\u2019s forms are perfect, immaterial, changeless, and intangible.<\/p>\n