The history of philosophy is a fascinating study, and one Christians need to be familiar with. Most Christians, however, think that philosophy is for “intellectuals,” and not something they would be interested in or could understand. Yes, much philosophy is esoteric and difficult to understand, but the basic ideas really are’t. This is important because history reveals what ideas have given us the world we inhabit, and it’s culture, in the 21st century. In other words, in the title of an influential book by Richard Weaver written in 1948, Ideas Have Consequences. To take the title one step further, and as I’ve heard numerous times from the folks at Breakpoint and the Colson Center, “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.” Many of the consequences of the ideas bequeathed to us from Western thinkers have been good, but the bad ones have been really, really bad. In fact, we live with the consequences of both every day. The bloody 20th century, with north of 100 million people killed, was a result of very bad ideas.
But before I share a few recent thoughts in my reading (and listening) of the history of Philosophy and ideas, I am convinced, as I argue in my recently released book, that Christian parents have to “know their stuff.” A hostile, secular culture is a constant source of challenge (and even more so opportunity, as I also argue) to the faith of our children, and if we don’t know how to engage and challenge it, we risk our children becoming seduced by it. Knowing our stuff means reading and study. There is just no way around it. We can’t entrust the confidence of our Children’s faith to the Church or anyone else. It’s our responsibility as parents to build that confidence into our children, and we must have knowledge if we’re going to do that well. So if you are not familiar with the history of philosophy, which is just the history of ideas, I would encourage you to read a book by the late, great R.C. Sproul,The Consequences of Ideas. And the subtitle says why this is such a crucial study: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World. As he says in the introduction, his book is “not for philosophy scholars but for laypersons–albeit educated laypersons.” Anyone who is willing to put in the effort can get a lot out of it.
Christianity, and the ideas it spawned, transformed the ancient world, and all for the good (I can’t wait to read Larry Hurtado’s Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World). What we know as Western civilization come about because of Christian ideas, mixed with a good helping of ancient Greek and Roman ideas as well. But without the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the latter’s ideas would never produced the civilizations in which liberal values prospered, such as human rights and dignity, universal literacy and education for common people, universities and hospitals, and eventually freedom, democracy, and capitalism. Without Christian ideas and assumptions about reality, the world would have been a very different, less hospitable place. Those ideas, however, began to be challenged in the 17th century.
Wherever one targets the decline of the Christian influence in the West, by the mid-17th century what we’ve come to know as Western secularism was well on its way. Most agree this really gained momentum with a pious Catholic French philosopher, René Descartes (d. 1650), who was, ironically, trying to justify and defend his faith against the skeptics of his age. The problem this brilliant man was trying to solve was epistemological, or the question of how we know what we know, and how we can be certain of it. He started by doubting everything that could be doubted, which wasn’t the problem. What was, was that he concluded that the only thing he couldn’t doubt was that he existed, therefore his famous dictum, cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). From this starting point, he argued, we can prove God’s existence, and have certain knowledge about reality. Almost overnight, historically speaking, the starting point for human knowledge became man as opposed to God, and thus revelation as relevant to philosophy became increasingly discarded.
All you have left, though, is speculation. As I like to say in my favorite metaphor, all you have are the pieces of the puzzle of existence, but no actual puzzle into which the pieces fit. It’s a powerful thing to witness the hubris of sinful man in the history of philosophy trying to figure out the meaning of existence. God didn’t make a quick exit, but the writing was on the wall (a biblical metaphor that most people today have no idea from where it came). We’re seeing the implications, the consequences, all around us, and it isn’t pretty. All of it and opportunity to teach our children that without the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, hell on earth is the logical and inevitable conclusion.
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