{"id":502,"date":"2023-10-29T09:33:25","date_gmt":"2023-10-29T13:33:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/?p=502"},"modified":"2023-10-29T09:33:25","modified_gmt":"2023-10-29T13:33:25","slug":"the-enlightenment-is-dead-chapter-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/2023\/10\/29\/the-enlightenment-is-dead-chapter-4\/","title":{"rendered":"The Enlightenment is Dead: Chapter 4 – From Modernism to Postmodernism: The Transformation of \u2018Better Living through Chemistry\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Better<\/a><\/p>\n

Materialism and the Crisis of Meaningful Existence<\/em><\/p>\n

The beginning of the twentieth century was the best of times and the worst of times for atheism.\u00a0 Science was making stupendous discoveries and technological advances faster than any time in history, and science was interpreted as a product of atheism.\u00a0\u00a0 Darwinism had triumphed in the highest levels of all the institutions that governed the world.\u00a0 The Great War (World War I) was welcomed as an opportunity for a great evolutionary leap forward for humanity by culling the weak and allowing the fit to triumph.\u00a0 Yet the scene of massive misery, destruction, and death caused by the war was revolting. \u00a0The triumph of atheism that was supposed to be a triumph for humanity forced intellectuals to confront Nietzschean nihilism.\u00a0 The term \u201ccrisis\u201d became the word of the day among academicians in Europe, which called for an existential philosophy that addressed whether human life had any meaning.\u00a0 Max Scheler wrote, \u201cIn our ten-thousand year history, we are the first time period in which the human being has become fully and totally \u2018problematic\u2019; the first time period in which the human being no longer knows who he or she is, but also knows<\/em> that he doesn\u2019t know.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0 The machines built by science threatened to destroy the self, the spirit, the soul.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Continental rationalists argued that the value of the inner, spiritual life of man needed to be reestablished to overcome the crisis of personal meaning brought about by strictly materialistic science, which they did not question.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 They focused on motifs of despair, dread, angst, the absurd, and fear of death.\u00a0 They saw the human condition, broadly considered, as more important than debating the narrower issue of scientific knowledge and whether you can know that your hand is in front of your face.\u00a0 They formulated their views as Cartesians and Kantians, not as a call to return to traditional Christianity.\u00a0 Edmund Husserl tried to establish certainty of knowledge in terms of necessary, eternal essences of the human psyche, very similar to Plato and Descartes, and sought to establish other areas of knowledge like science from that basis.<\/p>\n

Husserl\u2019s student Martin Heidegger rejected his teacher\u2019s attempt at Platonic certainty and took up the cause of an existential philosophy with an analysis of \u201cBeing\u201d in general and how humans can live authentic, meaningful lives despite being thrown into a world not of their own making and with no transcendent meaning.\u00a0 He declared that there are no satisfactory answers about the meaning of life, but we must ask the questions anyway.\u00a0 Humans face inescapable dread in the face of their uncertainty and thrownness into a life without meaning. \u00a0Heidegger wanted to affirm the view of modern science that the laws of nature exist before they are discovered by humans, which implies a realist metaphysic; but the main thrust of his philosophy was a Kantian, anti-realist analysis of Being.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 Recognition that man is thrown into a world not of man\u2019s making sets up any Kantian for failure because it contradicts the claim of the sovereignty of human consciousness over the laws and facts of nature.<\/em>\u00a0 That there is a world not of our own making implies that there is rationality beyond what we impose on the world.\u00a0 But if humans are autonomous, there should be no meaning beyond what humans impose. \u00a0The individual is left with the disoriented feeling of thrownness into an unintelligible world, a strangely self-conscious speck arising from and floating in an infinite sea of irrationalism.\u00a0 In the decade after the 1927 publication of his major treatise, Being and Time<\/em>, Heidegger realized the failure of his approach.\u00a0 He was followed by Sartre, who pushed existentialism to its logical conclusion of the absurdity of human existence, as I addressed above.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Empiricists\u2019 Failure to Demarcate Between Science and Religion<\/em><\/p>\n

Ignoring the problem of meaning and human consciousness, philosophers following the empiricist tradition pushed full-throttle materialism.\u00a0 \u00a0In the spirit of Kant, they wanted to make the case for the possibility of scientific knowledge and show that it is different from religious knowledge, even though God was dead among the intellectual class already because of Darwin\u00a0and Marx.\u00a0 Kant at least claimed that he wanted to \u201cmake room for faith,\u201d but philosophers of the twentieth century generally wanted God completely eliminated.\u00a0\u00a0 Philosophers such as G.E. Moore\u00a0and Bertrand Russell\u00a0led a revolt against idealist philosophy in favor of naturalistic, analytic empiricism.\u00a0 Like Kant, they wanted to restrict all knowledge to phenomena, but they rejected Kant\u2019s noumenal realm.\u00a0 They held to a strict empiricism, which placed them basically in the same position as Hume\u2019s philosophy.\u00a0 But they thought this time, with an analytic emphasis on clearing up ambiguities in the use of language, they could solve many of the problems of philosophy.\u00a0 By clarifying ordinary language, they thought that they could get rid of the illusion of a non-empirical aspect to reality like universals and God.<\/p>\n

G.E. Moore promoted \u201ccommon sense realism,\u201d that our normal, common-sense view of the world is largely correct.\u00a0 His \u201ccommon sense\u201d proof of an external world was \u201cBy holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, \u2018Here is one hand\u2019, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, \u2018and here is another\u2019.\u201d[4]<\/a> \u00a0Impressive, right?\u00a0 Of course, such a superficial analysis failed to prove his point.\u00a0 He later wrote an essay called \u201cCertainty,\u201d and by the end of it admitted defeat because he could not know whether or not he was dreaming about seeing his hands, or sitting, or whatever his senses seemed to tell him.[5]<\/a> \u00a0Even while materialistic science had come to rule the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, the philosophy<\/em> of materialistic science was groping in the dark, unable to know whether there is a material, external world.<\/p>\n

One attempt to defend empiricism through clearing up language was to define rational meaning as language about things that could be empirically tested.\u00a0 Since, they alleged, religious claims could not be tested empirically, religious claims must not be rationally meaningful \u2013 only emotionally meaningful.\u00a0 This view was known as logical positivism.\u00a0 If the logical positivists had been consistent, they would have designated mathematics and universal causation as meaningless because their universality cannot be empirically observed or tested.\u00a0 R.G. Collingwood observes,<\/p>\n

I do not know why the logical positivists have not thus pilloried as nonsensical the principle that mathematics is applicable to everything in nature; unless it is that they know this principle to be one upon which natural science ever since Galileo has depended, and still depends, for its very possibility. Being the declared friends of natural science, they would never dream of making a fuss about anything which natural scientists find it necessary to take for granted. So they let it pass, and to ease their consciences drop heavily upon the proposition ‘God exists’, because they think nobody believes in God except poor miserable parsons, whose luggage enjoys no such diplomatic immunity. If they knew a little more about the history of science, they would know that the belief in the possibility of applied mathematics is only one part of the belief in God.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0Around the 1960\u2019s philosophers realized that they could not solve the problems of the strict empiricism\u00a0that they equated with hard science. \u00a0Ironically, or maybe with some cultural influence involved, this happened at the same time that \u201cbetter living through chemistry\u201d (a DuPont advertising slogan beginning in 1935) was transformed from a triumphant claim of modernistic scientism into a slogan for escapism through psychedelic drugs. The philosophers found that empirical testing was not such an easy concept to define.\u00a0 The \u201cverification\u201d principle failed miserably.\u00a0 Atheist philosophers and scientists cannot help but use abstract ideas in their speech, thus making those sentences rationally meaningless according to the verification principle.\u00a0 The verification principle\u00a0itself, that only sentences that are empirically verifiable are meaningful, is not empirically verifiable.\u00a0 So it is self-refuting.\u00a0 It also excludes common statements of science, such as \u201cwater always expands when it freezes,\u201d because such universal statements cannot be verified by finite humans.[7]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Since verificationism didn\u2019t work, Karl Popper proposed the falsification criterion.\u00a0 He argued that a statement must be empirically refutable in some conceivable circumstance to be rationally meaningful.\u00a0 This rule had the advantage of not disqualifying generalized statements like \u201cwater always expands when it freezes.\u201d\u00a0 But then some philosophers realized that any statement can resist falsification because nobody holds just one belief that an empirical test can exclusively target.\u00a0 A person always holds a network of beliefs, and when a test seems to falsify a particular belief that a person doesn\u2019t want to give up, another less strongly-held belief can be sacrificed.\u00a0 This applies to atheist beliefs as much as traditional religious beliefs. Everyone has a \u201cweb of belief\u201d (as W.V.O. Quine called it).\u00a0 For people to differ in their worldviews means that they have different beliefs that are more central and strongly held onto and different beliefs that are more peripheral to the web and therefore more easily abandoned, but everyone has a web of belief of this structure.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Atheists, like Christians, can divert counter-evidence to defeat a less strongly held belief in order to preserve a more strongly held belief.\u00a0\u00a0Because different people have their beliefs positioned in their web differently, different people will abandon different beliefs in light of the same evidence.<\/p>\n

Imre Lakatos\u00a0\u00a0used the example of a Newtonian scientist:\u00a0\u00a0If an experiment brought into question Newton\u2019s\u00a0laws, a scientist committed to Newtonianism might be willing to give up this belief, but he also might propose some undetected planetary body or force as the cause of the unexpected result, or question the reliability of the measuring instruments, rather than give up his belief in Newton\u2019s\u00a0laws. [8]<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Lakatos concluded that the falsification criterion fails as a self-sufficient tool for gaining scientific knowledge because \u201cthe prime target remains hopelessly elusive\u201d to \u201cthe arrow of modus tollens.\u201d[9]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The problem can be illustrated with a slight modification of the well-known Aristotelian\u00a0syllogism:\u00a0\u00a0All gods are immortal; Apollo is a god, therefore Apollo is immortal.\u00a0\u00a0But what if we empirically verify that Apollo has died?\u00a0\u00a0That could mean\u00a0either<\/em>\u00a0that Apollo is not a god\u00a0or<\/em>\u00a0that all gods are not immortal.\u00a0\u00a0That could be expressed as:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n
      \n
    1. If all gods are immortal and Apollo is a god, then Apollo is immortal.<\/li>\n
    2. But Apollo dies (is not immortal)<\/li>\n
    3. Therefore it is not true that all gods are immortal and Apollo is a god.<\/li>\n
    4. Either all gods are not immortal, or Apollo is not a God.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      There is also the joke about psych inmate who was convinced that he was dead.\u00a0 His psychologist proposed a test to prove him wrong.\u00a0 He told the inmate, \u201cLet\u2019s prick your finger and see if you bleed because dead men don\u2019t bleed.\u201d\u00a0 He pricked his finger.\u00a0 It bled.\u00a0 The psych inmate exclaimed, \u201cDead men bleed after all!\u201d\u00a0 In symbolic logic this can be expressed as follows:<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. \n
          \n
        1. (p & q) -> r<\/li>\n
        2. ~ r<\/li>\n
        3. ~ (p & q)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a01,2 MT (Modus Tollens)<\/li>\n
        4. ~p v ~q\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a03\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0DM (DeMorgan\u2019s rule)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          Faced with counter-evidence to “r,” a person is within his logical rights to pick either of the two beliefs to abandon, \u201cp\u201d or \u201cq.\u201d[10]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

          Quine\u2019s\u00a0web of belief means that beliefs are \u201cunderdetermined by experience.\u201d[11]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 He says that, \u201cthe edge of the system must be kept squared with experience; the rest, with all its elaborate myths or fictions, has as its objective the simplicity of laws.\u00a0 Ontological questions, under this view, are on a par with questions of natural science.\u201d[12]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 We posit things like objects, forces, abstract logical and mathematical entities like sets, or even gods in order to explain experience:<\/p>\n

          Objects at the atomic level and beyond are posited to make the laws of macroscopic objects, and ultimately the laws of experience, simpler and more manageable. . . .\u00a0\u00a0 Physical objects, small and large, are not the only posits. Forces are another example; and indeed we are told nowadays that the boundary between energy and matter is obsolete. Moreover, the abstract entities which are the substance of mathematics — ultimately classes and classes of classes and so on up — are another posit in the same spirit. Epistemologically these are myths on the same footing with physical objects and gods, neither better nor worse except for differences in the degree to which they expedite our dealings with sense experiences.[13]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

          As a materialistic atheist, Quine\u00a0did not believe in gods, but he admitted that he could not exclude them, given that our beliefs are underdetermined by experience:\u00a0 \u201cLet me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s\u00a0gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits.\u201d[14]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Atheists who seek naturalistic explanations for everything in experience and try to find alternate explanations where a divine miracle seems to have intervened in nature are operating at the same epistemological level in terms of their web of belief as Christians are in their web of belief when they appeal to God as an explanation and try to find alternate explanations of evidence that seem to disprove God\u2019s existence. You could say that the atheist and the Christian are being equally \u201creligious\u201d in maintaining faith in their belief system in the face of apparent evidence to the contrary.\u00a0 The atheist, however, faces a problem with his reasoning that the Christian does not:\u00a0 The atheist is being inconsistent with his view of how he claims knowledge is supposed to be gained, by following the facts wherever they lead without regard to any non-empirical assumptions.\u00a0 Excluding God is a non-empirical assumption, part of most modern atheist\u2019s theoretical (non-empirical) definition of science.<\/p>\n

          Postmodern\u00a0atheist philosophers of science realized that knowledge could not be completely reduced to sense experience.\u00a0\u00a0This can be seen in the definition of science.\u00a0\u00a0The definition of science cannot be derived from isolating a physical substance called \u201cscience\u201d in a test tube.\u00a0\u00a0The definition of science\u00a0cannot be found growing on trees.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cScience\u201d is an immaterial, universal concept.\u00a0\u00a0The definition of naturalistic science is non-empirical.\u00a0 That science requires empirical verifiability is not itself empirically verifiable \u2013 which leads to the absurd conclusion that any definition of science is unscientific.\u00a0\u00a0The commitment of twentieth-century intellectuals to the materialistic faith, that the isolated particulars of sense experience are the source of all knowledge, logically excludes the possibility of knowing abstract universals, such as the definition of science.<\/p>\n

          To put it another way, the problem of the science\/religion dichotomy is that verification that a claim is true requires some standard of truth by which to judge the claim in question.\u00a0\u00a0But being committed to finite experience of isolated particulars as the source of knowledge, the atheist empiricists could find no fixed truth to serve as that standard.\u00a0 They could not logically appeal to a universal standard to reject the universal concept of \u201creligion.\u201d\u00a0 Certainty of anything was rejected by many of them, and indeed, logical consistency with their basic commitments required the rejection of certainty.\u00a0\u00a0Some select \u201ctruths of science\u201d were assumed to be absolute in practice, but again, logical consistency with their theory of knowledge would not allow knowledge of absolutes.\u00a0With no fixed standard, verification is impossible.\u00a0\u00a0A naturalistic, empiricist epistemology can provide no fixed standards.\u00a0 Therefore, it has no fixed standard to separate science from myth.<\/p>\n

          The difference between science and religion that secularists imagined turned out to be an illusion, even though most secularists today are oblivious to this discovery by their own experts.\u00a0 Most secularists and all liberal theologians still believe in the na\u00efve dichotomy expressed by Galileo\u00a0(interpreted in a Kantian sense that is alien to Galileo\u2019s Christian beliefs that he held to his death), that \u201cThe Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Or as a leading modern evolutionist and Marxist has put it, science and religion are \u201cNon-overlapping magisteria,” or “NOMA” for short (\u201cmagisteria\u201d meaning teaching authorities).<\/a>[15]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 A.J. Ayer, a leading logical positivist philosopher, admitted the failure of that school of thought that championed a sharp epistemic distinction between science and religion.\u00a0\u00a0Speaking of the \u201cVienna Circle,\u201d a group of influential logical positivists that included Ayer himself, he says,\u00a0\u201cThe Vienna Circle did not accomplish all that they once hoped to accomplish.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Many of the problems which they tried to settle still remain unsolved.\u201d<\/a>[16]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0He admitted in a 1976 interview with Bryan Magee that logical positivism was false, even though he had been a primary promotor of it through his famous book published in 1936, Language, Truth, and Logic<\/em>:<\/p>\n

          Bryan Magee:\u00a0 \u201cWhat do you now, in retrospect, think that the main shortcomings of the movement were?\u201d<\/p>\n

          A.J. Ayer:\u00a0 \u201cWell, I suppose most of the defect is that at the end of it all it was false.\u201d[17]<\/a><\/p>\n

          Here was the main philosophy that defined science in the twentieth century, and still considered today by most secularists as the view that defines science, and it was a bunch of baloney.\u00a0 Likewise, atheist apologist Kai Nelson\u00a0states:<\/p>\n

          While for Hans Reichenbach\u00a0or Bertrand Russell\u00a0or Ernest Nagel, there was a commitment to clarity in the service of a scientific world-perspective, for post-positivist analytic philosophers, there is no clear rationale for their clarifications:\u00a0\u00a0there is no philosophical knowledge to be gained, no demarcation of science from metaphysics or ideology to be drawn, no systematic representation of our concepts to be constructed or critique of our society to be made.\u00a0\u00a0Post-positivist analytic philosophers afford us no hope of the gaining of a framework from which such a critique could be carried out.\u00a0\u00a0There is no clear conception of what the demand for clarity should come to.[18]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

          Similarly, in an essay entitled “The Demise of the Demarcation problem,” Larry Lauden\u00a0writes:<\/p>\n

          \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that, for a very long time, philosophers have been regarded as the gatekeepers to the scientific estate. They are the ones who are supposed to be able to tell the difference between real science and pseudo-science. In the familiar academic scheme of things, it is specifically the theorists of knowledge and the philosophers of science who are charged with arbitrating and legitimating the claims of any sect to “scientific” status. It is small wonder, under the circumstances, that the question of the nature of science has loomed so large in Western philosophy. From Plato to Popper, philosophers have sought to identify those epistemic features which mark off science from other sorts of belief and activity.<\/p>\n

          \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Nonetheless, it seems pretty clear that philosophy has largely failed to deliver the relevant goods. Whatever the specific strengths and deficiencies of the numerous well-known efforts at demarcation . . . . , it is probably fair to say that there is no demarcation line between science and non-science, or between science and pseudo-science, which would win assent from a majority of philosophers. Nor is there one which should win acceptance from philosophers or anyone else . . . .[19]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

          \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The failure of naturalistic empiricism to establish a line of demarcation between science and religion is a failure of the central claim of naturalistic empiricism, that sense experience can account for all knowledge.\u00a0 There is an unavoidable theoretical, non-empirical aspect of all knowledge claims.\u00a0\u00a0 Determining the origin of those mental concepts and how they can relate to and govern the functioning of the material world is the key to a sound philosophical account of knowledge.<\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

          Kuhn and Scientific Paradigms<\/em><\/p>\n

          Adding to the case against naturalistic empiricism, Thomas Kuhn\u00a0wrote a famous book in 1962 called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/em>.\u00a0 Kuhn argued that science has not progressed merely by the discovery of more and more new facts, nor can it, contrary to the expectations of the naturalistic empiricists.\u00a0 Science looks like a mere accumulation of new facts under \u201cnormal science,\u201d when a scientific discipline has an accepted paradigm that appears to be working.\u00a0\u00a0 But anomalies that cannot be explained in terms of the accepted paradigm can build up.\u00a0 They are either ignored or regarded by the establishment as puzzles to be solved within the rules of the paradigm, at least until there are so many anomalies that the scientists acknowledge that there is a crisis.\u00a0 Scientific revolutions occur when someone tries to account for the anomalies by thinking of a new way of looking at the world, a new paradigm that can change the meaning of the facts already discovered and sets new rules about how to discover more facts.\u00a0 This happened in physics when the Aristotelian\u00a0view that bodies come to rest because of a principle of coming to rest that resides within bodies was replaced by the Newtonian\u00a0view that gravitational forces act on bodies.\u00a0 And the Newtonian view was later replaced by the Einsteinian\u00a0view of curved space.\u00a0 Often the younger scientists who have not invested their careers in the old paradigm have to replace the old guard before the new paradigm becomes the new normal science.\u00a0 As physicist Max Planck purportedly said, science advances one funeral at a time.<\/p>\n

          Paradigms are global visions of how the world works, and might not, especially initially, explain all the facts better.\u00a0 A new paradigm is sometimes accepted by scientists because it appears to promise better solutions to the crises with more research in the future. [20]<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Kuhn\u00a0says that this was initially true in regard to those who endorsed the Copernican Theory over the Ptolemaic Theory.[21]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 As I will discuss later, Galileo promoted the Copernican\u00a0Theory without providing substantial evidence for it.<\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

          Wittgenstein, Atomism, and Universals<\/em><\/p>\n

          Russell\u2019s\u00a0prize student, Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote a celebrated defense of atomistic empiricism in his treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus<\/em>.\u00a0 But then he reconsidered what he had written and decided that atomistic empiricism did not necessarily clear up language.\u00a0 The meaning of language can\u2019t be defined with logical precision.\u00a0 Language is much more ambiguous and a product of the flux of human life in all the various human communities. To ask what are the parts of something can have various answers depending on the intent of the question.\u00a0 Are the parts of the tree the branches, or the molecules?\u00a0 \u201cTo the philosophical question: \u2018Is the visual image of this tree composite, and what are its component parts?\u2019 the correct answer is:\u00a0 \u2018That depends on what you understand by \u201ccomposite\u201d.\u2019 (And that is of course not an answer but a rejection of the question.)\u201d[22]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Wittgenstein pointed out that the same word is often used in many different ways; therefore, the atomistic empiricists\u00a0were mistaken to think that a word should always stand for one, simple object.<\/p>\n

          Wittgenstein thought that he had \u201cdissolved\u201d the problem of universals by the observation that the same word can be used in different ways.\u00a0 But as long as there are similarities in the ways that we use a word, \u201cfamily resemblances\u201d as he called them to avoid the atomistic view of language, we are still dealing with universals.\u00a0 To quote Nietzsche\u00a0again, \u201cI am afraid we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar.\u201d \u00a0Out of all the similarities between different things in the world, we can pick a certain similarity or group of similarities and attach a word to them, but there will always be other sets of similarities that we could choose to attach the same word to.\u00a0 This gives language a quality of arbitrariness, but it does not dissolve into the chaos of unrelated particulars, which would be a place where humans could never learn to use language because the future would never resemble the past.\u00a0 If nothing were similar, a particular word could never describe more than one object, and every object would have only a momentary existence before it became another object in the flux of experience.\u00a0\u00a0 Humans can invent words and learn to apply them because there is an objective unity to the world, about which humans, being made in the image of God, can communicate with each other using the words that they invent.<\/p>\n

          Wittgenstein\u00a0urged rejecting specialized philosophical lingo in favor of ordinary language.\u00a0 But is that going to solve all philosophical problems?\u00a0 Is ordinary language perfect? \u2013 all the different languages of all the different cultures that all the people in all the world and throughout time have used in ordinary life?\u00a0 Since some cultures believe things that contradict what other cultures believe, making ordinary language the ultimate standard of truth would mean that contradictions are true.\u00a0 That is the end of philosophy, the end of any refinement towards greater accuracy of thinking.\u00a0 And while Wittgenstein is anti-metaphysical, his appeal to ordinary language can\u2019t exclude those who talk of God and angels and souls in their ordinary speech.\u00a0 Wittgenstein wanted to reform philosophy, but his approach is self-destructive.\u00a0 He wanted to \u201clet the fly out of the fly bottle\u201d of \u201cartificial\u201d language; but he could not help but speak from his own fly bottle, behind his own pair of glasses that interpret the world, using the words of his own language-game to critique other language games.\u00a0 His philosophy is radically anti-metaphysical, so he has no way to say that he has found an absolute truth, a universal that transcends the particular language games to allow knowledge of an objective, common world.\u00a0 Like atheist worldviews in general, he is stuck with the self-refuting claim that the truth is that there is no truth.\u00a0 Everyone is playing a language-game with no reality behind the game, including Wittgenstein.\u00a0 His goal was a philosophy \u201cthat is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question,\u201d[23]<\/sup><\/a> but he failed to do that.[24]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Wittgenstein\u00a0is right that we cannot get outside of language to describe language and the world, but there is still an objective world beyond what human language may describe because the world is created by a linguistic God, the Word, the Logos, who created the world with a rational structure through speech (Gen. 1; John 1:1-3).[25]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

          Secularism Undermines Objective Factuality<\/em><\/p>\n

          The recognition of the truth that all facts are interpreted facts by secularist postmodernists only highlighted their inability to account for science.\u00a0\u00a0Any interpretation of facts developed by autonomous, finite minds (assuming such minds could arise from the ultimately non-rational in the first place) would be completely arbitrary.\u00a0\u00a0The discovery of a new fact could never be an indication of what is true about the world.\u00a0 On the basis of human autonomy, whether based on empiricism or rationalism or some combination of the two, any regularity of nature that a scientist might conceive has no better standing than any ancient mythology.\u00a0\u00a0The autonomous human mind can provide no\u00a0Archimedean fulcrum,\u00a0no\u00a0absolute that\u00a0ought<\/em>\u00a0to be central in the web of belief and serve as a judge over other beliefs.\u00a0\u00a0With anyone\u2019s web of belief\u00a0being as good as anyone else\u2019s, there is no basis for distinguishing between the beliefs of a person who is insane and the beliefs of a tenured college professor, much less make a distinction between religious beliefs and scientific beliefs.\u00a0\u00a0Once again, an ultimate commitment to isolated particulars has excluded universals, resulting in the very possibility of science being undermined.<\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

          Creationism is Scientific\/Science Depends on Metaphysics<\/em><\/p>\n

          When evolutionists claim that creationism\u00a0doesn\u2019t count as science because its claims are not empirically verifiable, they are committing two logical fallacies:\u00a0 begging the question of naturalism and making a self-refuting statement.\u00a0 In terms of begging the question of naturalism, they are excluding evidence for supernatural creation by definition, before they look at the evidence.\u00a0\u00a0 Naturalism is a lens through which they interpret the evidence.\u00a0 Yet to have an interpretive lens rather than just look at the facts is anti-naturalistic.\u00a0 Thus the claim is also self-refuting.\u00a0 From this we can conclude that the naturalistic lens is a false one, a lens that distorts the world rather than clarifying it.\u00a0 \u201cThe sinner has cemented colored glasses to his eyes which he cannot remove. And all is yellow to the jaundiced eye.\u201d[26]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 As I will explain, Christians have a basis for saying that they know the Truth even though all facts are interpreted facts; Christians can say that they have the true interpretation.\u00a0 Christians are able to acknowledge an interpretive lens without being self-refuting in the context of the epistemology and metaphysics of their worldview.<\/p>\n

          Since it is impossible to empirically test all of one\u2019s beliefs, or even one\u2019s most important beliefs about the world, atheist scientists are being philosophically na\u00efve and self-refuting when they claim that only scientifically testable beliefs are rational.\u00a0 Science requires empirically<\/em>\u00a0untestable beliefs as a precondition for doing empirical science.<\/em>\u00a0 Science depends on rational categories, like rules of logic and mathematics, in order to evaluate sense impressions.\u00a0 Scientists do not test for the uniformity of natural law.\u00a0 They assume it in order to conduct experiments.\u00a0 Even atheist scientists \u201cwalk by faith and not by sight\u201d (2 Cor. 5:7) when they assume that future will be like the past since they have never seen the future.\u00a0 The assumption of the existence of God, especially if it supports the scientific enterprise, is no less rational than the assumption of the uniformity of nature.<\/p>\n

          Early twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead\u00a0pointed out that scientists that adhere to Hume\u2019s naturalistic empiricism despite its failure to account for knowledge are making a blind leap of faith<\/em> that science is rational:<\/p>\n

          For we shall find that since the time of Hume, the fashionable scientific philosophy has been such as to deny the rationality of science. This conclusion lies upon the surface of Hume’s philosophy. . . .\u00a0 If the cause in itself discloses no information as to the effect, so that the first invention of it must be entirely<\/em> arbitrary, it follows at once that science is impossible, except in the sense of establishing entirely arbitrary<\/em> connections which are not warranted by anything intrinsic to the natures either of causes or effects. Some variant of Hume’s philosophy has generally prevailed among men of science.\u00a0 But scientific faith has risen to the occasion, and has tacitly removed the philosophic mountain.[27]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

          Science among atheists can continue so long as atheists don\u2019t take their atheism too seriously.\u00a0 If their actions were logically consistent with their atheist philosophy, they would stop doing science.\u00a0 A more thoroughly secular society would be a society where science dies, and eventually civilization as well.\u00a0 Again, quoting Whitehead:<\/p>\n

          In the first place, there can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things<\/em>, and, in particular, an Order of Nature<\/em>. I have used the word instinctive<\/em> advisedly. It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts. But until this has occurred, words do not count.[28]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

          Thank God that, for now, the instinct remains (a remnant, as we\u2019ll see, of the influence of Christianity on western civilization) and the secularists\u2019 words do not count as much as they could.\u00a0 They are not yet fully epistemologically self-conscious.<\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

          Justifying Induction in the Twentieth Century<\/em><\/p>\n

          The empiricist philosophers in the twentieth century failed make any headway finding a solution to Hume\u2019s problem of induction, that there is a universal law of cause and effect.\u00a0 Bertrand Russell admits as much.[29]<\/a><\/p>\n

          Karl Popper opens his book, Objective Knowledge<\/em>, with the claim that \u201cI may be mistaken; but I think that I have solved a major philosophical problem: the problem of induction.\u201d[30]<\/a>\u00a0 But it turns out that he is not talking about the same problem.\u00a0 He says that a prediction can found to be false<\/em> by present or past observations.\u00a0 But he acknowledges that no reason can be given for affirming that a scientific theory is true<\/em> or probably true<\/em> by present or past observations.<\/p>\n

          Frederick L. Will argues that inductive inference is justified because we are constantly confirming that instances that were future<\/em> resemble instances prior to those instances.\u00a0 In this sense, the future is observable.[31]<\/a>\u00a0 But it misses the point of Hume\u2019s objection, that we don\u2019t have an empirical basis for knowing that the future will be like the past prior to the future becoming the present or past.<\/p>\n

          Some have offered a pragmatic justification of induction:\u00a0 if induction turns out to be true, we will have some chance of success to assume that it true; but if we assume that induction is not true, we have no chance at success.[32]<\/a>\u00a0 Betting on induction being true, however, does not prove that it is true.<\/p>\n

          Others have claimed that the demand for a justification of induction is improper because conformity to inductive standards is included in what we mean by the term \u201creasonable,\u201d like when we say that a scientific theory is reasonable.\u00a0 That is, induction is a necessary, analytic truth, like saying that a triangle has three sides.\u00a0 But that the future will be like the past is contingently<\/em> true, if it is true at all; so it is not a necessary, analytic truth.\u00a0 We can\u2019t make something true simply be defining it as true.\u00a0 A group of people could define \u201cwishful thinking\u201d as reasonable, but that does not make wishful thinking true.<\/p>\n

          While the a posteriori<\/em>, the pragmatic, and the linguistic approaches to justifying induction fail, I will argue that an a priori<\/em> theistic argument is the only way to justify induction.[33]<\/a><\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

          Postmodernism and the Failure of Atheist Philosophy <\/em><\/p>\n

          Bertrand Russell rightly observes,<\/p>\n

          Hume’s philosophy, whether true or false, represents the bankruptcy of eighteenth-century reasonableness. He . . . arrives at the disastrous conclusion that from experience and observation nothing is to be learnt. There is no such thing as a rational belief:\u00a0 \u201cIf we believe that fire warms, or water refreshes, ’tis only because it costs us too much pains to think otherwise.\u201d\u00a0 We cannot help believing, but no belief can be grounded in reason. . . . Subsequent British empiricists rejected his scepticism without refuting it. . . .\u00a0 The growth of unreason throughout the nineteenth century and what has passed of the twentieth is a natural sequel to Hume’s destruction of empiricism.[34]<\/a><\/p>\n

          Ironically, Hume\u2019s naturalistic, empiricist view of the world and human knowledge was shown to be a failure by Hume, yet naturalistic empiricism has become the reigning paradigm of rationality since Hume.\u00a0\u00a0 The history of epistemology since Hume has been a series of failed attempts to explain how scientific knowledge is possible without God, all the while boastfully equating godless knowledge with science.\u00a0 It\u2019s a charade, and it\u2019s time for Enlightenment philosophy to be called out for the fraud that it is, for the good of science.<\/p>\n

          Because of the failure of modern philosophers to make sense of the world, Richard Rorty\u00a0has called for a post-philosophical era, particularly in regard to the issue of epistemology \u2013 how we can have knowledge.[35]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 He says that since philosophers have failed to explain how we can have knowledge, the question shouldn\u2019t be asked anymore.\u00a0 Yet, Rorty acknowledges that philosophers are supposed to provide the first principles that \u201cgive direction to the whole movement of human thought.\u201d[36]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Rorty\u2019s suggestion, then, leaves apologists for atheistic science with nothing \u2013 no way to defend \u201cscience\u201d (as they define it) against any rivals or detractors.\u00a0 Since the modern philosophy department is largely the philosophic apologetics headquarters for the atheistic, materialistic worldview, the whole atheist program for how to shape the world is in trouble.\u00a0 The atheist foundation is sand, so the whole edifice built on it must eventually crumble.<\/p>\n

          Postmodernist\u00a0philosophers don\u2019t see everything else crumbling with the end of philosophy because they still hold that there must be some truth to the scientism that has been so productive during their lifetimes, even though they admit that they haven\u2019t been able to explain it.\u00a0 Rorty expresses his loyalty to the science\/religion distinction even while saying there is no rational argument that can prove it:<\/p>\n

          We are heirs of three hundred years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing sharply between science and religion, science and politics, science and art, science and philosophy, and so on. . . .\u00a0 We are fortunate that no little perplexity within epistemology, or within historiography of science, is enough to defeat it.\u00a0 But to proclaim our loyalty to these distinctions is not to say that there are \u201cobjective\u201d and \u201crational\u201d standards for adopting them.[37]<\/a><\/p>\n

          Rorty\u00a0and the other postmodernists realize that their idea of historical progress as the increasing reliance on naturalistic science depends on their discredited distinction between the objectivity of scientific facts and the subjectivity of metaphysical belief.\u00a0 But, like Rorty, who was taught Marxism\u00a0at his mother\u2019s knee, they still seem to assume, or desperately hope, that Christianity\u2019s loss of influence and secularism\u2019s gain in influence during the twentieth century was some sort of Hegelian\/Marxist\/Darwinist inevitable progress of history toward greater enlightenment, despite mistakes along the way.\u00a0 Their acknowledged philosophical failure to account for scientific knowledge in terms of their naturalistic worldview means that they should know better.\u00a0 They tenaciously and irrationally hold on to their secular faith.\u00a0 Rorty says that he considered a theistic solution, but the secular inertia of his life was too strong to redirect it:<\/p>\n

          As I tried to figure out what had gone wrong, I gradually decided that the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had been a mistake that a pursuit of such a vision had been precisely what led Plato\u00a0astray.\u00a0 More specifically, I decided that only religion \u2013 only a non-argumentative faith in a surrogate parent who, unlike any real parent, embodied love, power, and justice in equal measure \u2013 could do the trick Plato wanted done.\u00a0\u00a0Since I couldn’t imagine becoming religious, and indeed had gotten more and more raucously secularist, I decided that the hope of achieving a single vision by becoming a philosopher had been a self-deceptive atheist’s way out.[38]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

          The raucous inertia of secular thought with only small intellectual resistance from Christianity keeps secularism dominant in current society despite its intellectual bankruptcy.<\/p>\n

          Rejecting any sort of unchanging truth, Rorty\u00a0appeals to continued conversation through the course of history as the source of and guide to progress in civilization.\u00a0 However, as Richard Bernstein\u00a0observes, Rorty simply substitutes one myth for another, \u201cthe historical myth of the given\u201d for the \u201cepistemological myth of the given.\u201d[39]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Rorty\u2019s appeal to historical conventions provides no criterion to choose one convention over others as more enlightened.\u00a0 The conversations that he values are those among political liberals like himself; but with no criterion, choosing that tradition of conversations is special pleading.\u00a0 The arbitrary preferences of Rorty\u2019s\u00a0ego are projected upon the world, and he expects the world to conform to his will to power.<\/p>\n

          Postmodern philosophers don\u2019t have the courage of their convictions to consistently follow their philosophy because it would end in the Abyss.\u00a0 They still want to be human and cling to the hope that the basic program of the Enlightenment can be rescued, justifying science in secular terms.\u00a0 Rorty holds onto a historical given as objective truth.\u00a0 Quine still clings to his belief \u201cin physical objects and not in Homer’s gods.\u201d Jacques Derrida protests, \u201cI totally refuse the label of nihilism which has been ascribed to me and my American colleagues.\u00a0 Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness towards the other.\u201d[40]<\/a>\u00a0 But the \u201cother\u201d would have to be deconstructed like any other text.\u00a0 He holds out hope for an objective other, even though his philosophy gives him no basis for hope.<\/p>\n

          Most atheists are still under the delusion of modernism.\u00a0 They have failed to recognize the philosophical bankruptcy of the ideas that undergird their understanding of science.\u00a0 Of those who have heard of the postmodern\u00a0rejection of the demarcation between science and religion and the problems with empiricism, they readily dismiss the philosophers of science.\u00a0 But they inevitably fall back to their own philosophy of science that just consists of slogans from Hume\u00a0and Popper\u00a0that have already been weighed in the balance and found wanting.\u00a0 Philosophers have already rigorously examined it, vigorously tried to defend it, but eventually had to admit that it is a failed attempt to account for science.<\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

          Hawking\u2019s Failed Epistemology<\/em><\/p>\n

          A prime example of this is the famed physicist Stephen Hawking, who claims that physics has proven that God did not create the universe.\u00a0 He declares that philosophy is dead because it has not kept up with modern science.[41]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Yet he relies on a philosophical position that is bankrupt, the epistemology of positivism,[42]<\/sup><\/a> which is unable account for scientific knowledge and which presupposes the non-existence of God.\u00a0 He admits that \u201cFrom the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, one cannot determine what is real.\u00a0 All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. . . .\u00a0 So what is real and what is imaginary?\u00a0 Is the distinction just in our minds?\u201d[43]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 But an appeal to \u201cthe universe we live in\u201d is an appeal to something real.\u00a0 And as I argued earlier with respect to Charles Darwin\u2019s positivism, this view of knowledge fails to account for mathematics and the predictability of phenomena.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Like Darwin, Hawking\u00a0tries to have a scientific claim substitute for a philosophical claim, all the while relying on a bankrupt philosophical claim, that of positivism, which determines the theological question in the negative before the scientific research begins.[44]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

          Flew\u2019s Parable of the Imaginary Gardener<\/em><\/p>\n

          Anthony Flew\u00a0wrote what has been said to be the most widely read philosophical essays of the second half of the twentieth century, called \u201cTheology and Falsification.\u201d\u00a0 He presented the paper at the Socratic Club at Oxford in 1950, and it was published in 1955 in New Essays in Philosophical Theology<\/em>.\u00a0 This was during the heyday of linguistic philosophy and its rejection of religious language as meaningless because it involves unfalsifiable claims.<\/p>\n

          In the parable, two explorers come across a clearing with flowers and weeds growing.\u00a0 One of the explorers, the Believer, says that a gardener must care for the flowers.\u00a0 But a series of empirical tests fail to produce evidence of the gardener. The Believer then claims that the gardener must be invisible and intangible.\u00a0 But his companion, the Skeptic, exclaims that there is no difference between the Believer\u2019s invisible, intangible gardener and no gardener at all.<\/p>\n

          As I have been arguing and will argue more fully in the next chapter, empiricism is a bankrupt theory of knowledge, unless God is assumed as the Creator of the world.\u00a0 The proof of God\u2019s existence is not the result of a scientific experiment but as the necessary condition for the possibility of scientific experiments. \u00a0Flew\u2019s essay assumes the failed modernist position of naturalistic empiricism.<\/p>\n

          Alvin Plantinga\u00a0revived philosophical interest in theism with his 1967 book God and Other Minds<\/em>.\u00a0 He observed that belief in God is a lot like belief in other minds.\u00a0 Empirical arguments for God and for the existence of other minds share the same strengths and weaknesses.\u00a0 Yet a person is within his epistemic rights to believe in other minds, and so he is warranted to believe in God as well. \u00a0Plantinga attacked Flew\u2019s\u00a0assumption of, as Plantinga called it, \u201cclassical foundationalism,\u201d which is that the only rationally justified beliefs are those that are self-evident, evident to the senses, or rationally incorrigible (impossible to deny).\u00a0 But many of our basic beliefs, such as our belief in other minds, that objects endure when we aren\u2019t looking at them, and that memories are reliable, cannot meet this test.\u00a0 Yet they are still rational beliefs.\u00a0 Even the small number of scientists and philosophers who deny the existence of a mind do not interact with other people as if they had no mind.\u00a0 Additionally, Plantinga pointed out that the criteria of classical foundationalism cannot meet its own standards of justification.<\/p>\n

          Plantinga went on to argue that, if God does exist, then it is reasonable that a sensus divinitatis<\/em> (the innate awareness of God) produces a basic belief in God, just as belief in other minds is a basic belief.\u00a0 As a basic belief, people are rationally warranted for believing in God even if they can\u2019t provide evidence for the belief.<\/p>\n

          While Plantinga found a number faults with the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments as traditionally stated and did not try to prove the conditional, \u201cif God exists,\u201d in his book, I will get to that in the next chapter using a transcendental argument that is different than the traditionally-stated arguments.\u00a0 This proof is in terms of God\u2019s existence being necessary for the possibility of knowledge of any fact.\u00a0 If this proof is sound, every fact of experience is proof of the existence of God.\u00a0 Rather than the Gardener being undetectable regardless of how many facts we look at, the Gardener is necessarily evident in every<\/em> fact of experience.\u00a0 No fact of experience can fail to bear God\u2019s mark of ownership.<\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

          Conclusion<\/em><\/p>\n

          Both the modernists and postmodernists fail to realize that modern science is relying on principles borrowed from their ideological enemy, Christianity.\u00a0 As Phillip Johnson\u00a0observes in respect to naturalistic science, \u201cIdolatrous programs may appear to succeed spectacularly for a while, but in the end they use up their borrowed fuel and succumb to their own inherent contradictions.\u201d[45]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 The sooner the mythology is exposed, the sooner we can get to a better, more consistently rational and scientific world.\u00a0 \u201cWhat is falling, we should still push.\u201d[46]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

          When God is denied, philosophers are forced to explain how human knowledge and reason could arise in an ultimately non-rational universe.[47]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Secularists have failed at this.\u00a0 Kant was right that bare particulars are unintelligible.\u00a0 Facts need order to be intelligible.\u00a0 All facts are interpreted facts, as postmodernists have recently emphasized again.\u00a0 Atheists who believe that there is an objectively knowable world beyond what the human mind has rationalized are borrowing from the Christian worldview.\u00a0 They are relying on a view of science and knowledge that Hume, Kant,\u00a0and the postmodernists\u00a0have shown to be impossible to rationally defend in terms of the atheist worldview.\u00a0 Not only was Kant right that bare particulars are unintelligible, he was also right that on the assumption of human autonomy and the assumption that there is something external to the human mind, bare particulars are unavoidable.\u00a0 Since all facts are interpreted facts, if the human mind is autonomous, then there are no facts until the human mind rationalizes them.\u00a0 Outside the autonomous human mind, all is irrational.\u00a0 Hegel\u00a0provided the useful concept of the \u201cconcrete universal\u201d to extend knowledge beyond Kant\u2019s solipsistic cage, but he was still basing his philosophy on human autonomy, so his philosophy does not provide a true universal and therefore doesn\u2019t overcome the problem of Kant\u2019s noumenal irrationalism.\u00a0\u00a0 In the next chapter, I will show how the idea of a concrete universal, when placed in a Christian context, provides the philosophical foundation for science.<\/p>\n

          \n

          [1]<\/a>\u00a0 Max Scheler, \u201cThe Human Being and History,\u201d Gesammelte Werke<\/em> IX, p. 120; quoted in \u201cMax Scheler,\u201d Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/em>, revised Oct. 18, 2018, https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/scheler\/<\/a>; Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos<\/em> (Cambridge, MA:\u00a0 Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 108.<\/p>\n

          [2]<\/a> \u00a0For example, Edmund Husserl, \u201cPhilosophy and the Crisis of European Man\u201d(1935).<\/p>\n

          [3]<\/a> Gordon, Continental Divide<\/em>, pp. 232-233.<\/p>\n

          [4]<\/a> \u00a0G.E. Moore, \u201cProof of an External World,\u201d G. E. Moore: Selected Writings,<\/em> T. Baldwin (ed.) (London:\u00a0 Routledge, 1993), p. 166.<\/p>\n

          [5]<\/a> \u00a0G.E. Moore, \u201cCertainty\u201d in Philosophical Papers<\/em> (London: Allen & Unwin\/Unwin Hyman, 1959).<\/p>\n

          [6]<\/a> \u00a0Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics<\/em>, p. 257.<\/p>\n

          [7]<\/a>\u00a0 For the history of verificationism and falsificationism, see Greg Bahnsen, \u201cThe Problem of Religious Language,\u201d http:\/\/www.cmfnow.com\/articles\/pa146.htm<\/a>, originally published as a series in The Biblical Worldview<\/em>\u00a0(Part I-Vol. VIII:9; Sept., 1992), (Part II-Vol. IX:1; Jan., 1993), and (Part III-Vol. IX:5; May, 1993), and republished in Greg Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith<\/em> (Atlanta, GA:\u00a0 American Vision Press, 1996), chapter 33.<\/p>\n

          [8]<\/a>\u00a0 Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes” in\u00a0Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge<\/em>, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 174-75.<\/p>\n

          [9]<\/a>\u00a0 Ibid., p. 175.<\/p>\n

          [10]<\/a>\u00a0 If either\u00a0p<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0q<\/em>\u00a0could be proven to be necessary truths, then modus tollens would have to point to the non-necessary one as the false one; but the naturalistic, empiricist worldview of modern atheism excludes absolutes like necessary truths that are not mere tautologies, which would not be the subject of empirical testing.<\/p>\n

          [11]<\/a>\u00a0 Willard Van Orman Quine,\u00a0\u201cTwo Dogmas of Empiricism,\u201d<\/a> (1951, revised 1961), http:\/\/www.ditext.com\/quine\/quine.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n

          [12]<\/a>\u00a0 Ibid.<\/p>\n

          [13]<\/a>\u00a0 Ibid.<\/p>\n

          [14]<\/a>\u00a0 Ibid.<\/p>\n

          [15]<\/a>\u00a0 Stephen Jay Gould,\u00a0“Nonoverlapping\u00a0Magisteria,”<\/a> http:\/\/www.stephenjaygould.org\/library\/gould_noma.html.<\/p>\n

          [16]<\/a>\u00a0 A.J. Ayer\u00a0\u201cThe Vienna Circle,\u201d in\u00a0The Revolution in Philosophy<\/em>, ed. Gilbert Ryle (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 86.\u00a0 See Cornelius Van Til,\u00a0Christian Theistic Evidences<\/em>\u00a0(Nutley, NJ:\u00a0\u00a0Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1978), pp. 143, 146.<\/p>\n

          [17]<\/a> \u00a0\u201cA. J. Ayer on Logical Positivism and Its Legacy,\u201d (1976), https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=nG0EWNezFl4<\/a>.<\/p>\n

          [18]<\/a>\u00a0 Kai Neilson, \u201cOn Being Skeptical About Applied Ethics,\u201d in\u00a0Clinical Medical Ethics:\u00a0\u00a0Exploration and Assessment<\/em>, Ed. Terrence F. Ackerman and Glenn C. Graber, et al. (Lanham, MD:\u00a0\u00a0University Press of America, 1987), p. 107-08.<\/p>\n

          [19]<\/a>\u00a0 Larry Lauden, “The Demise of the Demarcation problem,” in\u00a0But Is It Science?: \u00a0The Philosophical Question in the Creation\/Evolution Controversy<\/em>, Michael Ruse, ed. (Buffalo, NY: \u00a0Prometheus Books, 1988), pp. 337-38.<\/p>\n

          [20]<\/a>\u00a0 Charles Darwin\u2019s book Origin of Species<\/em> was published in 1859, and while prominent scientists opposed it, all the academic disciplines were reinterpreted according to Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution before the end of the 1870\u2019s, before there was much hard evidence for it.\u00a0 Darwin and his contemporaries didn\u2019t even know about genes, believing instead in the Lamarckian view of inheritance of acquired characteristics.\u00a0 An experiment that purported to prove natural selection was not even published until the 1950s (H.B.D. Kettlewell, “The importance of the micro-environment to evolutionary trends in the Lepidoptera,” Entomologist<\/em>, 91:214-224 [1958], and H.B.D. Kettlewell, “Darwin’s Missing Evidence,” Scientific American<\/em> 200(3):48-53 [1959], http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article.cfm?id=darwins-missing-evidence<\/a>), and that experiment contained major flaws of unnatural positioning of the variously-colored peppered moths\u00a0(Jerry Coyne, “Not Black and White”, Nature<\/em>, 396 [Nov 5, 1998], pp. 35-36; Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution:<\/em> Science or Myth?<\/em> [Washington, DC:\u00a0 Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2000).\u00a0 Darwin noted the lack of transitional fossils discovered in the geological record in his time and admitted that it \u201cis the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.\u201d\u00a0 He blamed the problem on the \u201cextreme imperfection of the fossil record\u201d (Darwin,\u00a0Origin of Species<\/em>, 6th edition, 1872 [London: John Murray, 1902], p. 413, available at http:\/\/literature.org\/authors\/darwin-charles\/the-origin-of-species\/chapter-09.html).\u00a0 Darwin\u2019s followers had faith<\/em> that more digging would remedy that evidential problem.\u00a0 At least in regard to pre-Cambrian life, even many evolutionists have admitted that the evidence is simply not there, as documented by Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design<\/em> (Harper One, 2013) (also see www.darwinsdilemma.org\/<\/a>).\u00a0 To cite one pro-evolution admission: \u201cEven if bilaterians were tiny in the Precambrian, they would be capable of being preserved in the microfossil record, suggesting that their absence is real\u201d (Maximilian Telford, Graham Budd, and Herv\u00e9 Philippe, “Phylogenetic Insights into Animal Evolution,” Current Biology<\/em>, Volume 25, Issue 19, 5 October 2015, pages R876\u2013R887).<\/p>\n

          [21]<\/a>\u00a0 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/em> (Chicago:\u00a0 The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 76, 154, 157-58.<\/p>\n

          [22]<\/a>\u00a0 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations<\/em>, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1958), \u00a7 47.<\/p>\n

          [23]<\/a>\u00a0 Ludwig Wittgentstien, Philosophical Investigations<\/em>, \u00a7 133.<\/p>\n

          [24]<\/a>\u00a0 See Greg Bahnsen\u2019s critique of Wittgenstein in \u201cPragmatism, Prejudice, and Presuppositionalism,\u201d\u00a0in Foundations of Christian Scholarship<\/em>.<\/p>\n

          [25]<\/a>\u00a0 For more on God and universals, see Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til\u2019s Apologetic:\u00a0 Readings and Analysis<\/em> (Phillipsburg, NJ:\u00a0 Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1998), pp. 235-41.<\/p>\n

          [26]<\/sup><\/a> Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith<\/em> (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Philadelphia, 1955), Ch. 5, 1.<\/p>\n

          [27]<\/a>\u00a0 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World<\/em> (New York: The Free Press, 1997), p. 4.<\/p>\n

          [28]<\/a>\u00a0 Ibid., pp. 3-4.<\/p>\n

          [29]<\/a> \u00a0Bertrand Russell, \u2018On Induction\u2019, in The Problems of Philosophy<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).\u00a0 In this section I am following the outline of James N. Anderson\u2019s \u201cSecular Responses to the Problem of Induction,\u201d www.proginosko.com\/docs\/induction.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n

          [30]<\/a> \u00a0Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach<\/em> (Oxford: Clarendon Press, rev. ed., 1979), p. 1.<\/p>\n

          [31]<\/a> \u00a0Frederick L. Wills, \u2018Will the Future Be Like the Past?\u2019, in Antony Flew (ed.), Logic and Language: Second Series<\/em> (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), pp. 32-50.<\/p>\n

          [32]<\/a>\u00a0 Wesley Salmon, \u2018The Pragmatic Justification of Induction\u2019, in Richard Swinburne (ed.), The Justification of Induction<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 85-97.<\/p>\n

          [33]<\/a> \u00a0As James N. Anderson\u00a0suggests in his \u201cSecular Responses to the Problem of Induction.\u201d<\/p>\n

          [34]<\/a> \u00a0Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day<\/em> (New York:\u00a0 Simon and Schuster, 1945), pp. 672-73.<\/p>\n

          [35]<\/a>\u00a0 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature<\/em> (Princeton, NJ:\u00a0 Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 209-12, 357ff.<\/p>\n

          [36]<\/a> Richard Rorty, \u201cThe Philosopher as Expert,\u201d in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature<\/em>, p. 395.<\/p>\n

          [37]<\/a>\u00a0 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature<\/em>, pp. 330-31.<\/p>\n

          [38]<\/a> Richard Rorty, \u201cWild Orchids and Trotsky\u201d in Wild Orchids and Trotsky:\u00a0 Messages from American Universities<\/em>, Mark Edmundson, ed. (New York, NY:\u00a0 Penguin Books, 1993), p. 41.<\/p>\n

          [39]<\/a>\u00a0 Richard J. Bernstein, \u201cOne Step Forward, Two Steps Backward:\u00a0 Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,\u201d Political Theory<\/em> 15 (Nov. 1987), pp. 538-63.\u00a0 Also see John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism:\u00a0 Modernism and the Crises of Knowledge and Authority<\/em> (Chicago:\u00a0 University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 450-62.<\/p>\n

          [40]<\/a> \u00a0Quoted in Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers<\/em> (Manchester:\u00a0 University Press, 1984), p.124.<\/p>\n

          [41]<\/a>\u00a0 Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design<\/em> (New York, NY:\u00a0 Random House Publishing Group, 2010), p. 5.<\/p>\n

          [42]<\/a>\u00a0 Stephen W. Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell<\/em> (New York, NY:\u00a0 Bantam Books, 2001), p. 31.<\/p>\n

          [43]<\/a>\u00a0 Ibid., p. 59.<\/p>\n

          [44]<\/a> On Hawking\u2019s appeal to imaginary time in order to deny a beginning to the universe being a metaphysical appeal, see William Lane Craig, \u201cThe Ultimate Question of Origins: God and the Beginning of the Universe,\u201d Astrophysics and Space Science<\/em>\u00a0269-270 (1999): 723-740, http:\/\/www.reasonablefaith.org\/the-ultimate-question-of-origins-god-and-the-beginning-of-the-universe<\/a>,<\/p>\n

          [45]<\/a>\u00a0 Phillip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth:\u00a0 Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism<\/em> (Downers Grove, IL:\u00a0 Intervarsity Press, 2000), p. 38.<\/p>\n

          [46]<\/a>\u00a0 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em>, Part Three, \u201cOne Old and New Tables,\u201d \u00a720.<\/p>\n

          [47]<\/a>\u00a0 It\u2019s essentially the reverse of the problem of evil (which I address more fully in the second section of the book).\u00a0 The theistic problem of \u201cIf God is all good, how could evil arise?\u201d is parallel to the atheist problem of \u201cIf the universe is ultimately non-rational, how could rationality arise?\u201d\u00a0 Christians can rationally appeal to mystery where they can\u2019t explain everything because they are appealing to the absolute rationality of God, but atheists don\u2019t have that prerogative because there is no mind higher than the human mind in their worldview.\u00a0 They would be appealing to the non-rational to appeal to mystery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          Materialism and the Crisis of Meaningful Existence The beginning of the twentieth century was the best of times and the worst of times for atheism.\u00a0 Science was making stupendous discoveries and technological advances faster than any time in history, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":504,"href":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions\/504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianciv.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}