Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (29 page)

14.
Evan Fales, “Naturalism and Physicalism,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Atheism
, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 120. Fales tries to solve the mystery by simply decreeing that consciousness
must
be natural: “Since such processes evidently
have
produced consciousness, … consciousness is evidently a natural phenomenon” (italics in original).

15.
Colin McGinn,
The Problem of Consciousness
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 45; and
The Mysterious Flame
(New York: Basic Books, 1999), 13–14.

16.
Mark A. Bedau, “Weak Emergence,” in J. Tomberlin, ed.,
Philosophical Perspectives: Mind, Causation, and World
, vol. 11 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 375–99. For a detailed discussion of various versions of emergentism, see J. P. Moreland,
Consciousness and the Existence of God: A Theistic Argument
(New York: Routledge, 2008).

17.
Galen Strawson,
Real Materialism and Other Essays
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6 (italics added).

18.
Thomas Reid,
An Inquiry into the Human Mind
, ed. Derek R. Brookes
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 215–16.

19.
Philosopher Jaegwon Kim spells out the problem. On one hand, many philosophers who embrace materialism or naturalism deny that consciousness is real, holding that mental states are fictions. On the other hand, Kim writes, “contrast this lowly status of consciousness in science and metaphysics with its lofty standing in moral philosophy and value theory.” When philosophers discuss what is intrinsically good, what makes life worth living, most of the time the answer is happiness or love or significance or even simply pleasure. But these are all aspects of conscious experience. “It is an ironic fact that the felt qualities of conscious experience, perhaps the only things that ultimately matter to us, are often relegated in the rest of philosophy to the status of ‘secondary qualities,’ in the shadowy zone between the real and the unreal, or even jettisoned outright.”
Physicalism, or Something Near Enough
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 10–12.

20.
Arthur Schopenhauer,
The World as Will and Representation
, vol. 2 (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1958), 13. Similarly, Catholic novelist Walker Percy writes, “The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is … marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection.”
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
(New York: Picador, 1983), 47.

21.
Ian Barbour,
Issues in Science and Religion
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 67. For more detail on Romantic pantheism, see M. H. Abrams,
Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
(New York: Norton, 1971). Seeking scientific support, the Romantics fastened on the work of Leibniz, a contemporary of Newton. For Newton, everything was composed of atoms, tiny hard particles of matter. For Leibniz, everything was composed of monads, tiny centers of spiritual or mental energy. The term
monad
derives from neo-Platonism, and Leibniz employed it to say that nature is a vast organism imbued with a soul or spirit. “The whole nature of bodies is not exhausted in their extension, that is to say their size, figure, and motion,” he wrote. Instead “we must recognize something that corresponds to soul.” See
Soul of Science
, 84.

22.
Randall,
Making
, 419.

23.
Walker Percy,
Signposts in a Strange Land
(New York: Picador, 1991), 278. The former pope John Paul II was a trained philosopher. “He points out that the radical separation between the two great currents in the Western philosophy [realism versus idealism] originated in the absolutization of one of the two aspects of human experience”—either outer experience (absolutizing the material world) or inner experience (absolutizing consciousness). Jaroslaw Kupczak,
Destined for Liberty: The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II
(Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2000), 76. See also Rocco Buttiglione,
Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 68, 72. For a fuller discussion, see my chapter “
Evangelium Vitae:
John Paul II Meets Francis Schaeffer,” in
The Legacy of John Paul II: An Evangelical Assessment
, ed. Tim Perry (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007).

24.
For a fuller treatment of these two philosophical traditions, tracing their expression through the arts and humanities, see
Saving Leonardo
, chapters 4–9.

25.
Arthur Lovejoy writes that a conspicuous aspect of Romanticism was “a revival of the direct influence of neo-Platonism.”
The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 297. Paul Reiff writes: “If we are to speak of anyone at all as a ‘key’ to the understanding of Romanticism, one man only merits the term, Plotinus,” the founder of neo-Platonism. Cited in Abrams,
Natural Supernaturalism
, 428.

Neo-Platonism, which was founded by Plotinus, was the main avenue by which Greek thought influenced Christian theologians all through the Middle Ages (including Augustine, Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, and the Cappadocian fathers). Even other philosophies, such as Aristotelianism, were typically read through a neo-Platonic lens, until additional writings by Aristotle became available in the form of Arabic translations (twelfth century) and Greek copies from Constantinople (thirteenth century). Neo-Platonism was also at the heart of the Platonic Academy in Florence that did so much to launch the Renaissance. At the birth of modern science, neo-Platonism influenced such diverse figures as the early chemists Paracelsus and Van Helmont, the astronomers Copernicus and Kepler, and both Leibniz and Newton. (See
Soul of Science
.) So it is not surprising that the Romantics still considered neo-Platonism a viable intellectual option.

Lloyd Gerson summarizes: “In the writings of the Italian Renaissance philosophers, the 15th and 16th century humanists John Colet, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Thomas More, the 17th century Cambridge Platonists, and German idealists, especially Hegel, Plotinus’ thought was the (sometimes unacknowledged) basis for opposition to the competing and increasingly influential tradition of scientific philosophy.” “Plotinus,”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, ed. Edward N. Zalta, summer 2014 ed., http://plato.
stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/plotinus
/.

26.
See Lovejoy,
Great Chain
. Technically, neo-Platonism is not pantheism but pan
en
theism. What’s the difference? In classic pantheism, the material world is an illusion. In panentheism, the material world is real, but it is a concretization of the divine and imbued with spirit. As an illustration, think of a cascading fountain in the winter when the top layer freezes: the ice is a solidification of the water itself, while the water continues to run below the surface.

How does a non-personal essence create the world, since it cannot consciously will or act? Neo-Platonism answered that the One was so “full” of being that it simply emanated other beings automatically, from necessity, without any conscious intention, like the sun radiating its light or a fountain gushing water. Some of these ideas were in the cultural air when the New Testament was being written, especially in early Gnosticism. In Colossians, when Paul speaks of “thrones, dominions, principalities, and authorities,” he is referring to the spiritual entities (the higher levels) that emanate from the One out of the “fullness” of its being. In fact, “fullness” was a technical term (Greek:
pleroma
) describing the sum of these higher spiritual levels. So when Paul says that in Christ, “the whole fullness [
pleroma
] of the Deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9), he is appropriating that term from Gnosticism, proclaiming that the full range of divinity does not reside in multiple spiritual emanations from the One but rather resides solely in Christ.
See Study Guide

27.
Eagleton,
Culture and the Death of God
, 96; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in
Self-Reliance, the Over-Soul and Other Essays
(Claremont, CA: Coyote Canyon, 2010), 56.

28.
See Lovejoy, “The Temporalizing of the Chain of Being,” chap. 9 in
Great Chain
, 242–87. The escalator metaphor comes from Mary Midgley,
Evolution as a Religion
(London: Methuen, 1985). In chapters that I contributed to
How Now Shall We Live?
, I show that several modern ideologies are variations on the Escalator Myth, notably Marxism and the many liberation movements that are its offshoots. See chapters 23–29.

29.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science
, bk. 5, aphorism 357. Because of Hegel, many Europeans were already thinking in evolutionary categories prior to Darwin, and were just waiting for someone to fill in the biological piece of the puzzle; and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Philosophy Works
(3 in 1)
, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894),
Philosophy of Right
, sect. 342. The word “Mind” is the German word
Geist
, which is a cognate of the English
ghost
and is translated as either spirit or mind.

30.
John Herman Randall,
Philosophy after Darwin
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 8.

31.
“Just as the classical science ideal absolutized the aspect of mechanical motion, so the historical science ideal absolutized the aspect of history.” Dooyeweerd,
Roots
, 183. For precursors to Hegel’s historicism, see John Passmore, “Progress by Natural Development: From Joachim to Marx,” chap. 11 in
The Perfectibility of Man
, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000).

32.
Passmore,
Perfectibility
, 369.

33.
Steven Pinker, “The Trouble with Harvard,”
New Republic
, September 4, 2014.

34.
Solomon,
Continental Philosophy
, 57. For example, for Hegel, morality was not “a matter of rational principle, but part of a life of shared values, feelings, and customs” within particular communities (70); and Hegel,
Philosophy of Right
, sect. 344. “Hegel’s idealism saw history as an unfolding of absolute spirit through a necessary dialectical process, and this framework left little room for the freedom or significance of individual persons.” Thomas Williams and Jan Olof Bengtsson, “Personalism,” in
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, November 12, 2009.

35.
The secularization of Hegel’s thought was partly the work of his followers, several of whom were materialists, such as Marx. (Marx liked to say he “turned Hegel on his head” by proposing that material forces shape ideas instead of the other way around.) Others progressively cut the Absolute Mind down to size. First it became human consciousness: phenomenology absolutized human consciousness (Husserl spoke of consciousness as “absolute being”). Then it became individual consciousness: existentialism treated the self as absolute (Merleau-Ponty wrote, “I am the absolute source”). See Solomon,
Continental Philosophy
, chaps. 9, 12.

36.
For Hegel, “the individual can only exist as such within particular communities. The individual is a product rather than a premise of the social order.” David West,
Introduction to Continental Philosophy
, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 40. For Hegel, even Christianity is merely a mythological way of talking about the evolution of consciousness: the real meaning of the narrative sequence of Jesus’s death and resurrection “is that it represents the negation of individual consciousness (death) and … the passage of individual consciousness into the general spirit which is the community-consciousness (resurrection).” Hans Frei,
The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 318.

37.
Dooyeweerd,
Roots
, 179. Dooyeweerd was writing before the rise of postmodernism, but he saw clearly that the same trends were already evident in Romanticism: “Romanticism replaced the gospel of the autonomous and nondescript
individual
[from the Enlightenment] with the gospel of the autonomous and individual
community
.”
Roots
, 178–79.

38.
Stanley J. Grenz,
A Primer on Postmodernism
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 199), 8. Terry Eagleton says in postmodernism, culture “operates as a kind of absolute.” He adds that in this regard postmodernism shows itself to be a successor to idealism, for whom “culture is a secular name for God.”
Culture and the Death of God
, 191, 77. Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity,” in
Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23.

39.
Don Cupitt,
Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 34. According to J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, the two main streams of Western thought are “Enlightenment naturalism and postmodern anti-realism.”
Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 1.

40.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873),
Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s
, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1979), 88.

41.
Philosopher Roger Scruton writes, “The assumption that there is first-person certainty, which provides a starting-point for philosophical enquiry … has finally been removed from the centre of philosophy.”
A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein
(New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 292. See the discussion by Roger Lundin, “Interpreting Orphans: Hermeneutics in the Cartesian Tradition,” in
The Promise of Hermeneutics
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999).