My wife and I watched a documentary on Netflix the other night about these three great German thinkers who have shaped the modern world in innumerable ways, most of them harmful. I couldn’t help thinking as I watched about the great divide in human existence between God revealing himself and Truth to us, and human speculation. It’s one or the other, my friends. Without seeking and accepting the former, the latter is all we have. When I was much younger a cultural phenomenon called the Rubik’s Cube was all the rage. It’s a 3-D puzzle that is very difficult to solve, but it is solvable. Reality without revelation is not, a completely unsolvable Rubik’s Cube.
Critics of Christianity love to point out that there are so many denominations, and that Christians disagree about all kinds of things, so it obviously can’t be the Truth about the nature of reality. But Christianity is an absolute monolith when you compare it to the history of philosophy. Those thinkers disagree about pretty much everything. You have your Atomists, Platonists, Sophists, Aristotelians, Skeptics, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Neo-Platonists, Gnostics, Manicheans, Nominalists, Cartesians, Idealists, Kantians, Hegalians, Realists, Empiricists, Materialists, Romantics, Marxists, Aesthetes, Logical Positivists, Nihilists, and one could go on. Plus every school of thought has its subsets who disagree on everything in ever more minute degrees. And that’s only Western philosophy!
This isn’t to say that some of these thinkers didn’t capture some profound truths about the nature of reality, but all of their efforts put together are as feeble as a blindfolded child whacking away at a pinata, but often much more destructive. And Christians are the ones who should be on the defensive about our what turn out to be petty disagreements? All orthodox Christians agree that the Nicene Creed is the fundamental statement about the basic truths of the Christian faith. Nothing comes close to such agreement for those who reject it.
For Christians revelation comes to human beings in creation, Scripture, and ultimately in Christ in whom it all makes sense, the good, the bad, and the ugly. From the beginning of recorded history thinkers have tried to make sense of the messy, painful, and often tragic reality human beings inhabit. The problem is that without revelation, without the one who created reality breaking in to tell us what it’s all about, it will never make sense. Any reading of the history of philosophy makes this abundantly clear. These German thinkers are perfect examples, products of their times, all coming after the anti-supernatural foundation of the Enlightenment had been laid, and the Darwinian creation myth accepted as unassailable truth. Without God, and revelation, they saw it as their job to tell us what reality was all about. Good luck with that.
Karl Marx’s (1818-1882) bailiwick was economics (with a large dose of Hegel and dialectical materialism), and his insights such as they were gave us Soviet communism among other things, and north of one hundred million(!) needless deaths in the 20th century. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the first honest atheist in history, bequeathed to Western culture Nihilism because God is dead, and all you have left is “the will to power.” Hitler was a big fan. He was also the father of postmodernism which denies objective truth is possible, and has become the reigning worldview of Western, secular cultural elites. And the last of our three, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), gave us psychoanalysis, and opened the door to the cultural sexual obsession we live with every day. Without Freud the sexual revolution of the 1960s may have never happened, along with the fruit of that rotten tree, including 60 million abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, depression, and suicide.
The late Christopher Hitchens wrote a book that “religion poisons everything.” He had that tragically backward. I would put the record of Christianity, the favorite target of Hitchens, up against the record of our trinity of atheist thinkers anytime. Revelation in creation, Scripture, and Christ gave Western civilization, schools, hospitals, science, the concepts of human dignity, human rights, and liberty, capitalism, and America itself. Philosophical speculation gave us Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and we see how that worked out. It’s one or the other.
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