The Enlightenment

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The Enlightenment
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• A. William Paley (1743 -1805)
• 1. He was a pastor
• 2.Wrote Evidences of Christianity (1794) and
  Natural Theology (1802) in which he set forth a
  teleological argument for the existence of God.
• a. In Evidences he says that there are three
  things about Christianity that would have been
  know even if the Gospels had not been written
• i. The historical Jesus changed the world
• ii. Disciples risked life and freedom to testify
  of Jesus resurrection

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• iii. The resurrection message thought to be
  radical, but they preached It any way in the city
  where it was claimed to have happened.
• b. In Natural Theology he argues from the design
  in the universe to the reality of God. He used
  the watchmaker analogy.
• c. This was a very important work as it was
  required reading in many of the universities on
  both sides of the Atlantic.

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• B. Immanuel Kant (1742-1804)
• 1. He was raised in a pietistic home
• 2. Read Hume who woke him from his dogmatic
  slumbers
• 3. An Answer to the Question What is the
  Enlightenment?
• a. If it is now asked whether we at present live
  in an enlightened age, the answer is No, but we
  do live in the age of enlightenment. As things
  are at present, we still have a long way to go
  before men as a whole can be in a position (or
  can even be put into a position) of using their
  own understanding confidently and well in
  religious matters, without outside guidance.
• b. According to Kant the key Issue is
  freedomfreedom from the dogma of others.

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• 4. All knowledge begins with experience, but
  does not arise from experience. He is both a
  rationalist and empiricist who is trying to gain
  a system that is consistent. He thinks nobody yet
  has done that. Hume had separated the subject and
  the object and this was unacceptable to Kant.
• a. a priori knowledge which is absolutely
  independent of all experience 224
• b. a posteriori empirical knowledge which is
  possible only through experience
• 5. Kants epistemology was revolutionary
  (Copernican revolution) for with him rather than
  the mind having to correspond to objects, objects
  correspond to our knowledge.
• a. the perceived order of the universe is only
  the order of the observers mind

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• a. Sensation feeds our minds the raw material
  of the phenomena and then the a priori categories
  is how that material is processed, that is, how
  we think about the sense data.
• 6. There is the noumenal world and the phenomenal
  world.
• a. Noumena is the world we do not experience you
  can think about them, but you cannot know them.
  This is the metaphysical. The noumena is the
  thing in itself.
• i. This involves all transcendent notions like
  God.
• b. Phenomena is the world we do experience. And
  human knowledge is limited to the things as they
  appear.

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• 7. Two types of judgments
• a. Analytical the property of the predicate is
  contained in the subject. (a rainy day is a wet
  day)
• i. necessary statement
• b. Synthetic the predicate says something about
  the subject which is not already contained in the
  notion of the subject. (Tuesday was a wet day)
• c. The first does not extend our knowledge it
  only helps us order it.
• d. The second increases our knowledge, but it
  must be verified in our world of experience.

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• 8. A synthetic a priori proposition was knowledge
  that one had apart from experience like
  mathematics.
• 9. There are two pure forms of sensibility (by
  which he means intuition) which are in the mind a
  priori. (Pure and a priori are interchangeable,
  they are the transcendental aesthetic)
• a. These two pure forms are Space and Time. They
  exist in the mind without a real object of the
  senses. This would have been against Newtons
  view. Space and Time for Kant are subjective in
  that they are categories of the mind which are
  placed on the external world.

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• i. Space is not something inherent in the object
  itself it structures all our outer
  representations
• ii. Time structures all our inner representations
  
• iii. Because of this, the mind conditions
  everything it think about according to these
  innate categories.
• 10. Transcendental (innate categories)
• a. 12 categories
• i. Four groups of three
• (a) Quality (kind)
• (b) Causal (cause and effect)
• (c) Quantity (number)
• (d) Relation (Modality (unity/diversity)

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• 11. Sense of Autonomy
• a. Grace is no longer necessary as revelation is
  no longer around
• b. Ideal was to be influenced only by nothing but
  ones one moral will
• c. Freedom is not something actual in
  ourselves and in human nature but only something
  we must presuppose. Only an idea of reason
  whose objective reality is in itself
  questionable.
• i. The lower story is what we know, the upper
  story is what we cant help believing

Freedom The Autonomous Self
Nature The Newtonian World Machine
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• 12. Kants Ethics Deontological
• a. Hypothetical imperative You must do this if
  you want that. In other words, this ethic teaches
  that you do what you must to get what you want.
  If you do this, then you get that.
• b. Categorical Imperative You must do this or
  that because it is objectively necessary. Act as
  it the maxim of your actions were to become
  through your will a natural law.
• i. Kant realized that everybody wanted to be the
  exception, but that will not work.

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TABLE OF THE CATEGORIES

• 1 Of Quantity UnityPluralityTotality.

• 2 Of Quality RealityNegationLimitation

3 Of RelationSubstance and accidentCause and
effectAction and reaction. 4 Of
ModalityPossibility impossibilityExistence -
non existenceNecessity - contingence
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TABLE OF THE CATEGORIES

• 1 Quantity of judgmentsUniversal, particular,
  singular.

• 2 Quality Affirmative, negative, infinite.

3 RelationCategorical, hypothetical,
disjunctive. 4 ModalityProblematical,
assertory, apodictic (above contradiction).
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• C. Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher
  (1768-1834)
• 1. The Father of Modern Theology or Religious
  Modernism
• a. The question is How should man know God or
  is it possible?
• 2. His life
• a. Father a reformed pastor in Breslau (Poland)

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• b. He was entrusted to a Moravian upbringing and
  in 1783 he and his sister and brother joined a
  Moravian boarding school at Niesky. His mother
  died a few weeks after his entry to the school.
  His father was a chaplain in the Prussian army,
  which prevented him from ever hearing from his
  father or seeing him again. So at 15 he was
  without parents.
• 3. There is no doubt that the Brethrens
  warm-hearted devotion to Jesus influenced him for
  the rest of his life
• a. Reformers taught that God could be known
  through biblical revelation
• b. The philosophical approach tried the way of
  natural theology
• c. Schleiemacher tried to steer between the two.
• d. Everything is based on feeling

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• 4. Schleiemachers views
• a. The key was religious experience
• b. Truth was not propositional, it was
  existential
• c. Religion was about feeling
• d. The essence of religion lies in our sense of
  absolute dependence on God
• e. The heart of religion is an inward and highly
  personal experience of the influence of Jesus met
  in the community of the religious
• f. That which is felt inwardly is primary over
  doctrinal statements

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• g. Religion was not to be rejected on scientific
  grounds, as if religion claimed to be a theory
  about the causal structure of the world in
  competition with the scientific view. Religion
  did not take such an analytical view, being
  instead a direct, intuitive feeling for the
  infinite in and through the finite world
• h. Religion is the self in relationship, which
  is the object of consciousness. Man is not to be
  focused on himself, but on the other, that is,
  others and the realm of nature and society.
  Emotions are significant not simply because they
  are felt, but because they are inward witnesses
  and responses to realities other than self
• i. Remember, that by this time, orthodox religion
  is being marginalized in the intellectual world
  and this was thought of as a way to keep
  Christianity alive, as it were, for the modern
  man.

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• D. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
  (objective idealist)
• 1. All reality is the out-working of Spirit (the
  essence of what is history) Phenomenology of
  the Giest (mind)
• 2. Hegel was concerned with bringing a unity to
  knowledge. Kant had not gone far enough. Kant had
  brought about a connection with the particulars,
  but at a great expensethe loss of the universal,
  that is, so a person could not know the thing in
  itself.
• 3. In Hegels mind there was no unity of
  knowledge with Kants epistemology.

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• 4. Reality is a continuum, not separate parts
  (particulars)
• 5.Whenever we make a particular assertion we are
  only partly true, because we have not spoken in
  concreteness concretness for Hegel is to
  conceive of a particular in its relation to other
  things and particular to Uncle in his
  illustration.
• For example If we say that Uncle is Absolute, we
  realize that in order to have an uncle we must
  also have a brother and wife and so on. So when
  we say Uncle we have not spoken truly
  (concretely) until we have related it to
  everything, which is ultimately the Geist. Now we
  have unity, but we have placed truth in process.

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• 6. For Hegel, history is the progressive
  self-unfolding and self-realization of the
  Absolute-Geist (The Phenomenolgy of History) The
  unfolding of the Mind is through the minds.
• 7. This gives a unity, but now full truth is
  never really known until it is related to
  Absolute Mind
• 8. The sum total of human knowledge is none other
  than the Absolute thinking out its thoughts
  through human minds. Our history, nature and
  human thought are the self-conscious expression
  of Absolute Spirit.

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• 9. The reality is constantly on the move,
  changing, advancing, and actualizing the ultimate
  state, which is Absolute Spirit, which is the
  complete consciousness and freedom of reality.
• 10. This Is, as we can see, different from
  atomism which says that reality is composed of
  individual units and the individual is more real
  than the whole. Not so with Hegel his view is
  organicism in which the whole is more real than
  the parts and the parts depend totally on the
  whole
• 11. The goal is to free Spirit from its
  confinement in nature so that it might be one
  (pantheistic)

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• E. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55)
• 1. Born in Copenhagen often referred to as the
  Father of Existentialism places existence prior
  to essence the concrete and individual over the
  abstract and universal.
• 2. Faith is irrational, absurd that is the
  nature of faith the absurd is the object of
  faith and the only object that can be believed.
• 3. We should choose the right thing without any
  rational criterion for doing it. Just do the
  right thing.

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• 4. Either/Or choosing the aesthetic life (the
  one of pleasure) or the moral/ethical life (the
  life of faith) which is a paradox/even absurd.
• a. The aesthetic man (either)
• i. Life is one distraction after another because
  life is a bore.
• ii. Boredom is the root of all evil
• iii. Man looks to pleasure to avoid boredom
• b. The Ethical man
• i. Follows rules of morality out of a passion
  from moral virtue
• ii. Independent of rationality just do it

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• c. Either/or is not so much a question of
  choosing between willing the good or evil, as of
  choosing to WILL, but by this in turn the good
  and evil are posited. He who chooses the ethical
  chooses the good, but here the good is entirely
  abstract, only its being is posited, and hence it
  does not follow by any means that the chooser
  cannot in turn choose the evil, in spite of the
  fact that he chose the good. Here you see again
  how important it is that a choice be made, and
  that the crucial thing is not deliberation, but
  the baptism of the will which lifts up the choice
  into the ethical.
• 5. He reacted to the strong rationalism of Hegel.

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• 6. What is important is to make the decision. The
  leap of faith to that which is absurd/
  irrational/ paradoxical.
• 7. Faith and reason are mutually exclusive there
  is no rational ground for choosing right over
  wrong, I hat is not even the right way to frame
  the situation. What is important is that you make
  the choice, not based on the rational, but the
  absurd

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• F. Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
• 1. Evolution was aided by the fact that theists
  failed to take it seriously. Wilberforce (British
  Society in 1859) made light of it and Thomas
  Huxleys rebuttal was backed by evidence .
  Remember the influence of Bacon and Newton
• 2. Origin of Species (1859)
• a. Organisms developed from simple to complex
  structures through natural and random causes new
  species, not just adaptation
• b. Survival of the fittest determined which ones
  would be called upon to continue the evolutionary
  process.

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• c. Up until this time much of Christian
  apologetics was based on the teleological
  argument. (Palelys Watchmaker analogy)
• d. Some like F.R. Tennant (1866-1957) suggested
  theistic evolution as a counter weight.
• 3. The Descent of Man (1871)
• a. Man developed from animals
• b. The famous Scopes Trial 1925 Tennessee.
• 4. Man is a highly successful animal, not Gods
  noble creation with a divine destiny.
• 5. Consciousness, once was believed to rule the
  universe, now it was understood to have arisen
  accidentally in the course of matters evolution.

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• 6. Man had no real certainty that anything was
  going anywhere and no reason to believe that his
  fate would be any different from the 1000s of
  other extinct species.
• 7. Man had no basis for values outside himself,
  leading to relativistic ethics.
• 8. Social evolutionary theories developed from
  this as well, and capitalism John D.
  Rockefeller.
• 9. Now the last prop had been removed in the
  intellectual community from theism. The matter of
  origin. Until this time many still tacitly
  accepted God as the originator, but now that is
  all gone.

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• G. Karl Marx (1818-1883)
• A materialist like his father, a Jewish lawyer,
  converted to Christianity when Karl was 6
• 1. Admitted that Darwin had influenced him and
  wanted him to write the preface to Das Kapital.
  He refused. Marx was optimistic about human
  nature. This now tries to build an
  economic/political system on this notion of man.
• 2. Marx also used Hegel, but turned Hegel on his
  head by denying Spirit and in its place put
  materialism kept his organicism.

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• 3. Like Hegel he thought that he could discern
  the end of history.
• 4. He preferred Homo Faber (mar) the maker) to
  Homo Sapien (man the knower). Man is What he
  expresses in his product.
• 5. Division of labor created hierarchical social
  structures
• a. Laborers produce 100 but get less the
  surplus value
• b. Ruling class keeps goods without contributing
  effort to their production

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• c. Marx asks, what is the fate of industrialized
  society?
• i. It must be possible to rid society of self
  interest.
• ii. Ruling class perpetuates and legitimized
  hierarchy because they support the intellectuals
  who make the rules that in turn favor them
• d. In essence he wants to return to nature
  (Rousseau) before exploitation

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• H. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
• 1. Deliberately anti-Christian
• 2. Christianity is worthless because it makes no
  distinction between one man and the other
• 3. God is dead and there are no Christian morals
• 4. Darwin
• a. Twilight of the Idols (Part X, sec. 14)
• i. Species do not grow into perfection. It is the
  weak that prevail over the strong, and they are
  always in the great majority. The weak also have
  more intellect, exactly in proportion as they
  lack instinct and will.
• ii. Darwin forgets that intellect holds back
  progress. The weak have more intellect because
  they need it in order to make up for their lack
  of instinctual power.

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• iii. Any thought we may have of the basic
  principle of reasoning, that is, the principle of
  non-contradiction is only a subjective rule
  invented by ourselves.
• (a) It cannot be an expression of something
  actually in the world the world is really only
  an amorphous mass of becoming. . .
• iv. The greater the ability to think logically,
  to formulate scientific formulas, and to think
  about God, the greater the falsity.
• v. What we should be praising instead is the
  power of the will
• (a) The ability to take control, first of
  ourselves, and then of others and the world

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• vi. God is dead, and now the only thing worth
  pursuing is the production of the superman.
• (a) In sharp contrast to the members of the herd,
  the superman stands head and shoulders above the
  worthless shopkeepers and ordinary people who
  want nothing but mediocrity, peace, and security.
  
• (b) The superman is the supreme odd ball in
  comparison to the middle members of society.
• (c) Even while being a person of panach
  swagger, he joys the terrible, ugly, dirty, and
  destructive aspects of life, especially as he
  finds them in himself.