Lecture Series: Lecture 9: Key Terms in Philosophy

We reserve this lecture to discuss certain fundamental terms in philosophy, and perhaps to review some we have already discussed.

1. Epistemology: The study of sources of knowledge. The controlling question of epistemology is, "How do you know what you know?"

A philosopher friend of mine has a bumper sticker that asks, "Are you epistemologically self-aware?" While this is about as nerdy as it gets, the question is absolutely essential. And the answer of most people is a resounding No!

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that one's epistemology may be the single most important aspect of a philosophy of life.

Dr. Noebel in his fine work has cited six primary sources of knowledge. They are experience, reason, intuition, culture, witness and revelation.

It is worth asking yourself how you came to believe what you believe. To simplify all of this, consider why you are Christian (assuming you are)? How do you know Christianity is true? It seems to me this is so fundamental a question that it can be asked of nearly any religious, historical, political or social perspective. If someone says, for example, that I ought to "save the whales," then my question ought to be, "Who says?" "On whose authority?" "How do I know it is right to save the whales?" Asking this simple question reveals a person's epistemological sources and whether or not I should accept them.

When considering the three major worldviews, we see that each has different, even opposing, epistemologies.

In Pantheism (the belief that all things are god or are animated by god), it is clear that certain sources of knowledge cannot be trusted. The senses, for example, are notoriously deceptive, and so we must detach from our limited perceptions of the world. Human reason is likewise often deceptive and confining. The source of knowledge prized most by pantheists is direct mystical encounter (a form of subjective revelation... often referred to as intuition).

In Atheism (the belief that there is no God and no spiritual dimension), an opposite epistemology to pantheism emerges as prominent. Atheists are proud of being scientifically minded people, controlled by the precautions of reason, logic and evidence. Atheists would universally discount any divine revelation, either mystical or propositional (written in books). They would also highly doubt intuition as any relevant source of truth.

Christians, unlike both atheists and pantheists, want to recognize the contribution of each of the six sources listed above. There is a place in Christianity for the mystical and subjective, as well as for the rational and objective. The best Christians have maintained that there will be no conflict in Christianity between the discoveries of reason and science and the discoveries of the spiritual life. The two are distinguishable domains with their necessary tasks, but they are not opposed to one another. When there is conflict between them, it is usually because there has been an error with respect either to our observations or our passions. No Christian would suggest, however, that because it is difficult to align the spiritual and the physical, one or the other must not exist.

2. Cosmology: The study of the universe and its causal relations. The controlling question of epistemology is, "How is there something?" "How did everything begin?"

And again each worldview answers this question according to its first principles.

Atheists would say that the universe is self-generating. The big bang must have banged on its own, somehow. Most atheists today maintain that the universe was finite in the past but came into existence of its own accord. One physicist, named Victor Stenger, claims that the big bang must have been something like the particles generated in nuclear decay--that is, they seem to come out of nowhere.

Pantheists are not really interested in mechanistic explanations of the universe. They don't care about tracing causal connections between events back to a first cause. And the reason for this is that their philosophy precludes any meaning to the notion of a "beginning" to the existence of the world. If the world is indistinguishable from man and all other entities in creation, and all of it is God, then certainly it would be foolish to look for a beginning to "God." Everything simple is!

Christians believe there is rational order to the universe, and that everything is knit together by the principle of causality. As such, we can trace causation back to an absolute beginning to time. This of course is where the Cosmological argument takes over (see article on the various arguments for God's existence) and explains that it is reasonable to conclude that all of time and space began to exist as a result of God's creative act.

3. Ontology: The study of reality. We also referred to this as "Metaphysics." Both touch on a philosopher's understanding of reality. The controlling question here is, "What is real?"

Atheists would answer that matter alone is real. This is a position called "materialistic monism." Monism simply means "one substance." In this case, the only substance that exists is matter. Matter may be configured in various ways, but everything we find in the universe is reducible to various forms of the composite parts of the universe. And the only reason matter is constructed in the ways we now see it reduces to "luck." Even natural laws and their various values (such as the strength of gravity) are accidental and not essential features of nature. The only essential, apparently, is the "stuff" of the universe itself.

Pantheists assert precisely the opposite position to atheists on the question of ontology. Their position is often referred to as "spiritual monism." Here the only substance in the universe is spirit, or God. Any beliefs about particular expressions of matter are karmic illusions. Through various spiritual practices, one can be led to abandon one's belief in the dizzying multiplicity of perceived material things. One will be able to see that everything is already dissolved into an ocean of interrelated spiritual unity.

Christians maintain the age old philosophy of dualism, which means that there is a dynamic tension between the spiritual and the physical. Both exist and can be distinguished, but they cannot be wholly separated. The spiritual and the physical are intertwined. Plato also believed in this dualism, except without using explicitly Christian categories. He believed that there was a realm of perfect and changeless spiritual entities, known as the forms. And there was also the realm of the material world, which is a kind of shadow of the ideal world. Christians can certainly agree with Plato to some extent, but there also exists several serious points of disagreement. For example, Plato suggests that the reason we know about this realm of spirit is because our spirits were once happily enthroned in the realm of the forms, but they were unfortunately imprisoned within bodies and have since been yearning for escape back into the realm of the forms. Christianity on the other hand claims that God made us in His image, and has in various ways revealed His good character, causing us to yearn again for perfection.

4. Ethics: The study of human behavior. The controlling question is, "What ought mankind to do?" "How should we behave and how do you know?"

Ultimately both Pantheism and Atheism reduce to relativism, but the routes by which they travel to this end differ.

In atheism, one must ultimately assume that authority in ethics comes from our nature, which is the product of a mindless, purposeless process. And of course ethics appears to be a deliberate precondition for ordered and optimal human conduct. But it must be clear that any system of ethics based on the authority of an accidental phenomenon must itself be accidental. Thus human beings are perfectly within their natural rights to reject the imperatives dictated by a random and unreliable process. This is a simple logical path really. If ethics is derived from our nature, which is itself derived from a wholly mindless process, then we can of course question and disobey it. Certainly there is nothing "outside" of nature to enforce it. If it is not objective, then it is subjective, or open to discussion and disagreement. If it is subjective, then it is by definition relative.

Pantheists arrive at relativism through a different route. Since their view of reality suggests that everything in the universe is an expression of the divine, then of course one has to wonder if war, serial killers and disease are also expressions of the divine. A strict pantheist would have to admit that these so called "evils" are necessary to understand the multifaceted beauty of the divine. How can one appreciate health unless there is disease, they might ask. Perhaps there would be no context for generosity if there was no such thing as greed. Evil and good are interdependent realities. Since this is true, then the only "evil" in the universe is one's insistance on calling anything evil. To do so is to hold the universe at arms length in an effort to define oneself over against the universe as superior to it in some way.

The way the Stoics put this was to imagine a mighty river. This river is good and its outcome is good, but people begin to believe there is evil in the river when they focus too much on particular points within the river. For example, a soldier who dies unjustly in battle may have a short and miserable life, but he has given his life for the greater good. If his focus, or the focus of his family, rests too much on his individual suffering and not on the good produced from it, then they will only bring greater suffering on themselves. Thus in the end there is no real "evil" in the river of nature or in the flow of nature. There is only the belief that there is real evil. If people can learn to see the "big picture," then they will come to accept their own suffering as necessary to bring about the good of the whole.

The problem here is that this process is wholly subjective. In the Bhagava Gita, there is a story of a young prince, named Arjuna, who must decide whether or not he will kill some rivals to his throne. Krishna, an Avatar of Brahman (the pantheistic notion of God in Hinduism), tells Arjuna that he shoud do what he will do, but to do so in a spirit of detachment. And if he can do that, he can "slay thousands and be no slayer--" meaning he can murder and not "feel" guilty because he is merely participating with the flow of nature, so to speak. Of course one is led to wonder whether Arjuna could have forgiven these rivals to the throne also in a spirit of detachment, so that even if they killed him he would be "murdered and yet be no victim." Thus, in Pantheism, ethics reduces to the subjectivity of one's "internal" state alone. One can presumably do the most heinous crimes but do so in a spirit of internal detachment. In the end, there is no right or wrong action; only right or wrong "intentions."

5. Theology: The study of the question of God. The controlling questions are two: "Is there a God." And "If there is a God, what is He/It like?"

The atheist of course believes there is no God or gods. This is a conviction for the atheist, even though fair atheists will affirm they cannot prove it. It is a belief, presumably drawn from the best evidence. Since there is no God, there is no ultimate being that will take care of everything in the end. We are on our own to make of the world whatever we will.

The pantheist claims that God is not an anthropomorphic projection of our psychological yearnings, but it rather the sum of everything in the universe. God and the universe are indistinguishable. Some would say that God is "in" everything in the universe, in much the same way we think our soul is "in" our bodies. This is sometimes referred to as the "Gaia" hypothesis, or "panentheism." If this is true, the the goal of life is not to "relate" to God as something external to oneself, but rather to come to recognize one's own innate divinity. Jesus, Buddha, even Muhammad, are all really just guides, who come to help us experience our own long denied divinity.

The Christians claim that there is an all-powerful, all-good, all-loving being behind the universe, or above it, or beyond it. God has created beings "like" himself, but they are distinguishable from Him. He is God and we are not! God, as a distinct being in the universe, can be misunderstood and slandered in various ways. He has set forth a clear statement of who He is and what He is up to through Holy Writ.

6. Anthropology: The study of man and his moral nature. The controlling questions here are also two: "What is man?" And, "What is his moral nature?"

Atheists believe that man is nothing more than a fortuitous biochemical accident. In the end, there can be no meaningful assertion of man's dignity apart from his particular collection of abilities--namely, he is smart enough to dominate the planet. But this does nothing to ensure that he is, was, or will ever be, the most important being that has existed in the universe. It is at least conceivable that another creature exists in the universe, whose intelligence is as far above our own as ours is above cattle. And it would therefore be equally plausible to suggest that such a being would have the same right to do with us what we do with cattle.

For the atheist, man's moral nature must be, on balance, an irrelevant question. Even if one could argue that evolution has hard wired us with a kind of moral law, why would anyone be compelled to obey it, since this "law" is itself the product of a wholly random process? Why not simply conclude that the sociopath (the man without a conscience) is at least possibly the most evolved being? What can "most evolved" even mean in a purposeless universe governed by nothing?

The pantheist would suggest that man is divine. His problem is that he is not aware of his divinity, and thus he must go through a process of enlightenment, either through reincarnation or various spiritual practices now. The lovely sentiment of pantheism is that everyone is, or will be, "saved"--that is, all will be absorbed into the universal some day.

This means that man's moral nature can only be "good." In strict terms, pantheists don't like to speak of dichotomies like "good" and "evil." This is the language of Karma, they might suggest, since the use of such terms leads to an inability to see the necessary interdependence of "good" and "evil." Pantheism at base is amoral, because the universe is amoral. It just is! One thinks that cancer is evil or that a war is evil because one can only see how such things affect one's immediate physical existence. When we see beyond such things, we can come to transcend the labels "good" and "evil."

Back to our Stoic example of the rushing river. Remember it is a good river and its outcome is good, but there may be events that take place within the river that tempt us to use the term "evil." For example, a bear might drown in the river while attempting to hunt for fish, or a man might be crushed to death while attempting to navigate its rapids. But this is to isolate a single incident in the whole life of the river and claim that such an event somehow makes the whole less good. In the same way, we are tempted to claim that "evil" takes place in nature, but when we see these events from a larger perspective, we become aware of their necessity in producing the good. A fruit fly may live a short and miserable life, but it is needed by creatures above it in the food chain.

7. History: The study of events over time. The questions here are two: "Where is history going?" And, "Why do things happen as they do?"

For the atheist, history is moving towards eventual universal heat death, in the words of famed atheist Bertrand Russell. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the destiny of the universe in atheism is a particularized junkyard of dead matter floating about in a vacuous black sea. But of course, what is happening now is not all that much more dignified. We think it is, but perhaps we are merely deceiving ourselves. If the universe is meaningless, so is everything in it. To conclude this is not a division fallacy either, simply because in some cases what is true of the whole is necessarily true of the parts. If, objectively speaking, the universe has no value, then neither does anything in the universe, just as it is also true that the whole human race is mortal and that also means that every human being is mortal. It is also reasonable to suggest that if an entire garbage heap is worthy of being rejected by man, then so is every individual thing in it. But that is what Russell has done to the universe; he has turned it into a garbage heap of mind reeling proportions.

There is a fatalistic strand in atheism, and in every worldview really, depending on what one emphasizes. The fatalism in atheism sounds something like this: Perhaps we are nothing more than the products of chemical and environmental factors outside of our control, and that these factors were set up for us by chance. We are all playing a gigantic lottery game, and some of us have been lucky while others have been unlucky. It remains only for the lucky to assert their advantage and for the unlucky to hope for the "scraps of the table" of the fortunate.

It seems to me that even if an atheist could summon an argument for free will, such an argument would be swallowed up by the sheer futility of asserting one's will timidly before the crushing pointlessness of the universe.

Pantheists maintain a cyclical view of the universe, unlike either atheists or Christians. It should be noted that the universe works in cycles only in our perceptions and not in reality. In reality, there must be only one unchanging, wholly stable reality--namely, God. What is constantly in violent flux is the individual's perceptions of this whole. And thus "he" is led through various experiences (reincarnation) so that he might ultimately give up any attachment to any one perception, or life, and then at last be set free to see the interconectedness of all things.

Pantheism as such is fatalistic--meaning, all things happen exactly as they must. Even the individual, apparently asserting his independence from the whole, is led by the whole to a place where he cannot deny his submersion into the whole. And he makes this discovery in exactly the way that "God" has planned it. There is no isolation or liberty from the "Godness in all."

Christians believe in the ultimate just outcome of the universe. God is sovereign over history, meaning He is not in any way surprised by anything that is happening in time. He is causally active at every moment of history, leading it to its ultimate outcome. History will be exactly what God predetermines it must be, and human freedom is limited by God's predetermined design. Christians deny that there is only one will in the universe and that God is the cause of evil. But all Christians also confess that God, in order to be God, must bring all things together in the end. There will be a perfect resolution to the chaos and injustice of the world as it presently stands.

8. Death: The study of life's end. The question is one: "What happens after we die?"

There are only three options in the various worldviews with respect to this question: annihilation, reincarnation and final judgment. It probably seems clear which of these fits with which worldview.

Atheists are annihilationists. All of humanity is an accident of evolution destined for annihilation. Matter is simply recycled until there is no heat energy to appropriate.

Pantheists are reincarnationists. All people eventually come to see their lives in the light of the unchanging and eternal, and at this point there is merger with the eternal.

Christians believe in final judgment and resurrection. It must be clear that the Bible teaches that all human beings are immortal creatures, not just the ones that go to heaven. Believers are "resurrected" to newness of life in God's eternal kingdom. Unbelievers are "resuscitated" in order to face the "second death." In other words, they are not given "new life," but are rather restored to their old minds, spirits and bodies, and sustained in them forever and ever.

To get a sense for this, we should look at two cases of life after death in the Bible. The one case involves Lazarus, who was simply restored to his old body and spirit after he had died, and he was left in this world only to die again. In the other case, we must consider Jesus' resurrected body as an example of a glorified body, purged of all disease and suffering. Of course, in our case, this body will also be reunited with a spirit that is wholly cleansed of any defect as well, so that there will be a perfect harmony of body and spirit.