Category: Apologetics

A Power Unto Salvation: Part III – Can Language Save?

In this series I am analyzing three approaches to the existential problem of being human, i.e. the human condition. Those approaches are: Scientism, Semanticism, and Supernaturalism. In this post I will examine a view I am calling “Semanticism” and see if it has the resources to fully address the existential condition of man. However, before asking whether this approach can do the work of allaying our deepest concerns or answering our most profound questions, let’s revisit the idea of the human condition itself.

Taylor’s Immanent Frame and One Bad Answer to The Human Condition

Invoking a concept introduced by the philosopher Charles Taylor know as the “Immanent Frame,” I want to look at one attempt to answer the deep questions of life provided by Taylor’s philosophical predecessor, Martin Heidegger, who was already mentioned in a previous post. First, we must get a gist of what Taylor’s immanent frame refers to, then we can look at Heidegger’s tragic attempt to answer the problem.

The Immanent Frame is best summarized by one of Taylor’s foremost commentators, James K.A. Smith, who writes:

[The Immanent Frame] is a constructed social space that frames our lives entirely within a natural (rather than a supernatural) order. It is the circumscribed space of the modern social imaginary that precludes transcendence.

James K.A. Smith, How (Not) To Be Secular, 141.

In short, Taylor argues that the social and cultural conditions that formed in the wake of the Enlightenment, and which were carried to fruition through the natural sciences have lead to a contemporary social background, a cultural milieu, against which all of our thinking is first and foremost immanent, anthropocentric, and humanistic thinking. We live in a world that seems and feels entirely naturalistic. One major ramification of this development in human thought, is that we (meaning the average Westerner) no longer believe that meaning is “out there” in the things of the world themselves. Instead, meaning is in the mind, and it is the human agent who gives or confers meaning upon the world.1 Those who know the history of philosophy will recognize this in part as the shift from realism or essentialism in metaphysics to nominalism, except that current theories of meaning are far more radical than anything Ockham or Abelard would have suggested This will come up again when the issue of language (semantics) is discussed below.

While there are people, many people even, who still believe in the supernatural and transcendent, and who even consider themselves religious, nevertheless our default mode of thinking, acting, and behaving takes place within an exclusively humanistic realm. Our public lives are predominantly secular ones and even if we are religious we know many people who live exclusively secular lives, and they seem to be pretty happy within that secular framework. As such, corporately we live and move and have our being as if there is only the mundane; what it has to offer and how it can explain things. It is hard, implausible even, to think supernaturally, even if we sometimes feel “haunted” by the numinous or mystical: there is a vague sense of longing for the transcendent that is often mediated to us through movies (especially horror movies) or music.2Smith considers bands like Death Cab for Cutie or The Postal Service as good examples) Yet, our modern world in the West (this does not apply to many Eastern or Middle-Eastern cultures per se) sees with almost purely immanent eyes. Thus, ideas of goods that exist beyond human flourishing “down here,” for example: heaven, saintly rewards, or an eternal glory with God, may exert some pressure on us, but the fact is that they do not feel real enough in this pluralistic and “post-metaphysical” society, at least not enough to engender radical spiritual and religious action. There are very few who would take the route of St. Francis of Assisi today, even if there are some rare exceptions (Anjeze Bojaxhiu, for example).

Heidegger’s Immanent Frame and Immanently Bad Answer

Returning now to Heidegger, a brilliant thinker but, at the same time, a rather disappointing moral figure, we look at his suggestion to answering the existential crisis of human life. Working within a framework of the immanent, Heidegger suggests that we must try and re-imagine something that while knowing it to be purely secular, we treat it as if it was sacred. The idea being to immanentize objects of knowledge which in pre-modern times could only have been understood as transcendent. This move attempts to place everything religious belief once held to be eternal, unchanging, and immaterial into the world of the finite, fluid, and physical.

For Heidegger this new, immanent sacred object had to be something that could fulfill the role of God.3 For a detailed analysis of Heidegger’s “replacement” for religious belief, see the entry “Martin Heidegger” in Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Michael Wheeler, 2011 (Section 3.5) But, what thing could do that? According to Michael Wheeler, “Heidegger sometimes seems to use the term ‘god’ or ‘divinity’ to refer to a heroic figure (a cultural template) who may initiate (or help to initiate) a transformational event in the history of Being by opening up an alternative clearing.”4 Wheeler, “Martin Heidegger” 3.5 Wheeler goes on to say, however, that it need not be just an individual persona that could fulfill this role of redivinizing history, acting as a “grounder of the abyss” and a “restorer of sacredness,” rather it could even be an event or a series of events:

It might even be consistent with Heidegger’s view to relax the requirement that the divine catalyst must be an individual being, and thus to conceive of certain transformational cultural events or forces themselves as divinities (Dreyfus 2003). In any case, Heidegger argues that, in the present crisis, we are waiting for a god who will reawaken us to the poetic, and thereby enable us to dwell in the fourfold.

Wheeler, “Martin Heidegger” in Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 3.5

For anyone familiar with the Nazi cult and the mythos that is constructed around not just the Aryan identity, but also around Hitler himself, it seems that Heidegger’s existential views willingly opened the door for National Socialism to step in–a door that until today no one thinks Heidegger ever really closed. For this reason, as Wheeler points out, Heidegger’s legacy, to include aspects of his philosophy, remain tainted with a very dark taint indeed:

There is no doubt that Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies, however long they lasted, have a more intimate relationship with his philosophical thought than might be suggested by apologist claims that he was a victim of his time (in 1933, lots of intelligent people backed Hitler without thereby supporting the Holocaust that was to come) or that what we have here is ‘merely’ a case of bad political judgment, deserving of censure but with no implications for the essentially independent philosophical programme. Why does the explanation run deeper? The answer is that Heidegger believed (indeed continued to believe until he died) that the German people were destined to carry out a monumental spiritual mission. That mission was nothing less than to be at the helm of the aforementioned transformation of Being in the West, from one of instrumental technology to one of poetic dwelling.

Wheeler, “Martin Heidegger”

Heidegger’s longing to see the finite and immanent “made” transcendent, yet without deference to any actual supernatural principle or power, any religious or theological truth, any revelation, should serve as a warning for us today. For clearly the Nazis were on some kind of spiritual mission, and Hitler certainly had a goal for a total transformation of the world.

But, why is Heidegger’s tainted legacy so important to what I am calling the “Semantic” approach to the human condition? As we will see, the Semantic approach, like the Scientistic approach on the one hand, has to remain in the realm of the physical and the immanent. However, unlike the scientistic approach, Semanticism sees something like transcendent power in the narratival and poetic use of language and in the application of concepts, symbols, and metaphors that arouse in us the desires for the eternal and transcendent. These, however, are notions that the pure adherent to Scientism, people like W.V.O. Quine or A.J. Ayer, would have rejected and avoided at all costs.

The Semantic Approach: Can Language Save?

Although I am calling this approach “Semanticism” it could be called various other names. I use this term, however, based on my reading of some philosophers in the Continental tradition who could be called “Critical Theorists.” These are men like Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and later Jürgen Habermas, all of whom were with regard to metaphysics, and especially the metaphysics that underlie any religious truth claim, minimally agnostic. In other words, they were materialists and “postmetaphysical” philosophers, even if they were not “anti-metaphysical” like their scientistic counterparts.

Moreover, unlike their British empiricist contemporaries, these continental thinkers felt that religion and religious statements, religious sentiments and theological concepts could not be so easily, or should not be, reduced to mere scientistic explanations. There was something about religion and traditional theology that mattered at a fundamental level to human beings, and, as such, some of religion had to be retained if human beings were to flourish. So, there was a rejection on the one hand of science as a purely instrumental tool to analyze dispassionately the phenomena of human existence, while on the other accepting sciences conclusions on most things about the physical world.

What this left for later critical theorists like Habermas, and his Swiss predecessor Karl Jaspers, as a means to addressing the human condition was to posit something that would operate as a secular theology, a sort of theology without the theos. What was important to retain then from traditional religion was not the validity of its actual truth claims about God, or gods, or angels or demons, or immortal souls and eternal kingdoms, but rather the meaning, the semantic content, of those concepts translated into a non-metaphysical language. So regarding anything transcendent, Jürgen Habermas can say on the one hand, “Enlightened thought sees through the illusion of this embodiment of transcendence,” which basically suggests that pre-modern notions of the transcendent were not statements about what is real, but merely a pre-scientific way of talking about immanent human experiences. This is what both Habermas and others like Charles Taylor have called the “disenchantment” of the cosmos.

Because religious language cannot be seen as a referring language any more, e.g. when I say “God is Father, Son and Spirit” I am not talking about an extra-mental, uncreated, eternal, powerful and personal Being: GOD; rather I am talking about a concept of the transcendent as understood within a particular human tradition, namely Christianity. The Trinity in this sense is not an actual mind-independent reality, but a symbol, or cipher of something that is deeply human, but ultimately also only a product of human agency and imagination. Critiquing his predecessor, Karl Jaspers, Habermas continues to talk about the “semantic potential” contained in traditional religions:

It [postmetaphysical philosophy] must disclose and preserve the truth-content concealed in the semantic potentials of traditions shattered by enlightenment. By contrast with the sciences, philosophy moves in the space of the essential–in other words: existential–experiences, a space which is occupied and structured by faith.

Jürgen Habermas, “The Conflict of Beliefs” in The Liberating Power of Symbols, 37.

Philosophy, unlike the natural sciences, must now provide the medium through which people’s existential longings and desires for the transcendent can be addressed and answered. However, it is a philosophy that cannot be adulterated with metaphysical thinking or any kind of acquiescence to a transcendent authority:

But, in contrast to tradition, it [philosophy] retrieves these experiences with the argumentative tools of postmetaphysical thinking. In opposition to Kierkegaard, [Karl] Jasper’s aim is to thematize the experiences which find expression in the Bible, without slipping into the mode of a belief in revelation…Just as [Kierkegaard] strove to retain the dialectical self-movement of Spirit without accepting the notion of absolute Spirit, so Jaspers would like to complete the transition from the ethical to the religious stage, without arriving at Jesus Christ.

Habermas, The Conflict of Belief, 38.

To sum up this view of the power of language as professed by philosophers like Habermas or Jaspers, the potential to address the experiential and existential aspects of human life lies not in the natural sciences, but in philosophy. But, this is not the classical philosophy of Plato or Aristotle or of Augustine, Anselm or Aquinas. This is a philosophy that seeks to address humanity purely through the medium of symbol and language in the hope of alleviating the crisis of faith we now have in a postmetaphysical and post-Christian culture.

While this “third way” between strong Scientism and Supernaturalism may seem obscure and convoluted, it is actually the most attractive and most influential approach in Western society today. The advantages of Semanticism are easily identified: first, it holds on to the language and symbolism of religious practice without the dogma (especially those annoying truth claims about sexual ethics that most philosophers find so terribly inhibiting); second, it can engender in us a sense of purpose and meaning, especially if, as some post-modernists believe, language actually creates or generates new worlds as opposed to simply describing or referencing the actual one; and finally third, it does not require us to abandon any firm deliverances of the natural sciences about the physical world. The semantic approach does not invalidate or come into conflict with the conclusions of physics, chemistry or evolutionary biology, it only says they cannot properly weigh in on the existential conditions of the “lifeworld” we all inhabit.5 For a sketch of what Habermas means by the term “lifeworld” see Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, (2002) 15-17.

Finally, Semanticism as an approach offers a way to live in a pluralistic society without tearing ourselves apart in violent conflict motivated by fundamentalistic attitudes about dogmatic religious claims, claims like Jesus Christ is Lord, a statement which has provided the occasion for many a bloody conflict, for example, between traditional Islamic and Christian cultures. Or even statements like Justification by faith alone through Jesus Christ alone which, again, has not been benign in the history of Latin Christendom. However, this also does not mean that those who practice traditional religions must practice them together, in some syncretistic fashion, as Jaspers points out, “This philosophical faith, which appears in many forms…cannot [become] an authority or a dogma, [it] remains dependent on communication between human beings, who are obliged to talk to each other, but not necessarily to pray with each other.”6 quoted in Habermas “The Conflict of Beliefs” in The Liberating Power of Symbols, 40.

Conclusion: Semanticism Cannot Really Save

There is only one problem with the Semantic approach, but it is a rather large one: Semanticism is simply false. More accurately, and even more problematically, the Semantic approach simply skirts the issue of truth completely, attempting to wiggle its way out of what are ultimately the first principles of philosophy, namely “What is real?” and “How can we know it?” To give up on these questions is almost worse than the adherent of Scientism, who at least makes attempts to describe the real, and thinks she can actually know it. In a 2004 dialogue with Habermas, then Kardinal Josef Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, put it this way, “To cease asking questions about the origin and goal of the whole of reality [of being as such] is to leave out the characteristic element of philosophical questioning itself.” In other words, a philosophical system that precludes metaphysics, questions of causality, and the grounds and justification of knowledge from the onset is hardly worth calling a philosophy.7 This may also be why most classes on “critical theories” today, e.g. Critical Race Theory, are not found in the philosophy departments, but in the social ‘sciences’ departments or, more saliently, in English departments.

Further, because Semanticism is false it is also open to all kinds of other problems, moral and political. For, at the end of the day, Semanticism refers to nothing other than the words of human beings and the imaginative worlds constructed out of those words. It is a view as fluid and transient as the desires of those who avow it. As such, everything on the Semantic approach is subject to change, everything is contingent. So while today their may be human rights for most people in the West (the unborn being the gross exception), if some party or political faction were to come into power and change the language game on us, altering its current rules and manipulating our Christian and religious symbols, then there really would be no fixed point, no natural law or transcendent principle, upon which the minority could rest its arguments, or seek existential refuge from the coming tyranny. This is, after all, what happened in Heidegger’s Germany, and it was what Heidegger ultimately failed to denounce.

In conclusion then, it seems that a better approach is needed than Semanticism. If for any reason, simply because to believe that language itself creates worlds in which we can inhabit is not only on the face of it a war against common sense, but because language does have a power to change things and change them in a radical way. But, it is not the real world that language can actually change, and as such we still remain in it, it is merely human minds that can be fooled or manipulated by language. This use of language to alter common sense realism not only played out in 1930’s Germany, but plays out before our eyes today as we confront a culture that has been so indoctrinated through language and symbol that many, if not most, American actually believe that a boy can choose to be a girl, and vice-versa. Finally, there still remains the ultimate “calling card” of the human condition: death. And this, as we have seen recently with the rise of COVID, cannot in any way really be addressed by mere words.

A Power Unto Salvation?: Part II – Can Science Save?

In this series I am analyzing three broad approaches to understanding and responding to the human condition: Scientism, Semanticism, and Supernaturalism. In the previous post I defined what I mean by each. In this post I will take a closer look at Scientism, and see how it tries to answer the fundamental questions of human morality, meaning and purpose, i.e. the human condition.

First, What is The Human Condition?

While this foundational question could be addressed several ways, for my purposes here I will draw from perhaps the greatest existentialist philosopher of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, who framed the problem of human existence in a profound way. The human condition is for Heidegger, at rock bottom, related to the simple fact that when we think about any kind of beings that exist in the world, one thing we recognize is that only human beings, out of all other beings (e.g. apples, aardvarks, atoms), are capable of asking the question itself, “what is Being?”. Human beings, whatever they may be, and only those beings that are human grapple with the meaning of Being itself (in German Sein), as well as the experience of “Being-there” (Dasein) among other beings. For whatever “Being” is we are at least concretely participatory in it in virtue of our being alive and being conscious. As such we find ourselves like helpless creatures, creatures thrown into the world (Geworfenheit), disposed to it (Befindlichkeit), having various moods (Stimmungen) about it, and, in some very real way, fallen away from it and from our own selves, for we do not properly know what it means to be to begin with.1 One artistic attempt to portray this kind of existentialism is the movie, Being There with the late British actor Peter Sellars. In the film, the gardener, Chance, is thrown out of his simple, edenic circumstances into a modern world that he has no way of understanding or really relating to. He is a mere observer of the variety of beings presented to him. This just is our experience of things, or at least it is in this period of late modernity in which we now reside.

Hence, we find ourselves in the world, having experiences of it, but with this (horrible?) capacity to “step back” and think about our own being in the world, to include the tremendous freedom we possess to interact with the world, i.e. with other beings, and with our own selves (called Projection).2 For more on Heidegger, see Michael Wheeler’s article in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#Que We are therefore both determined, in virtue of our not having chosen to exist, yet we are also existentially free in that we can make choices to act, and in acting become something other than what we are right now. This is both a wondrous, and terrifying, reality. It is wondrous because the fact of it is innately mysterious. It is terrifying, because having abandoned the previous universal hermeneutic of religious belief that explained our existence to us, we now feel incapable of offering any sufficient answer to the emotional and intellectual anxiety existence causes.

The other fundamental aspect of this anxious act of existing, of “being there” in the world, is our experience of it as unfolding. In other words, this existence happens in time.3 Heidegger’s magnum opus was entitled Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). It begins and will, with our own death, ultimately end. Our own death, it is worth noting, is not however part of Dasein itself, since it will not actually be something we experience. We only experience the death of others, those deaths are part of our experience and therefore part of Dasein, our own deaths are not.

Beyond this brief, and profoundly deficient, summary of a Heideggerean view of the human condition, I cannot venture. It is well known that Heidegger is both one of the most obscure philosophers of the 20th century, as well as one of the most difficult to read, even in his native German. In a later post we will look briefly at what Heidegger thought could potentially save man from such a conflicted condition, a potential solution that was, tragically, aligned with the National Socialism of his day. For now, however, this descriptive, albeit vague, presentation of the human condition will serve the main purpose of this post: how do these three approaches to the human condition try to explain or answer both the terrible anxiety, and the mysterious wonder that conscious, self-reflective life presents to our experience? Which approach, in other words, answers the questions of morality, meaning, and purpose that emerge from such experiences and such reflection?4 There are other foundational questions of human existence than these, like identity, authority, and, of course, origins. But, this phrase serves as a metonym of sorts for the questions associated with the human condition.

Heidegger’s description of the human condition in the life of modern man also seems to sync well with the view of a very different kind of philosopher, his contemporary in England, Bertrand Russell, who might have called modern philosophy a philosophy of despair. In a personal letter, Russell once wrote:

What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and the emptiness; sometimes a voice answers out of the darkness. But it is the voice of one drowning; and in a moment the silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful; the unhappiness of many people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. To know people well is to know their tragedy: it is usually the central thing about which their lives are built. And I suppose if they did not live most of the time in the things of the moment, they would not be able to go on.

Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Betrand Russell, 194.

The human condition, or so it seems, is for both the British logician Russell and the German existentialist Heidegger a rather unpleasant, if not outright cruel affair. For modern man, in the wake of the Enlightenment critique of traditional religious modes of existence and explanation, the obvious question emerges: is there something, some idea or practice or perhaps story, outside of the biblical account of salvation and eternal life, that can save man from such a cruel set of circumstances?

Can Science Save Us?

Leaving behind the ruminations of the German existentialist, and following along with the thought of the British logician, Russell himself speaks to the human condition we are forced to confront, if, as his philosophical atheism suggests, the scientific picture of the world is in fact the true picture of reality:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship”

But, was Russell being too negative about what a scientific view of the world could do relative to man’s existential condition, relative to his struggle with his own existence, identity, and purpose? Perhaps, there has been progress in science since Russell’s day (d. 1970) that makes a scientific worldview capable of rescuing us from the foundation of “unyielding despair” Russell thought we must construct our lives upon. Is there a firmer foundation upon which science can construct a universal sense of meaning, morality and purpose for all of (metaphorically speaking) “God’s creatures, great and small?”

Having defined “scientism” in the previous post, there is no need to review in detail what its claims are. The basic idea is that the scientific method alone holds the key to truth, and all other claims that cannot be verified through the scientific process, or in the domain of the natural sciences especially, must be considered dubious, if not just false. Since Scientism “puts Christian claims outside of the ‘plausibility structure’ (what people generally consider reasonable and rational)”5J.P. Moreland, Scientism and Secularism, 31. of belief, it reduces any claims to meaning, morality or purpose from a Christian worldview (and any religious worldview) down to purely private expressions about one’s subjective mental states and emotional preferences. Religious claims are spurious at best, if not wicked or delusional.6 Hence Dawkins most rhetorical book is entitled very simply The God Delusion.Thus, according to perhaps the leading advocate of Scientism of our times, Richard Dawkins, the so-called “why” questions7 “Why” questions are another metonym for existential questions, questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing?” or “Why do human beings have consciousness?” that cannot be answered by the natural sciences are probably not questions worth answering at all, “The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention. Nor, even if the question is a real one, does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can.”8Excerpt From: Richard Dawkins. “The God Delusion.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-god-delusion/id427263983

Dawkins goes on:

“Perhaps there are some genuinely profound and meaningful questions that are forever beyond the reach of science. Maybe quantum theory is already knocking on the door of the unfathomable. But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can?”

Richard Dawkins. “The God Delusion”

While other renowned scientists like the late Stephen J. Gould or the cosmologist Paul Davies or the astronomer Sir Martin Reese may make more room for the sociological usefulness of religion than Dawkins, it is safe to say that they are all beholden to some degree to this scientistic approach to reality.9 My point here is to not lump all scientific materialists into the same category as a Dawkins, whose particularly anti-religious views are well known. Others who hold to scientism, may still appreciate the cultural benefits of religious institutions and practices, even if they disbelieve in Christianity’s claims about reality. In short then, for the average advocate of Scientism, those genuine and profound questions of human existence are likely beyond the reach of science and hence without meaning.

However, even if Dawkins ascribes meaninglessness to the “why” questions of human existence, that ascription clearly has not translated into an actual end of “why” questions being asked. Even in the most secular countries today like the United States, Britain, Canada, and Germany, countries where we might expect to see the biggest influence of the natural sciences on culture, it is not as if the quest for morality, meaning, and purpose has been abandoned. From the sexual revolution, drug culture, and civil rights movements of the 1960’s, to the rise of the New Age in the 1980’s and 1990’s, to the cry for Social Justice and racial equality today, the empirical and sociological evidence overwhelmingly suggest that the search for answers to morality, meaning, and purpose has not ceased, and that the desire for the transcendent cannot be satisfactorily answered by putting modern man in the MRI chamber and presenting him with the scan results. This tells him nothing substantive about himself.

But, if science doesn’t try to answer, or if scientists willfully reject even asking, the “why” questions, then it is already de facto the case among those who ascribe to Scientism that the natural sciences cannot speak to our existential condition. Any scientist speaking qua scientist to the existential condition of man would be speaking out of turn. And if Scientism cannot really address the human condition, then it certainly cannot exert any real power over that condition, nor relieve us from it in any real way.10 I suppose there could be some scientistic answers to the human condition. Someone might suggest, as Huxley did in his dystopian novel Brave New World, simply anesthetizing people with regular doses of pleasure-inducing drugs. That would be at least a possible answer to the existential question, one that stops short of simple mass extermination. At most it can help us to extend our knowledge of the condition itself by analyzing the nature of the physical components around us and how they interact. Or perhaps it helps in virtue of leading to medical technologies that extend the existential time we have to reflect on the very same condition. Beyond this, as Dawkins admits, that the Scientistic approach to the human condition remains powerless to save us from it appears certain. We should conclude, as Russell did, that, at bottom, all the Scientistic approach to the world can tell us is that there is nothing much positive to say about existing. Being (Sein) and our experience of our own being (Dasein)11 Or, perhaps more accurately, our realization that we are the only kind of entity, the only existing kind of thing, that allows us to even raise the questions of what Being is or that gives us a concept of Being in general. Again, it’s confusing, but not absurd. are beyond the ken of science.

While it could be the case that the world really is the way the adherent of Scientism says it is, it could also be the case that some other approach is more likely true than the scientistic one. Scientism could simply be false12 In his book Scientism and Secularism, J.P. Moreland demonstrates the self-refuting nature of “strong scientism” starting with the strong scientistic claim “Only what is testable by science can be true.”(51), which is itself a fundamentally unscientific, and therefore untestable, truth claim. Moreland goes on to show how both strong and weak scientism are themselves “enemies” of the entire scientific project, since when properly understood they are both deficient philosophical views., and some other approach could approximate better to the way things really are. An approach that would seem to better address the existential condition, might prima facie be seen as having at least more explanatory power than its scientistic alternative, which itself could be counted as evidence for that approaches truthfulness.

Finally, it could also be the case that some alternative approach contains within it some innate property, some content, which allows it to address the existential “why” questions of human experience, and not only address them, but maybe even sufficiently so by providing actual answers to them. One approach that may provide such an answer is what I am calling “Semanticism,” a view which will see the power to save neither in an exhaustive analysis of the natural world, nor in the causal powers of supermundane agencies, but in the nature and power of language itself.

A Power Unto Salvation?: Part I – Science, Semantics, and the Supernatural, Defining the Views

“In all religion there is a recollection of the Divine Truth which has been lost; in all religion, there is a longing after the divine light and the divine love; but in all religion also there yawns an abyss of demonic distortion of the Truth, and of man’s effort to escape from God.”

Emil Brunner

In this series I examine three broad approaches to engaging the question of the human condition. Those approaches are Scientism, Semanticism, and Supernaturlism. After defining each, the question will be asked: “Which of these, if any, has the power to save people from their existential condition?” Each view offers some answer to the problem of human existence, but I will argue only one is sufficient to truly liberate us from our present condition of alienation and oppression.

Introduction: Two Kinds of Naturalism

Since the Enlightenment and the breakdown of the Medieval Synthesis1 The Medieval Synthesis is best represented in the work of Thomas Aquinas, who synthesized the inspired Special Revelation of the Bible and the authoritative teachings of the Church with the best philosophical reflections on general revelation, namely, Aristotle. there have been, at least in the European and especially in the Anglo-Germanic speaking cultures, essentially two posited views on the nature of the human condition: the scientistic materialist view and the semantic existentialist view. The former of these places authority and power in the domain of the natural sciences and the scientific method, the other in the domain of language and human culture.

For most Christians living in English-speaking contexts today, the major battle of ideologies has played out between a very logic-centered, scientistic empiricism and a reason-oriented, metaphysical, and historical Christianity. In the 19th and 20th century this battle was waged between rationalists on both sides: metaphysical naturalists and metaphysical supernaturalists, who used arguments and evidence to both justify and compel belief– either toward atheism or in Christian theism. These engagements developed into robust philosophical debates between the great minds of the previous generation, e.g. Copleston and Russell, and those of today, e.g. William Lane Craig and Graham Oppy. Since the emergence of Christian analytic philosophy in the 1960s with the likes of men like Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, this domain of intellectual dispute has informed much of our theological dialogue in the United States, especially in Evangelical Christianity.

Less familiar perhaps to many Evangelical Christians in the United States, however, were the contemporaneous developments occurring in the German and French speaking worlds of existential philosophy. As such, for many Evangelical apologists, the works of men like Sartre and Camus (on the French side), or Heidegger and Jaspers (on the German side) went unnoticed for quite some time. In addition, the Christian, or theistic, interlocutors to these existentialist philosophers have also gone under the radar, or perhaps remain entirely undiscovered, with the exception perhaps of particularly giant names like Karl Barth, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedikt XVI), or the much beloved Francis A. Schaeffer.

In particular, the most impactful group of German existentialists were the founders of Critical Theory, the philosophical grandfather of today’s multitudinous critical theories. This group attempted to develop a third way of looking at the world, one that neither denied the metaphysical naturalism of the scientistic worldview, nor that rejected the symbolic value and meaning of the religious worldview. The main figures in this very German-Jewish secular movement of philosophy were Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Weber.

For critical theorists, the result of accepting metaphysical naturalism (i.e. rejecting philosophical metaphysics), while not rejecting the existential aid of Christian theology, invested this innately Marxist philosophy with a quasi-religious flavor or tone. A flavor or tone that makes it very difficult to discern for many Christians today whether or not its tenets, or the tenets associated with any of its successor theories, are compatible with an actual biblical worldview, a worldview replete with God, gods, angels and demons, and human souls that have actual causal powers, moral natures, and that endure after physical death. This is a quite different kind of naturalism in this sense, and one harder to identify than its overtly anti-religious counterpart.2 For a prime example of scientistic critiques of religion, see almost anything by Richard Dawkins, most especially, The God Delusion.

Before we look at each of these naturalisms individually, and how they attempt to address the human condition, let’s define them a bit more narrowly, and also introduce their metaphysical opponent, Supernaturalism.

The Three Views: Scientism, Semanticism, and Supernaturalism

Scienticism is best embodied by philosophers like A.J. Ayers who avowed logical positivism (at least early on),3 Ayer went on to say this of his former views “I suppose that most of the defects of it were that nearly all of it was false.” or W.V.O. Quine, who tried to naturalize the philosophical domain of epistemology,4 see Stanford entry on “Naturalism in Epistemology” especially Chapter 2, “Epistemology Naturlized” or scientists like Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss today. Since the days of Ayer’s positivists, who considered any claims that could not be verified through scientific means to be meaningless, modified versions of Scientism have been fairly robust and well-defended in the English speaking world. Scientism, in brief, holds that while there are true statements about the world (i.e. the way things really are), the only statements that we can know to be true are ones that can be known via the natural sciences. According to the eminent philosopher of Metaphysics, J.P. Moreland, “In scientism, therefore, science is the very paradigm of truth and rationality….There are no truths that can be known apart from the appropriately certified scientific claims, especially those in the hard or natural sciences [e.g. physics, chemistry, biology].”5 J.P. Moreland, Scientism and Secularism, 29.

Thus, when it comes to metaphysical statements about non-physical entities or agents, Scientism says these are at best speculative (weak Scientism), or, more likely than not, they are just false or meaningless (strong Scientism)6 Moreland, 29-30.. When it comes to moral issues, those who hold to Scientism may try to ground moral values or obligations in scientific facts about material reality, even though this has been traditionally seen as an inherently quixotic task, as it is almost universally agreed upon that the fact-value distinction cannot be bridged apart from something other than, or outside of, the scientific statements. In short, you cannot get “an ought from an is.”7 This idea goes back to the Scottish Enlightenment Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). As we will see in a later post on the question of meaning and purpose, those who avow Scientism cannot help but be noticeably quiet.

Semanticism, or what I am calling “Semanticism,” might be described as an ideology that rejects the hegemony of science to fully explain the world, but also the hegemony of any religion, most specifically of the Judeo-Christian religion, to do the same, yet that retains core components of both. On the one hand Semanticism holds on to the empirical analysis of the scientific method, while affirming the symbolic and “semantic” world of theology and religion on the other. Semanticism sees power primarily in how language is used and how concepts are employed in human societies. As such the main theories that assume Semanticism are social theories, most predominantly Critical Theory, and its successor theories (e.g. Critical Race Theory, Feminist Studies, Queer Theory, etc.) that try to rationally analyze not the composition of physical objects, natural processes, or the nature of causal relations, as in chemistry or physics, but rather analyze the meaning and value of human artifacts, i.e. of human culture itself. In empirically analyzing forms of culture, Semanticism tries to understand how individuals interact in their own socially constructed environments of communication and meaning. As such, Semanticism puts far more emphasis on human experience and the subjective life of the human person than does Scientism, which tends to reduce the human subject and her experiences down to mere natural, and impersonal, facts (i.e. facts about particles, gravity, and neuro-biological functions).

This semantic approach to the human condition can be summed up in Jürgen Habermas’ comments on Karl Jasper’s theory of the role of modern philosophy:

Jaspers regards the transition to modernity and to postmetaphysical thinking as a profoundly ambivalent process. On the one hand, the Enlightenment frees us from the dogmatism of a faith based on inherited authority [i.e. the Bible and the Church’s teachings]….On the other hand, this philosophical translation of symbolic [religious] meanings courts the danger that the enciphered truth-contents of the great traditions [i.e. Judeo-Christianity] will be entirely forfeited, while the modern sciences reduce the lifeworld to the domain of the objectively knowable and technically controllable.

Jürgen Habermas, “The Conflicts in Belief” in The Liberating Power of Symbols, 37.

What Scientism and Semanticism have in common is that they both share a common view of metaphysics, namely, that beyond the physical world nothing exists. Jaspers and other critical theorists can confidently claim along with Dawkins and Dennett that we all now live in a “postmetaphysical” world. However, as Habermas explains, the costs of accepting a full-blown Scientism is too great for the human creature, and, consequently, the existential content of religion must be salvaged to protect us from science reducing “the lifeworld” down to the merely objective and impersonal, even if we can be happy about being relieved from religious “dogmatism” at the same time.8 And here I think we could say that certain moral dogmas of traditional Christian churches, especially in the area of sexual morality and ethics, are in view for the critical theorists. For more on the deconstruction of religious sexual ethics see Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, where he argues for sexual “free play” and a “libidinal rationality.”

When it comes to morality, therefore, these two kinds of naturalism begin to differ in that those who invest their hope in the semantic power of language and symbols try to ground morality in some universally shared aspects of human culture, as opposed to merely natural facts about the human organism. As we will see, however, this is no less a quixotic, or herculean, task than that of its materialistic cousin.

Regardless, both Scientism and Semanticism are on one side of a philosophical line, while a third view, Supernaturalism, is clearly on the other side of that line.

Supernaturalism is the view that there is a real world of immaterial Being (either God or something like Abstract Objects or both), and real cause-and-effect agency beyond the mere physical world of natural processes or human biological machines. As such Supernaturalism is usually the overarching view of the traditional theist, the view of someone who really believes that the semantic content of their sacred texts actually refers to mind-independent entities: to a God or gods, angels or demons, etc. For the supernaturalist, these are real substances (albeit immaterial ones) that have causal powers, a moral dimension, and some kind or degree of free will. Those who hold to the existence of minds may also be rightly called super-naturalists, or at least metaphysical dualists of some sort.

For Christians of a classical persuasion, Supernaturalism is the correct understanding of and approach to reality. Although it may sound unfashionable or shocking to modern and post-modern ears, the true Christian really does believe that the cosmos is a lot “spookier” than the scientist or semanticist may be willing to grant. Christians who accept the full inspiration of Scripture, for example, really believe that the scriptures contain a special kind of knowledge, a revelation knowledge, part of which confirms our common sense notion of a realm that goes unseen in the normal day to day. As such, the beings the scriptures speak of, this “unseen realm”9 For more on the unseen realm of the Bible, see Michael S. Heiser’s book of the same name, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. referred to in its pages, are to be taken quite seriously, since they themselves are in some sense more real than the physical world itself (or, at least, equally as real).

When it comes to morality, the supernaturalist will have a far wider range of explanatory options than the adherent of scientism or semanticism, and that in virtue of their being an actual Divine Person, and various principles that issue forth from that Person, either directly in the form of commands, e.g. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, or wife, or ox, etc…” or indirectly through natural laws embedded in the creation itself. The same goes for meaning and purpose, as the supernaturalist, whether Christian or Jew or Muslim, will also claim some kind of true story, some universal hermeneutic that explains our position in reality, and that comes replete with an origins story and an eschatological future.

In the next post I will look at Scientism, and ask the question of whether or not it can offer us any sense of hope in light of our existential circumstances.

Our New Redemption: Critical Theory as Theology Without “Theos”

There is one, almost singular, theological and philosophical problem that has haunted Western civilization since the rise of modern skepticism in the mid-17th century, i.e. since Descarte. It is a theoretical problem that has launched a thousand ships of philosophical speculation, all floundering on the open seas of human inquiry, and subject to the acidity of the rational mind reasoning about itself.1 Kristen Irwin expounds on the view of the early, modern philosopher Pierre Bayle, who questioned the reliability of reason, “The sense in which Bayle is a skeptic is not entirely straightforward, but what is clear is that Bayle exhibits a profound suspicion of reason’s ability to deliver certain knowledge. In Bayle’s view, reason seems to be useful in enabling us to draw conclusions about the world, but it runs into so many contradictions and yields so many paradoxes that it ultimately undermines itself, and thus cannot be trusted. Thus, Bayle’s skepticism is, minimally, skepticism about the reliability of reason.” in https://iep.utm.edu/bayle/#:~:text=The%20sense%20in%20which%20Bayle%20is%20a%20skeptic,ultimately%20undermines%20itself%2C%20and%20thus%20cannot%20be%20trusted. But, it is a theoretical problem that plays out in the everyday life of every man, woman and child; a theoretical problem that cannot be easily ignored (as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems perhaps can be). That problem is how to think, speak, and act morally apart from any metaphysical grounds for moral values or moral duties. This problem, at first considered soluble if baptized in the waters of pure reason, a reason unadulterated by claims of divine revelation and church authority, quickly became an unassailable fortress against which no weapon formed by human heads seemed able to prevail. The Enlightenment, many now claim, failed to illuminate the issue of human morality, making it only more obscure to us than it was under the transcendent light of its predecessor, the Queen of the Sciences: Theology.

The existential void the Enlightenment left behind in western culture, in virtue of seeking after a universally applicable moral system grounded in reason alone, provided the seedbed for the emergence of a new kind of philosophy: Critical Theory. Early Critical Theory2 I am thinking here of Marx and The Frankfurt School in particular, along with all of its subsequent, social scientific subsets, e.g. Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, etc., sought, and still seeks, to construct morality apart from anything ontological other than the human subject herself, and apart from any phenomena other than that of human experience. Critical theory as such is a purely empirical theory, but one where the human reasoner is himself part of the empirical data subject to social and historical analysis.

Where the enlightened modernists failed to successfully replace religious morality with Reason (capital “R”), the post-modern critical theorist now took up the mantel of moral progress. This new, critical philosophy consisted of Marx and his successors on the one hand, e.g. the cultural Marxists: Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, et al., and Nietzsche on the other (few have been willing to embrace Nietzsche as an ethicist worth emulating, but perhaps someone like Ayn Rand might fit the bill). Abandoning the first principles of metaphysics, and the classical theories of knowledge, the question of ethics was now placed squarely in the realm of the human will by both parties; either with the emphasis on its communal (Marx), or its individual (Nietzsche) forms.

However, while the moral axiom: “How now shall we live?” remains the question that motivates us all, at least as a culture, if not as individuals, the answer remains an elusive target. Further, it is a question that motivates us even apart from, and independent of, any religious commitments. For we cannot help but live in a society of peers, and we cannot help but have moral intuitions about our relations to each other, and to the environment in which we live, and move, and have our being. And, even if one were banished and isolated to the proverbial deserted island, moral questions about how to treat oneself would still be with us even there.

“How now shall we live?” seems, therefore, to be a question that cannot be answered with any kind of unifying consensus if there is no agreement about our religious commitments, and even if there is agreement in our total rejection of any religious commitments whatsoever. With our without acknowledgment of God, we seem lost to a never-ending series of speculation about what is “the good” and what is “the good life.” To have unity on moral values and duties we would seem to require a real, extant, and clear moral principle, or Person, to either guide us into the Good, or tell us about it, or even model it for us.

Otherwise, what do we really have to say about morality?

Critical Theory as The New Theology

In his chapter, “To Seek to Salvage an Unconditional Meaning Without God is a Futile Undertaking: Reflections on a Remark of Max Horkheimer” the prodigious, second-wave philosopher of Critical Theory Jürgen Habermas says this about a comment made by his predecessor and founder of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, Max Horkheimer:

“Horkheimer’s interest in the doctrines of Judaism and Christianity was spurred less by a concern with God as such than with the redemptive power of God’s will. The injustice that comes to pass in a suffering creature should not be permitted to have the last word. At times it seems as if Horkheimer wanted to put the religious promise of redemption directly at the service of morality.”3 in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, 95

This passage, upon first reading, may seem obscure. However, once understood it can be shown that the idea contained herein, this notion of trying to realize the “redemptive power of God’s will” apart from any interest in God “as such,” is what lies at the heart of much, if not all, of the social justice movements that engulf and inflame our society today. It is the sentiment at the center of organizations like Black Lives Matter, and the fulcrum of initiatives that seek justice and the healing of division, yet attempt to do so without resort to a Divine Nature that grounds the apparently divine will found in traditional, religious texts. This, as we shall see, leads to a dangerous conflation: the confusion of the will of God with that of man; or the elevation of man to God rather than the descent of God to man.

First, however, what is Habermas saying about Horkheimer’s interest in “the doctrines of Judaism and Christianity?” Clearly, the critical philosopher, meaning Horkheimer, is presupposing “the death of God” as pronounced by Nietzsche, and assumed by Marx, as the inevitable consequence of the Enlightenment project of rationalization about religious belief. Thus, for all critical theorists, like Horkheimer or Habermas after him, that God is dead, meaning He never existed, is the starting point for any social theorizing, and any attempt to answer our question “How now shall we live?” Atheism is true, and we must simply get on with it.

Second, however, is the realization that we cannot seem to simply “get on with it!” The idea that the injustice that accompanies the suffering of sentient creatures, i.e. ourselves, animals, can be treated in a sterile, scientistic manner as mere “natural fact,” is simply unpalatable to the socially conscious, existentially sensitive human agent. How can we look at the long history of human and animal suffering, in all it horror, and say “well, that is just what molecules in motion do, and there is nothing more to say.” Certainly, there must be not only more to say, but also more to do! There must be a morality that gives us some meaningful context for that suffering, and that spurs us to some kind of ethical action. Stoic resignation is not an option for the critical theorist who seeks liberation from the oppression of such a woeful existence. In this sense, moral action becomes imperative for the critical theorist. For all critical theories, liberation from existential oppression is the focal point of all human thought and action.4 James Bohman writes in the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosohpy entry on Critical Theory, “In both the broad and the narrow senses, however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms.

However, as we have alluded to above, morality according to the post-modern critical theorists cannot really be considered an object of the intellect, i.e. as something capable of being grasped or discovered by the natural light of reason. After all, if God is dead, then there is no ultimate truth about morality to grasp, nor universal standard to be discovered. No abstract reasoning about abstract “truths,” no further scientific investigations of natural processes, and no theological commentary about supposed special revelations from above, e.g. the Bible, will give us any real moral content. For, where there is no moral law Giver, there really is no moral law.

In light of this “reality,” the novel proposal to the problem of dealing with moral sensibilities about perceived injustices, arises out of being pressed in between a modern rock, which says there are only natural facts about the world, no moral ones, and a post-modern hard place, which cries out that we need morality to live and to thrive as sentient and feeling creatures. The proposal of Horkheimer then, and several others, was to assume the moral content of Christianity, and his native Judaism, as descriptively true, yet without assuming its God as real. Horkheimer does not consider the moral content to be true in the sense of referring to an ultimate, non-physical reality (which would make it an object of the intellect to be grasped), rather he asserts it, morality, as being useful to us for the sake of functioning well (imposing function being an object of the will).

Third, then, is assuming the particular Judeo-Christian content of morality, in spite of rejecting the metaphysics of biblical and theological claims. What then for Horkheimer (the ethnic Jew) is central to biblical morality?— it is the “religious promise of redemption.” Redemption, even a redemption without a Redeemer, is still the only hope for modern man to get on with modern life. Habermas details this aspect of Horkheimer’s thinking,

“Once the rationality of the remorse experienced by a religiously tutored conscience is rejected by a secularizing world, its place is taken by the moral sentiment of compassion. When Horkheimer expressly defines the good tautologically as the attempt to abolish evil, he has in view a solidarity with the suffering of vulnerable and forsaken creatures provoked by outrage against concrete injustices.” (Habermas, 96)

In other words: even when we realize that religion is metaphysically false (and feel remorse because of it), we nevertheless recognize that our moral intuitions have been “tutored” by thousands of years of religious practice. And, even more, we still sense that those religious sentiments (even if they be only that, sentiments) are somehow correct, and worth defending. So, we feel compassionate in spite of the stark reality of a brute, naturalistic universe, a universe that is indifferent to us, and therefore are still moved to fight “evil” when we “see” it in the form of concrete injustices (knowing full well that there is no such thing as justice against which we can actually measure our feelings about the perceived injustice). Our outrage is stoked when we perceive these apparent imbalances in society, and our compassion demands we respond accordingly. Habermas goes on to tell us more about Horkheimer’s plundering of this particularly Christian moral content:

“The reconciling power of compassion does not stand in opposition to the galvanizing power of rebellion against a world devoid of atonement and reparation for injustice. Solidarity and justice are two sides of the same coin; hence, the ethics of compassion does not dispute the legitimacy of the morality of justice but merely frees it form the rigidity of the ethics of conscience.” (Habermas, 96)

But, now we come to the heart of the moral matter, if indeed God is not that heart. Having jettisoned religious belief as true but still finding that we have a conscience that has been trained in and molded by religious content, in particular that of Judeo-Christianity and the Bible, we are now told by the critical theorist that in a world where there is no “real” atonement and reparation for injustice, because there is no real God to do the atoning and repairing, our own “reconciling power of compassion” must be the vehicle by which “concrete injustices” are rectified. After all, if we are not going to be the ones to do the redeeming, then the redemption will not, cannot, come. Moreover, this immanent, and human-centered power of compassion, is not opposed to the “galvanizing power of rebellion,” but rather embraces it.5 one might think here of Saul Alinsky’s dedication in his classic work Rules for Radicals, where the author commends Lucifer for his rebellion, a rebellion that won him his own kingdom. In other words, if there is no God to atone for us, yet atonement is still necessary for us to live morally and to have an “unconditional” meaning that contextualizes our suffering, then in a world where there are concrete instances of things we perceive as unjust, and that “must” be made right for us to experience atonement, rebellion becomes a morally acceptable vehicle of redemption.

Compassion and rebellion are the new moral dynamo generating the new, moral society. This begins to look very familiar to what we see currently on our television screens and YouTube videos, where cries for justice and compassion are inevitably accompanied by acts of rebellion and revolutionary fervor. This is the politicizing of religiosity, the messianism of our times.6 Few journalist have done a better job of identifying and explaining the new religion of Social Justice than Andrew Sullivan, see here https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-roots-of-wokeness


But here is where those who identify themselves with “Christ” face the stark choice: We must decide whether the critical theorist is right in saying that religious belief itself is a mere product of man’s own making, and that its truth claims (like all others) are historically situated and thus unfixed from anything transhistorical, transfinite, or culturally transcendent. For if this is the case, then the redemption we need may tell us something about ourselves, our current “society,” but tells us nothing about anything beyond ourselves, or this latest version of ourselves. If Horkheimer is right, then Critical [social] theory is the new theology, in that it calls us to a form of moral life, even one replete with corporate atonement and communal redemption; however, it is a theology without a theos, or, at least, without a divine theos. It is religion “from below,” an earth without a heaven:

[Social theory] has superseded theology but has no new heaven to which it can point, not even a mundane one. Of course, social theory cannot completely efface [heaven’s] traces and hence is repeatedly questioned about how it is to be attained–as though it were not precisely the discovery of social [critical] theory that the heaven to which one can point the way is no heaven.” (Habermas, 98)

For in a world that is itself the sum of all reality, the new religion of social theory, with its hope for an immanent, social justice, the new heaven just is that culture which will result (perhaps for us, most likely for our children or grandchildren) if we were only to act now! What that new culture will be like, of course, is not something we can really say much about. You have to arrive in the “undiscovered country” before you can know what it will be like.

Alternatively to this New Theology, we can choose to believe that there is a something beyond ourselves, even a Someone, whose eternal life and transcendent nature is reflected in that which He has created. Further we can come to believe that our need for redemption tells us as much about the eternal Creator as it does of His temporal creatures. Instead of listening to the words of the critical theorist, we listen instead to the words of the critical realist, who says:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:18-20)

Either those things that are called moral evils are, as the critical theorist says, the product of human construction, and, consequently, the redemption that they demand also the product of human construction; or, they are, as the Apostle Paul says, the product of human rebellion against ultimate reality, and, consequently, redeemable only through the reconstructive action of the author of that reality. In ontological terms, redemption is either a bottom-up struggle performed by purely accidental creatures, and which has included in it the creation of culturally relative theological concepts and religious practices that aid us in our survival; or it is a top-down event, one enacted by a necessary Creator who has given us reason that allows us to form ideas, concepts, and language to describe that which is ultimately and actually real.

Whichever we decide will make a world of difference in what happens “down here” and in our daily lives. For on the former view the only authority against which we rise up is that of men and women just like ourselves, yet who merely constructed morality in a different fashion than we do today, a dynamic which implies an endless process of doing the same deconstruction and reconstruction with every generation of human society. On the latter view, however, the authority we are rebelling against is not like us, because He is not us, and we are not Him. Moreover, in virtue of not being like us, He (or It) may have an actual answer to our moral problem, so long as we can have access to Him (or It). And, if we have access to Him, we may be able to change who we are, and if we can be changed, then so can our moral behavior. And, if our moral behavior can change, so to the society in which we live.

Conflating the Divine Will With Human Will: Black Lives Matter And the Doctrine of “Heal Thyself”

In paragraph four of their statement about “What We Believe,” the most powerful and dominant social justice movement of our time: Black Lives Matter, claims the following: “Every day, we recommit to healing ourselves and each other, and to co-creating alongside comrades, allies, and family a culture where each person feels seen, heard, and supported.”7 (https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/) This doctrine of “self-healing” or “heal thyself” is fundamentally related to the above exposition of the early critical theorist, Max Horkheimer’s, notion of a theology without God. Upon further reading of the Black Lives Matter doctrinal statement, one will quickly discern that the moral and religious impulse is still there: human dignity is presupposed, redemption is what matters, and liberation is the key. The only problem is that we are the only agents of atonement (and, oh is there a process for how to atone!), as well as the only standard by which we name what is good “good”, and distinguish it from what is “evil.” Again, the determining factor of moral judgments no longer being the intellect seeking knowledge, but the will exercising power. Human power becomes the sole vehicle for societal change, because the human will is the sole determiner of moral “truth.”

In his short work Marxism and Christianity, former Marxist now Roman Catholic philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre says this about the role of religion in the life of the individual agent:

“But religion is only able to have this latter transforming function because and insofar as it enables individuals to identify and to understand themselves independently of their position in the existing social structure. It is in the contrast between what society tells a man he is and what religion tells him he is that he is able to find grounds both for criticizing the status quo and for believing that it is possible for him to act with others in changing it.”

MacIntyre. Marxism and Christianity. Apple Books, 13.

MacIntyre wrote this in 1968, many years before his conversion to Catholicism. This is why the astute observer will take note of MacIntyre’s fundamental metaphysical flaw when he says “it is in the contrast between what society tells a man he is and what religion tells him he is.” At that time, MacIntyre, like so many social justice theorists and social justice activists of today, confused the dictates of religion with the reality of God. Still a metaphysical naturalist, religion for MacIntrye was, as it remained for Horkheimer, merely a set of descriptive, yet non-referring claims—a set of sociological constructs, not universal moral truths revealed by a divine will. At some point for MacIntyre that understanding of religion ended, and his attention, unlike Horkheimer, turned to God “as such.”

To turn to God “as such” is to recognize the reality of the Divine Nature, and come to understand the words of the Bible and the content of the Christian faith no longer as just highly compelling products of human sentiment, but as divinely revealed fixtures of an intricately designed cosmos. A cosmos replete with essences and natural kinds, with ontological realities that can be examined by reason, be experienced with the affections, and by which we can gauge our moral attitudes, harness the best of our moral intuitions, and help guide our moral actions.

To not see this objective, mind-independent, fabric of the universe; a fabric not woven by human brains, but by a divine Mind, is ultimately to conflate God’s will with our own. For to look at the Bible and think of it as merely a human book, as Horkheimer did, even if a book worthy of plundering for the cause of moral action and the execution of justice, is to conflate the human will with the divine. It is to grant divinity to ourselves, and to elevate our own goodness as we conveniently ignore all the evil that we have done, and will continue to do. It is to try and do Christianity without Christ. It is to “heal ourselves.”

For many Social Justice theorists and activists today, society is all there is, and it does “tell a man what he is,” or perhaps “what it is.” For them to change society is for them to change man. But for the Christian this is not so, nor is it, as the younger MacIntyre erroneously claimed, religion that tells a man what he is. It is God who tells us who we are, and that divine speech act of identity, that communication from above, can be found both in the careful observation of His creation, and in the direct revelation of His Word.

That is the Old Theology. Theology with theos.

Bridging Lessing’s “Ugly Ditch”: The Historical Testimony to Miracles

One of the great skeptical minds of the 18th century, Gotthold Lessing, coined a phrase to describe what for him was an unbridgeable gap between the 18th-century enlightened mind and the purported supernatural events of the Bible. Lessing called this gap the “ugly broad ditch,” a chasm in knowledge that made it unreasonable for someone in the 18th century to believe in miracles and consequently many of the New Testament claims. For Lessing, since miracles did not occur in his time, the likelihood of them having never occurred at all was high. As such, the historical claims made by the Apostles and recorded by the writers of Scripture were too unreliable to put one’s faith in.

In Lessing’s thought, the contingent, or “accidental,” events of history could not be the basis for a rational belief in what had to be universal and necessary truths of religion. Whether or not historical claims were true, was leaving far too much to chance and fluctuations in the kinds and degree of evidence for those claims. This inherent susceptibility of historical testimony to skepticism made belief in any supernatural features of that testimony, especially the miracle stories of the Gospels and resurrection of Jesus, unjustified. If one was to accept only what was rational for an 18th century person to believe, one would have to forgo belief in the miracles related in the Scriptures, and consequently the idea of their being any historical basis for Christianity’s grand, theological claims.

Still, why think that Lessing’s “ugly ditch” is really there? Why believe either that religious claims must be grounded in necessary truths, like those of mathematics, or that the historical evidence for miracles was in the 18th century no longer valid, while it seems that in the 12th century it was?

First, the claim that religious truths cannot be left to the evidence of history is itself question-begging, since there is no reason to think that all truths must be self-evident or necessary in the same way that “2+3 = 5” or “there are no married bachelors” are necessary and self-evident. Moreover, if the actual content of a specific religious revelation (e.g. the Bible) gives good theological reasons for why religious claims are not grounded in necessary truths like math or logic– for example because human freedom is valuable, and interpersonal love must be freely chosen as opposed to coerced–then there is also an explanation for why religious truths are fundamentally different from others, and consequently need not be grounded in the same way. As to Lessing’s second contention, that the historical evidence is too shaky to believe in the miracles of the Bible, or that there was too much temporal distance between himself and those events to justify belief, this also seems tendentious at best.

Miracles and Historical Testimony

One obvious reason to reject Lessing’s claim is his assumption that miracles did not occur in the 18th century. Much of his argument seems to ride on the fact that because one has not experienced miracles personally, it is then unreasonable to assume that figures in the past experienced miracles. Seeing for Lessing would indeed be necessary for believing, albeit one is left to wonder if it would have been sufficient.

Lessing therefore begs the question whether or not there were credible miracle claims circulating in his own time. This is a logical fallacy that also appeared to not bother the Scottish philosopher David Hume enough to rethink his own position on contemporary miracle claims. It was assumed that there simply were none, and that they were mainly to be found among the more “barbaric and ignorant” peoples– peoples that must be intellectually naive, or predisposed to perverting the truth for the sake of more mundane goals. Either way Lessing, like Hume, argues circularly, simply asserting that contemporary miracles claims are not reliable.1 It is worth noting here that Humean skepticism goes far beyond just claims of supernatural activity, but to cause and effect relationships themselves. As such, Hume’s skepticism cut across a much broader range of knowledge than just the religious.

There is another problem though with Lessing’s understanding of miracle claims as it relates to the generational thread of historical testimony. For, it is not simply that the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ apparent miracles, or to the apparent Resurrection, claimed to have experienced miracles, it is that all of the early church–all subsequent Christian communities that persisted past the original eyewitnesses– also believed in those same miracles. Those historically and culturally closest to the original testifiers of Jesus’ miracles had no problem believing them, unlike Lessing who, being further removed in time, apparently could not. But, temporal distance alone seems hardly sufficient to dismiss the validity of a historical claim!

While it could be the case that the earliest, non-eyewitnesses were simply duped by the so-called eyewitnesses (e.g. Peter, Paul, the Marys), this would entail that all, or many, of the early Christians (young, old, rich, poor, peasant, aristocracy) were equally susceptible to the lies of these original Apostles. They (the early Church members) basically believed the testimony of the Apostles without any independent, corroborating evidence to support the idea that things like miraculous healings, or the multiplying of food, could really happen. This means that none of these early Christians, many of them eventual martyrs, had ever seen or heard of a credible miraculous event in their own time, yet regardless still believed the Apostles’ testimony to the same or similar kinds of events in their time.

If not duped, however, then the other option is that early followers knew for themselves the stories were false, yet propagated them in spite of knowledge to the contrary. If this were the case, then the earliest Christian communities, to include their leaders, would be implicated in the greatest conspiracy of all time– propagating known falsehoods about miraculous events, events that never occurred, over a vast geographical space and an extended, continuous period of time. For what purpose they would have done this, we have no idea. That they were able to maintain that known falsehood for so long, and across so many cultures, might itself be considered more miraculous than the Resurrection they claimed to believe occurred.

Further, it is hard to believe that these earliest Christian communities would continue to propagate known falsehoods only to enjoy the social ostracism, imprisonment, and even the torture and death that ultimately befell many of them. This was hardly a win-win situation. In fact it was clearly a lose-lose: lose if you are persecuted for telling the known falsehood, lose even if you are not, since ultimately you know there is no real, redeeming content to the faith you claim to hold– something made explicit by the Apostle Paul himself (see 1 Cor 15:12-19).

On the other hand, one reason why the early Christians might have believed in the purported miracles of the Gospels is that they had independent evidence that miracles occurred in their own times, a fact that would begin to undermine Lessing’s critique, as belief in contemporary miracles, say in the 2nd century, would bridge the epistemic gap about supernatural claims between 2nd century Christians and the generation of the 1st century Apostles. Thus, if this belief in contemporary miracles by post-Apostolic, early Christians was part of the reason why they believed the miracle stories passed on by the Apostles– orally or in Scripture– then the question must be asked: “When, or at what point in time, or even in what place in time, did this epistemic bridge from one generation to the next regarding belief in miracles collapse? When did the “ugly ditch” actually get dug?

The question can also be formulated this way: at what point in history did testimony about specific miracles, either the ones mentioned in Scripture, or in ones ongoing, cease to be a valid source of evidence for justified belief in miracles?

The Seamless Testimony from The Apostles to Today

It seems that for the vast majority, historical testimony to miracles was still a valid source of evidence in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, as well as in the 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th and all the way through to the 14th and 15th centuries. There is not an abundance of skeptical literature about either ancient claims to miracles, or contemporary ones, in the 16th century either (although skepticism about Natural Theology begins with the likes of Michel de Montaigne around this time). That is not to say that there are not any critiques of miracle claims prior to the 16th century, but just that the abundance of evidence is to the contrary: most people accepted the reality of miracles up to Lessing’s day.

So, when does Lessingische skepticism toward human testimony about miracles first emerge in history? When does the “ugly ditch” get dug, especially if the majority of people up until the 18th century did hold that testimony about miracles was reliable? Who or what ultimately digs this ditch? After all, the ditch cannot simply be assigned to some arbitrary date; as if in 1748, on a Thursday at 5:45pm GMT, all miracle claims, both ancient and contemporary, became subject to the skepticism of 18th century man.

The reason for Lessing to reject justified belief in miracles is not that the historical testimonies were ever demonstrated to be false, something that is nearly impossible to do, or that the temporal gap between the New Testament miracle claims and Lessing’s belief about them is too long, especially if there was continuous, persistent belief in miracles. Clearly it would be one thing to pick up some ancient text no one had read in several hundred years, comprised with fantastic stories in it and say: “Eh, these are ancient stories filled with claims of things we have never seen before. Why believe these things really happened?” But, when you have a historical lineage, a succession of real, human communities called “the Church” that has passed on these beliefs, and passed them on often under very harsh conditions, then you have some additional reasons to believe that what was being passed on was not just mythological. It was something real enough that people were willing to stake their physical lives and their cultural identity on its being true. Very few philosophies have garnered that kind of dedication in both belief and practice!

It seems therefore that the reason Lessing felt belief in miracles was unjustified was the simple fact that he never experienced one personally. So, there really is no argument about whether older, or contemporary, testimonies about miracles are false other than to say: “I never saw one, therefore all testimonies to miracles are false, or at least unreliable.”

Further, if the writings of the New Testament were mere fabrications, at least in regard to reports about its miraculous events, then the entirety of the early church, starting with men like Polycarp and Ignatius, moving forward to Irenaeus and Origen, up on through Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas, to Luther and the Reformers, through the great puritan thinkers of the 17th and 18th-century, to today’s analytical philosophers of religion, are all in some way implicated in the continued fabrication of said miracle stories– for each generation going back to the first would have known that the miracles reported by the Apostles were false and thus irrational to believe, and yet passed them off as being true. Or, if not liars, there has been a persistent, almost seamless strain of men and women being “fooled” into thinking something incredible happened that did not happen, and that based solely on the fact that someone told them so.

After all, if miracles do not happen then literally no one, not Clement of Rome, not Ignatius, not Polycarp, not Jerome, not Augustine, not Aquinas or Edwards, nor Lewis or Ratzinger, Swinburne or Polkinghorne, has ever experienced anything themselves, or heard any credible account in their own time that would give them additional warrant that the claims made by the Apostles, or found in the Scriptures, are reasonable to believe. Talk about a leap of faith by men who could hardly be called “barbaric or ignorant.”

What is more likely then– that thousands, if not millions, of Christians throughout the Church’s history have experienced miracles that make it justified for them to believe the miracles reported in the Scriptures actually occurred;2 One contemporary compendium of miracle claims is Craig S. Keener’s book, Miracles. Keener documents personal testimonies from every continent, most of which are healing miracles. That said, some miracles in the Bible might be harder to accept than others, e.g. the multiplication of the loaves and fishes as opposed to the healing of the paralytic, in virtue of seeing more kinds of one miracle attested to today than other kinds. Still, a miracle is a miracle.or that Christians from the very beginning have been fooled into thinking that incredible events for which they have no independent reason to believe happened, except it was told to them, really happened?

In the end Lessing dug his own ditch, and did so because he was seeking absolute certainty. But, absolute certainty is not forthcoming about anything in this life outside of a very limited set of claims. Lessing’s concern about the shifting sands of time may have been warranted, but his ultimate conclusion on where to place his faith was not. What Lessing perhaps should have done is believed in the preponderance of evidence– a preponderance that points to the reality of miracles, both in 1st-century, in the 18th, and today.