Tag Archives: William Lawhead

Philosophy

Are You a Romantic?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I don’t mean in the sense of displaying strong affection toward your spouse.  I mean in the sense of the nineteenth century movement of Romanticism.  I think the romantics still have something to say to us today, and I’m wondering how many of you can relate to their ideas.

According to William Lawhead, in his The Voyage of Discovery,  “Romanticism was a quasi-philosophical literary and artistic movement that reacted against the Enlightenment picture of the universe as a machine that could best be studied by the analytical techniques of the sciences.”

Lawhead expands on this theme:

For the romantics, the scientific vision of the world was too alienating, for it threatened to turn our moral, aesthetic, and religious longings into isolated aberrations within an otherwise mathematically ordered cosmos.  As the romantics looked out on nature, they did not see atomistic particles in motion.  Instead, they felt they were in the mystical presence of an organic unity that resonated with the human spirit. 

Furthermore, they were convinced that logic and telescopes missed what was most important about reality.  Rather than reason and science revealing the secrets of this world to us, they fragmented nature and turned it into a catalogue of abstractions.  In place of the banquet table of life, full of rich colors, tastes, and textures, science offered us only a cookbook of recipes. 

To be sure, every savory dish present at the banquet of nature was represented in the scientists’ recipes.  But to mistake the scientists’ calculations for the fullness of reality would lead to spiritual starvation.  The physicist could summarize the sunset and rainbow in optical equations, and the physiologist could describe the body of one’s lover as a machine made up of organic pumps, tubing, levers, and pulleys.  However, in each case the scientific account missed the beauty and the mystery of these realities.

Although I don’t agree with everything the Romantics had to say, there is much to be commended about their movement, and I find myself agreeing with several aspects of it.  It often seems to me that the battle of worldviews today is between the reductionists who want to explain every part of human experience in terms of scientific data and theory, and the modern romantics who see that human experience is so much more than what scientific data can explain.

Where do you stand?  Do you align yourself more with the reductionists or the romantics?  Why?

Philosophy, Polls, Science and God

How Should Religion and Science Interact?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, philosophers continuously changed their views on how science and religion should interact.  Philosopher William Lawhead describes the continuum chronologically in his textbook The Voyage of Discovery.

Initially, most scientists and philosophers “saw religion and science as co-equal partners in the search for truth.”

Lawhead continues: “Gradually the viewpoint emerged that the claims of revealed religion should be accepted, but only after they have been trimmed down to conform to the scientific outlook.”  Put another way, religious claims must be confirmed by science.

The third stage of development was deism – the belief that the world is wholly rational on its own and that human reason alone can answer questions of nature, religion, and morality.  The deists retained God as the Creator of the universe, but believed that God did not intervene in nature after he created it.

Following deism, “Agnosticism or religious skepticism began to appear in the works of such thinkers as David Hume.  The agnostics urged that we must suspend judgment concerning God’s existence, for reason does not give us any grounds for believing in a deity, although it cannot prove that one does not exist.”

Lawhead explains that “finally, full-blown naturalism or atheism appeared. . . . Its proponents claimed that the philosophical and scientific evidence is stacked against the God hypothesis.  Therefore the rational person will reject it, just as we have the flat-earth theory and the theory that diseases have supernatural causes.”

What is fascinating to me is that all of these views are still held by our contemporary society, hundreds of years later.  That is one reason I find the study of philosophy to be so useful; the ideas never go out of style.  In fact, the same ideas are repeated over and over again throughout history.

What about you?  Which of these five views do you hold about the interaction of science and religion?  Please vote in the poll below and leave comments explaining your vote.

Morality, Philosophy

Will Science and Technology Lead Us to Utopia?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Many people in our western civilization are optimistic that things are always getting better.  If we continue to invest in education, if we produce more advanced technology, and if we push scientific understanding as far as it can go, then we will eventually reach a paradise on earth.  This paradise is inevitable, they believe.

This optimism can be traced back to the eighteenth century, to the period known as the Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment thinkers sincerely believed that man’s reasoning powers were unlimited and that science and technology would eventually prevail.  According to Professor William F. Lawhead, one of the central beliefs of the Enlightenment was that “all problems, theoretical or social, can be solved through science and concerted, rational effort.”  Sound familiar?

Those who continue to hold to the ideals of the Enlightenment, however, have at least one major counter-example to answer to, that of the Holocaust.  I was reminded of this counter-example by Professor J. T. Bridges, whose research yielded the following chilling quotation from author Michael Berenbaum:

The Holocaust, by its scope, nature, and magnitude transforms our understanding of human culture and human existence.  An unspoken premise of the advocates of culture and education is that the refinements of culture and learning somehow make us into better people and intensify our moral worth.  Yet the Holocaust was perpetrated not by the least cultured and least sophisticated of nations but by the most cultured and most advanced of societies.  Furthermore, the elements within that society that proved capable of perpetrating the evils were not the least cultured, but came from all spectrums of society including philosophers and scientists, musicians and engineers, lawyers and ministers, artists and intellectuals.  No segment of German society proved immune. . . . We see that people could love good music and kill young children.

A people with some of the most advanced science and technology, sophisticated culture, turned into Nazi Germany.  You will excuse me if I harbor some doubts about the utopian hopes of our modern day Enlightened.  Clearly science and technology, education and culture did nothing but make the Nazis into more scientifically advanced, more educated, and more culturally sophisticated killers.