Jesus talked about two houses....one built on rock and another built on sand. In the parable, the storms came upon both, but the house on sand couldn't withold the power of the storm, while the house built on rock could. The foundation represented the object of our ultimate trust in life. The houses were the lives we lead on those foundations we choose. The storms come on both, representing the pressures of reality. Any foundation that is man-made will not be able to withstand the storms of reality. The part of Jesus' parable that is sometimes overlooked is that even though the house built on sand doesn't last, at first, it sits side by side with the one built on rock. It isn't until the storm comes that it washes away. There are other foundations that have lasted...some nearly 800 years...but eventually were washed away by time. Today, we have many foundations to choose and, if Jesus is right, all but His will not last. You can disagree with Jesus, but the conclusions of His teaching on this are pretty clear.
I watched a guy talk about his year of living biblically. He was an agnostic. But he decided he would try to follow the bible, strictly, and see how it worked out. Well, since the bible is 66 books, starting with patriarchs, then the Law, then the Kingdom(s), prophets, exhile, return and then Christ, the Apostles and the new church, this guy picked a few books out of the Law and called it living out the Bible.
Needless to say, anyone who reads the Bible at all would have thought it insipid and short sighted. After all, his conclusions were that living strictly according to the Bible is to grow a beard, obsess over mold color and avoid shellfish, among many other regulations. There wasn't anything mentioned about the Gospel of Jesus Christ or what living that out looks like and especially how it relates to those regulations. Could be he was just trying to be a consistent Jew. Or it could be he intentionally ignored the other 63 books, particularly the Gospels and how it addressed those old regulations. Why?
One clue for this is in what he said in his speech. He appealed to the difference between science and faith. Knowledge and truth about reality is found in science and faith is something that has little to do with reality but keeps us going, according to this guy.
He represents the thinking of this age. We are taught that science or, more particularly, emperical knowledge, is about reality and that any other knowledge claim that can't be touched, seen, heard, smelled or tasted wasn't real knowledge or far inferior to emperical knowledge. It's called naturalism or scientific naturalism. It goes like this: the only truth there is is that which can be reduced to chemistry and physics....the only knowledge we can obtain is that which can be verified (Verification Principle)...we are basically bodies, rather than persons, with brains, rather than minds, whose every behavior is reducable to evolutionary survival instincts. The universe is all there was, is and ever will be. Science is soveriegn over all thought, especially metaphysics and philosophy in general.
The question is this: have we simply evolved our thinking to arrive at something far better than any other worldview held prior to it?
The answer is 'no'. Naturalism, as defined above, holds no water at all, even though it is prevailing thought in which we have all been educated.
First, it's foundation is....well, doesn't exist
It claims science is sovereign over metaphysics and philosophy in general. Science is not soveriegn over philosophy but relies on it for its practice and theory. Logical Positivism was a movement that begin in the 1920's and from it came several theories that aided scientific theories up to our day. One of them was the Verification Principle or its modifications, which states that there is no knowledge unless it can be verified. It was debunked over 60 years ago, and the only reason science still relies on it today is because it is essential to modern science's very existence. The Verification Principle, itself, is self refuting. The statement itself cannot be verified. In response, its adherants revised it to come up with the Falsification Principle....the only meaningful knowledge is that which can be emperically falsified. If you can't possibly falsify a proposition by emperical observation, it was considered meaningless (several agnostic thinkers fall back on this). But that too was self refuting. Go back to the guy who tried to live out the bible in a year. He thought that was restrictive. But if you wanted to live out the Verificiation/Falsification Principle for a day, how much better would you fair? It would be so restrictive that vast amounts of knowledge and theories and truth would have to go out the window, because they would not be able to pass the test. What sort of knowledge fails this test? Knowledge of moral values, politics, theology and even more mundane things like the mind, other minds, self, numbers, secondary qualities or properties like colors and pain, etc. It would also be a huge contradiction to try living out your life with a theory that can't be verified or falsified itself, let alone everything else. The only way to continue believing in naturalism, is to presume atheism, prior to anything else.
Does that mean science is itself too restrictive or self-refuting? Of course not. But you have to separate scientific from the philosophies that underguird modern science that lead to theories that have no room for any knowledge but emperical knowledge...and when you do that, you realize that not only can science be free to move forward less restricted, but several 'theories' whose existence relies on these self-refuting philosophies now open up again for questioning.
Second, naturalism cannot provide a basis for living
If the definition of truth and knowledge for the naturalist is accepted, then an enormous amount of essential things have to go. There can be no objective moral values. Any moral values we hold are simply reduced to behavior for survival purposes. Torturing babies, for example, may 'feel' wrong to us, but in fact, the only reason we hold this is because of how natural selection works on our nervous systems to get us at the right place at the right time. In a universe that is only matter, energy in space and time, there simply cannot exist moral values because they fail the test of emperical knowledge. We can live a 'moral' life if we choose, but under the naturalistic view, the morals we live by simply cannot exist in reality.
There can be no such thing as love, unless it is reduced to natural behavior to propogate genes. When you spend a romantic get-away with your spouse, what you are doing, in purely naturalistic terms, is behaving in a way for your species as a means to propogate your genes. You can call it 'love' if you wish, but 'love' doesn't really exist. It is just a concept we created prior to figuring out our survival behavior through evolutionary theory. The same thing can be said about your children. What you term as 'love' for your children is reduced to the very same thing....they have your genes and you want them to grow up and propogate as well. It is instinctive within human animals to propogate for survival purposes. Love, the way you understand it, does not exist. Thank goodness for evolutionary theory to help explain old wives tales, like essential love relationships we hold dear, so we can better understand reality of natural selection at work in our species (sarcasm).
Under naturalism, there is no such thing as a mind. It is only a brain. All abstract thought is reducable to chemical reactions in the nervous system. All beliefs...all beliefs...are reducible to biological reactions to stimuli. There are different naturalistic theories behind this. One theory believes that all thought is reducible to brain reactions and doesn't exist on its own. This is called Physicalism. Another believes that thoughts exist, but only 'supervene' over the brain activity, much like wetness supervenes over the accumulation of water molecules. This is called Epiphenominalism. Both are common in that the mind and thought itself are totally reliant on the body and stimuli. So, the idea of liberatian free agency....the idea that you have freedom of thought and choice, is illusion. So, mind and thought have to go or be reduced, and freedom of thought and choice have to go, in favor of a scientific fatalism. So much for voting this November! Richard Dawkins has tried to bridge the gap between mind and brain by introducing 'memes' into the English language. However, memes are theoretical entities and were created, not through scientific method, but a stop gap measure to try to hold to essential things while not abandoning naturalism.
Under naturalism, there are several other problems. Numbers, properties and several other things that cannot be proven emperically, have to go. There are at least four things that have to go, if science is sovereign, in addition to the above: 1) Mathematical truths. Since science relies on mathematics, it can't prove mathematics. 2) Aesthetic truths. Science can't prove why some things are beautiful and other things aren't. 3) Proof of other minds. There is no way to emperically prove that other minds exist outside of your own. It is a brute assumption based on faith. 4) Other basic truths, like the past...that it isn't really just 5 minutes with the appearance of age.
I could go on forever. In a nutshell, the very 'wisdom' of our age is no wisdom at all, but foolishness.
Evolutionary Theory Is, Ironically, Incompatible with Naturalism
Believe it or not, it is. Alvin Plantinga has done an incredible job explaining how naturalism/materialsm and evolution are the strangest of bedfellows. I won't get into the details, and if you want to get into them, post it or email me. Bottom line, according to Plantinga, is that evolution is concerned with behavior, not so much belief, particularly the content of belief. Natural selection works on nervous systems to get a behavior conducive to survival. Unless evolution can provide a scientific explanation necessarily correlating behavior with belief, any belief, particularly the belief in evolution, cannot be held with high probability. To date, it is still struggling with this correlation and has yet to provide a sufficient explanation. In fact, the probability of any belief being true, particularly evolutionary theory, is low or inscrutable. There's more detail to it, to put meat on the bones, but I provide this as a mear skeletal structure of Plantinga's arguments. So, if one holds to scientific naturalism, they have to either abandon evolutionary theory as a probable theory, or abandon scientific naturalism, which calls evolutionary theory into question.
Why Hold To It, Proclaim It and Chide Anyone Against It?
So why is scientific naturalism a brute given in our age? I think one clue is because it gives us the ability to live out our erotic and political desires. It rips the rug out from under alot of things we can't live without, but with it we can abandon 'restrictions' to what we want to do, think or say, without impugnity. We accept scientific naturalism as a moral decision. There can be no God and any God-Talk is considered meaningless because it fails the Verification/Falsification test. But no God is liberating to do, think and say what one wants. However, with every gain comes a trade off. And the trade off's mentioned above are titanic.
But because they are so titanic to give up, we can't. So, does that mean we abandon scientific naturalism and start believing things we actually already knew before we educated ourselves into stupidity? Nope. That's where we turn to postmodernism. Postmodernism stands alongside scientific naturalism, but because naturalism fails in large respects for the reasons I gave, postmodernism steps in as a way to fill in the gap and try to ease the tension. What we end up with is a billion 'meta-narratives' that conflict, create more tension and end up, after the dust settles, a world-wide power struggle among different opinions, none of which being any more superior or less superior than the others. But I am jumping ahead. That's all in Part 3.
So why is scientific naturalism a brute given in our age? I think one clue is because it gives us the ability to live out our erotic and political desires. It rips the rug out from under alot of things we can't live without, but with it we can abandon 'restrictions' to what we want to do, think or say, without impugnity. We accept scientific naturalism as a moral decision. There can be no God and any God-Talk is considered meaningless because it fails the Verification/Falsification test. But no God is liberating to do, think and say what one wants. However, with every gain comes a trade off. And the trade off's mentioned above are titanic.
But because they are so titanic to give up, we can't. So, does that mean we abandon scientific naturalism and start believing things we actually already knew before we educated ourselves into stupidity? Nope. That's where we turn to postmodernism. Postmodernism stands alongside scientific naturalism, but because naturalism fails in large respects for the reasons I gave, postmodernism steps in as a way to fill in the gap and try to ease the tension. What we end up with is a billion 'meta-narratives' that conflict, create more tension and end up, after the dust settles, a world-wide power struggle among different opinions, none of which being any more superior or less superior than the others. But I am jumping ahead. That's all in Part 3.
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