(Edited on August 7th 2011 for accuracy)
Early Modern Scientists
In the conviction of knowledge concerning God's creation is for all people to enjoy, and not just a professional elite, Michael Faraday gave famous public demonstrations of his pioneering work in electricity. James Clerk Maxwell, who, like Faraday, worked with electricity, was also a believer in a personal God. Indeed, the majority of those who founded modern science, from Copernicus to Maxwell, were functioning on a Christian base. Many of them were personally Christians, but even those who were not, were living within the thought forms brought forth by Christianity, especially the belief that God as the Creator and Lawgiver has implanted laws in his creation which man can discover.
Albert Einstein stood against any such application of his concepts. We can think of his often quoted words form the London Observer of April 5, 1964: "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos." (This is not a line we must use to infer that he believed in our Lord. He opted for Spinoza's god over a personal god.)
The Impossibility of a Random Universe
The Quantum Theory:
Einstein's Concept of the Location of an Object and its Velocity
If we try to establish the exact position and speed of two atomic particles which are going to collide, we will never be able to determine exactly how they will rebound. The physicist cannot have an accurate observation of both their location and their velocity simultaneously. The quantum theory of either light or particle, light does not function at random and it is an effect which brings forth causes. Even the far-out theoretical existence of "black holes" in space, as set forth by John G. Taylor, is based on the concept of an orderly universe and calculations resting on that concept.
If an airplane is to fly, it must be constructed to fir the order of the universe that exists. People, no matter what hey have come to believe, still look for the explanation of any happening in terms of other earlier happenings. If this were not possible, not only would explanations cease, but science could not be used reliably in technology. It is possible to so function in our universe that, because there is a uniformity of natural causes, a man may travel hundreds of thousands of miles to the moon and land within a few feet of his planned destination, or he may aim an atomic weapon at a target on the other side of our planet and land it within ten feet of that target. We know we live in a universe that is much more complex than people, including scientists, once thought it to be, but that is much different from the concept of a random universe.
Functioning on a Christian Base
Cause-and-Effect: Beginning-and-End;
The uniformity of natural causes in a limited time span
On the Christian base, one could expect to find out something true about the universe by reason. There were certain other results of the Christian world view. For example, there was the certainty of something "there"—an objective reality—for science to examine. What we seem to observe is not just an extension of the essence of God, as Hindu and Buddhist thinking would have it. The Christian world view gives us a real world which is there to study objectively. Another result of the Christian base was that the world was worth finding out about, for in doing so one was investigating God's creation. And people were free to investigate nature, for nature was not seen as full of gods and therefore taboo. All things created by God and are open for people's investigation.
What was the view of the modern scientists on a Christian base? They held to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in an open system, or, as it may also be expressed, the uniformity of natural causes in a limited time span. God has made a cause-and-effect universe; therefore we can find out something about the causes from the effects. But (and the but is very important) it is an open universe because God and man are outside of the uniformity of natural causes. In other words, all that exists is not one big cosmic machine which includes everything. Of course, if a person steps in front of a moving auto, the cause-and-effect universe functions upon him; but God and people are not a part of a total cosmic machine. Things go on in a cause-and-effect sequence, but at a point of time the direction may be changed by God or by people. Consequently, there is a place for God, but there is also a proper place for man.
This carries with it something profound—that this machine, whether the cosmic machine or the machines which people make is neither a master nor a threat—because the machine does not include everything. There is something which is "outside" of the cosmic machine, and there is a place for man to be man.
Closed System
Three big shifts came, and it was these shifts that made modern man what he is and our modern societies what they are. First, we will look at the shift in science, then the shift in philosophy, and later at the shift in technology. We have already seen that the Scientific Revolution rested on a Christian base. The early modern scientists believed in the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in and open system. God and man were outside the cause-and-effect machine of the cosmos, and therefore they both could influence the machine. For them all that exists is not one big cosmic machine which includes everything (which Leonardo da Vinci foreseen). The shift from modern science to what Francis A. Schaeffer calls modern modern science was a shift from the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in an open system to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. In the latter view nothing is outside a total cosmic machine; everything which exists is part of it.
Scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to use the word God, but pushed God more and more to the edges of their systems. Finally, scientists in this stream of thought moved to the idea of a completely closed system. That left no place for God. But equally it left no place for man. Man disappears, to be viewed as some form of determined or behaviouristic machine. Everything is a part of the cosmic machine, including people. to say this another way: Prior to the rise of modern modern science (that is, naturalistic science, or materialistic science), the laws of cause and effect were applied to physics, astronomy, and chemistry. Today the mechanical cause-and-effect perspective is applied equally to psychology and sociology.
Charles Darwin, in his book The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), set forth the concept that all biological life came from simpler forms by a process called "the survival of the fittest." Questions still exist in regard to this concept. Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism, and reductionism all have their problems explaining how the processes they postulate actually work.
Darwin's idea was popularized by Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who actually coined the phrase "survival of the fittest," extended the theory of biological evolution to all life, including ethics. Spencer said, "The poverty of the incapable . . . starvation of the idle and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong . . are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence." There was no necessity to extend biological evolution to "social Darwinism." But it was natural for these men to do this because of their desire to find a unifying principle that would enable autonomous man to explain the everything through naturalistic science, that is, on the basis of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. This had become the frame of reference by which they attempted to give unity to individual things, the particulars, to the details of the universe and to the history of man. By the particulars we mean the individual things which are about us; a chair is a particular, as is each molecule which makes up the chair, and so on. Thomas Aquinas brought this Aristotelian emphasis on individual things—the particulars—into the philosophy of the late Middle Ages, and this set the stage for the humanistic elements of the Renaissance and the basic problem they created.
Later, these ideas helped produce an even more far-reaching yet logical conclusion: the Nazi
movement in Germany. Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), who grew up Catholic, stated numerous times that Christianity and its notion of charity should be "replaces by the ethic of strength over weakness." The Christian consensus had largely been lost by the undermining from a rationalistic philosophy and a romantic pantheism on the secular side, and a liberal theology (which was an adoption of rationalism in theological terminology) in the universities and many of the churches. Thus biblical Christianity was no longer giving the consensus for German society. After World War I came political and economic chaos and a flood of moral permissiveness in Germany. Thus, many factors created the situation. But in that setting the theory of the survival of the fittest sanctioned what occurred.
The Nazi movement was not the last result of this way of thinking. In a quieter way, and yet as importantly, some of today's(1979) advocates of genetic engineering use the same arguments to support the position that the weak should not be kept alive through medical advances to produce a weaker next generation. Rather, they argue, genetic engineering should be used to propagate the fittest. Humanism had set out to make man autonomous; but its results have no been what the advocates of humanism idealistically visualized.
Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard
"Through a "leap of faith" one must try to find meaning without reason."
In our day, humanistic reason affirms that there is only the cosmic machine, which encompasses everything, including people. To those who hold this view everything people are or do is explained by some form of determinism, some type of behaviourism, and some kind of reductionism. The terms determinism or behaviourism indicate that everything people think or do is determined in a machinelike way and that any sense of freedom or choice is an illusion. In one form of reductionism, man is explained by reducing him to the smallest particles which make up his body. Man is seen as being only the molecule or the energy particle, more complex but not intrinsically different.
To the question of origins: What was the beginning of everything? Ultimately, there are not many possible answers to this question. First, we could say that everything came from nothing—that is, from really nothing, what I call nothing-nothing. This means that once there was no mass, no energy, no motion, and no personality. This is theoretically a possibility, but I have never heard anyone hold this view, for it seems to be unthinkable. It follows that is we do not hold that everything has come of nothing-nothing, then something has always existed.
Second, there is the possibility of a personal beginning—that some form of the impersonal has existed forever, even if in a form vastly different from that which we now know. This idea of an impersonal beginning has many variations, including the use of the word God to mean the ultimate impersonal, as in the case of pantheism. A more accurate word than pantheism to describe this connotation of personality, even though, by definition, the concept excludes it. In much modern thought, all begins with the impersonality of the atom or the molecule or the energy particle, and then everything—including life and man—comes forth by chance from that.
This is really very curious because Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), the French chemist, demonstrated the impossibility of the then-accepted concept of the spontaneous generation of life—that is, life springing from nonliving things. Pasteur showed in 1864 that is the nonliving things were pasteurized, then life could not come forth. In other words, what was previously considered spontaneous generation of life from nonliving things was mistaken—life always came from living things. When pasteurization killed all the elements of life, life never came forth from the nonliving things. but then the men of that same era returned to the concept of the spontaneous generation of life by adding a new factor: long reaches of time.
This equation of the impersonal plus time plus chance producing the total configuration of the universe and all that is in it, modern people hold by faith. And if one does in faith accept this, with what final value is he left?
Down to the present despair, we can understand where modern people are. They have no place for a personal God. But equally they have no place for man as man, or for love, or for freedom, or for significance. This brings a crucial problem. Beginning only from man himself, people affirm that man is only a machine. But those who hold this position cannot live like machines! If they could, there would have been no tensions in their intellectual position or in their lives. But even people who believe they are machines cannot live like machines, and thus they must "leap upstairs" against their reason to do so they have to deny their reason.
Such a solution is intellectual suicide, and one may question the intellectual integrity of those who accept such a position when their starting point was pride in the sufficiency of human reason.
Reference: How Should We Then Live? by Francis A. Schaeffer, Pages 52, 139, 140, 142, 146, 148, 150, 151, 164, 165.
Early Modern Scientists
In the conviction of knowledge concerning God's creation is for all people to enjoy, and not just a professional elite, Michael Faraday gave famous public demonstrations of his pioneering work in electricity. James Clerk Maxwell, who, like Faraday, worked with electricity, was also a believer in a personal God. Indeed, the majority of those who founded modern science, from Copernicus to Maxwell, were functioning on a Christian base. Many of them were personally Christians, but even those who were not, were living within the thought forms brought forth by Christianity, especially the belief that God as the Creator and Lawgiver has implanted laws in his creation which man can discover.
Albert Einstein stood against any such application of his concepts. We can think of his often quoted words form the London Observer of April 5, 1964: "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos." (This is not a line we must use to infer that he believed in our Lord. He opted for Spinoza's god over a personal god.)
The Impossibility of a Random Universe
The Quantum Theory:
Einstein's Concept of the Location of an Object and its Velocity
If we try to establish the exact position and speed of two atomic particles which are going to collide, we will never be able to determine exactly how they will rebound. The physicist cannot have an accurate observation of both their location and their velocity simultaneously. The quantum theory of either light or particle, light does not function at random and it is an effect which brings forth causes. Even the far-out theoretical existence of "black holes" in space, as set forth by John G. Taylor, is based on the concept of an orderly universe and calculations resting on that concept.
If an airplane is to fly, it must be constructed to fir the order of the universe that exists. People, no matter what hey have come to believe, still look for the explanation of any happening in terms of other earlier happenings. If this were not possible, not only would explanations cease, but science could not be used reliably in technology. It is possible to so function in our universe that, because there is a uniformity of natural causes, a man may travel hundreds of thousands of miles to the moon and land within a few feet of his planned destination, or he may aim an atomic weapon at a target on the other side of our planet and land it within ten feet of that target. We know we live in a universe that is much more complex than people, including scientists, once thought it to be, but that is much different from the concept of a random universe.
Functioning on a Christian Base
Cause-and-Effect: Beginning-and-End;
The uniformity of natural causes in a limited time span
On the Christian base, one could expect to find out something true about the universe by reason. There were certain other results of the Christian world view. For example, there was the certainty of something "there"—an objective reality—for science to examine. What we seem to observe is not just an extension of the essence of God, as Hindu and Buddhist thinking would have it. The Christian world view gives us a real world which is there to study objectively. Another result of the Christian base was that the world was worth finding out about, for in doing so one was investigating God's creation. And people were free to investigate nature, for nature was not seen as full of gods and therefore taboo. All things created by God and are open for people's investigation.
What was the view of the modern scientists on a Christian base? They held to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in an open system, or, as it may also be expressed, the uniformity of natural causes in a limited time span. God has made a cause-and-effect universe; therefore we can find out something about the causes from the effects. But (and the but is very important) it is an open universe because God and man are outside of the uniformity of natural causes. In other words, all that exists is not one big cosmic machine which includes everything. Of course, if a person steps in front of a moving auto, the cause-and-effect universe functions upon him; but God and people are not a part of a total cosmic machine. Things go on in a cause-and-effect sequence, but at a point of time the direction may be changed by God or by people. Consequently, there is a place for God, but there is also a proper place for man.
This carries with it something profound—that this machine, whether the cosmic machine or the machines which people make is neither a master nor a threat—because the machine does not include everything. There is something which is "outside" of the cosmic machine, and there is a place for man to be man.
Closed System
Three big shifts came, and it was these shifts that made modern man what he is and our modern societies what they are. First, we will look at the shift in science, then the shift in philosophy, and later at the shift in technology. We have already seen that the Scientific Revolution rested on a Christian base. The early modern scientists believed in the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in and open system. God and man were outside the cause-and-effect machine of the cosmos, and therefore they both could influence the machine. For them all that exists is not one big cosmic machine which includes everything (which Leonardo da Vinci foreseen). The shift from modern science to what Francis A. Schaeffer calls modern modern science was a shift from the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in an open system to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. In the latter view nothing is outside a total cosmic machine; everything which exists is part of it.
Scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to use the word God, but pushed God more and more to the edges of their systems. Finally, scientists in this stream of thought moved to the idea of a completely closed system. That left no place for God. But equally it left no place for man. Man disappears, to be viewed as some form of determined or behaviouristic machine. Everything is a part of the cosmic machine, including people. to say this another way: Prior to the rise of modern modern science (that is, naturalistic science, or materialistic science), the laws of cause and effect were applied to physics, astronomy, and chemistry. Today the mechanical cause-and-effect perspective is applied equally to psychology and sociology.
Charles Darwin, in his book The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), set forth the concept that all biological life came from simpler forms by a process called "the survival of the fittest." Questions still exist in regard to this concept. Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism, and reductionism all have their problems explaining how the processes they postulate actually work.Darwin's idea was popularized by Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who actually coined the phrase "survival of the fittest," extended the theory of biological evolution to all life, including ethics. Spencer said, "The poverty of the incapable . . . starvation of the idle and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong . . are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence." There was no necessity to extend biological evolution to "social Darwinism." But it was natural for these men to do this because of their desire to find a unifying principle that would enable autonomous man to explain the everything through naturalistic science, that is, on the basis of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. This had become the frame of reference by which they attempted to give unity to individual things, the particulars, to the details of the universe and to the history of man. By the particulars we mean the individual things which are about us; a chair is a particular, as is each molecule which makes up the chair, and so on. Thomas Aquinas brought this Aristotelian emphasis on individual things—the particulars—into the philosophy of the late Middle Ages, and this set the stage for the humanistic elements of the Renaissance and the basic problem they created.
Later, these ideas helped produce an even more far-reaching yet logical conclusion: the Nazi
movement in Germany. Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), who grew up Catholic, stated numerous times that Christianity and its notion of charity should be "replaces by the ethic of strength over weakness." The Christian consensus had largely been lost by the undermining from a rationalistic philosophy and a romantic pantheism on the secular side, and a liberal theology (which was an adoption of rationalism in theological terminology) in the universities and many of the churches. Thus biblical Christianity was no longer giving the consensus for German society. After World War I came political and economic chaos and a flood of moral permissiveness in Germany. Thus, many factors created the situation. But in that setting the theory of the survival of the fittest sanctioned what occurred.The Nazi movement was not the last result of this way of thinking. In a quieter way, and yet as importantly, some of today's(1979) advocates of genetic engineering use the same arguments to support the position that the weak should not be kept alive through medical advances to produce a weaker next generation. Rather, they argue, genetic engineering should be used to propagate the fittest. Humanism had set out to make man autonomous; but its results have no been what the advocates of humanism idealistically visualized.
Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard
"Through a "leap of faith" one must try to find meaning without reason."
In our day, humanistic reason affirms that there is only the cosmic machine, which encompasses everything, including people. To those who hold this view everything people are or do is explained by some form of determinism, some type of behaviourism, and some kind of reductionism. The terms determinism or behaviourism indicate that everything people think or do is determined in a machinelike way and that any sense of freedom or choice is an illusion. In one form of reductionism, man is explained by reducing him to the smallest particles which make up his body. Man is seen as being only the molecule or the energy particle, more complex but not intrinsically different.
To the question of origins: What was the beginning of everything? Ultimately, there are not many possible answers to this question. First, we could say that everything came from nothing—that is, from really nothing, what I call nothing-nothing. This means that once there was no mass, no energy, no motion, and no personality. This is theoretically a possibility, but I have never heard anyone hold this view, for it seems to be unthinkable. It follows that is we do not hold that everything has come of nothing-nothing, then something has always existed.
Second, there is the possibility of a personal beginning—that some form of the impersonal has existed forever, even if in a form vastly different from that which we now know. This idea of an impersonal beginning has many variations, including the use of the word God to mean the ultimate impersonal, as in the case of pantheism. A more accurate word than pantheism to describe this connotation of personality, even though, by definition, the concept excludes it. In much modern thought, all begins with the impersonality of the atom or the molecule or the energy particle, and then everything—including life and man—comes forth by chance from that.
This is really very curious because Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), the French chemist, demonstrated the impossibility of the then-accepted concept of the spontaneous generation of life—that is, life springing from nonliving things. Pasteur showed in 1864 that is the nonliving things were pasteurized, then life could not come forth. In other words, what was previously considered spontaneous generation of life from nonliving things was mistaken—life always came from living things. When pasteurization killed all the elements of life, life never came forth from the nonliving things. but then the men of that same era returned to the concept of the spontaneous generation of life by adding a new factor: long reaches of time.
This equation of the impersonal plus time plus chance producing the total configuration of the universe and all that is in it, modern people hold by faith. And if one does in faith accept this, with what final value is he left?
Down to the present despair, we can understand where modern people are. They have no place for a personal God. But equally they have no place for man as man, or for love, or for freedom, or for significance. This brings a crucial problem. Beginning only from man himself, people affirm that man is only a machine. But those who hold this position cannot live like machines! If they could, there would have been no tensions in their intellectual position or in their lives. But even people who believe they are machines cannot live like machines, and thus they must "leap upstairs" against their reason to do so they have to deny their reason.
Such a solution is intellectual suicide, and one may question the intellectual integrity of those who accept such a position when their starting point was pride in the sufficiency of human reason.
Reference: How Should We Then Live? by Francis A. Schaeffer, Pages 52, 139, 140, 142, 146, 148, 150, 151, 164, 165.
No comments:
Post a Comment