Does the "No Meaning Without God" argument rest on a mistake?
Tuesday, November 4, 2025 • Duration 16:48
§ In a recent lecture, popular science and philosophy communicator Curt Jaimungal presented an argument against the simulation hypothesis.
The Simulation Hypothesis: The idea that we are in a realistic computer-simulation like The Matrix.
Advocates argue that surprising features of reality, like false collective memories (“The Mandela Effect”), are what you would expect if the simulation hypothesis were true. Therefore, it probably is true.
But Jaimungal demonstrates that this argument rests on a logical fallacy. (Relevant clip: 16:42)
Consider its structure:
* If the simulation hypothesis were true, you would expect false collective memories.
* There are false collective memories.
* Therefore, the simulation hypothesis is probably true.
In other words,
* On hypothesis H, you would expect evidence E.
* There is evidence E.
* Therefore, E indicates the probability of H.
But this reasoning is precisely backwards.
In order to demonstrate the probability of H given E, we cannot use the probability of E given H. We want the probability of the hypothesis given the evidence, not the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis.
And several common Christian apologetic arguments commit the same logical fallacy.
§ Seven years ago, William Lane Craig met atheist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in debate.
But this was not any ordinary atheist-theist debate, because also on stage was psychologist Jordan B. Peterson.
In his remarks, Craig argued that, given the hypothesis of atheism, we would not expect life to be meaningful or morality to be objectivity, and that given the hypothesis of theism, we would.
Yet both his interlocutors argued for moral realism (the objectivity of moral truth), independently of the God hypothesis. As a result, Craig was left trying to argue his opponents out of their moral realism, because it is not what you would expect on an atheistic worldview.
I recently listened to and reacted to the whole of debate and discussion. I’ll be posting my (very long) reaction to YouTube soon. Here’s the first clip from the video:
Why did Craig end up in this unenviable position? Because his argument, the “No meaning without God” argument, is—like the above simulation argument—backwards.
Consider its structure:
* On the God hypothesis, you would expect to find meaning (or morality or mind).
* Life is meaningful. We all want life to be meaningful.
* Therefore, if we want life to be meaningful, we need to adopt the God hypothesis.
It’s paired with the opposite argument about atheism (or naturalism):
* On naturalism, you would not expect to find meaning (or morality or mind).
* We do find meaning. It would be nice if life were meaningful.
* But, if you believe in naturalism, you should conclude—in order to be consistent—that life is not meaningful.
Like the argument for the simulation hypothesis, the reasoning proceeds by considering the probability of the evidence given the two hypotheses on offer.
If God exists, it is probable intuitively that he would create meaningful rather than meaningless forms of existence. But that’s not what needs demonstrating.
What needs demonstrating is that it is probable that God exists, given the evidence of meaning and morality.
We need to prove the probability of God given meaning/morality, not the probability of meaning/morality given God.
Therefore, we need first to demonstrate the existence of meaning, morality, or mind independently of either hypothesis.
And of course, that’s where we encounter another wrinkle.
§ Rather than admitting the independently-evident existence of meaning or morality, Christians often object to it.
As you may have noticed, I had to strike through the middle premise of each argument. Unlike in the simulation case, the evidence is not even granted.
Instead, when Christians encounter a non-believer who believes in morality or meaning, we pressure them to call this into question, given its improbability on an atheistic view.
But if there is no meaning or morality, then there is no reason to postulate God as the explanation of meaning and morality.
How do you explain morality on an atheistic worldview? Well, if there’s no morality or meaning, then there’s no explaining to do. Unless we grant that morality and meaning are demonstrable independently of one’s worldview, the argument cannot get started.
Rather, the first step of a natural-theological argument is to demonstrate the phenomenon that will serve as evidence, whether meaning, morality, or mind.
That means that, in this debate, Goldstein and Peterson are engaging in the appropriate first step of natural theology, demonstrating the relevant phenomenon independently of metaphysical hypotheses.
The second step is to demonstrate that the explanation of that phenomenon requires the existence of something else as its minimal, sufficient explanation.
But notice what Popular Christian Apologetics does instead. It fallaciously reverses step two, by considering the probability of the evidence on the hypothesis, instead of the hypothesis on the evidence. And it undermines nonbelievers’ confidence in the phenomenon of step one.
In effect, this is worse than the problem with the simulation argument. There, the evidence is granted. Here, the evidence is not even granted.
It’s as if the simulation people tried to argue everyone else into thinking that hallucinations and false collective memories don’t exist. But those phenomena were supposed to be your evidence for the simulation hypothesis!
Popular Christian Apologetics argues in just about the opposite direction it should argue.
§ What are the steps to demonstrate that meaning or morality—let’s pivot to morality—indicates the existence of God?
1. First, you must demonstrate the truth of moral realism, that moral statements express truths about reality. This is no easy feat. But let’s imagine you were able to do so.
(I think that page one of Mere Christianity, Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment,” and Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology all do this work, in a certain way. By demonstrating that we all engage in moral thinking and can’t help but doing so, I think we are forced to recognize that we all are moral realists, whether we like it or not. See my video on natural law.)
2. Second, you must argue that moral realism cannot be explained naturalistically. My late professor Helen De Cruz carefully considers these arguments in her chapter on the moral argument for God’s existence. When it comes to moral psychology, there are many available evolutionary explanations of moral psychology, even if I would raise questions about them.
But for moral realism, evolutionary explanations tend to be “debunking.” We believe these things, not because they are true, but because they contribute to group survival. As a result, many thinkers—both religious and secular—think it is difficult to see how naturalism can account for the truth of moral statements. From scientific ‘is’ statements, you don’t arrive at any moral ‘ought’ statements. Hence, a moral argument against naturalism has good odds of success.
But what follows? Many folks who adopt moral realism “from below” adopt either a kind of Platonism or a kind of social constructivism (a non-reductionist one). For example, in analytic philosophy, Iris Murdoch proposed a kind of Platonism to explain the reality of the good and the truth of moral statements in contradiction to the ethical emotivism of the logical positivists. On the other hand, John Rawls resurrected moral philosophy by introducing a kind of constructivism, which many take to have realist implications. As a result, most secular analytic philosophers today are moral realists.
(Even Peter Singer recently came out as a moral realist.)
3. Step three is to argue for the minimal, sufficient non-naturalistic explanation of moral realism. This could be the Platonism or constructivism mentioned above, or true Kantianism, where moral statements express not truths of theoretical reason but of the form of practical reasoning.
Most Christians are not so chastened in their reasoning. Rather, we propose God as explanation and jump to the conclusion that we’ve hit the jackpot.
But given the Euthyphro dilemma, it is not at all clear that this is so. Trying to explain morality (or logic) by God rather than Platonism is suggestive of voluntarism.
In fact, I think that moral realism indicates either something like Platonism or something like Kantianism. Natural reality is an inadequate explanation of morality, so either a non-natural moral reality (vaguely akin to Platonic forms) is suggested, or something endemic to practical reasoning, a kind of logic of action introduces moral categoricity.
4. Step four is the one you’ve been waiting for. We ask what metaphysically explains the existence of this non-natural moral reality or what follows from Kantian practical reasoning. Only at this stage will we be led to appeal to God.
If we think moral realism requires a kind of Platonic moral reality in addition to nature, then we ask a causal question about what could explain and give rise to it. A naturalistic causal explanation is not even an option, since this reality is non-natural. A supernatural source of moral reality must, arguably, be postulated.
If moral realism leads to Kantianism, then, at least according to Kant, God arises not as a causal explanation of the world, of human beings, or of moral reality. No God himself is another postulate of practical reason, the being that must exist in order to bring about cosmic justice in accord with the categorical imperative.
But either way, there are more steps until we arrive at anything like God, and those steps are not obvious.
The Four (4) Steps of a Non-Fallacious Moral Argument for God’s Existence:
* Argue for moral realism.
* Rebut naturalistic explanations of moral realism.
* Determine the minimal, sufficient non-natural explanation of moral realism.
* Seek a metaphysical explanation of the non-natural explanation of moral realism.
§ My caution to Christians is that we stop making arguments that short-cut these steps.
The process of reasoning from a phenomenon to God is not something that can be done on the cheap.
Some of our arguments are fallacious, like the argument from the probability of the evidence on the hypothesis—a favorite of both presuppositional and evidential apologists.
Others are not fallacious but are far too quick. In the process, we jump to conclusions. And we are pressuring our interlocutors to jump to those conclusions with us.
This is not classical apologetics. It is a kind of fideistic metaphysics.
“Leap into my belief because it can quickly solve some of your philosophical and spiritual puzzlement!”
Now atheistic naturalists engage in this kind of reasoning as well. I fully admit that. But that doesn’t excuse the error on our part.
I’d like to see more Christian philosophers and apologists making careers out of steps one through three, rather than jumping to step four (and reversing its logical order).
But I don’t think you have to be a career philosopher or apologist to start putting these ideas into practice.
§ Instead of demolishing nonbelieving worldviews and jumping to conclusions, practiceapologetics that are 1) constructive and 2) patient.
To be constructive, don’t undermine nonbelievers’ intuitions of things that are more than material. As human beings inhabiting God’s world, they are entitled to perceive the irreducible character of mind, meaning, and morality. Use this perception as common ground from which to reason in a Godward direction.
And take things slowly. You may, like William Lane Craig, want to push Jordan Peterson or a secular philosopher to metaphysically explain their moral realism. The answer is probably that they can’t.
But, as I suggested to someone this weekend, give these philosophers another forty years to think about it. Maybe they’ll go the way of Thomas Nagel or Antony Flew.
The equivalent for non-philosophers is a solid ten years, minimum. That’s how long an adult, intellectual conversion takes. (I wrote about this pattern in conversion stories here.)
Patient apologetics has time for people to consider these arguments, to follow steps one through four of the moral argument, rather than leaping all the way to the end, short-cutting and cheapening the conclusion.
For if our moral experience and awareness is an indication of the divine, then patient reflection, not suffering through an anxious sales-pitch, will reveal it to be so.
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Before You Discover the Meaning OF Life, Try Finding Meaning IN Life
Tuesday, October 28, 2025 • Duration 15:15
§ Recently, one of the world’s most downloaded podcasts hosted a debate between a Christian, an atheist, and a psychologist.
Their topic?
The meaning of life.
Christian apologist Greg Koukl argued that, without belief in God, a materialist worldview holds no hope to provide meaning.
The atheist—young and dapper Alex O’Connor—countered that, even if there is a God, who’s to say he hasn’t given our lives a meaning that we find meaningless? Say, designing us so that our purpose in life was to produce paperclips?
However, at other points the Christian and the atheist seemed to be in complete agreement:
Koukl: “There either is meaning objectively, or not.”
O’Connor: “I think so too, to be clear.”
Meanwhile, a third participant, “Dr. K,” trained psychologist with a background in Eastern spirituality, had this to say:
Countering both sides of the metaphysical debate, Dr. K continued, “For me, finding meaning and purpose…is a very practical thing.”
Rather than answering the perennial questions of metaphysics and religion, Dr. K is concerned to intervene in a recent, acute crisis of loss of subjective meaning—the very crisis with which Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary, framed the discussion.
As Dr. K puts it, “If someone asks me, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I don’t know. But if someone says, ‘I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”
And in saying this, Dr. K exposed the deep failure of several decades of both Christian and atheist apologetics, a failure that comes down, in this case, to a single preposition.
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Natural Selection Only Explains a Fraction of Biological Adaptation
Friday, September 26, 2025 • Duration 14:30
In A Natural History of Natural Theology, my late professor Helen De Cruz (1978-2025) and husband Johan De Smedt write that “most modern versions of the design argument do not take natural selection and its principle of cumulative selective retention into account as a viable explanation” (75).
Advocates of the design argument have not proven that the argument remains valid after Darwin; they—we—have simply ignored natural selection.
Dr. De Cruz, who served on the committee for my dissertation prospectus, died this June at the age of 46 of an aggressive illness. She left behind two children and a husband. Her work in philosophy was truly remarkable, not to mention her prior Ph.D. in art history, her fiction-writing, and lute-playing(!). While this article engages in criticism, it arises from deep respect for her amazing, cross-disciplinary scholarship.
However, while De Cruz and De Smedt argue that contemporary natural theologians ignore natural selection, their own description of natural selection is simplistic.
They illustrate the process with an example of Richard Dawkins’. And they begin with an important admission:
The likelihood that a computer program that generates random combinations of letters will produce by pure chance a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, such as METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL, is vanishingly small.
(I did the math; that’s less than 1 in 1032!)
But here’s how natural selection can overcome this probability threshold:
However, allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt will produce the sentence in no more than 23 × 26 = 598 runs.
Allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt?
That’s not natural selection. That’s cheating.
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Further Reflections on Machen: Objectivity, Convictions, and Institutions
Some questioned whether Machen’s later turn away from “objective” methods wasn’t the right move after all.
Others raised concerns about the dangers of free inquiry, especially when it risks undermining Christian convictions.
Still others debated the wisdom of staying and reforming corrupt institutions rather than leaving them to act authentically.
Here are a few reflections in response to those critiques.
1. Should Christians Strive for Objectivity?
A common objection was:
“The theological modernists claimed objectivity, but they were, in fact, biased. Doesn’t that vindicate Machen’s later turn toward Christian perspectivalism?”
This strikes me as a category confusion.
The problem with theological modernists wasn’t that they tried to be objective. The problem was that they weren’t. They imported philosophical and theological assumptions while presenting their conclusions as neutral scholarship. Their failure wasn’t in aspiring to objectivity, but in failing to live up to it.
The right response isn’t to embrace perspectivalism as if all truth is merely a projection of our ideological priors. It’s to strive for greater objectivity, not less.
I’ve described this elsewhere as civilized empiricism—a pursuit of truth grounded in a recognition of one’s biases, tested through dialogue with dissenting voices and institutions designed to expose blind spots. This is distinct from a kind of naïve or “brute empiricism,” where a lone thinker imagines they can arrive at truth without community, history, or correction.
If our institutions are prone to dogma, the answer isn’t to surrender to subjectivity. It’s to lean more fully into practices that counterbalance our partiality.
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Why I STOPPED Being a Presuppositionalist
Monday, June 23, 2025 • Duration 19:24
My theological education took place at Westminster Seminary, the bastion of presuppositionalism.
Presuppositionalism: Christian thinking must begin from all and only Christian presuppositions.
And this thesis had a noticeable effect on our studies.
95% of the time we would read people who already agreed with us in order to believe what they said.
5% of the time, we would go find somebody we disagreed with and be assigned to go figure out what was wrong with them.
But after Westminster, I did a program in philosophy at the University of Chicago. In this beautiful, gothic reading room, etched in stone over one of the doorways was this quotation:
“Read, neither to believe nor to contradict, but to understand.”
And those words summed up what had been wrong with my experience at a presuppositional seminary, and what was so right about my experience at the University of Chicago.
Now, my Christian perspective is not just based on Christian presuppositions.
Now, my Christian perspective suggests that even if I’m not looking at the Bible, I see indications of the Divine.
Readers, last week, I argued that the theology nerd mindset is that of a closed system, a self-reinforcing circle of Bible and theology, with no outside inputs.
While much evangelical theology makes this error implicitly, presuppositionalism endorses and radicalizes this error explicitly.
The presuppositionalist avows that theology should utilize circular arguments, beginning all and only from Christian presuppositions.
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Why I'm Getting a PhD in Philosophy, Not Theology
Friday, April 18, 2025 • Duration 17:55
Hello, readers! The last several weeks, I’ve been deep in work on my Ph.D. dissertation. I’m excited to share some of the fruits of that research here. I’ll begin with my reflections on why I’m getting a Ph.D. in philosophy in the first place. Thanks for reading.
Hey, I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian.
And in this post, I’m going to talk about why I’m getting a PhD in philosophy and not theology.
1. Biblical Exegesis Is Not Enough
My first intellectual love has been theology, the study of Christian doctrine and what the faith teaches. That led me to take an interest in studying at seminary where we would study the sources of Christian theology in the Bible and the history of Christian interpretation of the Bible and the systematization of that into systematic theology. A whole coalition of disciplines that explore the contours of what Christianity teaches. And by attending seminary, you become competent. You can learn the original languages of the Bible. You can learn how to use the Bible in theological debate, what are the main arguments for and against different positions, and how to ground one's own position in those texts.
But what I realized over the course of my seminary studies was that the resources of biblical exegesis alone are not enough to do Christian theology.
I noticed this in each of the main evangelical debates.
Take the debate over complementarianism and egalitarianism, the relationship between men and women in the home and the church.
Now both of these arguments were presented as if they were purely exegetical arguments. They rested on the meanings of certain Greek words like kephalé, for head, the husband is the head of the wife (Eph 5:23). What does this mean, authority, source, or what? The “helpmeet,” the “companion” in the book of Genesis (Gen 2:18). These Hebrew and Greek words were supposed to be the linchpin of theological arguments.
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In Defence of Christian Civilization
Thursday, February 27, 2025 • Duration 51:13
Yes, that’s right — “defence,” with a ‘c.’
That’s because my guest on this episode is an Anglican priest and Substacker Father Thomas Plant (Fr Thomas Plant).
Father Plant recently responded to Paul Kingsnorth’s lecture “Against Christian Civilization” with his well-titled reply, “Kingsnorth’s Radical Protestantism: In Defence of Christian Civilisation.”
Fr. Plant writes:
“Do we want civilization,” he asks, “or do we want Christ? What if we can have only the one or the other?” The question is rhetorical, the presumed answer clear. Christ and civilisation are antitheses. To follow one is to reject the other. They are rival masters, and woe on him who tries to serve the two.
This dualistic principle governs Kingsnorth’s recent diatribe for First Things, Against Christian Civilisation. It is an ascetic principle of sorts, grounding Kingsnorth’s quietist distaste for politics and technology. But despite his newfound profession of Orthodoxy, it is a principle closer to the Puritans and Levellers than to the Hesychasts and Stilites he admires.
Given my own take on Kingsnorth’s talk, I had to have Fr. Plant on the podcast. Here is our conversation.
For the video version, watch our interview on YouTube. (And be sure to subscribe to TheNatural Theologian YouTube channel.)
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:57 Kingsnorth's Mistake
07:03 The Puritan Error?
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Jordan Peterson's Vision of Christian Civilization
Friday, February 21, 2025 • Duration 33:43
Recently, Jordan Peterson spoke at ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, his organization for international leadership. This article contains the transcript of his talk and my reaction to it, taken my from most recent YouTube video.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is Jordan Peterson’s sort of global policy and vision network, kind of an antidote to Davos and the elite culture. And he’s been casting his culturally Christian, conservative/classical liberal vision over last year’s and now this year’s conference.
This video just came out, so I’m gonna react and see what we can say about the philosophical and theological significance of his talk.
Jordan Peterson:
What is the defining characteristic of this civilizational moment? I would say that what lies in front of us, perhaps for the first time, is the opportunity to make the foundational principles of our civilization, conscious, explicit and propositional, and in so doing, to pave the way for a genuine and mutually appreciative union of traditional conservatism and classic liberalism.
To undertake such a venture, the first question that we must address is the nature of motivation, for life, for being and becoming. And I think we've proceeded far enough in our philosophical, theological, and psychological, biological investigations to provide an answer to that.
The default drives that motivate us, or personalities that possess us might be regarded as those that foster a narrow and self absorbed hedonism. And I would say that that's the default state that characterizes human immaturity.
That possession by implicit, fragmented whim must be transcended by a more sophisticated, uniting principle in order for the psyche to be integrated and to be sustainable across time in an iterated manner, and for community itself to exist. Hedonistic pleasure, seeking the gratification of immediate desire, the simple avoidance of pain or displeasure is not a principle that can improve when it's implemented, or unite people in productive cooperation and competition, so that a society can be established.
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TEN Things I Learned from Jordan Peterson
Friday, February 14, 2025 • Duration 22:38
Dear readers, the following article is taken from the transcript of my latest YouTube video. I hope you enjoy!
I've learned many things from Jordan Peterson since he came on the public scene in 2016. I've learned things about psychology, morality, philosophy and even about Scripture and the Christian faith, things that have bolstered my understanding as a Christian philosopher and theologian.
So without further ado, ten things I learned from Jordan Peterson.
1. The Reality and Importance of Personality
Jordan Peterson is a personality psychologist. Following Carl Jung, he believes in the divisions between different personality traits that can be discovered through empirical study. He’s an advocate, in particular, of the recent Big Five model of personality. In the Big Five, there are five traits along which human beings can vary, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, assertiveness and neuroticism.
Now, I used to be a bit of a skeptic about psychology in general, but personality in particular. Anytime someone tried to put me in a psychological box, I would resist it. I would hear about the Myers Briggs scale and be put into a category, whatever it was, INTJ, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It never made any sense to me. It never felt accurate to me.
The interesting thing is, the Big Five is not about putting people in personality types. It's about traits that vary independently.
And so since I've learned about this, you start to see it everywhere. Some people are more extroverted, some less so and more introverted. Some people are more assertive than others. Some people more open to intellectual experience and ideas and so on.
And I think a lot of us resist this out of a sense that it puts us, of course, in a box or that it limits what we can change, what we can become. But there's also a deep reality to this. Not everything about human personality is malleable, and more importantly, some things in human personality are given.
What was even cooler to understand about personality was that so many other aspects of human differences can reduce down to personality differences, differences of ideology, whether that’s in theology or politics.
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Praeparatio Evangelica: The Evangelistic Step Evangelicals Forgot
Tuesday, February 11, 2025 • Duration 13:49
[Doorbell buzzes]
“Hello! Would you like to change religions? I have a free book written by DJEE-ZUS!”
While the Broadway show from which that line comes is not about evangelicals but Latter-Day Saints, it fits.
The average evangelical is liable to think that their free afternoons and weekends ought to be spent engaged in similarly abrupt evangelistic conversations.
After all, people are dying! If we don’t act quickly, they’ll soon face God’s throne of judgment; and then they’ll go to hell.
But our Christian forefathers would have had us behave with more circumspection and preparation. Since the second century, Christian theologians have recognized the reality and even necessity of what Francis Schaeffer called pre-evangelism. The Church Fathers called it praeparatio evangelica, preparation for the gospel.
But since the 19th century, American Christianity has been shaped more by tent revivals than patristic treatises. We have cultivated an urgency to share the gospel as soon as possible, to drive the unbeliever toward conversion, to immanentize the personal eschaton.
Theological theories have sometimes reinforced this. Cornelius Van Til criticized Francis Schaeffer for holding that there was a work of pre-evangelism prior to the acceptance of a Christian worldview. This was to concede too much to autonomous man and his felt need of proof or persuasion.
However, in the absence of Christian pre-evangelists, God gave us a non-Christian one. Theaters fill to hear Jordan Peterson lecture about the Bible. Secular podcast hosts press him on his Christology. And just as the wokeness Peterson opposed was experiencing defeat in last year’s election, the long ebb of the sea of faith began to reverse.
Rather than asking , we should understand Peterson’s work as a . In doing so, we join a long tradition of Christians who hold that non-Christian philosophers can and do prepare the way of the Lord.
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§ The Diary of a CEO is one of today’s top podcasts. Host Steven Bartlett is a young, successful entrepreneur who interviews the best minds in a wide variety of areas, from psychology, to politics, to—more rarely—religion.
That is why it was exciting to see him host this discussion on meaning and religion with a Christian apologist among the participants.
Even secular audiences have become interested in religious questions as a result of what many term “the meaning crisis,” a combination of psychological down-turns that have prompted a resurgence of religious belief and participation.
And that is the setup with which Bartlett frames the podcast discussion:
The reason I wanted to speak to all three of you today is to discuss meaning and purpose. And there’s some stats that I wanted to share that kind of frame the discussion:
Three in five young Americans believe that their life lacks purpose. Nine in ten young people in the UK believe that their life is lacking purpose.
And to give some further stats, which I found really interesting around the rise of religiosity in the UK, a belief in God amongst 18-24 year-olds has risen from 18% in 2021, to 37% in 2025. According to YouGov and in the UK, monthly church attendance has risen from 4% up to 15% in 2025.
There is something going on, and that’s what I want to talk about today.
Bartlett identifies two trends.
First, there is an increase in the number of people in Western countries who report lacking purpose in their lives.
Second, in only the last couple years, there has been an increase both in religious belief and attendance.
What is interesting about this is that, for a long time, there have been intellectuals—from Friedrich Nietzsche to Francis Schaeffer—arguing that the decline of religious belief is the cause of contemporary purposelessness. This argument has ramped up in intellectual spaces in the last nine years, chiefly through the influence of Jordan Peterson.
However, until the last two years, there was little evidence that this had had an impact on the religious beliefs and practices of the population at large. This recent turn of events lends empirical, sociological credence to what was previously only a philosophical postulate.
But the connection between religious belief and felt purpose remains opaque. Does one need to resolve questions of religion in order to gain a sense of purpose in life? Or is religious conviction merely a psychological remedy that happens, sometimes, to be effective?
2. Team Metaphysics, Unite!
§Over the course of the discussion, it is revealed that the Christian apologist and the atheist are strongly aligned in their answer to that question.
For both Greg Koukl and Alex O’Connor,
the questions of metaphysics are prior to those of psychology.
So Greg Koukl:
“I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic explanation can explain the consciousness’s hunger for meaning and significance.”
In other words, you need to decide between metaphysical naturalism and theism before you can satisfy the hunger for meaning and significance.
And Alex O’Connor:
“You asked, ‘Do I know my own purpose?’ That assumes that there is a purpose to know.”
On the other hand, they both throw bones to psychology, acknowledging its significance in measure.
Koukl rightly points out that, because God made the world with objective purpose:
“People can participate in that meaning and purpose even if they don’t know God.”
Effectively, Koukl acknowledges the doctrine of the natural law in a way I applaud.
For O’Connor, the New Atheists neglected the psychological dimension, and he acknowledges that religion serves an important role in strengthening us against the existential threat of death:
“The New Atheist movement was quite philosophically shallow. It didn’t seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place.”
However, in spite of these concessions, when pushed, both Koukl and O’Connor express their view of meaning as 1) turning on questions of metaphysics, and 2) being all or nothing.
At one point, Greg Koukl bluntly says, “There either is meaning or there isn’t,” to which O’Connor responds, “I completely agree.”
In short, the atheist and the Christian have teamed up on team metaphysics.
Their program is this:
“Want meaning in life? First determine the meaning of life.”
But the psychologist is having none of it.
3. Psychologist: “I hard disagree.”
§ Several years ago, Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig, who has long been YouTube-famous for rattling sabres with atheists in heated philosophical debates, was caught off-guard by the introduction of a third participant: Psychologist Jordan Peterson.
While Koukl and O’Connor are clearly poised to engage in some classic atheist-theist exchanges, Dr. K presses a different question:
“If someone asks me, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I don’t know.
But if someone says, ‘I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”
At one point, Dr. K brings the discussion back to the statistics with which Bartlett framed the podcast:
Steven started this out with some really scary statistics that we’re seeing, right? There’s a mental health crisis. I think a lot of what we’re seeing is, while it may be perennial, I think it’s like seems more acute right now.
Dr. K also challenges Alex on an important point. Alex argues that the discussion they are having is a perennial one. People for all history have had existential questions, questions of meaning and metaphysics, and so these are the perennial questions which will not be answered in one conversation.
But Dr. K points out that their discussion is not framed by a perennial problem, but an acute one.
That acute problem is not the perennial problem of metaphysics: What is the meaning of life?
Instead, it is the personal problem: How can I find meaning in life?
The difference is but a preposition.
Because he thinks the problem of meaning is perennial, Alex emphasizes more than once that it will be impossible, in the course of one conversation, to settle the matter.
But Dr. K disagrees. He does think their conversation can provide an answer.
4. Incremental Improvement
§ Moments later, Dr. K reveals why he thinks the meaning crisis is manageable.
While, for the atheist and the theist, the problem of meaning is all-or-nothing, for Dr. K, meaning is measurable along a sliding scale. He describes how psychologists measure a sense of meaning or purpose in life. They give people a series of surveys that get responses to questions related to meaning, control, and purpose (all of which clump together psychometrically, suggesting that they measure the same psychological variable).
He surveys the debate participants on the spot, asking how they would rate their subjective sense of purpose on a scale of 1 to 10: Koukl offers 10, Bartlett 5, and Dr. K presses Alex to admit that he would score greater than five on such a scale.
But what is Dr. K’s goal in the conversation? Not to get people from zero to ten in a single conversation, but to help people move “some vague percentage points, I’m shooting for about 20%.”
Yes.
This is it.
Dr. K wants people to move some small percentage along a vague scale that he doesn’t understand, but that we kind of all know is there: More meaning and purpose, less meaning and purpose.
That’s what he’s going for. It’s incremental improvement.
Meaning in life is not agrand, metaphysical sense of the purpose of all existence.
Meaning can be as simple as moving from doing less well to doing a little bit better.
5. A New Apologetic
§ In much of popular Christian apologetics, a certain kind of argument predominates.
While I have previously made much of the presuppositionalist-classical distinction, this argument predominates on both sides, whatever the apologist’s professed methodology.
The argument:
* If there is no God, there can be no meaning.
* The atheistic worldview has no God.
* Therefore, people with an atheistic worldview have no meaning.
But the conclusion doesn’t follow.
My freshman year at Wheaton College, I remember being struck by the title of a book: The God Who Is There.
And that is the relevant point.
An improper inference is made from “The atheistic worldview has no God,” to atheists have no God.
But they do. People with an atheistic worldview live in a world where God is there—even though they don’t believe he is.
And what that means is that there is no one whose life does not have meaning.
Dr. K and Jordan Peterson are right, therefore, to help people find meaning in life well before they’ve figured out the meaning of life.
Team metaphysics—the atheist and the theist—say:
the questions of metaphysics are prior to those of psychology.
But the actual result of Christian realism—the belief that God is there whether we believe it or not—and if psychological pragmatism, like that of Dr. K and Jordan Peterson, is the opposite:
the questions of psychology—including that of meaning in life—are prior to those of metaphysics.
And so, I envision a new kind of Christian apologetics, one that moves in the following order:
* Help people find meaning in life. And only then,
* Help people discover the meaning of life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein once lamented the collective influence of both atheists and theists on ethical and philosophical development:
Russell and the parsons between them have done infinite harm, infinite harm.
To which his friend responded:
I was puzzled by his coupling Russell and the parsons in the one condemnation.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, M. O’C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” 117.
I think Wittgenstein’s condemnation applies not only to Russell and the parsons, in his day, but also to Dawkins and the apologists in our own.
In a rush to solve the question of the meaning of life, we neglected the question of meaning in life.
Fortunately, there’s still time to reverse course.
What I greatly respect about Dr. De Cruz’s work is its careful integration of science with philosophy and theology. For example:
But on this point, I find myself disappointed.
I had hoped for a robust analysis of wherein modern evolutionary science conflicts with the design argument. Instead, I find an inaccurate overestimate of the power of natural selection, with the assumption that natural selection is the sole causal source of biological evolution.
De Cruz and De Smedt are also dismissive toward Bill Dembski and the theory of Intelligent Design. (At least they are willing to cite Dembski!) As a result, I find myself craving more accurate analysis of the power and limits of modern evolutionary theory and the remaining viability of teleological thinking in science and philosophy.
In this article, I’ll argue that De Cruz and De Smedt’s analysis of natural selection assumes the presence of design and, citing Bill Dembski’s recent article on “the conservation of information,” argue that natural selection explains only a fraction of biological diversity.
While structural biologists, admitting the problem, propose additional mechanisms of evolution, I conclude that no naturalistic explanation of the origin of biological diversity yet exists. The design argument, therefore, remains as viable as ever.
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In his contemporary defense of the design inference, Dembski discusses the same three, calling them “chance, regularity, and design.”
But De Cruz and De Smedt argue that this is to ignore a fourth causal option that modern science has turned up: Natural selection.
Admittedly, natural selection is not independent of the other three causes. It is a combination of chance and regularity, and purportedly, it mimics or creates the appearance of design.
On this analysis, Aristotle’s trichotomy has been superseded by Darwin’s tetrachotomy. Hence, contemporary teleologists, including intelligent design theorists, are working with an outdated palette of options.
For pre-Darwinians like Aristotle and Cicero, and even William Paley, “natural selection was not in the pool of possible explanations,” De Cruz and De Smedt admit. But for modern advocates “of the design argument,” De Cruz and De Smedt allege that they “do not take natural selection and its principle of cumulative selective retention into account as a viable explanation” (75). Modern advocates of design are simply ignoring the advance made by Darwin’s discovery of natural selection.
But as revealed in the above example, De Cruz and De Smedt confuse natural selection’s combination of chance and regularity with the workings of a pre-programmed filter.
While the chance of producing METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL by chance is prohibitively low, they argue that, by the “principle of cumulative selective retention,” a computer could reduce the odds from <1 in 1032 to something that could be produced in less than 600 attempts:
Allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt will produce the sentence in no more than 23 × 26 = 598 runs.
But a computer program that “retained the correct letters at each attempt” would not be a combination only of chance and regularity, but of chance, regularity, and design.
Chance is involved in the mechanism of random-letter-generation.
Regularity governs the mechanical working of the computer’s selection mechanism.
But allowing, i.e., programming, a “computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt” would require design.
While De Cruz and De Smedt are confident that “Darwin…came up with natural selection as a naturalistic explanation of design,” their own description of its workings—even as highly-educated, scientifically-informed philosophers over a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species—tacitly invokes design.
Conservation of information sparked scientific interest once a recurring pattern was noticed in the evolutionary computing literature. In grappling with the creation of information through evolutionary algorithms, this literature consistently revealed that the information outputted by such algorithms always needed first to be programmed into them.
Thus, the primary goal of this literature—to uncover how information could be created from scratch or de novo—was shown to be misconceived: the information was not created but instead shuffled around or smuggled in, implying that it already existed in some form or other.
Information output in these situations therefore always presupposed a counterbalancing input of prior information.
In other words, mechanistic processes are incapable of producing new information. The most a mechanistic process can do is shuffle it around or destroy it.
Accordingly, while natural selection was an important scientific discovery, it does not have the power to produce new biological information (or lines of Shakespeare). It can only reshuffle or destroy existing information.
Consider an example of biological evolution for which the mechanism of natural selection is adequate: The evolution of the polar bear.
Scientists believe that the polar bear shares a common ancestor with the brown bear and the North American black bear. The evidence of this is their shared genetic material, less two notable mutations.
One mutation is to a gene
involved in fat metabolism, which allows the polar bear to have a diet that ‘contains a very large proportion of fat (much higher than in the diet of brown bears)’ (Behe, Darwin Devolves, 16). The second gene “is associated with pigmentation, and changes in it are probably responsible for the blanching of the [polar bear] ancestors’ brown fur” (17).
Yet both mutations, when they occur in other mammals, are damaging.
“When the same gene is mutated in humans or mice, studies show it frequently leads to high levels of cholesterol and heart disease” (Behe, 17).
Likewise, the loss of pigmentation in the fur was a loss of functional genetic material, not the creation of a new gene for white fur.
As I once summarized it,
“Scientists have reason to believe that both variations that occurred in polar bears [involved] a loss of genetic information that, as we saw, is shared by mammals, up to and including humans.”
In other words, in a scientifically demonstrable instance where biological evolution was caused by natural selection, no new information was created. Biological information was lost. And this loss of biological information was, by accident, beneficial. It was selectively retained without any pre-programming—without any design.
Importantly, however, while natural selection can explain how the polar bear evolved from the biological kind of bear that was the common ancestral population of the brown bear and the North American black bear, it cannot explain the origin of the biological information that gave rise to that ancestral kind of bear in the first place.
Natural selection explains the speciation of an off-shoot, whose differentiating mutations are damaging to existing functional genes.
But what natural selection cannot explain is the origin of biological kinds.
3. Evolutionists, Don’t Give Up!
In What Darwin Got Wrong, philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini report that, among structural biologists, no one believes that natural selection is sufficient to explain biological diversity: “None of them is ‘that kind’ of Darwinist any more” (xiv).
However, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini report that this admission from structural biologists has yet to influence “informed opinion in [other] fields,” including those they have worked in, like philosophy and cognitive science (xiv). “In all of these, neo-Darwinism is taken as axiomatic; it goes literally unquestioned.”
Neo-Darwinism: Random genetic mutation and chance-based natural selection suffice to explain the origin of biological diversity.
They include an entire appendix of scholars outside of “‘wet’ biology” assuming neo-Darwinism axiomatically to demonstrate this.
They could add to their list De Cruz and De Smedt’s axiomatic assumption of neo-Darwinism (or adaptationism).
While I am disappointed by De Cruz and De Smedt’s analysis of how modern evolutionary science affects the viability of the design argument, this does not mean that evolutionary science has not affected the design argument.
In the first place, natural selection has been shown to have the power to explain variations in the color of moths, the separate, convergent evolution of sub-varieties of Cichlids (a kind of African fish) in merely thousands of years, and the evolution of the polar bear from an ancestral kind of bear.
In the second place, as Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini describe—as well as Andreas Wagner inArrival of the Fittest—contemporary structural and computational biologists are considering many other causal mechanisms that (may) contribute to biological evolution. Especially, they are considering non-random sources of variation from the internal structure of the organism and the possibility-space of biological forms.
Now, I don’t want to advocate a “God of the gaps” argument any more than the next guy. So bring on new mechanisms of evolution, evolutionists.
But let’s not pretend that anyone has yet demonstrated that there is a naturalistic mechanism that can produce the panoply of biological diversity and apparent design.
Because so far, the best of evolutionary science has explained only a fraction of biological adaptation.
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Before You Go: Subscribe to Bill Dembski’s Substack
Oh, and why doesn’t Bill Dembski have more subscribers? (He currently has only 724.)
That means that students of faith should study with secular professors and peers, and secular scholars should welcome religious students into their classrooms.
We need shared spaces of inquiry across disagreement, not echo chambers of our own convictions.
2. Should We Pursue Truth Before Christ?
Another objection was more spiritual in nature:
Is there not danger in pursuing truth wherever it leads, especially if that pursuit might lead us away from Christ?
I take this concern seriously. The fear isn’t just about what we might find out if we looked deeper. It’s about our own susceptibility to pride, to the allure of intellectual respectability, or to temptation masquerading as insight.
There is wisdom in spiritual caution. Not everyone is ready for every branch of philosophy or science.
But while maturity matters, I don’t believe the answer is to foreclose hard questions for fear of where they might lead. Christians often speak of the need for moral commitment to Christ prior to intellectual inquiry. But the New Testament seems to assume the reverse: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Our faith depends on something being true, and that truth is, in principle, open to examination.
Faith seeks understanding, yes, but it also rests on good reasons. We are not asked to believe blindly, but to weigh, inquire, and discern.
To do that well requires what I might call a “philosophic temper”—a posture of non-anxious, open-minded interest in truth. Some secular scholars model this better than many Christians.
(This is very different from the kind of student who learns a bit of textual criticism and suddenly becomes pro-abortion. That’s not inquiry; that’s reaction.)
One helpful way to cultivate a philosophic temper: Ask yourself what kind of worldview you’d hold if you lost your faith. Don’t just assume you’d become a Nietzschean or a nihilist. Perhaps you would continue to “act as though God exists,” like Jordan Peterson, or maintain the best insights of “religion for atheists,” like Alain de Botton. Thinking through those scenarios helps clarify what’s at stake, and what’s not, in our beliefs.
3. Should We Stay or Leave Broken Institutions?
Finally, some readers defended Machen’s own institutional departures, asking:
Wasn’t Machen right to leave the mainline Presbyterian church and Princeton Seminary? Aren’t some institutions working at cross-purposes with their founding principles?
In my earlier post, I only revealed my views on Machen’s decision to paid subscribers, but I will say this here: Burnett’s biography has me reconsider my Protestant impulse to take doctrinal purity as the deciding factor in favor of leaving corrupt institutions.
The question applies far beyond Machen’s choice to leave his denomination and academic home. Many of us wrestle with similar choices in our relationship to academia, to the church, or to legacy institutions in general. Should we remain, or break away and start afresh?
Often our conclusions reflect our own sociological positioning. Those outside academia often see only its ideological flaws and institutional failures. Those within it, especially those embedded in its better corners, see the benefits it still offers: peer review and intellectual collaboration and camaraderie.
I’m part of academia, though not at its center. I see both its value and its limitations. (See my “Don’t Let Academia Stop You Being an Intellectual.”) I envy the acknowledgements pages in academic books, in which top scholars credit tens, if not hundreds of other academics for conversations, criticisms, and challenges that shaped the final work. That kind of collaborative refinement can’t easily be replicated on Substack. Substack has its strengths, but it doesn’t yet foster the same kind of rigorous back-and-forth.
The same dynamic plays out in the church. Many evangelicals ask, “Why stay in a theologically liberal denomination?” But consider what was lost when evangelicals abandoned the mainline: beautiful buildings, central properties in every city, and a visible presence in the cultural square. By leaving, we may have preserved our theology, but at the cost of place, heritage, and public witness. There’s a kind of escapism in that.
Doctrinal purity matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Institutions do more than just preserve doctrine: they order life, preserve memory, and embody truth in social form. When they lose their way, leaving is tempting, but rebuilding outside the institution is costly. You lose the infrastructure, financial, intellectual, and even architectural, that once supported your mission.
Those supports aren’t ultimate, but they’re not irrelevant either. There’s a kind of radical Protestant, or Donatist, impulse in assuming we can do without them.
“Donatism was a schism from the Catholic Church from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.”
from “Donatism,” Wikipedia
What Comes Next?
As I continue reflecting on Machen’s biography, I find myself drawn to an earlier generation of Christian leaders—those turn-of-the-century college presidents who pursued academic excellence while holding firm to the faith. There was a window of time when Christian intellectuals helped shape the modern university—before ideological conformity closed that door.
In one sense, you could see what I’m doing as reconsidering the idea that the seminary theologian is the ideal of the Christian intellectual. Perhaps the ideal of the Christian intellectual is somewhere closer to the interface of the modern research university, the Christian faced with the objective pursuit of truth in a whole variety of areas, with empirical research, with philosophy, and so on. It’s for such an individual that the conflicts between faith and reason are raised in an institutional calling.
I’ll be drawing attention to some of these figures in the near future.
This post was written with the editing help of ChatGPT.
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And even if you haven’t encountered presuppositionalism, I think you’ll recognize the tendency to ideological thinking that refuses to be challenged and protects its ideas from outside interference.
Not so the Christian humanist. Outside interference, from reality, is what the humanist desires.
That’s why the story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist is also the story of how I became a Christian humanist.
In the rest of this post (originally a YouTube video I made in February), I tell the story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist. Thank you for reading.
If you want to learn more about transcending the theology nerd mindset, sign up for my upcoming (July-August) course, From Theology Nerd to Christian Humanist.
I. What Is a Presuppositionalist?
The story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist begins back when I was one.
A presuppositionalist is someone who believes that, to have a consistently Christian worldview, you need to start from all and only Christian presuppositions.
The underlying theory is that people of different worldviews all start from their own presuppositions. If you’re a materialist atheist, you start from those presuppositions. If you’re a Christian, you start from a Christian set of presuppositions, and never the twain shall meet.
Nobody really bases their beliefs on just an objective look at the evidence. We all bring a set of lenses, interpretive schemes to the world, and a Christian ought to make the Bible their interpretive scheme.
Now for me, this was compelling as I was first taking my faith seriously. I’d had a lot of time where I just was a Christian on Sunday, and I didn’t know how to apply my faith to the other days of the week. That’s a lot of people.
But as I was trying to take that faith more seriously, reading the Bible more, studying theology—the idea of having Christian presuppositions for all that you do sounds really compelling.
I was also getting into the Reformed theology space where there’s an argument put forward that presuppositionalism is the consistent Calvinist or Reformed approach to apologetics, instead of classical or evidential apologetics, where you start from common ground and evidence to argue to a Christian worldview.
Now I remember going off to college, at a Christian college. I thought, “Hey, I can get a Christian perspective on things!”
And my now wife showed me her homework from a philosophy class, and it was about Thomas Aquinas, who is the opposite of a presuppositionalist. He’s a natural theologian. And he was arguing that there’s a distinction between the preambles of faith, the things you can know apart from faith or revelation, and the articles of faith, the things that are taught by faith.
Aquinas would say that the Trinity, the Incarnation, and redemption you can only get from the Bible. But that God exists, that there is a moral law, and that we’ve sinned, these things can be known apart from Scripture. They might be even what gets you interested in Scripture. If you start to think, “I think there’s a God out there. Maybe I should read this Bible people keep talking about.” That’s the preambles versus the articles.
But I denied that. I remember at the time thinking: “No, everything’s got to start from the Bible. That’s how you’re going to have a consistently Christian perspective on things in the world.”
II. The Turning Point: Moral Attitudes in P. F. Strawson
But there was a time in a final philosophy class I took at that college, we were reading about free will and moral responsibility.
And there’s an important essay by Peter Strawson, British philosopher from the mid-20th century—“Freedom and Resentment.”
In it, Strawson was arguing against the hard determinists. These are philosophers who think that free will and determinism are incompatible, that determinism is true and that therefore free will is false.
And the hard determinists thought that therefore, we should rid ourselves of all emotions that assume that other people are moral response morally responsible. Think, e.g., resentment, from the title, that assumes that the other person has free will and purposefully did something to you. Or gratitude on the positive side: to be grateful towards somebody assumes that they were free, deserving of praise for what they did, and not just, “Well, they were pre-programmed to do it.”
And Strawson’s argument took an interesting form, because Strawson was not a Christian. He was not somebody who argued that we have a soul or a metaphysical basis for free will, that we're not physically determined by our psychology or something.
No, he just said, “There’s no way that we’re going to rid ourselves of these emotions of resentment and gratitude, blame and praise. These are part of being human, that we are equipped with the ability to make these evaluations.”
And so from there, he said, no metaphysical thesis that pointy-headed philosophers or physicists come up with in the lab is going to affect this practice and its validity. If you bump into me, what decides whether I should be mad or forgiving is whether you intended to do so, not whether physicists have figured out whether quantum mechanics is true.
So that idea, I didn’t realize it, but that was already incompatible with presuppositionalism.
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How? you say. How was Strawson’s idea incompatible with presuppositionalism?
Well, let’s take an example of a presuppositionalist argument. A prominent one was the way Doug Wilson debated Christopher Hitchens in their recorded debates.
Wilson is officially a presuppositionalist. (He’s got some other C. S. Lewis, natural law influences that we’ll leave aside for the moment.)
But Wilson kept pressing Hitchens on Hitchens’ morally fervent critiques of the God of the Old Testament and the New. He would say, “Where do you get this morality by which you can judge—by what standard can you judge that God is evil, for having the Israelites go and kill the Canaanites? By what standard can you judge that penal substitutionary atonement is morally repugnant? You must be assuming a moral standard that has no place in an atheistic, materialist universe.”
Now there are two ways you can go with an argument like that. The presuppositionalist essentially says:
“You, atheist, have no basis for morality. Stop it. You need to be consistent. Go become a nihilist and go kill other people or yourself.”
That’s the extreme version, but that’s essentially, “Go take your presuppositions to their logical conclusion.”
But that’s not the direction that Strawson goes.
Strawson is not a Christian, but he’s saying there’s something else beyond metaphysical inklings (i.e., do you believe in God or materialism).
There’s our ingrained human ability to evaluate things on a moral level and to feel the emotions that are part and parcel of that.
And that’s not going away.
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III. C. S. Lewis and my Agnostic Professor
And that’s actually where C. S. Lewis starts his argument for Christianity, in the very opening pages of Mere Christianity.
C. S. Lewis says people are doing this all the time. They’re saying, “That’s mine!” “Don’t take that.” “You pushed me.” “I didn’t mean to!” They’re arguing in these moral terms based on these practices of praise and blame that we all already participate in.
And C. S. Lewis says, “We all already know about that, but that thing is a clue to the meaning of the universe.”
So both the presuppositionalist and the natural theologian hold that you can’t make sense of morality without God, but they do different things with this claim.
The presuppositionalist says, “You need to be consistent and give up on morality.”
The natural theologian says, “You need to be consistent with what you already know—that morality exists—and adopt a worldview that explains why the world is more than just material.”
The presuppositionalist says, “There’s no common ground between believer and unbeliever; there’s nothing we have in common. All that morality you’ve got is, at best, stolen capital. You don’t have a right to it.
The natural theologian says, “Of course, you have a right to that. That is your birthright as a human being.”
And now we’ve got common ground together, and we can look at the world, given our shared morality and say: “Well, what makes the best sense of this? Does evolution explain morality, or does it just explain why it's advantageous for weaker people to obey morality? Would it make better sense to believe that God is at the foundation of morality, or would that make morality arbitrary, as if God could command something different?”
These are the philosophical questions that morality and theology raise, but the natural theologian acknowledges that there is common ground between believers and non-believers on that basis.
Now, if we fast-forward, I’m in a position with my dissertation advisor, in a philosophy program, where he’s an atheist, or an agnostic rather. But he’s also a moral realist. He really does believe in morality.
Do I want him to be consistent with his atheism and be more amoral and nihilistic?
No, I’d like him to be consistent with that morality. I think he’s absolutely correct about what he’s seen in the world that gives him this sense of morality. I just think his evolutionary explanations of it fall short.
There’s more to this world than that in order to explain morality. The normative cannot be reduced to or explained by the natural.
IV. Westminster: Presuppositionalist Seminary
Now, from Wheaton College, I went on to Westminster Seminary, the bastion of presuppositionalism, where Cornelius Van Til taught of old, the chief presuppositionalist thinker.
And there I learned a lot. There was a robust curriculum, so much to be thankful for. But there was also presuppositionalism in almost every class.
And presuppositionalism, starting only from your own presuppositions, had an interesting effect on our studies.
It meant that if you wanted to learn something about any topic, you wanted to read something from someone who shared your worldview. So if you want to learn about mathematics, you need to go read a book like Redeeming Mathematics by one of our professors. You need to read a book from your worldview. If you want to think about laundry, you need to read a Reformed theology of laundry, and so on, to reach the absurd.
But leaving that aside, there was a tendency to just read our own perspectives.
95% of the time, we would read people who already agreed with us in order to believe what they said.
5% of the time, we would go find somebody we disagreed with and be assigned to go figure out what was wrong with them.
And I got dissatisfied with this at a certain point. I thought, “I already know that the people who agree with me agree with me. I’d like to learn from people who disagree with me. In fact, I’d really like to know whether anybody out there who isn’t a Christian thinks that some of the things we’re saying are true, or do they think we’re just totally crazy. They don’t have to agree with us on every point, but do they see some of what we’re saying about moral reality, about right and wrong, about the importance of faith and religion, the limits of science and so on?”
And in my own studies, I began to find that there were such people. The philosopher Roger Scruton was one I discovered. Jordan Peterson was coming on the scene. I saw him doing the same thing.
V. The University of Chicago: Humane Academy
And so, from Westminster, I decided to go get a master’s in philosophy.
I did a program at the University of Chicago, which was a 180 from Westminster. It was people of all different beliefs studying together in a much different way. There was no assumption that people shared their points of view. There were good ideas, bad ideas, but it was an open environment to think things through and come to your own conclusions.
In this beautiful, Gothic reading room at the University of Chicago, etched in stone over one of the doorways was this quotation:
“Read, neither to believe nor to contradict, but to understand.”
—words of Francis Bacon, the great Christian scientist-philosopher.
And those words summed up what had been wrong with my experience at a presuppositionalist seminary, and what was so right about my experience at the University of Chicago.
At the University of Chicago, no one told me what to think. At the University of Chicago, I was reading people who didn’tshare my presuppositions, and yet finding them making cogent and coherent arguments, and not in an exclusively atheistic or materialist direction, but carefully navigating the terrain of human thought, the merits of a more moral view of the world, the limits of a scientistic view of the world.
And I thought this experience was beautiful, and the real result of it was that now my worldview was not just based on the Word of people who agreed with me. In fact, now it was confirmed by people from outside the fold, if you will.
But more than that, I now had things that I could say to people outside my faith that built common ground, but that pointed in the direction of belief. I had arguments that didn’t just sound like an apologetics argument, that there’s a truth to morality that take the philosopher John McDowell, that there’s limits to the purely scientific worldview, that you start to lose our grip on ourselves as beings with minds and moral knowledge.
And all of those things could be said without asking somebody first to adopt an entire biblical worldview.
VI. Conclusion: Christian Humanism and Empiricism
And so what was the result of this change of heart and change of mind?
Well, it led to me taking a perspective that I now call either empiricist or humanist.
Humanism is often the bad thing in a kind of Christian worldview discourse. “Watch out for secular humanism!”
But there’s a long tradition of Christian humanism, of which C. S. Lewis was a part, Thomas Aquinas, many of the Protestant Reformers who were humanists, following Erasmus (like Zwingli!), and they believe that there’s a lot in secular learning that we can take. We can plunder the Egyptians, as Augustine says. Philosophy can be a preparation for the gospel, as Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr among the Church Fathers said.
And empiricist, in that now, I believed that the human faculties of our senses and our reason could get things from the world and learn new things. We didn’t just need to download biblical presuppositions, put on our Christian goggles and see the world through that.
We could see theworld. Unmediated information from the outside gets in, because God made us to know this world. (See my “Toward a Sophisticated Realism.”
What that’s done is it’s strengthened my Christian perspective. Now my Christian perspective is not just based on Christian presuppositions. Now my Christian perspective suggests that, even if I’m not looking at the Bible, I see indications of the Divine. I see reason to believe that there’s a moral reality to life.
I learned that from Christian thinkers who are natural theologians; and I learned it from contemporary thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Louise Perry, who see truth to moral to the moral claims of Christianity. I am not just stuck in my self-enclosed Christian circle of circular arguments.
I think this shift in perspective can really develop our ability to talk with people outside the faith. We need, in this day and age, to be able to talk to people we don’t agree with on the basis of the things we do have in common.
There’s a kind of parallel between presuppositionalism and radical forms of ideology, where, if you don’t agree with everything, I say, we’re in total disagreement.
No, your neighbor, whatever they think, you and they should be able to find some common ground. And from that you can build towards truth together through common truth seeking and a common good that you share.
(I wrote and recorded a pop-punk song about it:)
I’d like to see Christians be more an example of that and and that is part of the reason why I stopped being a presuppositionalist.
Feel free to add a comment if you disagree. I’d love to hear why people still find presuppositionalism compelling, or why you’ve left it behind perhaps, or never held it.
But for now, I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian. Until next time.
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Yet it wasn’t plausible to me that biblical exegesis alone was even the reason people held the positions they held. Did the evangelical feminist really hold their view just because of a dictionary definition of kephalé? Or was something more going on? (And the same applied to the complementarians, by the way.)
No, I started to think people get their ideas from outside the Bible. They’re shaped by the Bible, but their reading of the Bible is also shaped by what they already think.
And so we’re kind of thrown back on ourselves to actually examine the fundamental assumptions that we hold and the reasons for and against those, in conversation with the Bible, but not with the Bible alone.
Specifically, I started to see the way that different theological debates reduced down to philosophical debates.
The feminist one remains a simple example. If someone thinks that the reason churches, certain churches, ordain only men and not women is because of the patriarchy, we’re not dealing with a specifically Christian argument. That’s not a knock against it, but it is to say that this is an argument that shows up elsewhere.
To actually understand the merits of a key feminist argument like that, you have to go into feminist philosophy, look at the history of that argument. What is the sociological evidence for it? What is the philosophical grounding of it? And what are the contrary claims of the other side? Well, this would enmesh you in philosophy, that universal human discipline, rather than the parochial Christian theology of adherence of the Christian faith.
And so, I began to think in that, as in so many other debates, what we really need to do is get down to the philosophical arguments that are at the heart of things.
And this just dovetailed with the fact that, as many people criticize evangelicals for, debating from Bible verses actually doesn’t solve our problems. There are contested interpretations. There are different interpretations on completely opposite sides. There are views on completely opposite sides that both claim a basis in the Bible.
Now, this isn’t to say that there’s no way to read the Bible aright, but it is to say that the idea that you can do it all from the Bible is a bit shallow and narrow.
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2. Attending to Reality
Now another reason to go outside the Bible in order to understand Christian teaching is because the message of the Bible is actually about those things themselves. It’s a message to human beings about human beings. It addresses the various aspects of their lives. It addresses the world, the natural world, the human world.
And if you don’t understand those things on their own terms, as it were, you're liable to ignore them or misunderstand them or not even to comprehend how the Christian faith speaks to them. If you try to speak about those things just from the Bible and theology, you’re likely to be missing a lot of the relevant information.
An obvious one is politics. Whoever claims that their view of politics comes directly from the Bible immediately invites suspicion. Because there are people who can argue the exact contrary position and claim that it’s from the Bible.
And more importantly, because politics is a complex and messy subject in the real world. We have to use our eyes and our senses to gather empirical information about how the world works. And this is done in political science, political philosophy, sociology, history, and many other disciplines. The idea that we can do this from the Bible alone, get that sort of magic shortcut to the right answers, is deeply misguided.
There are other areas as well. Broadly, we could think about anthropology, the study of human beings. Can human beings be understood through science? Can we understand ourselves through the disciplines of psychology? What are the limits of that scientific understanding? Are there ways that human beings cannot be reduced to their scientific and natural substrate?
We see debates about counseling and psychology and their legitimacy for Christians. Can we use this information that’s gathered, not from the Bible, but by secular study and by secular psychotherapy to understand the human mind, to help people? Can we differentiate spiritual problems from psychological problems and properly relate these? Again, you can’t do that if you just say everything's going to come from the Bible, as some do. You’re liable to to mistake psychological problems for spiritual ones. (See “Are Thoughts Sin?” by Anna Carini and myself.)
If the Bible is to help human beings live human lives, we actually have to pay attention to human beings, how they work, how their minds work. We can’t just look at the Bible.
Now that’s not to say that the Bible can’t correct secular understandings. It’s not to say that the Bible can’t, for instance, emphasize human responsibility in ways that a kind of determinist psychology ignores. We should emphasize human moral responsibility. In fact, when you don't people become helpless, and science can even confirm that. (See discussion of “learned helplessness.”) But you need a healthy discussion and dialogue between between faith and science to even get that right.
There are other areas. In the church, when we try to reduce everything to theology, we often ignore power dynamics, ways that people are driven by narcissism or fame, psychological motivations. If we understand the church as another human institution, trying to exemplify something greater, but still subject to those infirmities and patterns, we're going to be on a lot better footing.
We can pay attention to how social media is shaping the Christian life, shaping online Christian personalities. We get a better sense of what’s really going on.
Example: Homosexual Orientation
Maybe more controversially, same-sex attraction is an important topic for the contemporary church. It’s where the church is frequently accused of homophobia, of misunderstanding and lacking sympathy with one particular human experience. And the church can easily do this. We can say, we’ve got our answers straight from the Bible. There's no mention of a homosexual orientation. Our desires are themselves sin. We can make these blanket proclamations.
This is an area of theology where I think the church needs to really grapple with reality that we can learn through philosophy and empirical science. We can learn from people’s experience and from scientific study that some people have a sexual orientation that is ordered contrary to how the Bible says we ought to direct our sexual activity. (See my “Sexual Orientation Is Not a Social Construct.”)
If that’s the case, that presents a real obstacle to just stating the Christian truth simply.
If there’s a fact that some people are same-sex attracted or gay, then we cannot simply assume that every desire is sin. We cannot simply assume that the Christian message of sexual fidelity in male-female marriage is easy for everyone. We must understand that it is more costly for some than others because of the way some people’s nature has been made, even though that's affected by the fall.
Empirical reality, things that are known from outside the Bible have to be allowed in if we are to be sympathetic to human nature, to the human beings that are around us as we know that Jesus Christ himself is.
3. Openness to Experience and Thought
We’ve moved further afield than just philosophy. Why does this explain that I'm getting a philosophy Ph.D. instead of a theology Ph.D.?
Well, it's because of this openness to other fields of learning. Now, philosophy itself acts as a kind of bridge between all these fields. It’s been remarked before that philosophy doesn't really have its own subject area. It studies all phenomena. There’s a philosophy of biology. There’s a philosophy of language. There’s a philosophy of man, and so on.
Philosophy stands at the boundary of these disciplines and often adjudicates how they are related. With respect to theology, philosophy has been called the handmaiden of theology because it helps theology understand the phenomena it’s working with. And that’s the role that philosophy has taken on for me.
Philosophy also uses tools other than the appeal to authoritative texts. That’s essentially what doing theology by biblical exegesis is. Now there was a time when the authoritative texts were not the Bible only. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, would use a statement of Aristotle almost as authoritatively as a scriptural text. Not actually as unquestionably authoritative, but there were many people thought to be trusted sources, who could quote from.
But when you engage in philosophy, you have to use a different mode of reasoning. You have to offer all the reasons for and against. You have to answer all the counterexamples. You have to answer the objections. And there’s a thorough plumbing of the depths of a certain phenomena that is so important to be able to do.
It’s one thing to have all the Christian Bible arguments for and against. It’s another to answer the objection of the non-Christian. It’s another to answer the objection of empirical evidence and to say, wait a second, that looks contrary. How does it fit? And philosophy equips one to begin to address all of this.
4. Philosophy Before Theology
Now, I’ve come to think even more that philosophy is actually at the intellectual foundation of theology. This is backwards from how most Christians would want me to frame this. But what I mean is this:
Take an argument in theology, for example, about whether we can interpret the Bible directly or do we need a sort of magisterial authority to adjudicate interpretations. Is it possible to read the Bible and honestly discover what it says? Or are we going to be projecting our subjective interpretation onto it?
Well, as you may recognize, this is not just a Christian debate. This is the core debate of the disciplines of hermeneutics and of kind metaphysical realism. Do we all project, in a neo-Kantian way, our concepts onto the world, or can we receive the world without a veil of interpretation?
This is a philosophical debate fundamentally. There’s not a specifically Christian way to go about this. There are arguments for and against this that have been offered by continental and analytic philosophers.
And so if I want to deal with this argument faithfully, I actually need to look into, Gadamer on the one hand as the founder of the discipline of hermeneutics, or the philosophers of language over an analytic philosophy like Frege, Russell, Kaplan, Strawson, and so on. I need to deal with the phenomena of language.
How does language refer to the world? Do we project our concepts onto reality? Do our concepts get their content from our own definitions of words or from the things in the world?
These are debates in philosophy and their outcome determines whether the argument that we only know things through an interpretation holds water. As I've come to think it doesn't.
But the question for me in all this is:
Do I just want to perpetuate the evangelical discourse? People on one side have their Bible verses; people on the other side have their Bible verses. We just throw back and forth the Bible verses, and the same tired old positions get hashed out again and again and again.
Or do I want to go to another discipline, bring its resources, and intervene into the debates of evangelical theology?
I’d rather do the latter. I’d rather bring something new. I’d rather show how we’ve been arguing on this level, but there’s something down here that we’ve totally missed. And so that’s what I’m hoping to do in getting a philosophy PhD, even as someone who calls himself, and aspires to be, a theologian.
5. Communicating to Non-Christians
There’s a last, perhaps obvious reason why I would get a philosophy PhD instead of a theology one. And that is that I don’t just want to talk to other Christians. I don’t just want to communicate the Christian faith to people who already believe it and argue within the sort of circular argument of its beliefs.
No, I’d like to become equipped in universal human language reasons for and against different beliefs. I’d like to be able to articulate Christian beliefs in ways that are accessible broadly. And I’d like to be able to offer reasons to believe this or that doctrine of the Christian faith independently of scripture. equips a person to do that in a way that biblical and Christian theology just doesn’t.
And so, in getting a philosophy PhD, I’m really trying to not just be Christian, but to be human.
I’m trying to admit that the way we get our beliefs isn’t just by downloading them from the Bible. Evidence, human experience, philosophical assumptions, and even philosophical argument persuade us as often as do appeals to texts we believe authoritative.
And I want to communicate these things in ways that are accessible to all people, whether they believe what I believe, something else, or nothing at all.
And after all, that’s what I’m up to here at The Natural Theologian.
So thank you for watching and listening. I’m Joel Carini. Until next time.
The dominance of the personality by local, narrow and self serving whim is not a playable or noble game, and it allies itself necessarily with the force that cynics, like the postmodernists, like the Neo-Marxists, believe is the only viable uniting force, that of power. If you're motivated by nothing but the pursuit of your own subjective desire in the moment, or your desire to avoid the necessary pain that mature conduct involves, you have to turn to power to impose your narrow will on others; because if you're dominated by the immature longing for your immediate self gratification, then it's all about you in the narrowest sense, and the only option you have in terms of your relationship with others is to turn to the force and compulsion that make them involuntary servants of your will.
We've seen forever, the dynamic between immature hedonism that fragments and that degenerates as it's played out, and the demand for the power that subjugates others to the will of the moment.
Hey, let’s stop there for a second.
Refounding Our Civilization
So the setup is giving an intellectual foundation to our civilization. And it’s really interesting because all the questions about, “Is this Christianity just cultural?” come to the fore as well as just like, “What is Jordan Peterson's project?”
He isn't bringing us back to religion kind of for its own sake in a a pietist way, to just get us close to God. It's not even narrowly psychological, for us to sort ourselves out, though that's obviously part of Peterson's program. It's for our civilization. If you think about the foundational questions that have driven Peterson, it was the Cold War. It was ideological conflict and the ability of human beings to do collective evil.
And part of that is to say that those two – psychology and politics – are connected. Like tyranny, a tyrannical state is one in which everyone is lying all the time, as Peterson says. And so very much the way that Socrates and Plato spoke in the Republic, the soul of the individual and the soul of a community are connected.
And I think that's important for those on the kind of religious side who really want Peterson to profess to be a Christian and to get other people to profess Christianity from the heart, with true piety, kind of à la Billy Graham. That's not what Peterson is about, but I think it's also a corrective that, “Isn't that too narrow a goal?”
You could think, as many do, that Peterson is instrumentalizing Christianity to political and social ends. But on the other hand, he's saying Christianity has at least to be something that can give foundation to society. Maybe it's more. Maybe it can bring you into the kingdom to come. But if it has nothing to say to the life here and now, in our political situation, what worth really is that?
Now he's really spelling out the poverty of what you could call “metaphysical liberalism.” So John Rawls is supposed to be a theorist really of classical liberalism. Rawls's liberalism was the idea that we're going to choose a society where you don't know what religion you're going to be. You don't know what your social or economic position is going to be. We're behind this veil of ignorance and we want to choose something fair for everyone.
And so it's not going to be based on any partisan doctrine. It's going to be metaphysically agnostic as to those things. And it's also going to be generally egalitarian social safety net, because if you don't know if you're going to become a poor person, you're going to want to be cared for. You're not going to want to just be blamed. We allow the kind of inequality that actually benefits everyone and especially the least well off.
Now, Rawls, early in his life was a Christian. He left behind that faith to be kind of this ethical figure spelling out political liberalism. But he never intended for [his theory of liberalism] to be metaphysical agnosticism. In response to critiques of his view, he argued that he was just after political liberalism, which is just a principle of pluralism. “Here's how we're all going to operate together, even though we don't agree on every point.” He's like, “If you can get there by thinking about natural law, as a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew. Great. That's not my foundation. If you can get there and you’re postmodernist, if you can just get there by mutual respect for other beings, great.”
But as it's played out, the lack of a coherent vision of the good or metaphysics has allowed society to become more about everyone seeking pleasure, with side constraints on your action so that you just don't hurt other people or inhibit their pursuit of pleasure. It's basically become organized hedonism, hedonism with maybe a little bit of Kantianism to respect other people's right to pursue their own hedonism.
And as Peterson is saying, that's just not adequate. We need a deeper foundation for society than that. Even the principles of classical liberalism that Rawls was for, those need a metaphysical foundation. We need to truly believe that people are ends in themselves, that humans have dignity. We need at least the mythical mythological version of the doctrine of the Image of God that Peterson is so famous for. So I want to see where he keeps going now.
He's going to have an argument against hedonism but let's just think about that setup. That seems like a very legitimate thing to be after and very necessary, especially the idea that it's time to become self-conscious as a civilization about our foundational principles.
For a long time, religious societies were very self-conscious about their foundational principles. They just thought of it as doctrine, though. They didn't think, “Well, we need this to be the foundation of civilization.” Maybe the kings and princes were thinking that way.
But there's something interesting about a society that has left that behind now saying, “Well, hold on, what do we actually need, simply in a political or pragmatic sense?” There’s a possibility for a civilization to become self-conscious of its own intellectual foundations. I'm excited for that.
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Let’s hear what Peterson has to say about hedonism:
Why is hedonism wrong? Why is power wrong? Technically, I think it's because both of those motivating forces, or sets of motivating forces, degenerate when they're iterated. You can't go through life like an immature two year old, because you can't sustain your own existence while pursuing immediate gratification in the present, and you can't sustain a society in a productive and abundant manner over the medium to long run if you use power to subordinate the will of others involuntarily to your desires. The reason that the hedonistic proclivity the fractionated, hedonistic proclivity and the drive to power are immoral is because they degenerate when they're implemented and iterated.
The skeptics, that's particularly true of the post modernists – this is the definition of post modernism. Literally, the skeptics proclaim that there's no uniting metanarrative other than that of power, and that's wrong. There is a uniting metanarrative, and as I intimated at the beginning of this discussion, I believe we're now in a position where we can explicitly understand it; and that explicit understanding, in principle, could allow us to regain the necessary faith in the self-evident…axioms in which our liberal democracies are nested.
The biblical library, that lays out the narrative principles upon which free, Western societies are founded, is an elaborated exploration of the theme of sacrifice.
Taken at face value, the dramas of sacrifice that are portrayed in our foundational texts have a impenetrable and opaque quality. What does it mean to offer something of value to the divine? It's a drama that's predicated on the realization that sacrifice is by necessity the foundation of civilization.
Civilization is social and future-oriented, and that means, since it’s social, that the individuals who come together to constitute society have to sacrifice their narrow pleasure, seeking individuality, demanding gratification in the moment, for the sake of their mutual, reciprocal relationships with others, locally, first in marriage, in family, in town, in city, expanding to province and state and country, nested all under the auspices, let's say, of the Divine. That's a sacrificial process. It means forgoing the narrowly immediate, for the sake of the community.
It means, equally, a sacrificial process in relationship to time, the distinguishing characteristic of maturity as opposed to immaturity, and wisdom as opposed to folly, is the ability to sacrifice the immediate demands of the present for the future. To think before you act. To act with Caution so you don't have to repent at leisure. It's a sacrificial process.
When a child learns to make a friend, he learns necessarily, the principle of sacrificial reciprocity. “I have a turn, then you have a turn.” “I have a turn, then you have a turn.” The sacrifice there is that it's not always my turn. And that sacrificial reciprocity is the…foundational principle, of the reciprocity upon which even the most primordial forms of society, friendship in childhood, let's say, are predicated.
The foundational texts of Western civilization, the biblical texts in particular, are an extended study in the intricacies of sacrifice, predicated on the emergent discovery or realization that the sacrifice most pleasing to God, that sets the world right, that creates the order that is good or very good is the sacrifice that tends towards the ultimate.
The Christian drama portrays the sacrificial process in its arguably ultimate form. It’s no chance occurrence that the sacrificial altar is at the center of the church and the church is at the center of the town, and the town is at the center of the state, and the state, organized under the Divine principle of sacrifice that constitutes our proper association with the divine spirit, that establishes the state that leads the desert to bloom and the land to abundance. [Light Applause]
Is Reciprocal Self-Sacrifice Enough?
Let's think about this thing about sacrifice.
In a recent video, I was listening to the Diary of a CEO interview, this clip that Ruslan KD had pulled out.
And Peterson wants to say that the Christian story is true in the sense that sacrifice, voluntary self-sacrifice is the ethical key to the saving of the world. Essentially, that is what we need to solve the problems of the world.
And I want to think about how that relates to Christian teaching, of course, in the full metaphysical sense, but then narrowing down to the ethical teaching of Christ.
And what it comes down to is a dichotomy in Christ's teaching between:
* The way of the world, the kind of reciprocity and justice that you find there, and
* This higher righteousness that Christ himself is calling for.
There’s a kind of give and take that is part of the natural human way.
And there’s a kind of giving without asking in return that goes beyond that.
Now, let's look at an example of that.
So Peterson is talking about the first beginnings of sacrifice are when a child and another child accept that they must sacrifice some of their time with a toy in order to allow the other child time with a toy so that the relationship of play can continue. It's just going to end if I don't share it all. So the price of getting to play is that I sacrifice the toy some of the time.
Now, is that “sacrifice” in the unique sense of Christ’s offering of himself unto us? I don't think so, but I don't know that Peterson is wrong to draw the connection.
So let's look at the key passage for this.
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners expecting to be repaid in full.
But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.”
— Luke 6:32-35
So looking at that, if you love those who love you, you will engage in some of these initial forms of sacrifice. You're no longer just about yourself. You have a circle of love that's wider than just yourself it's a circle of love governed by a principle of mutuality and your circle of who you do good to similarly is—it's tit-for-tat; it's I do good for those who do good for me.
In another passage (Matt 5:46-48), it talks about who you greet. Well, I'm going to greet on the street people who I know are going to say “hello” to me as well. I don't want to be in one of those situations where I'm like, “Hey!” and they ignore me (as I've often been).
And then the same for lending. Look at verse 34: “If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you?” Well, if there's any argument that civilization is founded on something, it would be that: If you have a society that can't even have the level of trust to do lending, you don't have civilization yet. You've got some stage of barbarism.
And to get to the level of Western civilization and modernization, you need a society to reach the point where you can lend money and expect repayment. You can have give and take. You can have what Aristotle might call natural justice.
OK, there's nothing supernatural here yet. There's nothing supererogatory going beyond the demands of justice. We don't have this new thing, which is lending without expecting to get anything back. And that's what gets you heavenly reward according to Christ.
So there’s a kind of sacrifice built into mutual love that goes beyond barbarism and hedonism. It founds civilization, but it's not yet the distinctively—it's not the kind of sacrifice that Christ brings into the world.
This is where you get something like Paul Kingsnorth’s critique of Peterson. Because Kingsnorth is going to say, “Mutual justice? No, it's fully self-sacrificing and making a bad business deal.” It's not capitalism that is the sign of Christianity, but this very terrible business practice of lending something without expecting to get anything in return.
Is Peterson flattening the distinction between those two?
Potentially. There's evidence that he is.
But he would probably argue that the one paves the way for the other.
The ability to love those who love you precipitates this extension of the circle of love even to those who do not yet deserve it. Verse 36: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” This is an extension.
ButI think the question remains. Are these the same in kind: the self-sacrifice of “I'll give you a little bit of time if if I get more time with the toy as well” — or is Christ teaching radical and something brand new – not something that founds a civilization, but something that might actually challenge the foundation of a civilization, as Paul Kingsnorth and others have argued?
But let’s continue listening:
And it's not just sacrifice; it’s voluntary self-sacrifice towards the highest possible end. That’s the foundation of civilization, the post-modernists be damned, which is virtually a certainty, by the way. Now understanding this, I think, in a more explicit sense, to see that what we've been wrestling with for millennia is the movement towards the explicit formulation of the principle of voluntary upward self sacrifice as the foundation of the community, as the foundation of abundance itself, as the precondition for the trust and reciprocity that enables us to compete and to cooperate so that We can produce societies that are endlessly productive. The explicit understanding of the centrality of that principle, in my estimation, allows for the intelligent union of the traditional Western conservative with the traditional Western classic liberal. The hypothesis being that the stage is set for the emergence of a liberal of the liberal individualism that we associate with the free Western world. The stage is set for the emergence of that ethos when the bedrock of reciprocal, voluntary self sacrifices, established and firm. And the Conservatives stand for the self evident foundation of Western civilization. And the classic rebel liberals stand for its manifestation at the level of the individual, a manifestation which only maintains its validity when the underlying presumption of voluntary self sacrifice is serves as the proper foundation.
Okay, so let’s stop there.
Socrates and Christ: Martyr and Messiah
All of a sudden, I’m hearing a duality emerge in that Peterson is trying to capture something from both philosophical conservatism and classic Western liberalism.
You see the duality here between:
* the firm foundation of Western civilization, the foundation on which community can be built, and
* the free individual who steps out and has the ability and the will and the wherewithal to stand against the community as necessary.
And I still don’t know if that is quite this Christian self-sacrificial love that asks nothing in return, but it might be.
The type of individual Peterson is talking about goes back before Christ, to Socrates, to a philosophical martyr, someone who’s willing to stand against the crowd.
He’s not an opponent of society or civilization, but someone who calls it to account, who articulates the foundations of society. Socrates is figuring out what is justice. He's not assuming that there’s no justice anywhere, though he does think current society is unjust in many ways.
But he's articulating those foundational principles on which society works and saying, we now need to hold to those. And because I’m holding you to that standard, I become a martyr.
Christ, in many ways, does the same with respect to Roman society, Jewish society, the Pharisees and so on.
In both cases, it manifests as the willingness of the individual to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of the good of the community in an elevated way, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of, I’m trying to make the community a better place, but I’m willing to be the sacrificial goat in this case. It won’t be mutuality. I’m not pitching in and everyone else is pitching in. It’s, “If I am the gadfly, which this society needs to hold us to account, I might be what gets sacrificed along the way, but that’ll be good for the community.”
And it’s hard to argue with the fact that Christ is embodying that archetype and that pattern. The idea is that he’s doing it on an even higher level. Christ goes even beyond Socrates. He's not less than Socrates. He is an individual holding a community to account and being martyred as a result.
But is Socrates still operating say on a natural level or is Socrates operating on this level where I’m sacrificing my own good and, I hope, for heavenly reward?
If you look at Socrates’ dialogues, if you look at the end of the Republic, there’s an argument that it’s the latter. Perhaps self-sacrificial love is anticipated with Socrates and other philosophical martyrs for their community, which Jordan Peterson also embodies in the slings and arrows he's willing to take to stand up for what is right. I’m open to that possibility.
But there in that duality between the conservative and the classical liberal, I see something of the duality between reciprocal sacrifice and true self-sacrificial love, the natural law and the New Commandment, that I see in Christ’s teaching.
Stay tuned next week for a post dedicated to explaining the distinction between the natural law and the New Commandment! I think it’s at the heart of our political and theological divides. And almost no one knows about it.
Let’s listen to the last section:
So what's this civilizational moment?
This civilizational moment is the opportunity that we have in front of us to wake up and to realize, consciously and explicitly the nature of the dream that has enveloped us for the thousands of years of Judeo-Christian civilization. That dream is the celebration, the worship, the divin- the deification of the principle of reciprocal, voluntary self sacrifice, the sacrifice of self to the future, the sacrifice of self to the community As the necessary, inevitable and revolutionary foundation of the civilization that makes us free and abundant.
And so, it’s a core part of our mission to get our story straight. And in the free West, the destination of the oppressed across the world, we've acted out the appropriate story and benefited in consequence, and now we have the opportunity to understand that story explicitly and to unite our understanding with our mythos with our drama, and to fortify ourselves with the reunion of our cynical and skeptical mind and the bedrock foundation stone, the cornerstone rejected by the builder, that constitutes the true basis for civilization. And so that’s what we’re doing.
Okay. Interesting. I love the material and there's so much there to think about.
Peterson and the Penultimate Things
What I come back to from a Christian perspective is, Do we not think that this stuff is important?
Peterson is not talking about how to get saved. That is not his topic.
His topic is, How can human society work?
And I think you could argue that maybe, he’s actually not talking about the distinctively Christian stuff. Maybe he's talking about the natural law and natural justice and the reciprocity that that includes. Maybe it's the stuff Jesus said, “The Gentiles do that.”
Well, these days, the Gentiles aren’t doing it. And so we're having to be called back to that that simple level of natural human justice, which isn’t so simple. It does require an ethical dimension. It requires virtue. It is certainly fed by Christian virtue, even if Christian virtue isn’t necessarily required to exhibit natural virtue.
But I think we can’t deny the goodness of natural justice and civic righteousness.
Bonhoeffer called these the penultimate things.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Ethics, written from a Nazi prison, basically argued against a bunch of Christians who just think it's about getting people saved. They think it's only about the ultimate things. He said, “Sure looks like how politics goes and how society goes matters!” It has some dire consequences if we get it wrong.
And these are the penultimate things. They’re not the ultimate things; they don't get people saved.
But as James said, “Don’t just say to somebody, ‘Here's the gospel. Be warm and well fed.’ Actually feed them.” Actually do good to people in their physical being.
The political too is about people’s physical being. Are people free? Are people materially abundant? Are they cared for? Are they safe?
These things matter.
They’re not the ultimate things, but they are the penultimate things.
And Peterson is calling us back to those things and opening up questions that I admit are still open: How does this relate to the distinctive content of the Christian faith and the unique call Christ has upon us, that we live out the New Commandment, to love even our enemies, not just to love those who love us?
Well, I’ve been Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian.
Try to tell me with a straight face that the difference between a Pentecostal and a Presbyterian isn't a difference of personality!
The same goes for liberals and conservatives. These are very much personality types. People who are extremely high in the trait of compassion, are strongly inclined to be liberal. It doesn't mean they're automatically more moral or righteous for doing so that compassion can lead them astray. It can lead them to be compassionate when it's time for judgment or boundaries.
But it really helps to understand that people don't get their ideas out of nowhere. We can also lower the temperature of ideological disagreements when we realize that we're all mostly just expressing our existing personalities.
2. The Psychology of Evil
Now this is one I'm still processing, but Jordan Peterson, following other psychologists, identifies the dark triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as the psychological causes of evil behavior.
And I used to think that it was just liberals, in the fundamentalist Christian sense, that believed that there were psychological causes of evil. Isn't evil just caused by sin, just by doing the wrong thing. “BAH — I want to do evil!” Isn't that how evil is explained?
But when you think about it, people vary greatly in their capacities and tendencies to do evil. Not everyone is evil in the same degree, and that creates a kind of catch-22, which is that if some people are more violent by nature, aren't they to that extent, off the hook? Isn't there a sense in which, by explaining their behavioral tendencies, we no longer view them in an explicitly moral sense.
Now you might just say this is the problem of free will, and to some extent it is, but I think it's a problem we all have to wrestle with.
No one does evil without a cause.
No one does evil without some kind of explanation or backstory.
It's not all Freudian backstories about how we were brought up.
Many of them are naturally existing differences in personality traits and tendencies, including the dark triad.
3. The Interest of Allegorical, Moral and Psychological Readings of Scripture
Now, throughout my theological education in a Christian seminary, I was taught to be wary of moral and even allegorical interpretations of Scripture.
Scripture has a literal sense. It says this is what happened, and that's what it means.
If it has a moral application, we risk the idea of moralism, of trying to justify ourselves before God or save ourselves through our own moral action, rather than by accepting the grace of God. All the Old Testament stories, which we might interpret as morality tales, actually foreshadow Jesus Christ and everything that he did for us. So we shouldn't try to be like David fighting our giants, we should accept that Jesus was the David who fought Goliath for us.
But now I've seen that this is very narrow, and it gives up an extremely appealing and compelling dimension of the scriptures.
Jordan Peterson, contrary to all those Protestant Christian theologians, packed auditoriums by talking about the allegorical and moral and psychological dimensions of Scripture, the things that these could mean and the ways they could apply to our lives even caveat if they weren't true.
And now I see more and more the poverty of trying to do with just the story of what Jesus did for us. One recent author calls it “The Abridged Gospel.” (Check out Jordan Raynor’s The Sacredness of Secular Work.)
And Jordan Peterson, while we don't actually know if he believes that specific part of the gospel, believes in the further dimensions of the scriptures, both those that precede Christ's coming, the moral teaching, the Old Testament, law and those that come after it, the third use of the law, the application of the Christian scriptures, the Christian message to our life, the life of self, sacrifice and denial that Christ called us to.
That I think should transform Christians view of what our preaching and our message and our evangelism ought to look like.
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4. The Existentialist Argument for the Limits of Materialism
Now I wouldn't be surprised if you had no idea what I was talking about here, but this is actually something from the very earliest lectures that I heard of Jordan Peterson, and from the opening pages of his book, Maps of Meaning.
Jordan Peterson, philosophically, is a Heideggerian, and Heidegger was an opponent of anyone who reduced human life and metaphysics down to the material, to pure science. And he did so not on the basis of a kind of Cartesian or spiritual dualism or an argument that mind was more than matter.
He did so on the basis of the idea that human beings fundamental orientation to the world, our fundamental way of knowing the world, is not scientific or theoretical. Our fundamental mode of being in the world is practical. It is to see things as ripe for action, to see the value in things, the valence, to see affordances for our action.
And Jordan Peterson put it this way:
It’s not only matter that exists; what matters also exists.
— Jordan Peterson (somewhere)
Other Heideggerian philosophers have echoed this, like John Haugeland and Hubert Dreyfus. John Haugeland’s festschrift is called Giving a Damn, because if you give a damn about things, then you're not a materialist. You believe that there is value and disvalue.
And so by that alone, Jordan Peterson disproved materialism.
5. Wisdom and Morality Don’t Have to Come from the Bible (especially wisdom)
Now, as a Christian by background, there's a tendency for Christians to think that all moral truth comes from the Bible. There's no other source for it. You can't get it from just human reflection or philosophy or reading books of ethics by secular philosophers. Now, instead, you've got to go straight to the Bible and find out what God directly commanded us.
But this is a very narrow view of morality. As CS Lewis said in the opening pages of Mere Christianity, everyone's making moral claims all the time. You took a bit of my orange. Now, give me a piece of yours. The smallest little moral attitudes we have that we give expression to show that we actually all believe in morality. We can't get rid of it.
Now Jordan Peterson doesn't get his morality, ultimately, from the Bible, or even what he does get from the Bible, he confirms, through psychology, science and biology. And this is important because it's very narrow to try to get all your morality from the Bible. We also have the book of nature. We have the world itself and human nature laid out before us. Why can't we use our eyes and observe it and gain good things from it?
Otherwise, we try to force Bible verses to give us the details of how we should live every part of our lives. We assume things like I've assumed that our problems in marriage are going to be solved by really understanding Ephesians 5 or some Greek word like kephalé — that's not going to solve our marriage problems.
Meanwhile, Jordan Peterson, looking at the sciences and psychology and the personality bell curves for men and women, can give you much better advice and wisdom about life. He can recognize, on the one hand, the complementarity of the sexes, that they really do vary in their distribution of personality traits. At the same time, he can tell you that the best relationship between a man and a woman, as between any two mammals, is one that is controlled by the spirit of play, by a kind of give and take, not by a command and subservience.
And that is this great wisdom about how man and woman can complement each other in marriage that does more than Bible verses do.
6. The Superiority of Empirical Knowledge of Human Nature and Morality to Biblical Knowledge of the Same
Now this follows from the previous one.
So Christians would tend to think that, Oh, maybe you can kind of pick up the pieces from just observing human nature, kind of figure out how humans ought to behave, but it would be better to just be told in the Bible and then just go do it.
But through understanding Jordan Peterson's ideas and his psychology, I've come to disagree with my fellow Christians on this one": I think it is better to understand how the world works on the basis of how the world works.
It's when we can look at the world and see, “These are its workings. This is the way God made things. Now I'm going to act in accord with that” — that is the best way to know and understand the world and to then live in accordance with it.
The Bible can give us clues and indicators. It can tell us things, but if we don't actually see those in the world, then it's like artificially pretending that the Bible is true instead of knowing that it is true.
And for example, the book of Proverbs is actually full of this. It's all about human wisdom, accumulated experience over time. It takes time to really understand ourselves and to live in accord with the warp and woof of the world, and that's something you can't acquire by three years studying in seminary, studying the Bible. It's something that takes decades and decades of experience and then learning from others, even more decades of experience.
That's the kind of Christian maturity and wisdom that Christians and human beings alike all ought to pursue.
7. The Pharisaism of the Evangelical Demand for Confession of Faith
Now this one is also very novel to me as an Evangelical, but I heard it directly from Jordan Peterson's lips.
I attended one of his lectures on the “We Who Wrestle with God” tour, and he opened with a salvo against evangelicals and Catholics who wish for him to confess the Christian faith, to explicitly say, “I believe in God, no if’s, and’s, or but’s.”
And Peterson said, “You don't realize this, but what you're asking for is actually what is actually what Jesus condemns the Pharisees for” — of praying on the street corner, of doing their good deeds before men in order to be seen by them.
For Jordan Peterson to come out as a Christian, specifically saying it, that would be this public thing. He would be lauded by Christians. We would praise Him for it, but he would also say it would be a claim to almost be worthy of saying that he believes in God.
I mean, if you say that you believe in God, but you scroll the internet mindlessly, or look at pornography, or ignore other people when you ought to be concerned for them, isn't that to be a practical atheist, as our Christian forefathers spoke of?
Well, Jordan Peterson is concerned about that. Wouldn't it be better that I act as though God exists, and you can tell what I believe by my action?
Sounds like something Jesus said in his Parable of the Two Sons (Matt 21:28-32). One son says he will do what his father asks him to do and doesn't do it. The other brother says that he will not do it, but then he does.
Who does Jesus praise?
The one who professed obedience or the one who actually obeyed?
8. The Prudential Argument for Morality Is Superior to the Moral One
Now, morality is the idea that some things are right and wrong: You can't do them…because they're wrong.
Prudence is this other dimension of human action, where we think about what's good for us, where we think about how to get the things we desire.
Now, if you tell people to do the right thing just because it's right, you'll get Immanuel Kant's praise, a lot of Christians will applaud, but not very many people will actually do what you said.
Now, there's another argument for doing what is moral that goes back to Socrates, the great founder of philosophy, and it is that the just life is actually the best life in terms of prudence as well.
And Jordan Peterson is actually a modern day Socrates, in this respect. He features, not the argument that you should just do what's right because it's right, but that you should do what's right because it is good for you…
…and it is good for your family
…and it is good for your community
…and it is good for the world.
And so he's compelling to people because he speaks about the way in which living a just life is actually in our self-interest, yes, but also honorable and desirable and praiseworthy, and something that we can sleep well at night as a result of.
And while you could critique that as not acting from a pure will in a Kantian sense, it is what human beings actually care about. It's actually much more compelling and inspiring to be told that this is the best life for a human being.
Christians often fail to communicate to people because our arguments are just moralistic. We need to cop Jordan Peterson and start making the same argument.
9. The Problem of Evil Assumes Moral Nihilism
Now this one's a deep cut towards the end of Jordan Peterson's groundbreaking Maps of Meaning. He deals with the problem of evil, which is one of the main reasons that our contemporaries do not believe in God. And in that section of his book, he talks about a premise that often goes unnoticed for the problem of evil.
The problem of evil says that given human suffering, God cannot exist.
What is assumed in it, though, is that the human suffering of life outweighs the good of existence.
And to actually believe that, to believe that it would be better if this world had never existed, is to adopt a nihilistic view of life. And this is a premise that has led many people to actually destroy the world. It is a premise that is held by school shooters, tyrants and psychopaths.
Let me read just a little bit from that book.
Should the world exist? Are the preconditions of experience so terrible that the whole game should be called off?
There is never any shortage of people working diligently toward this end.
It seems to me that we answer this question implicitly but profoundly. When we lose someone we loved and grieve, we cry not because they existed, but because they are lost.
This presupposes a judgment rendered at a very fundamental level, grief presupposes having loved presupposes the judgment that this person's specific, bounded existence was valuable, was something that should have been even in its inevitably imperfect and vulnerable form.
— Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning, p. 453 (“Conclusion: The Divinity of Interest”)
And I think what Jordan Peterson says here and in the rest of this section says more than what a generation of analytic Christian philosophers have said in response to the problem of evil.
It is not human—it is not it is not the right psychological frame to be in to think that it would have been better if this world had not existed.
It is a sign of psychological health to see the good in the world as outweighing the evil, that life is worth continuing on, overcoming suffering through valor, honor, sacrifice, and love.
10. The Need to Act as though God Exists
Christians are often suspicious of Jordan Peterson for saying that he acts as though God exists, but not saying that he just believes that God exists.
But which is more important: To believe that God exists or to act as though he does?
Peterson himself rejects the dichotomy. In his own terms, to act as though God exists is to prove that one does believe that God exists. Merely to believe that God exists, or to profess that one believes, is not worth anything at all.
Now I myself, I don't reject the question. As the Bible says, even the demons believe and shudder, and yet their belief does not amount to saving faith. It doesn't amount to acting in a righteous and upright way. It is intellectual, but they view God as an enemy, as something of which they are afraid.
Instead, I answer the question directly.
It is more important to act as though God exists, than to profess to believe that he does.
I take this from Jesus own words: “Many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord.’ And I will say to them, ‘I never knew you” (Matt 7:21-24).
It is those who act as though God exists, whose faith is shown by their works, who truly have faith.
It is the brother in the parable who did what his father asked who is justified, not the brother who said he would do it but did nothing.
And so from Jordan Peterson, I’ve learned lessons that go to the heart of ethics, politics, philosophy, psychology, theology and so much more.
While some people view Jordan Peterson merely as a guru, another fad, an influencer, I view him as a philosopher, and possibly even more, a prophet.
What I definitely view him as is as one who prepares the way. Like John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”
And I think by following what Jordan Peterson teaches, we are brought to the threshold of the Christian faith.
The only question is whether we will step through the door.
I'm Joel Carini, The Natural Theologian. Until next time.
This Just In: Justin Martyr Finds Seeds of the Word Among the Greeks
Justin Martyr (c. 100 – c. 165 AD) was a Gentile and a pagan who took up the study of philosophy in pursuit of truth and spiritual guidance. He found himself dissatisfied first with his Stoic tutors, then with a Peripatetic philosopher, and then the Pythagoreans. He adopted Platonism as a result of this search.
But, encountering a Syrian Christian while walking on the beach, the old man told him of the ancient prophets and “spoke of the testimony of the prophets as being more reliable than the reasoning of philosophers.” Justin was converted. He came to regard Christianity as “the true philosophy.”
However, Justin did not therefore conclude that all he had learned before was for nought, that all the rest of philosophy was falsehood. Rather, he concluded that the transcendent God in whom he had believed as a Platonist was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God who was the very form of goodness was he who had taken on the form of a man.
In his First Apology, Justin wrote that the philosophers before Christ had happened upon seeds of the Word, logos spermatikos, which led them along a path whose fruition was Christ himself.
Justin concluded that many before Christ who had followed these seeds of the Word, living in accord with God’s Logos, were proto-Christians: “Those who have lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists.”
Justin speculated that Plato may have had access to the writings of Moses. And he lauded Socrates as a martyr pre-figuring Christ.
Rather than becoming an evangelist, Justin dressed as a philosopher. Like Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus and others before him, Justin founded a school of philosophy. While he believed that Christianity was the true philosophy, he led others toward its truth by instructing them to detect the logos spermatikos in the great philosophers before Christ.
Justin was first in a long line of Christian theologians recognizing philosophy and secular wisdom as preparation for the gospel.
What the Old Testament was to the Hebrews: Clement of Alexandria on Greek Philosophy
Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – c. 215 AD) was, like Justin before him, a convert to the faith. Born a pagan, he rejected paganism “for its perceived moral corruption.” He traveled across Greece, searching for religious training, eventually studying Christian doctrine at the Catechetical School of Alexandria.
In his writings, Clement rejected the Greek mystery religions of his upbringing. But in his Stromata, Clement argued just as fervently for the preparatory value of Greek philosophy. Philosophy was for the Greeks what the Law had been for the Hebrews, argued Clement. It was a propaedeutic, or “schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind to Christ” (See Gal. 3:24).
Clement described the benefit of philosophy both before and after the advent of Christ:
“Before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness. And now it becomes conducive to piety; being a kind of preparatory training to those who attain to faith through demonstration. … For God is the cause of all good things; but of some primarily, as of the Old and the New Testament; and of others by consequence, as philosophy. Perchance, too, philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind, as the law, the Hebrews, to Christ. Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.” (Clement, Stromata, Book 1, Chap. 5)
Christian critics of philosophy fear that we will study it uncritically, or hail one figure as having the whole truth. But Clement denied that Christian appreciation of philosophy should be either uncritical or partisan:
“The Greek preparatory culture, therefore, with philosophy itself, is shown to have come down from God to men, not with a definite direction but in the way in which showers fall down on the good land, and on the dunghill, and on the houses.…And philosophy — I do not mean the Stoic, or the Platonic, or the Epicurean, or the Aristotelian, but whatever has been well said by each of those sects, which teach righteousness along with a science pervaded by piety — this eclectic whole I call philosophy.” Sophistry is dangerous, not philosophy.” (Stromata, Book 1, Chap. 7)
The Christian approach to philosophy should be critical and eclectic.
Clement also criticized the folly of Christians denigrating philosophical study for bare faith:
“Some, who think themselves naturally gifted, do not wish to touch either philosophy or logic; nay more, they do not wish to learn natural science. They demand bare faith alone, as if they wished, without bestowing any care on the vine, straightway to gather clusters from the first. … So also here, I call him truly learned who brings everything to bear on the truth; so that, from geometry, and music, and grammar, and philosophy itself, culling what is useful, he guards the faith against assault.” (Stromata, Book 1, Chap. 9)
The Christian thinker and apologist must prune the vine and till the soil, rather than trying to gather the harvest immediately and without sufficient preparation.
Contemporary Christians need to hear Clement’s exhortation for preparation for the gospel.
Eusebius: Van Til of the Fourth Century?
The phrase praeparatio evangelica, however, is best known as the title of a work by the 4th century theologian Eusebius (c. 260/265 – 339 AD). In Praeparatio Evangelica, Eusebius actually disputed the idea that Greek philosophy was a preparation for the gospel. In fact, he argued that it was Hebrew wisdom and Scripture that was a preparation for Greek philosophy.
Now, Justin had, of course, toyed with the same idea, suggesting that Socrates had taken a page from Moses. Yet even Eusebius’ counter-argument was only necessary on account of the Church Fathers’ shared sense that Greek philosophy contained truths whose source could only be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
In Eusebius, I detect more than a hint of Van Til’s 20th century claim that non-Christian thinkers operate, at best, on “borrowed capital.” But, if the evidence for Socrates’ and Plato’s access to Moses is slim, the evidence that all non-Christian thinkers operate only on borrowed capital — rather than the light of nature or the seeds of the Logos — is even slimmer.
The Necessity of Pre-Evangelism
Over Van Til’s protests, Francis Schaeffer urged the necessity of pre-evangelism. He argued that the first things the unbeliever needs to comprehend are the truths already displayed in reality itself:
The truth that we let in first is not a dogmatic statement of the truth of the Scriptures, but the truth of the external world and the truth of what man himself is. This is what shows him his need. The Scriptures then show him the real nature of his lostness and the answer to it. This, I am convinced, is the true order for our apologetics in the second half of the twentieth century for people living under the line of despair.
— Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There.
While Schaeffer argued for this method from his contemporary intellectual situation, he had the support of Justin and Clement from a very different time. We, in turn, are in yet another cultural and intellectual moment, yet the necessity of pre-evangelism remains.
In Schaeffer’s time, a confident logical positivism was ascendant in certain quarters. Yet simultaneously, existentialist philosophers pointed to the meaningless of a reductively material philosophy. At that time, the Christian apologist, perhaps, had an obligation to direct unbelievers from positivism to existentialism.
In recent times, New Atheism was ascendant; and yet, following the division of the atheist movement over social justice ideology, Jordan Peterson and the Intellectual Dark Web stepped in to explain the inevitability of religious and ideological thought. On this basis, Peterson urged us to find a deeper ground for our psyche than shifting ideological winds. He directed the Western world to an archetypal and psychological reading of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.
Today, Bible sales are up, and religiosity is on the rise. Ross Douthat, after sixteen years in the New York Times opinion pages, is simply saying it outright: Belief is the proper attitude for an intellectual. (His book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religiouscame out today.)
But the work of Peterson and others as a praeparatio evangelica does not absolve us of the same duty. In our conversations with those at and outside the boundary of faith, it is not our only work to harvest the fruit. We must first till the soil, water the seedling, and prune the vine. If God wills, we may have the opportunity of planting a seed or, even, of harvesting the fruit.
We are often too impatient to do so. But our Lord is not.
“He is not slow as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet 3:9).
If God is patient, then we can be too.
Share the gospel when the time is right, but before then and always, be preparing the way of the Lord.
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Further Reading
Read Ross Byrd’s contribution on Christ as the master soil-tiller, which served as the foundation for our podcast conversation, “Don’t Share the Gospel…Yet.”
And read my and Anna’s take on Jordan Peterson after attending the We Who Wrestle with God Tour:
