DID YOU KNOW?
This week’s, Did You Know is from a South Bend history professor’s book, “Changed by Grace.”
By the 1730s the rise of modern science had begun when Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley began devising their own ideas, and the eighteenth century Enlightenment was beginning to assault traditional Christianity with increasingly skeptical attacks. Widespread open atheism did not appear in western culture until the following century, but the groundwork was already being laid. Voltaire, one of the best known of these Enlightenment thinkers, quipped that the civilized world would not be safe “until the last king is throttled with a noose made from the entrails of the last priest.” The Scottish philosopher David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1799), skillfully used these Enlightenment-era arguments to create the most philosophically deadly attack on belief in God ever put together in the history of the western thought.
The formative figure behind the Enlightenment was Dutch born John Locke who was not only the founder of modern psychology, but also the founder of modern empiricist philosophy. Locke alleged that the human mind at birth was tabula rasa, a blank state, with nothing written on it?
This seemed at first glance obvious: newborn babies knew nothing about anything. There were no innate ideas already present in a baby’s mind at birth, he argued, and there was no way the human mind could directly contact the realm of the Platonic ideas—the fundamental intelligible principles of the universe—in spite of all the medieval theological writings which claimed that human beings had that ability. It seemed obvious that all of our human knowledge had to be based on one of two sources of information: (a) our five senses which gave us knowledge of the external physical world, and (b) our knowledge of our own inner mental states. We could use our external senses to tell that the rose was red in color, soft to the touch, and smelled sweet. We could use our knowledge of our inner states to tell when we felt angry, happy, sorrowful, and other such subjective feelings.
Since God was not a physical object, there seemed no way that we could apprehend God through our five senses in the same direct way that we saw an armchair or a large rock, or heard a rooster crowing in the morning, or felt the texture of a tree’s bark, or tasted honey. This left the frightening possibility that belief in God arose only as an inner mental state, and was based on nothing more than a subjective emotion which the mind then connected to some fantasy object which had no real existence outside our own minds.
By the next century, Ludwig Feurbach wrote his skeptical work, The Essence of Christianity (1841), in which he argued precisely that in rather devastating fashion. Since God was obviously not an external sense object like a tree or a rock, God was simply a creation of the human imagination which had been projected onto the heavens. Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and a host of other western thinkers rapidly took up various versions of this Feurbachian skepticism during the years that followed.
The chink in the Enlightenment philosophers’ armor was that so long as spirituality was based upon medieval theology, it could not defend itself against Lockean arguments. St. Augustine, St. Denis, and most of the rest of formative medieval western theologians (including semi-Aristotelian thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas) had assumed the reality at some level of the eternal ideas as the basic rational principles of the universe, and they believed in the realm of ideas—the noumenon as Kant called it—provided the fundamental framework of reality itself at the ultimate level. And more importantly they had also assumed that our human minds could come into some sort of direct contact with these fundamental universal principles…
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