Two Counter Cultures in Post Modern Confrontation from Rationalism to Irrationalism (Ii Cor

TWO COUNTER CULTURES IN POST MODERN CONFRONTATION FROM RATIONALISM TO IRRATIONALISM (II COR. 10.5) (18th to 20th Centuries/Narrative Displacement: From Enlightenment to Post Modern

Both rationalism and empiricism had exercised an influence on Western thought which far transcended the borders of philosophy. The extension of the influence of philosophical speculation extended into every area of intellectual activity, had received enormous impetus from the works of Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke. Newtonian equations asserted that physical laws had universal validity. Acting on this assumption Locke' and others endeavored to transform these Newtonian assumptions into two universal frames of references as a guide to all human thought. This new world view differed radically from that provided by the Reformers and the Rationalists, especially Descartes. Though Newton did not extend his physical theory into theology, most of his successors did. Newton's aspiration to free science from theological restraints produced the Newtonian world machine. The new world view espoused the fantastic faith int he infallibility of the scientific method. This new perspective created for itself a new trinity of reason, nature and humanity. The Enlightenment was the final step in the process of secularization of Western culture which began in the Renaissance. • The Enlightenment marked the triumph of Newton and Locke over Descartes. Locke utilized Newton's "laws of nature" for the purpose of determining these natural laws on which human society must be founded. On the humanizing power of natural law a new social order would be created. Locke's ambivalence toward Christianity is clearly exposed in his preoccupation in forming a natural theology (e.g. his Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695 and Discourse on Miracles. 1706). He believed that revelation confirmed what the right use of reason made available to man. Lockean empiricism was rationalism in disguise as reason was the final court of appeal for ascertaining religious truth. Locke also argued that the ultimate tests of the truthfulness of the Christian religion was its social utility, i.e., its promotion of morality. Of- course Locke's efforts to fuse his reasonableness of Christianity of his empirical epistemology were ultimately a failure. Under the sledge hammer blow of Hume and Voltaire, the attack on historic-Christianity grew more and more bold and natural law became the new religion. Newtonian physics regarded nature as an orderly, stable mechanism governed by a set of universal automatic and immutable laws.

The foundations for a thorough secularism was now intact. Natural law became the sovereignty in itself, not subject to the divine decrees of the God of Scriptures. God became subject to sovereign natural law--now enters Deism. Natural -law deteriorated into deep scepticism. This devolution of significance is exposed in Thomas Jefferson's weakening the concept of right of private property to redefining it as the right to pursue happiness.

Montesque, in his Spirit of The Law (1743) declared that the laws of any state or nation reflected predetermined conditions which were independent of human control. "Law in the widest sense of its meaning consists of the necessary relations derived from the nature of things." He attributed the differing laws in different nations to varying environmental factors. This emancipation from Christianity did not generate solutions for all human problems which were highly lotted by Enlightenment prophets of the new found freedom from any dependence upon a sovereign God.

1 Carl Becker in his Heavenly City of the 18th century philosophers provided a provocative answer to this problem. "Thus was bom the religion of humanity. For the love of God they substituted the love of humanity; for the vicarious atonement, the perfectibility of man through his own efforts; and for the hope of immortality in another world, the hope of living in the memory of future generations." (Becker, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932, p. 130)

The Coming of Secularism: This inherent optimism generated preoccupation with a secularized millennium which man could create on earth. Based in "inherent goodness" and "potential perfectibility" when fused with the right knowledge ingredients, the road to a social, economic and political Utopia lay right before him.

A Fatal Flaw in Newton's Natural Law: If unchanging law is the dominate force in control of human society and history, then how is progress possible? Natural law was both fatalistic and deterministic in its nature, but also impersonal. How could it bring about social and moral progress? How could immoral natural law produce moral progress? This problem of an optimistic illusion of the Enlightenment remained unresolved even for those who accepted the scepticism of a more logically consistent Hume. Another rational impasse was, how could political and economic thought be devoted to the pursuit of freedom and how could it be fused with reliance on natural law? This intellectual/cultural contradiction led not only to the disaster of the French Revolution but to the growth of totalitarian political and economic philosophies which appeared in Hegel and Marx during the 19th century and reached their culmination in the totalitarianism of the 20th century in Germany, Russia and Italy.

In his Main Currents in Modem Political Thought. John Hallowell stated the issue very succinctly: He insisted that the liberalism of the Enlightenment was its futile effort to bring about a compromise between two contradictory principles—the absolute value of the individual human personality and the eternal natural law of nature on the other hand. The powerless attempt to appeal to the Christian conscience as compromise between these two principles became self evident When Christian conscience is separated from the Church and is progressively divorced from revelation, it degenerates into a mere cult of sentiment and loses its value (see esp. John Hallowell, Main Currents in Modem Political Thought (Henry Holt: NY, 1950), p. 158)

This liberal mind set was unable to force a synthesis between these two irreconcilable principles and concluded by forcing the doctrine of the human soul as the source of personality into the background and produced the growing conviction that the biblical doctrine of man had no validity in an age dominated by philosophical materialism. In both classical modem and post modem sociology and psychology there is no evil, no guilt or disorder in nature, and that all natural phenomena are necessary.

Nietzsche, the Prophet of the Death of God: The ensuing atheism was strident in much thinking and writing. The editor of The Encyclopedia took the offensive and openly declared war on religion, not only historic evangelical Christianity and Roman Catholic theology, but also hurled thunderbolts on Deism as too moderate. Claude Halvetus (1715-1779) pushed the implications of the Enlightenment to not only deny Christian theology but Christian morality as well. The state should be used to abolish false class distinctions and false codes of morals, particularly those found in Christianity.

2 The most venomous attack on Church and Scripture in the 18th century was Baron Holback (1723-1789), and his State of Nature. 1770. He attempted to set forth a full developed naturalistic theory of man and the universe. He declared that the idea of God was morbid and abnormal and that Christianity was the result of fear and credulity. Here we hear Marx's voice before Marx. Holback declared that man was an animal, doomed to remain forever an animal. Hear once more for the first time the voice of Darwin crying in the 19th century voice.

The logical and inevitable conclusion of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution, which in 1789 was a conservative reaction to the absolutism of the Bourbon regime in France. The anatomy of this revolution reveals the more radical and irrational period which ushered in a new despotism. The French Revolution was the ultimate product of the Enlightenment! The cry of the revolution was Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and it had a tremendous appeal to the French masses and the masses throughout Western civilization. The human rights or privileges which inspired the revolution were not then possessions revealed in scripture. God and His word had become marginalized in the market place. The French Revolution was irrational in its underlying philosophy and anti theistic in its purpose.

The French Revolution was the first modern aggression of the democracy which expressed so forcefully and grotesquely the doctrine of the Sovereignty of man. All other Western revolutions were tempered within a strong theistic frame of reference which mentioned a semblance of sanity and rationality. European totalitarianism is the voice of popular sovereignty. The unbounded concern for Enlightenment, freedom, found its death knell in the gas ovens of Germany and the Death Camp in the Russian tundra (e.g.. 100 million deaths in World War II).

The Utopian visions of the 18th century was turning into dark despair but found its harbinger in Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and its full blown social contract with the German idealism of Kant and Hegel. Edmund Burke's (1729-1797) conservative political reaction to the Enlightenment thought attempted to provide a theistic answer to the revolutionary character of the Natural Rights school. Burke's influence on the biblical view of the government was short lived. Burke laid too much power in the redemptive power of the historic process and laid the foundation for the 19th century idealistic conception of history.

18th Century Unbelief Under the Guise of The Enlightenment: The unbelief of the 18th century has come to its dreary conclusion with its temple of human knowledge lying prostrate in the dust from the impact of Hume's savage and deadly attacks leveled against its foundations. The French Revolution was the greatest political catastrophe yet experienced by the Western world. These who had sought to escape from the control of the Sovereign God had now become the political prisoners of a despotic emperor.

The Age of The Enlightenment was in shambles religiously, philosophically and politically. Neither 17th century Rationalism nor 18th century Empiricism which replaced it provided satisfactory answers to the perennial questions. What method and epistemology can answer the perennial questions of life and death? Idealism arose as an attempt to rescue not only philosophy, but all of human intellectual endeavor, from Hume's devastating attacks. However, the emergence of Idealism by no means signaled a return to biblical theism. Idealism was incapable

3 of freeing itself from the Enlightenment and its entanglements. Idealism did not free itself from two basic presuppositions: (1) the autonomy of man and (2) the irrelevance of the Scriptures.

The Emergence of German Idealism: Another Narrative Displacement: German Idealism came into its own with the emergence of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). After Kant's conversion from German pietism in which he had been raised, he fell under the influence of the rationalism of Leibniz. His influence was soon displaced with English empiricism. From Locke and Hume he came to the conclusion that knowledge originates in sense experience, and he also retained from Leibniz the belief that while the mind has no innate ideas, it possesses innate capacities that give form to the experience brought to it by the senses. However, about the year 1765 he began to see the implication of Hume's devastating attack on Locke and claimed that it was this understanding of Hume which aroused him from his dogmatic slumber. Thus enters Kant's most fundamental problem. How can the absolute certainty supplied by mathematics and physics be reconciled with the fact that our knowledge comes from sense experience? Kant's goal was to erect the foundations of a new rationalism which would be unassailable. The tension between Locke's and Hume's empirical approach and the absolute certainty of mathematics and physics went unsolved. In an effort to account for the certainty he assumed that the mind has three faculties: (1) thinking, (2) willing and (3) feeling and he devoted a critiqued to each one of them. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781. The Critique of Practical Reason C1788) and The Critique of Judgment (1790). Kant's critique of both empiricists and rationalists generated his "true method" of transcendental or critical method, by which he meant a study of reason itself, an investigation of "pure reason" to see if its judgments have a universality beyond human experience itself and yet are necessary and related to human experience. The logic involved in such judgment must be absolutely reliable, yet must also be applicable to the world of things. Kant believed that thinking, feeling and willing are the fundamental forms of reason, and he placed the transcendental principles of reason in the realm of thought, the transcendental principles of morality in the will and the transcendental principles of beauty in the realm of feeling.

Kant, in his transcendental approach, was not concerned with the content of experience or in the forms or ways in which the mind reacts to the content of the external world. This knowledge is transcendental in the sense that it must occur in human experience under all circumstances. To realize this goal Kant restructured the philosophical scheme of Wolffand other rationalists as well as the world of Hume and Locke and offered a threefold division of the realm of human life and experience: (1) The subjective states, (2) The realm of things in themselves, and (3) The realm of phenomena. But the realm of the subjective states was not, for Kant, a realm of knowledge. Rather it was for Kant the realm of an individual's self consciousness, the realm of intuition and the immediate apprehension of the individual's own ideas and sensations. This subject state is one's private arena which confers upon him his unique individuality. Kant denies that this subjective consciousness lacks the capacity for knowledge. Kant's individual divides reality into noumenal and phenomenal areas. He placed the realm of things in themselves in the noumenal area, which for Kant was unknowable. This unknown presents a crucial epistemological problem. If the noumenal realm is removed from man how can he say that it exists? Kant's answer to this irrational impasse was (1) God, (2) Freedom, and (3) Immortality are placed in the noumenal world (al ab-as if). Thus enters the irrational in the God, freedom and immortality discussion. We are not far from Freud's critique and the Death of God in Nietzsche.

4 Reason in its various forms creates knowledge as such. The raw materials of sense data is organized into a meaningful whole through what Kant regarded as pure forms of time and space. Kant held that time and space are not empirical concepts and not innate ideas but innate forms. For him, our ideas of time and space are the results of our own reflection but not to properties of things themselves. Kant held that both time and space have an empirical reality which holds for all possible human experience. Time and space also have a transcendental reality in which they are only subjective and do not apply to things in themselves. It was for this reason that Kant called his philosophy empirical realism or transcendentalism. Kant used what he called transcendental logic and he devoted the second part of Critique of Pure Reason to its meaning and application. He denned his transcendental logic as the mechanism and operation of the understanding, but he actually divided his Logic into two parts: (1) Transcendental Analytic and (2) Transcendental Dialectic. He defined the Transcendental Analytic as the search for the a priori structure of the understanding, that mechanism by which the mind makes a world out of the data brought to it through the senses. How can these categories of understanding and the sensible manifold be brought together? This was the question which confronted Kant and for which he was seeking an answer in his logic. He found what he felt was his answer with transcendental activity of apprehension and the transcendental activity of apperception.

Kant summed up his position in the following: "Precepts without concepts are blind and concepts without percepts are empty." Kant's transcendental dialectic involved him in a curious paradox. The mind continues to think, although it cannot know. By this he meant that in pure thinking reason becomes involved in a series of contradictory arguments. For Kant the values of Pure Reason reveals that there is a reality beyond experience and that the world of natural science cannot possibly be the ultimate reality. The events of knowledge derived from pure reason points to the postulates of Practical Reason. Kant had serious objection to the insistence of philosophical realists and materialists that scientific laws extend to ultimate reality.

Kant maintained that man's greatest illusion was the claim that pure reason could demonstrate the existence of God. For Kant, the idea of God is regulative, in that it discloses the possibility that it may be true. It becomes clear why Kant rejects the classical arguments for God as they had been formulated by Augustine, Anselm and Thomas Aquinas. As Christians we can agree with Kant's critique of the classical arguments without accepting his epistemological or logical arguments which brought him to this conclusion. Nor can we accept his reason for his argument accepting the existence of God. Kant's Critique of Practical Reason placed the concepts of God, freedom and immortality in the realm of the noumenal. The realm of the unknown and unknowable!

His epistemology/logic leaves us with little rational ground for believing any or all of these three concepts. Kant's uncompromising rationalism had as its correlative a fatal rationalism. Kant isolated ethics from any theological foundation without resorting to empiricism; thus his only refuge to find the basis of the moral life in what he called the Categorical Imperative was nothing more than the unconditional command of practical reason in action. He insisted that practical reason must acknowledge as a self evident proposition that the good will is the only good as an end in itself, for it alone acts in a sense of duty without regard to the consequences. This good which the good will performs is self imposed, self regulated and autonomous. Kant's Categorical Imperative is expressed by three formulations: (1) Act solely on that principle which you would be willing to become a universal law of nature and which every other person should also act. (2)

5 Treat every human being you know, including yourself, as an end in himself and not as a means to the advantage of anyone else. (3) One should always act as if he were a member of the kingdom of ends in which one would act the same time both sovereign and subject. This is clearly the self-centered self of the counter culture of the 1960's (egs.. omnipotent self conflict among autonomous omnipotents). Within the context of his ethics he gave grounds for belief in God, Freedom and Immortality only and not as proofs. His concept of freedom is summarized in his dictum—"Thou oughtest, therefore thou canst." His ethics lies within empirically determined "things in themselves," that is, upon the noumenal realm which lies beyond human knowledge; moral good contains virtue and happiness. The inevitable conflict between these two necessitates unlimited perfectibility, since duty increases with its fulfillment. It is at this point that Kant brought his view of the existence of God via his discussion of ethical perfection. Even God must be subject to the moral law.

Kant's Copernican Revolution: Before Kant, all philosophers had proceeded on the assumption that our perception corresponds to the external world. But Kant held that the world in order to be known, must conform to the contribution of our minds. He even held that the laws of mathematics and physics owe their origin and validity to the structure of the human mind. The laws of the world owe their constitution to the structure of the human. We are not far from post modem multi cultural pluralism, i.e., the Social Construction of Reality and The Death of True Truth!!

Kant's quest was to destroy the materialism and atheism of the late 18th century and sought to make room for faith. For him the ultimately real world was not the mechanical world of mathematics and physics. Although we cannot know the ultimately real world, Kant insisted that we act "as if there is God, freedom and immortality, but these are no more than postulates permeated by reason. Kant's insistence on the Categorical Imperative is no rational ground for the True Truth concerning these three categories.

Kant sought to place limits on the realm of science in order to make room for faith. Kant's purpose becomes clear in his insistence that "only man and only in man as subject of morality, do we meet with unconditional legislation in respect to purposes which therefore alone renders how capable of being a final purpose, to which the whole of nature is Ideologically subordinated." (Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Barnard, (London, 1892, p. 361).

From Kant we see clearly the road to humanistic freedom motives as the driving force behind the human personality (compare with Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity) In modem and post modem culture man's influence to dominate nature spells out a determinism which tends to envelop man himself.

Post modem man's search for freedom has generated the demise of "The Person" which is the essence of post modernism. "If man were to know God in the way he knows nature, then God would be an object of nature. As such he would not be God at all. To be truly God, he must be wholly other than nature." (Cornelius Van Til, Christianity and Bartianism (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian Reformed Press, 1977): p. 244; Barrett's Lost Soul and my paper "Soulless in A Post Modem Culture")

6 Kant's God can be posited only by Practical Reason. In this Practical Reason the will of man has control and it deals with the question of good and evil, even as the theoretical reason deals with the question of the true and the false. Kant's Practical Reason has priority over theoretical reason. Kant's free man cannot know the higher realm. The will of man is the ultimate source of the distinction between good and evil. Thus Kant's irrationalism appears with full force in its ugly nakedness. Kant's irrationalism is expressed in his negative statement about the unknown/unknowable!! What is the logical status of negative statements about the unknowable? In Kant's religion there is no supernatural, personal God, no incarnation (the cross and atonement), no historical resurrection and no hope of eternal life in Christ. Kantian philosophy has become the basis for heresy within both Protestantism and Vatican II Roman Catholicism during the 19th and 20th centuries. The invasion of Kant's irrationalism is at the heart of our post modem irrationalism! Surely Kant is the most vicious enemy of biblical Christianity in history and its consequences has reached full fruition in our multi cultural post modem culture.

Successors of Kant: Fichte (1762-1814) and Hegel (1770-1831) also failed to address the dangers which Kant rightly saw in Hume as the logical successor to Locke. His successors were deeply under his spell and labored within the framework of his Idealism. The charm between Idealism and Biblical theism has shaped the growth of irrationalism in every category of Western civilization.

German Idealism swept German and French thought and took possession of the English mind in the form of English Romanticism and appeared in America as Transcendentalism. Thus Kant's influence spread the gospel of irrationalism throughout much of Western culture. His influence is full grown in The Demise of God. the Demise of Truth, the Demise of Meaning, the Demise of History, the Demise of Science, the Demise of Culture and ultimately the Demise of The Person in post modern multicultural pluralism.

Fichte's god plunged the mind of Europe further into the depths of an irrationalism which ultimately come to its conclusion in Existentialism. These intellectual phenomena were hatched out of the same egg as German Idealism! Hegel's genius restructured German Idealism into a process philosophy. Once again Rationalism, partially masked as Voluntarism, had as its inescapable correlative the deadly virus of Irrationalism.

The Romantic Revolt: The Romantic Movement of the first half of the 19th century was largely a revolt against the naturalism of The Age of Enlightenment. Its central emphasis was on the emotional rather than the rational side of man. The Enlightenment era failed to address the deepest longings of the human spirit. The Romantics rejected the 18th century emphasis that nature was rational and that alone. From Rousseau to Kant this emphasis intensifies in Western culture. Three basic assumptions of characteristics of The Age of Enlightenment: (1) There is an enduring rational order of eternal truths; (2) Man know the order through his mind; (3) Man has a will which is capable of acting in accordance with the truths. He can and will apply these corollaries to every category of reality.

The general assumptions of The Enlightenment disappeared after 1800. There was growing doubt about the existence of Eternal Truth, but there was also an even greater uncertainty concerning the power of the human mind and will to apply them. The orderly universe of the

7 18th century had been sadly fractured by the excesses of The French Revolution and in a very real sense the Romantic Era was a reaction against the smug assurance of the previous age that men were truly rational and that they could apply the truths which they might find in The Natural Law. The reaction against the supremacy of natural law in the 18th century and all the basic assumptions of that era are brought into question and although the search for certainty continued unabated, it took a different direction(s). The Romantics were intellectually rudderless but basically looked for intuition as their guide. Kant's intuition made it possible for the Romantics to believe what they wanted to.

The Romantics rejected the deistic notion that the universe was a vast piece of machinery and preferred to regard it as some kind of a living organism of which man was a part. This influence developed into the new radical individuation and the importance of the individual personality. The new irrational search for God became the "soul of the universe" and the result was a revival of Pantheism. This development entails a shift from Deism to Pantheism. The Romantics were tired of the coldness of the Natural Rights philosophy of The Enlightenment; the new world view was a creation of their own famished souls. The new cultural vision gave rise to Goethe and Schiller in German literature, while Beethoven and Wagner reflected its basic philosophy in the realm of music. In England Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats created a school of literature which was largely motivated by German Idealism, particularly by Kant and Fichte. In America the Transcendental Movement represented the same influence at work. Each in their own way Emerson, Thoreau, Whittier, Lowell, Hawthorne and Whitman translated German Idealism into the American mode of thought and the result was the Transcendentalist Movement which claimed the attention of the country during the first half of the 19th century. In many ways it impacted the political, social and religious thought of this country which had marked its arrival in Germany, France and England. The influence of Kant, Fichte or Schelling is the source of extensive inspiration. But perhaps Whitman's cry is more accurate, "All we need is Hegel!" The Romantic Movement was a continuation of the French Revolution's emphasis on human autonomy which was the source of most thought and activity.

Idealism at Jena: German idealism advanced a non formal state in the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Scheller (1775-1854) who became its formal leader at the University of Jena. This school developed a strong realistic epistemology which claims there must be correspondence between subject and object, a union of ego and nature. Both Scheller and Schelling's views of freedom were an illusion. Their anti theistic stance derived from Kantian irrationalism. Kant was bringing modern/post modem thought to its nadir of despair in the Existentialism of Sartre, et.al.

George Frederick Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831): Hegel was undoubtedly the greatest of all German philosophers after Kant. Hegel's pantheism presented a comprehensive system of idealism. It must be admitted that his system is the most comprehensive philosophy to be developed in modem times.

Hegel's basic concern was to understand the world as it is and to explain it logically. But he found Aristotelian logic most inadequate as a tool for the magnificent plan which he had in mind. Hegel set forth a new system of logic in his The Phenomenology of The Mind (1807) which would support his basic content was that reality is an organic whole and his logic he called dialectic. Hegel's dialectical logic was necessary to support a philosophy of evolution. Basically,

8 this new logic rested on the assumption that reality grows with truth and that the world is a growing and living organism. For Hegel, thought is dialectical motion and is only real. "Only the real is rational and only the rational is real." Hegel's thesis and the antithesis are reconciled in a larger unity—Synthesis. Hegel's dialectical logic is the assumed pre-established harmony based on the organic unity of all things. Hegel's "absolute idea" is fused in the subjective mind as psychology; the objective mind as morality and ethics; the absolute mind as art, religion and philosophy.

Hegel's system was grounded in a rejection of the Christian revelation and generated a highly developed form of irrationalism. His system was openly pantheistic. His Christianity bore no resemblance to Biblical Christianity! Hegel's God is captive to human dialectical logic. There is no absolute truth; but only the contradictory conception of absolute change. Hegel's view of the Geist in the dialectic of history has generated Caesars, Napoleons, Hitlers, Mussolinis, Al Capone's, Sadam Husseins, et al.

These great historic figures turned the tide but non^an reverse historical determinism. Where the Geist was dialectically engaged there was Hegel's god-geist at work; therefore no particular historical event could become a meta narrative to interpret the rest of history. There could be no revelatory/historical events such as the Exodus, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, or the Resurrection as normative judge of all other events. All events have an equal standing in the universe of discourse—post modem multicultural pluralism in Hegelian dress. Thus the irrationalism of Hegel's system of thought in its political results has given birth to the irrational totalitarianism in our global village.

Narrative Displacement—Impact of Hegelianism on Western Culture: Hegelian inclusivism gave birth to many contradictory systems of thought, all of which are tainted with his irrationalism. Two basic results follow Hegel's inclusivistic philosophy: (1) Ultimate conclusion of his resurgent idealism, i.e.. Pantheism and (2) Gnosticism. Those who reacted against it chose materialism in order to search for solutions for problems which Hegel raised but did not solve.

Arhur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) reflects both Kantian and Hegelian influences. His chief work was The World of Will and Idea. published in 1819. This reveals his thorough going subjective idealistic mentalism. There can be no object without a subject, by which he meant that there is no material substratum that serves as a support or cause of ideas. At this point he was pro Berkeley and in opposition to Locke. For him all matter is merely the idea of the knowing subject. The ultimate reality is as the thing in itself, (Ding an Sich) and this is known by the immediate intuition in reason or by introspection. He held hat perception can yield no real insight into the nature of the real world. Our real knowledge of the inner nature of reality arises from an intuitive insight into its nature for his ultimate reality is Will or the thing in itself. Intuition is the source of knowledge, not ideas which come to the human mind through the senses. For Schopenhauer the whole world is will (mind) and so are we. Schopenhauer's world is panthesitic. Schopenhauer's pantheistic Buddhism is expressed when he proclaims that the original sin of man was to have been born as a finite person and all the egoism which that implies.

Schopenhauer's basic irrationality has been widely recognized and his view of nature of reality as it is brought to him by intuition makes intuition a rational explanation of human experience

9 impossible. Once again the rationalism and voluntarism had their inescapable corollary, irrationalism, as the breach between idealism and Christian theism become wider and more pronounced.

The Left Wing Hegelism: Materialism/Liberalism: This later group, which included in its membership David F. Strauss (1804-1874) and Bruno Baur (1809-1882) the radical biblical critics, became the most important of the two groups in the intellectual life in Europe, and had a tremendous impact on the development of theology in Germany and elsewhere in Europe and America during the latter part of the 19th century. The positivistic tendencies of the left wing Hegelians became evident in the radical biblical criticism of both Strauss and Baur.

An ever more radical member of this group was Ludwig Feuerbach, whose influence over Karl Marx became very pronounced. Feuerbach had come to the conclusion that man had created God in man's own image and this conception became a dominate part of Marx's own thinking. Marx's Hegelian background was derived from Feuerbach. As early as 1844 Marx began to show the influence of Feuerbach in The Holy Family in which he declared that the proletariat would be compelled to abolish itself and private property for the good of humanity. Marx's Lockean epistemology is exposed in his declaration "that all man learns he learns through his senses." Self interest was Marx's guiding principle of morality. His Hegelian influence is exposed in his assertion "that man becomes truly incarnate through the creation of the communist society" and not the state, as Hegel had taught. For Marx, man apart from society has no value. Society confers upon men their values and rights. The process of incarnation could be achieved through the destruction of private property.

Marx laid the foundation for his dialectical materialism in Thesis on Feuerbach. which appeared in 1845. In this document Marx proclaimed that reality is nothing but human sensuous activity. Marx's irrationalism insisted that organic life is only a complex or material existence and nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and the development of nature, human society and thought. Inescapable in Marxian materialism is the insistence that thought itself is a natural process and nothing more. This spelled death to Rationalism. The whole Marxian process most certainly was not the result of the empirical process. This irrationalism is inherent in all Marxian philosophy. The Marxian gospel declares that man is alienated by economic exploitation and can be emancipated from exploitation, class distinction and class struggles by socialistic communism (see The Communist Manifesto).

Marx's materialistic determinism can never be the basis for human freedom from exploitation or anything else. Marxian dialectical materialism is the most ruthless form of determinism yet found in human history. His empirical epistemology is no basis for either personal or cultural optimism. Marxism is a complete antithesis to the biblical view of history. It is perhaps the most comprehensive negation of Christian theism. In his Das Kapital Marx offered only the impersonal forces of dialectical materialism as the sovereign before which man must bow. Christ's incarnation was replaced by the incarnation of man as he finds it in his membership in a community society.

Unlike Hegel, Marx openly defied Christianity and made no pretense of offering any possible reconciliation between his dialectical materialism and the gospel of Christianity by declaring that

10 Christianity is "the opiate of the people." He waged open warfare against the Christian Church in all its forms (e.g. 70 years of intolerance in Russia).

Narrative Displacement, Post Modern Respite: Social Darwinism and Its Impact on Western Culture: Evolutionary philosophies had been in circulation among European intellectuals since the 18th century and the philosophy of The Enlightenment very definitely regarded "social evolution" as one of the most important aspects of human history. The French and American Revolutions provided an aura of optimistic views of human history. A social and secular millennium was a very real possibility as a goal for the opening of the 19th century (e.g., Alexander Campbel’s Millennial Harbinger). In 1789 many European liberals were confident that the French Revolution would mean the realization of Utopian hopes for the achievement of such an era in Western history (e.g. The Campbell/Owen Debate).

If by 1860 the 18th century conception of the world as a vast machine had become orthodox, it was an orthodoxy which had undergone vast change, for the conception of natural law which had been popularized by Newton and his 18th century disciples underwent vast changes during the 19th century. And even the work of Newton himself underwent revision. John Dalton (1766- 1844) made significant revisions in Newton's version and interpretation of the atomic theory. The triumph of this interpretation of Newton was aided by other developments in the field of organic chemistry. Probably the first major departure from Newton's corpuscular theory of the structure of matter came in connection with the nature of light. Even these developments intensified the widely held conviction that the world in which we live was so much more complex than Newton had ever dreamed.

Charles Darwin, in his The Origin of Species (1859), laid the foundation in biology for a new orthodoxy in the area of science which while looking back to Newton in one sense, gave to natural law an entirely new interpretation which neither Newton nor his immediate successors had foreseen and which some might have rejected if they had come into contact with the Darwinian theory. Although Darwin worked in the area of biology, his theories were soon adapted to the whole realm of scientific endeavor and to nearly every other aspect of the intellectual life of the West. The evolutionary interpretation soon became the foundation of a new world view in much the same fashion that John Locke had used the Newtonian principles for the formulation of a new world and life view at the end of the 17th century.

This conquest of Western thought by Darwin was not accidental or unplanned, for Darwin himself compared himself with Newton. In his The Origin of Species. Darwin had confined himself to the area of biology, but in his Descent of Man (1871) he broadened his approach and applied his evolutionary interpretation to the emergence of man, thus laying the foundation for the emergence of a world and life view which would be evolutionary in its nature and outlook.

There can be no legitimate doubt that Darwin utilized his evolutionary hypothesis to discredit the biblical record of the creator-God, i.e., both God and creation! As a matter of fact, Darwinian evolution lead to widespread atheism and materialism. Darwinism entailed the denial of all intelligent design in the biological development of the world's systems. Darwin did not originate the theory of evolution. In view of this fact what factors contributed to the tremendous enthusiasm which greeted the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859: All succeeding

11 theories of evolution included purpose and design as an explanation of the theory. Perhaps a clue is expressed in David Strauss's, The Old Faith and The New (NY: 1872), p. 177). He paid tribute to Darwin for eliminating from the process of evolution any remnants of the operation of a supernatural force. This entailed the abolition of miracles, e.g., prophecy, revelation, incarnation, inspired scripture, etc., from every area of explanation. Charles Hodges' What is Darwinism? (NY: 1874) exposes the receiving mind set. "... that no one is willing to acknowledge himself not simply an evolutionist, but an evolutionist of the Darwin School who is either a materialist by profession or a disciple of Herbert Spencer and an advocate of the philosophy of David Hume." (p. 177) The ultimate results of the Darwinian revolution was the growth of 19th century atheism. David Strauss declared "that man has a head full of power. This sense of abandonment is at first something awful." (Hodge, p. 177) What factors provide rational explanation of the continuing commitment to Naturalistic Evolution?

Darwinian influence continues as a vital force in our post modem culture. This theory has been used to give life and vitality to radical democratic revolutions, social gospel, emergence of super races, super classes within races and super men within a class and the history of Europe from the 1850's on even until our post modem era, realization of many social economics and political implications of the evolutionary philosophy.

Perhaps no author has perceived these implications or presented them in such brilliant and penetrating manner as did Jacques Barzun in his Darwin. Marx and Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (Boston: Peter Smith, 1946, pb). In this work Barzun has one basic theme, the emergence of mechanistic materialism in science, art and the social sciences during the second half of the 19th century and in this connection he wrote: "Darwin, Marx and Wagner certainly do not represent absolute beginnings, but neither are they arbitrary starting points. If we take up the history of certain ideas, the idea of struggle for life, of economic interpretation in history of nationalism's art we find ourselves discussing Darwin, Marx and Wagner; but we also find ourselves embroiled in the present day problems of democratic freedom, anarchy and cultural revolution (J. Barzun, Darwin. Marx and Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, p. vii).

Barzun's unfolding thesis insisted that the contributions of Darwin. Marx and Wagner to the intellectual development of Europe during the second half of the 19th century actually formed a single stream of influence, which he called mechanical materialism. All three men wandered outside of their respective disciplines. Darwin strayed into the areas of psychology and social sciences, while Marx, who was originally a philosopher, turned to history and sociology and attempted to create an economic system based upon dialectical materialism. Barzun describes Wagner as an artist-philosopher who claimed the cosmos as his own province. (Barzun, p. 10) Barzun further contended that "we find so many links uniting Darwinism, Marxism and Wagnerism that the three doctrines can be seen as the crystallization of a whole century's beliefs. Each of these systems may be likened to a few facets of a whole crystal-at the core they are indistinguishable, so much so that it would be hard to find in the whole history of Western civilization a corresponding trio to share in the honors of a single epic with such perfect parallelism (Barzun, p. 10) (e.g. surely Freud must be infused into this cultural dynamic).

Barzun found a common core of the materialism of these three architects of Western thought in evolution. He also saw clearly that evolution was not and could not be confined within the realm

12 of scientific endeavor. In fact, this trio was used as the hermeneutical circle as a means of reshaping the intellect and culture of the Western civilization by turning it away from its historic basis in Christian theism to its new paradigm/narrative in the theory of evolution. This cultural fact is one of the most powerful narrative displacements in Western civilization. Darwin's fatalistic philosophy made its way into Western thought and eventually conquered the modem and the post modem mind which represents another major narrative displacement in Western Christian civilization.

Barzun's admirable summary of the significance of Darwinism cannot be seriously challenged: "The idea of development which made its way into every thinking mind in he first half of the 19th century was philosophical; it was a way of understanding things and it implied purpose. The evolution which triumphed with Darwin, Marx and Wagner in the second half of the century was something that existed by itself. It was an absolute. Behind all changes and all actual things it operated as a cause. Darwinism yielded its basic laws and its name; when viewed historically it was Progress. All things had physical origins; physical origins were discoverable by science; and the method of science alone could, by revealing the nature of things, make the mechanical sequence of the universe wholly benevolent to man. Fatalism and progress were as closely linked as the Heavenly Twins and like them invincible." (Barzun, pp. 351-352)

The Freudian revolution was a direct attack on the intellectual consequences of this preceding trio. Ultimate reality was reduced to the irrational. Thus the Darwinian fabric of fatalistic determinism was being undermined. But until the Freudian revolution implodes into Western intellectual life the aforementioned trinity of cultural transformers permeated nearly the whole of Western thought. In alliance with Wagner, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest gave a specious form of rationality to the philosophy of government which resulted in Hitlerism and Nazi Germany. In alliance with Marx it gave birth to the equally vicious form of Russian Communism which has become the enduring menace to Christianity and Western culture from 1917 on, and presumably it will continue to play the role throughout the remaining decade of the 20th century (especially China and Eastern Europe). Even the student revolts in Russian and China in the 1980s has not visibly modified the destructive power of tyranny. The Pope visited Cuba in 1997, the last Communist stronghold in the West, and we wait to see the positive significance of Communistic determinism. Its rationalism, rooted and grounded in the concept of the absolute nature of change and the struggle to survive as Darwin claimed to have it operating in the world of nature, was essentially a new version of the irrationalism which has plagued the Western mind since The Renaissance, and it spawned a philosophy of intellectual, moral and ethical relativity which accompanied the amazing development of a totalitarian absolution in government during the 20th century (see Bork's Slouching Off to Gomorrah, a critique of irrational immorality in the post modern government of the United States in Washington, D.C. Note the social significance of irrationalism in the radical redefinition to the family).

The twin developments of intellectual relativism on the one hand and political absolutism on the other seem to be so totally incongruous that they could not possibly have sprung from the same womb. Yet they did! (Nietzsche was correct—modernism will not only abandon Christian Ethics but have no foundation for their own ethical concerns) This is a seeming contradiction, i.e.. Relativism in post modern theology and morality must almost inevitably bring with it a political absolution. No society can endure with relativism as its only absolute and the struggle to survive

13 as its only rationale. The relativism to which Darwin gave birth by its very nature had to result in a political antidote tot he anarchy inherent in its nature. Western thought replaced what is called Christian irrationalism with another from of irrationalism. The relativity of all values which they professed to find in Darwin's Absolute made such a conclusion both easy and popular, at least for those able to survive in the struggle and become the "fit." Of course, the dialect entailed the narrative displacement of one "fit" with another "fit" and adinfinitum.

The history of the economic thought and practice, as well as the political development of Europe and the United States from 1865 on until our post modem^^3, is the story of the unfolding of the effects of Darwinism. Its effects were no less evident in the history of philosophy and educational thought and practice, and even the theology of both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches (compare Vatican I and II concerning evolution. Also the Social Gospel was social Darwinism in classical liberalism). No area of human interest has remained untouched or undamaged by the poisonous effects of Darwinism which unfolded ensuing popularization of a new form of irrationalism. For over one hundred years before Darwin, the Western mind was being developed for openness to the idea of progress. It has been popularized by the philosophers and Hegel, and it had become an essential aspect of all political revolutionary activity in the 19th century and was not absent from the American political scene. Darwin's evolutionary Weltanschauungwas a fusion of philosophical and scientific acceptance. The demise of classical metaphysical interpretative schemes were yielding ground to the scientific outlook. Both philosophy and science were powerful allies in their conflict with the biblical concept of both God and man in relationship to nature and creation. All forms of humanistic evolution as cultural methods is an effort to fuse nature and freedom. The idea of Progress is now rooted in these two emphases (see J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (NY: MacMillan, 1932). The essence of acquired characteristics is basic to anthropology, biology and psychology. Freud adhered through life to the Lamarckian belief (Ernst Jones The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. I, p. 347 (NY: Basic Books, 1953; see esp. Paul Vitz, Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconsciousness (NY: Guilford Press, 1988).

Jones charges that Freud was an adherent of this discredited Lamarckism (Jones II 311, 1957- 1960). Because of his hostility to Christianity the doctrine of evolution was intensely important to Freud and evolutionary theory provided for no effective mechanism for evolution apart from Lamarck. In post modem thought Lamarck and the inheritance of acquired characteristics was to posit a god like power somewhere in or beyond evolution and to introduce illegitimately an element resembling the supernatural. It pointed to an entelichy of being, a potential or power far exceeding the original elements of the universe. If nothing is acquired then everything is involved and has evolved and was originally involved in the original spark of energy or matter out of which all the universe has evolved. Freud states his thesis succinctly: "If nothing is acquired, nothing can be inherited." (Jones II, p. 333, 1995-1962 printings); see esp. M. Behe's, Darwin's Black Box. 1997 for a brilliant critique of Darwinism.) As a geneticist he affirms that the universe starts out in complexity; it does not evolve from simple to complex! (What is evidence evidence of?)

The 19th century was a growing endeavor to negate biblical, classical theology, both Roman Catholic and Protestantism. Man's seeming unlimited power as expressed in the enormous scientific development directly attacks the biblical view of creation, revelation and redemption

14 from sin and death. Biblical theology has stood in the way of man's unbounded optimism. The new trinity of science, technology and education replaced the biblical trinity. Christianity must conform to the new intellectual resources or become marginalized into irrelevance. Especially the perfectibility of man and the inevitability of progress were the prime forces in the modem world order.

The implications of the Darwinian thesis were easily and quickly recognized and the battle lines were quickly drawn both in Europe and in the United States between three parties: (1) those in favor of evolution as the most satisfactory explanation of the origin of all forms of life; (2) Those who cling to the biblical views and (3) Theistic Evolution. In the 19th century John Fiske became the leading exponent in America. This phenomenon continued to develop in America in the various forms of Process Philosophy. As a result, irrationalism based upon the concepts developed from the evolutionary hypothesis gained a foothold in the intellectual life of Western Civilization and gave impetus to eroding the structure of the modem cultural activity. This exposure produced post modem multicultural pluralism. This cultural phenomenon is the ultimate result of post modem denial of True Truth. (See my papers: "Terrorism of Truth;" "Search for True Truth in Cyber Space;" "Whatever Happened to True Truth? with reference to Self Referential Fallacy, egs. Quine, Rorty, Bernstein, et al.;" "The Demise of Transcendence: The Race Toward Immanence;" and "Lost Transcendence in the Post Modem Christian Culture.")

Darwinian Impact Develops into Social Darwinism: While cultural skirmishes were fought during the last three decades of the 19th century, the cultural war continues unabated in the 1990’s . Herbert Spencer (1820-1893) was one of the first to endeavor to use the theory of evolution to forego a whole new world and life view based upon a biological view of human nature. It is important to observe that Spencer was not familiar with Darwin but only with Lamarck. Spencer's efforts to create such a synthetic philosophy appeared at first in his Social Statics in which he proclaimed his conviction that the time had come to synthesize all knowledge, for it was now possible to arrive at a conception of evolution which applied universally—from the stars and planets on the one hand, to government and religion on the other. In 1860 he announced his world view by synthetic philosophy which brings all scientific knowledge into a unified whole. He inaugurated his crusade with the revision of his earlier work. Principles of Sociology, which had first appeared in 1855, in which he attempted to present a biological view of human nature. But his First Principles, which appeared in 1864, set forth his basic philosophy. In it he announced that the ultimate nature of reality is unknowable and assigned this realm of the unknowable to the area of religion and held that the realm of the knowable lay in science. He like Kant, proceeded to say a great deal about the unknowable. How unknowable is Spencer's unknowable? Spencer's reply was, the principles of evolution. His position generated utilitarianism. He thought that evolution confirmed utilitarianism. The fundamental assumption of this conclusion is that sensations producing pleasure arise from those acts which promote human survival. Spencer's "Laws of Biology" were synonymous with the law of survival of the fittest and the transmission of acquired characteristics in and by the surviving individuals of any species.

It is obvious that Spencer accepted in full the philosophical and social aspects of the evolutionary philosophy which he had acquired from Comte and Lamarck. Concerning the acquired

15 characteristic of the broader sphere of human society. Spencer held that the ultimate goal of any society was the achievement of peace and prosperity and when this goal had been achieved the state would no longer be necessary. Spencer believed in an unfettered social and economic freedom as well as political freedom and held to a conception of free enterprise in keeping with his utilitarian assumptions.

He had absolutely no faith in the power of the state as an institution to produce an ideal society such as he envisioned. His utopianism was a virtual reality! True reform must come only through the operation of the law of the survival of the fittest. He did not have any faith in the power of education to bring about reform. Spencer clearly did not fit into the pattern of 19th century liberalism. He regarded all socialists and communists as idealistic dreamers. Progress was possible in the character of free individuals. Yet, he held to a belief in the inevitability of progress. Spencer's deterministic concept of the survival of the fittest was the key concept to progress.

Spencer's irrationalism stalks him at every turn. It is contradictory to speak of freedom within an evolutionary philosophy which is dominated by a theory of determinism. His deterministic point of reference was his point of departure to erect a theory of individual freedom and laissez faire on this foundation. Man is the product of forces beyond his control and which have no sense of purpose or plan for him.

Prophets and Prospects of Social Darwinism: Spencer was an important figure in popularizing Social Darwinism. He had great influence on both William Graham Sumner and John Fiske, both of whom along with Lester Frank Ward applied Darwinian principles to the American political, economic and social scene.

Sumner was one of Spencer's first disciples in this country so the seeds of irrationalism have now been placed and irrigated. Sumner was much more thoroughly Darwinian than Spencer and had a much greater impact on the American mind after 1865. The Yale chair in political economy enabled him to exert a tremendous influence upon the thinking of future leaders in American business and industrial life. He had become convinced of the correctness of Darwinism, not only as an explanation of the biological process but also as a new frame of reference in the light of which political and economic thought must be formulated (e.g. C.S. Singer, A Theological Interpretation of American History (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1975), p. 103).

All social forces evolve an engagement as struggle for survival in which man must wrestle against nature. In 1879 he gave voice to this perspective: "If we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative and that is the survival of the unfittest. The former is the law of civilization; the latter is the law of anti civilization. We have our choice between the two, but a third plan, a plan for nourishing the unfittest and yet advancing civilization, no man will ever find." (W.G. Sumner, Essays (West Haven, 1934); cited in Richard Holstadton Social Darwinism in American Thought (Philadelphia, 1944), p. 43).

Sumner's man is clearly a product of blind evolutionary forces. Man is controlled by natural and cultural forces over which he has no control and in the face of which he is helpless. Basic to his ethics was the insistence that the classical Christian conception of right and wrong could no

16 longer be regarded as having any force in modem society, (see esp. Sumner's Folkways (Boston, 1906), p. 65) Sumner's voice merely echoes Machiavelli in the dress of scientific determinism. It is no wonder that Sumner's view point was pervaded by a dreary pessimism. In this world only the fittest should survive. This precipitated pessimism of a constant evolutionary process to stamp out the weak. His pessimism is emphatically expressed in an essay which received little attention:

"That is why it is the greatest folly of which men can be capable to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world." (Sumner, Essays (Yale University Press, 1934), p. 301)

The next generation after Sumner's pessimism would see war and social calamities. Sumner's irrationalism becomes crystal clear. His philosophy was designed to assert in incontrovertible terms the supremacy of man over God and nature via an optimistic philosophy of evolution, that it should produce such a hopeless pessimism. Man's freedom was enslaved to a blind and relentless natural law which had neither meaning nor purpose in its operations. Man's irrationality did not free him from the slavery of subjectivism. The social crisis called for a prophet of secular millennialism. One such prophet was Lester FranWard.

Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913): The fatalism inherent in Sumner's approach was perceived by many of his contemporaries. The real objection to Spencer and Sumner lay in their use of the concept of the Survival of the Fittest and Ward supplied an answer to this objection in Darwin himself and thus in effect he used Darwin against Sumner's "Social Darwinism." Ward turned to "the transmission of acquired characteristics." Ward admitted that in all lower forms of life environment was the determining factor in the evolutionary process, but he insisted that this was not the case with the emergence of man on the sciences. Ward held that the mind of men could and should exercise a determining influence on his environment. In Ward's Dynamic Sociology. he sought to prove that sociology offered the necessary positive approach. Through man's mind he controlled the process of evolution and directed it toward chosen social goals which he could realize (L.F. Ward, The Psychic Factors of Civilization (Boston, 1893). Ward deified science as containing virtually endless power. "Science is the great iconoclast. Our civilization depends wholly upon the discovery and application of a few profound principles, thought by a few great minds who hold the shallow babble of priests in contempt and have no time to dabble in theology." (Ward, Iconoclast (August, 1870) For Ward, then, science was to be the salvation of society and sociology was redeeming the sciences. All individual and social evils could be removed by man's new savior—science.

Ultimately, Ward's proposals were to transform society into a secularized Garden of Eden in which even labor would become pleasant. Ward, the father of American sociology, also gave sociology a much greater importance in his insistence that this discipline must enter into the political and economic life of the nation. His insistence that his version of social Darwinism must replace political science and statesmanship operating under the Constitution gave sociology an importance which it probably would not otherwise have obtained. He had a great impact on American government and business activity during the latter part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. Ward's socialism placed American life in his open advocacy of social betterment through governmental action and he laid the foundation for the welfare state of our day, which had its beginning in the various programs of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" Social

17 development would require the removal of laissezfaire philosophy enumerated by Sumner. Ward's sociological theories seemed to offer the one solution to the rampant and unbridled competition which they saw as the great enemy of the people. Ward's collective state dedicated to collectivist achievement was nothing more than a thinly disguised totalitarian regime. The individual would find his happiness only in the collective state as the fulfillment of the Hegelian doctrine that man is nothing apart from the state and that in the state he achieves his personality and derives his right from it. Ward's emphasis on the importance of education as an ally in the realization of the social order was borrowed from The Communist Manifesto of 1848. Both Marx and Ward clearly saw that a properly controlled system of public education was absolutely necessary for the creation of a collectivist society, for public education itself is a form of collectivism. In advocating such a system of public education. Ward became the inspiration for John Dewey and a host of "progressive" educators. The new educational gurus looked upon the public schools of this nation as the most effective weapon in their program for democratizing the United States by which they actually meant the socializing, collectivizing, communizing of the United States.

Ward was more hostile to evangelical Christianity than Sumner. He was equally opposed to all meta physical theories and was very close to Marx in his acceptance of materialism. Materialism permeated every aspect of his system. Believing that man is a product of evolutionary forces. Ward was forced to deny the biblical account of creation and that man had been created in the image of God. His materialism was at the heart of his explanation of the rise and function of human institutions and his ethical and moral philosophy. He held that the family in its origin was simply an institution "for the more complete subjugation and enslavement of women and children .... The primitive family was an unnatural and autocratic excrescence upon society." (Ward, Pure Sociology (NY, 1903), p. 353) He thus very easily arrived at the conclusion that marriage, like the family, is a whited sepulcher. Just as easily he declared that sexual satisfaction is a social necessity and morality is only the product of the rational faculty (ibid., p. 389). His total naturalistic explanation for the origin of the idea of the state, religion and the church for the proper ordering of society by God, was totally rejected by Ward. A state under sociocratic control would no longer allow family, marriage and the Church for they would become unnecessary and undesirable.

19th Century Historicism and Positivism: His inherent positivism and relativism in his ethical and moral outlook was brought vividly to the fore in his declaration that morality and religion were devices by which man had been bullied into a passive acceptance of the status quo. Ward's Marxism becomes crystal clear. His naturalistic and hedonistic tone replaced the Judaeo- Christian heritage. Once the denial of the destruction between good and evil followed the denial that man was evil. All forms of alienation are caused by socio-politico-economico-psycho factors. Ward's new "social science" would enable man to understand his chief end as the satisfaction for his desire for happiness. All forms of classical Christian ethical teaching leads now to "abstract sophistries and invalidity, ultimately generating morbid asceticism or bigoted fanaticism. Neither serves to accelerate in the smallest degree the onward march of civilization." (quoted in Samuel Chugerman, "Lester Frank Ward, The American Aristotle," (Durham, 1939), pp. 337-538; also see my two papers, "Hegel's View of Alienation", and Marx's View of Alienation")

18 In essence. Ward taught an ethical hedonism; the aim of human life is happiness. Pleasure means life and pain means death. Pain and pleasure become the only real basis for moral judgment. Only dynamic sociology can provide the necessary insight for a truly educated man.

Narrative Displacement in Theories of Modern and Post Modern Laws: Ward's conquest of sociological thought in the United States has been nothing short of a disaster. His social theory penetrated not only the major universities, but eventually the law schools and much of our judicial prudence. The transition into legal structures even during Marx's own life time was in the person of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. In his Common Law he showed the beginnings of the departures from the biblical view of the meaning and application of law. "The life of law has not been logic; it has been experience. . . . The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and that in order to know what it is we must know what it has been and what it tends to become." (O.W.Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (Boston, 1881), pp. 1,2)

Through William Graham Sumner and Lester Frank Ward, Darwinism made its way into American life, bringing with it a new and deadly form of Irrationalism. Their power was kindled by he so-called infallible dictates supplied by the scientific methodology to which many intellectuals in this country were paying due homage by 1890. This world view generated irrationalism in the form of Darwinian rationalism which spread into every sector of the American intellectual indicator, bringing with it the inevitable fragmenting rejection of the Scriptures and replacing them with the frame of reference which was studded with Relativism, a relativism which is the inescapable companion of Rationalism inherent in Evolutionary Rationalism (see the impact of The Darwinian Social Gospel in my paper, "Shaping Intellectual/Cultural Forces: The Social Gospel in America").

The Impact of Darwin on European Thought: Although Herbert Spencer was one of the first important European thinkers to pay homage to Darwin and to incorporate portions of his evolutionary theory into his philosophy, Darwin influenced two major cultural players—Karl Marx and Richard Wagner. Darwin's theory swept over European thought even to a greater degree than America. In the United States the biological and geological disciples largely succumbed to Darwinism. His influence entered the fields of political science, sociology and economics, although with less impact. Darwinian evolutionism was met by resistance among evangelical conservatives, particularly Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and Lutheran circles. In America a vigorous fundamentalist movement developed against all forms of The Scientific Revolution in the wake of various crisis concerning the application of Darwinism to problems which forced Western culture. The earlier optimism faded as the theory gave birth to relativism in ethics, political, social, and economic practice and gave rise to psychological views of men which raised grave doubts about the worth of the whole human endeavor.

There was a growing resentment and embarrassment deriving from the assimilation of Darwinian evolution as an overarching hermeneutical circle. The rise of Social Darwinism exposed the ever widening influence of Darwin's Origin of Species. He was here to stay. But his presence sent the Western world on toward its relativistic and nihilistic philosophies which have characterized the post modem world view of the 20th century. The 19th century exposed two conflicting interpretative schemes of wide influence: Positivism and Historicism. The developments in the

19 hard sciences in the 20th century brought the down fall of Positivism and opened Pandoras' Box of post modem multicultural pluralism—the ultimate expression of Irrationalism.

Most intellectuals assimilated evolutionary biology and evolutionary geology in their attack on the integrity of the biblical account of creation and to the origin of man. The widespread irrational response to attack on the biblical world view was a confession of anti intellectualism on the part of those scholars who would adopt this as their resolution of the various dilemmas which the theory of evolution ? raised. The seeds of Irrationalism cannot be harvested by any form of anti intellectualism.

Within three decades after the appearance of the of the Origin of Species Darwinian thought in most cultural guises was the commonly accepted interpretation of the beginnings of the universe and of life on earth. Its influence extended to the origin and function of all human institutions— family, government, economic thought and practice, sociology, psychology and education as well as philosophy and theology, and were all subjected to the demands and scrutiny of the evolutionary hypothesis. No area of human thought or activity was allowed to escape from this scrutiny. Darwinism became the order of the day. All scholarship who did not pay due obeisance to the new deity became suspect. Permeating every area of academic and intellectual endeavor, it became the frame of reference for the Western world view.

In order to understand and expose the growth of irrationalism in its wider scope, in the area of political philosophy, economic and social thought, in psychology, religion and in the arts critical attention must be paid to Michael Behe's classical work, Darwin's Black Box, 1997. In our post modern cultural maze all fields of intellectual and cultural activity are increasingly tainted with the virus of irrationality. Philosophical literature is more and more concerned with the meaning of history, the proper economic and social relationships as seen through the eyes of evolution, the meaning of art and music in terms of this philosophy, even educational thought and practice take on a new importance as they become part of this intellectual battleground and take part in the departure from any meta narrative. The invasion of revolutionary philosophy is not always easy to detect, but beneath the pattern differences the basic presuppositions become quite evident upon critical investigation.

The French Connection to Darwinism: In France one of the first to betray its underlying theme was Adolph Taine (1828-1893). Seeking a science of culture, he looked to history as the source and foundation for such a culture. He vainly tried to escape the Jacobian tradition, regarding it as the source of the social chaos which precipitated the French Revolution. Denying in essence the Christian view of man, Taine held that man was the victim of forces outside of himself, and thus human life for Taine could not be anything essentially different from that view which was at the root of revolutionary philosophy which he hated vehemently. Irrationalism was as much a part of his philosophy as it was of Comte and the Jacobians.

In Jules Michelet (1798-1874) the evolutionary philosophy is more prominent, although it took a somewhat different turn. In his writings, notable in his work. Introduction to Universal History (1831), we see the incipient view of the historical process which would reach its zenith in Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, although he would have vehemently denied such a charge.

20 Michelet viewed the whole historical process as a magnificent yet ceaseless struggle between geist and matter. Fused into this impasse were two irreconcilable principles of free will on the one hand and determinism on the other. His view of history was a blending of Darwin and Hegel. This evolutionary spiral of cultural progress, each of the European nations had a role to play in the realization of freedom. Just as Hegel insisted that the Germans had a peculiar destiny in the unfolding of freedom, so did Michelet insist that the French had a similar role, but the French role was unique—that the French identified freedom with equality, at least since 1789.

Since history for Michelet was a ceaseless struggle between two contending and hopelessly irreconcilable principles of free will and fate, the kind of freedom which he faced in the French Revolution was incapable of sustaining the kind of edifice which Michelet was presenting. His kind of freedom, found in the unbiblical view of human equality, is no freedom at all; but merely subjection to the tyranny of a faceless majority. His futile effort to fuse freedom and equality with Darwinian blind determinism did not produce the totalitarianism that had appeared in Germany under Hitler, but it headed in that direction. The French concept of freedom and equality have generally produced some form of a despotic government wherever they have been applied.

German Connection to Darwinianism: The impact of Darwinism in philosophy and more specifically on political thought, became more evident in Michelet's German contemporary, Heinrich von Triestschke (1834-1896), who combined the various elements which characterized the thought of the idealist into a more comprehensive system. In Triestschke, the future Nazi state is there to behold. Triestschke argued that national unity must be created in Germany by sheer strength of will and even brute force if Prussia was to achieve its true destiny in 19th century Europe. Triestschke deified The State but the resulting god is hardly attractive or conducive to worship. Only brute force can be used to obtain worship of which it is not worthy, and without which it could not obtain such reverence or adoration. Absolutely convinced that Prussia must unify Germany, he became a most articulate spokesman for Chancellor Bismarck in the Reichstag from 1871 until 1884. In his Die Politik 1897-1898) he offered a justification for the head of state which we first saw emerge in the thinking of Machiavelli. It is the purpose of the state to unify the people of a nation into a true volk, it is justified in using whatever means seems to be necessary to achieve such a goal. One of Trietschke's themes was to preach the concept of "racial purity." War was an expression of national unity. War fuses the national purpose and unity; therefore, it becomes a positive good! Darwin's "survival of the fittest" lurks just below Triestschke's Political Theory. The irrationalism inherent in Hegel's political thought in view of history Triestschke is concerned with the reliance upon irrationalism involved in Darwinian scientific thought. This irrational strain dominated Germany's political philosophy until the rise of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and the communist regime of Stalin, Lenin and their successors in modem Russia. Trietschke's irrationalism will be refused by Nietzsche and others before it would be able to capture the German people after World War II.

The emergence of irrationalism in political thought took another step forward to its fulfillment with H.S. Chamberlain, the son-in-law of Richard Wagner, who in his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century inspired the Nazi movement in Germany. Chamberlain stripped the Darwinian dogma of whatever romantic veneer it may have received from Wagner and brought

21 its basic implications clearly to the forefront. The rocky road led from Darwin and Wagner to its ultimate in political irrationalism in the emergence of Hitler to power in 1933.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Prophet of The Death of God (1844-1900) Every intellectual which has been mentioned in this brief trek has exposed a revolt against classical Christianity. The full focus of the Death of God was now clearly visible. Nietzsche was a descendent of a long line of Lutheran preachers. He was a student of Albert Ritschi, a colleague of Jacob Burchhardt at Basel, and for a time he was an admirer of Richard Wagner. Those influences replaced his earlier attention to Romanticism and Schopenhauer. He held that the aforementioned apostles of irrationalism were entirely inadequate for what he regarded as the one great age of German cultural development, the age of Sturm and Drang. His basic addiction to irrationalism drove him to search for a new foundation for his own intellectual development. He attributed Germany's culture demise to the triumph of the bourgeois with its emphasis on faceless mass man and the resulting triumph of cultural mediocrity on the one hand, enslaving and debasing in its impact, and of Christian morality on the other. The political philosophy of Trietschke would be refuted by the contribution of Nietzsche and soon would capture the German culture.

Nietzsche's escape from this impasse was returning to the Greek sense of tragedy, his rejection of the Christian view of life and death. He despised what he felt was the Christian negation of life on this earth and its insistence that the real goal of mankind is an after life. In place of this debilitating ethic, Nietzsche argued for the Greek concept of the hero, but which he meant the heroic resolve to create his own world in defiance of the gods. Nietzsche concluded that Goethe and Napoleon were the closest representatives of this Greek view of life in the 19th century Europe because of the rise of the bourgeois mass man. These themes constitute the essence of his earlier works. The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Untimely Thoughts (1873-78). However, the cultivation of his thoughts are found in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1891), Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Geneology of Morals (1887). In these classical expressions of Atheism, The Death of God and the resulting destruction of all values found in historic Christianity and the insistence on the recognition of the Will to Power as the basic principle of all life, the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence and the ideal of The Ubermensch or Superman. In these basic themes Nietzsche is really the unbiased irrationalist, flouting his convictions before the world and giving full vent to his repudiation of any Christian values.

Any and all efforts to free Nietzsche from his irrationalism by contextualizing his work is futile. All of his classic works fall by the scepter of his inherent anti intellectualism. In Nietszche the floods of humanism let loose on Western Europe by the Renaissance have broken through the dams that have been able to hold them somewhat in check until his day. The rationalism of the Renaissance humanists has now become destructive irrationalism, so violent and devastating in its character that to express it is to do violence to its Nihilism. The irrationalism of the later 19th century was now devouring the rationalism which gave it birth. This radical paradigm shift represents ajfnot the major narrative displacement of the 19th century. Fused with Darwinian irrationalism the journey to the culture of darkness is complete. The prepared Utopia is destroyed by the German invasion of irrationalism resulting in the first World War. Then the dark cloud of irrationalism shall remove all light in the rise of Hitler and Nazism, Mussolini and the Italian fiasco and Marx's and Stalin's chaos in Russia.

22 Nietzsche's work. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is suffused with Irrationalism and its accompanying Nihilism. His entire work was a denial of the Judaeo-Christian God and insisted that the entire history of mankind is a continuous story of human attempts to create values and gods.

"Once people did say God when they looked out upon distant seas; now, however, have I taught you the way to Superman; God is a conjecture: but I do not wish your conjecturing to reach beyond your creating will. Could you conceive a God? But let this mean will to truth in you, that everything be transformed into the humanly conceivable, the humanly visible, the humanly sensible! Your own discernment shall follow out to the end! .. . But that I may reveal my heart entirely into you, my friends; if there were Gods, how could I endure it to be no God! Therefore there are no Gods". (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra. tr. Thomas Cemma, Modem Library edition NY, 1997-98)

Clearly Nietzsche's irrational nihilism is unsatisfactory. Nietzsche's irrationalism produced himself as creator. "But so willeth it my creating will, my fate . .. Away from God and God's did this will allure me; what would there be to create if there were—Gods! But to man doth it ever impel me anew, my fervent creative will; this impelleth it the hammer to the stone. Ah, ye men, within the stone slumbereth an image or me, the image of my visions! Ah, that it should slumber in the hardest, ugliest stone! Now rageth my hammer ruthlessly against its prison. From the stone fly the fragments: what is that to me? I will complete it: for a shadow came into me, the stillest and lightest of all things one came unto me! The beauty of the superman came into me as a shadow, ah, my brethren! Of what accounts now are, the Gods to me! (Zarathustra, pp. 99,100)

Clearly Nietzsche has replaced the God of creation with the Superman. He boldly declares his anti intellectualism. This irrational meaning of thought is expressed in brutal words. "I must tell myself the following: the largest part of conscious thinking must be considered an instinctual activity, even the case of philosophical thinking. We must simply re learn, as we have to re learn about heredity and "inborn" qualities. . . most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided by his instincts and forced along certain lines." (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (E.T., Chicago: Regnery Press, 1955, p. 3)

Thought is not conceptual in nature; it is not the result of a conscious effort to discern meaning in creation or human life. It is instinctive and void of any real meaningful content. "No matter from what philosophical point of vantage one looks today .. .the fallaciousness of the world in which we think we live in this firmest and most certain insight that needs our life." (Ibid., p. 40); his nihilism also entices both ethics and morality) He places them under the scaffold of relativism (ibid. p. 48). "My judgment is my judgment, to which hardly anyone else has a right," is what the philosopher of the future will say. . . . The expression contradicts itself; what can be common cannot have much value." (p. 48). This is clearly post modem relativism as expressed by Rorty, Bernstein, Lyotard, et al.

In his Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche used this negation of Christian morality and an unrelenting assault upon Christianity in general (ibid., pp. 66-67) declaring that all moralities are but a symbol language of passion. "All this violence, arbitrariness, rigor, gruesomeness and anti irrationality turned but to be the means for disciplining the European spirit into strength, ruthless inquisitiveness and subtle flexibility." (ibid., p. 99)

23 Nietzsche's response is a call for the emergence of "the philosophy of the future." The 20h century will bring with it the strength for world dominion, the compulsion to higher politics. The poison which had spread over Europe as a result of the French Revolution will expose itself in socialism and communism which had issued forth from it, he was seeking for a remedy which would restore order and tranquillity to Europe. Nietzsche's response was suffering from the same infection of the revolution—the rejection of classical Christianity. By declaring The Death of God he declared the death of culture as well. To offset the mediocrity of man, which he had seen in the emergence of democracy and the herd, Nietzsche's answer was the "Will to Power" and the emergence of the Ubermensch. Therefore his nihilistic gospel did much to bring about the chaos which he foresaw to be the nightmare of the 20th century.

Chaos lay thinly concealed just below the veneer of its cultural achievements in the progress toward sheer nihilism in the intellectual life of the war and the inescapable emergence of totalitarianism as a furious but futile effort to escape from the political and social chaos which necessarily accompanies such a philosophy. The brilliant pen of John Hallowell places a fitting epitaph over Nietzsche's intellectual grave. "In Nietzsche the tortured soul of modem man is laid bare for all to see." (John Hallowell, Main Currents in Modem Political Thought (NY, 1963, p. 550)

In the loss of Christian faith we see the death of civilization and Nietzsche's works are a literary casket in which Western man may behold his cultural self ready for burial. The efforts of the 18th century thinkers, in conjunction with those of the 19th, had made great headway in their determination to destroy the cultural products of Christian theism as it had been guiding the mind of Europe for over a thousand years. But the deists, and the philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Marx and Wagner had also made significant strides in this direction. Not even their advance toward irrationalism could be permanent or complete without the efforts of their successors in the areas of theology, psychology, sociology, and political and economic thought. Each of these various academic disciplines contributed to the irrational death of True Truth as proposed by the efforts of these apostles of anti intellectualism and irrationalism. Their intellectual seeds have produced our post modem multicultural pluralism which announced the Death of God, the Death of True Truth, the Death of Man, the Death of Science, the Death of History, the Death of Culture and the Death of Meaning—world views in conflict.

The new humanistic, naturalistic Weltanschaung was totally opposed to the Judaeo-Christian nomativism. The developments in the physical sciences fused with the disciplines of philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology, political and economic proposal continued the blessed rage for order outside of the Christian world view. The devastating world view into all areas of intellectual activity boded ill for the future of Western civilization. We now live in a global village under the "Big Brother" control of Pluralistic multiculturalism where revisionist history, anti science, epistemological/cultural relativism reign in our post modem temple.

John Stuart Mills' New Logic: 1860-1873: Along with Herbert Spencer in England, John Stuart Mill reflects post Darwinian emphasis in his thought. His powers of radical reformation were translated into social, economic and political activity. Mill was a utilitarian, a follower of Jeremy

24 Bentham. Utilitarianism was a particular form of empirical thought which stressed the utility, the usefulness of philosophical knowledge in the improvement of the human condition.

The essence of Utilitarianism was "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people." In practice for John S. Mill and those in his school of thought in Victorian England, the practical application of this goal was to be realized in the reform of the English legal system, a new or improved theory of representation based on the major utilitarian premise, the channeling of economic theories into a systematic academic discipline, the abolition of all legal restraint upon trade and labor, and the substance of a utilitarian doctrine of morality in place of the biblical ethic. He also insisted upon a reform of the educational system of Victorian England into an instrument which would promote, rather than hinder, the achievement of his major aims. Mill regarded science and the scientific frame of reference as the necessary replacement for the earlier religious or Christian outlook. He was a follower of August Comte, but it is true that he sought to modify some ofComte's more revolutionary and radical demands in order to make them more acceptable to the English mind. As a pragmatist he was solidly into English tradition springing from John Locke and had sought to adapt the principles of Comte to this tradition.

Basic to Mills' thinking was the assumption of human benevolence. This assumption, which denied the biblical doctrine of sin, placed a great deal of emphasis upon the "innate goodness of men" and held that when men sought their freedom and welfare they were at the same time promoting these for society as a whole. Thus Mill, et al. placed great emphasis on human freedom. It was for this reason that he demanded the abolition of restrictive laws on labor organizations. Mill was greatly influenced by Bentham, who in turn was deeply indebted to both John Locke and David Hume. The essentially good man will use his freedom not only for his own improvement but for that of society as a whole.

Mill launched a strong attack on all previous ethical systems. He insisted that both the intuitive and inductive approaches were essentially the same. Both schools concluded that morality must be deduced from certain basic principles to which the each gave allegiance. Mills' own ethical theory was advanced in his utilitarian work The Greatest Happiness Principle. His theory held that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." (J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism: Liberty and Representative Government (NY: 1951, p. 3)

Mill farther defines happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain. This view is "Epicureanism redividus." Mill's reply to criticism was:

"But there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and of the imagination and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasure than those of mere sensation." (Ibid., p. 9)

Mill's "pleasure principle" insisted not on amount, but in respect to its quality. But Mill's pleasure principle applied to "higher faculties" betrayed the weakness of his own position. What could be the inductive criterion of Mill's "lower" and "higher goods?" Utilitarians, relying on the empirical approach of Locke and Benthan, could not with any degree of consistency, make use of such a terminology, since empirical epistemology cannot possibly yield any knowledge of

25 either good or evil. Mill's unsupportable optimism, based in utilitarian empiricism is clear as he asserts—

". . .that there was absolutely no good reason why men should not, through the beneficent influence of culture, seek the higher things of life. Now there is absolutely no reason in the nature of things why an amount of mental culture sufficient to give an intelligent interest in those objects of contemplation should not be in the inheritance of everyone born in a civilized country. As little as there is an inherent necessity that any human being should be a selfish egotist, devoid of every feeling or care, but those which center in his own miserable individuality." (Ibid., 18)

Cultural evolution would come to the aid of what Mill had in mind. His optimism concerning the happy future of the human race knew almost no bounds. He describes it in terms which sound like a post modem politician appealing for votes.

"Yet no one whose opinion deserves a moment's consideration can doubt that most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable and will, if human affairs continue to improve, being in the end? reduced within narrow limits. Poverty in any sense implying suffering may be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society, combined with the good sense and providence of individuals. . . [all negative personnel and society] are caused by ill regulated desires or of bad imperfect social institutions." (Ibid., p. 18)

Even many of Mill's theistic sounding words are in reality hidden naturalistic humanism. Mill was aware of the implications of his utilitarianism in that the majority in any culture can become a tyranny and that individuals need protection against such a tyranny. The irrationalism is expressed in his utilitarianism, in which he upheld the theory of the benevolence of man. In his Essay on Liberty, he laid down the fundamental principle which underlay his whole approach to human liberty:

"The principle that the sole end for which mankind are warranted individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self protection in that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightly be compelled to do or forbear because it will make him happier because in the opinion of others, to do so would not be wise or even right." (Ibid., pp. 95-96). Mill held that evolutionary optimism would prevent such a catastrophe. The 20th century provides abundant refutation of Mill's evolutionary naturalistic optimism. In John Stuart Mill we have a blueprint of modern socialistic totalitarianism such as that which had most of Western Europe and Great Britain in its grip and constantly threatens to overthrow what is left of the American Constitution and classical Christian freedom. Mill's irrationalism is visible in our post modem anarchist licentiousness as we are "Slouching Off to Gomorrah."

19th Century Background of The Concept of Freedom (coming of Secular Sources of Grace, Peace and Freedom: The doctrine of freedom underwent a tremendous change after the French Revolution. This change has penetrated deeply into 20th century thought and affects the political, economic and social development of our multicultural post modem Western civilization. All modem and post modem definitions of freedom expose an anti-Christian maze—

26 God is Dead and specially He has become marginalized in the market place of public discussion concerning Freedom!

Tumultuous upheavals within the first fifty years of the 19th century produced a new sense of Nartionalism/Tribalism. Freedom was not an invention of 17th/18th century philosophers. It did not spring forth from the philosophical systems of the rationalists or the empiricists like John Locke.

The European doctrine of freedom had its roots in Christianity rather than in the classical thought of Greece and Rome. It did not wither on the vine during the Middle Ages as the advocates of The Natural Rights School of Thought and the Enlightenment finally irrationally believed. Indeed, the basic ingredients of English Constitutionism and Common Law were deeply imbedded in the structure of feudalism. These seeds of freedom were given new nourishment and encouragement by the theological developments of The Reformation. This theological foundation had enabled it to survive the constant attacks of the Naturalists and Secularists over the past four centuries.

The biblical view of freedom is distasteful to our post modem culture. Post modem perspective on freedom began with Descarte by the time of the Enlightenment view was being grounded on Natural Law (e.g.. natural rights) (see my "Rights in The Victorian Culture") Locke and his followers claimed the inevitability of human personality as the essence of true freedom and this concept furnished the basis for Kantian and post Kantian definitions of human freedom. These anti biblical perspectives on human freedom provided a very unstable foundation for the preservation of human rights, and Ruggerio is quite correct in his insistence that the 18th century view of property as a natural right logically led to a denial of this right. Communism was equally logical when Marx and his followers, using Locke's epistemology, turned Locke against himself (see Gido De Ruggerio, History of European Liberalism tr. R.B. Collingwood (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, pb).

The radicals of the French Revolution had already used Locke for this purpose when they sequestered the property of those conservatives who opposed their frantic efforts to bring in a new order. Ruggerio brilliantly sets forth the logic of the French Revolution of the Rights of Man and shows it actually contained the germ of three revolutions: (1) the liberal, (2) the democratic and (3) the social revolutions which ushered in socialistic and communistic regimes (Ibid., p. 69). Although the concept of liberalism and freedom developed along different lines in Europe during the 19th century, these differing patterns converged along remarkably similar lines in the 20th century.

The tension is still present in all efforts to find a reconciliation between the extreme individualism of Locke and the advocates of natural law and the needs of society. As a result, neither German political conservatism nor German philosophical and theological liberals were able to safeguard the doctrine of freedom as it had been preached by Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. All efforts sought to prevent freedoms from degenerating into privileges and monopolies. Yet, these freedoms provide the content for the formal concept of freedom, without which it is empty and meaningless (Ibid., p. 349). The tension between liberalism and democracy continues unabated in America. Post modem liberalism which has taken over since 1933 has become a religion of

27 sorts which seeks to crowd Christianity from the courts, the schools, and the public life and replace it with a civil religion instead, in which the state would become a kind of god or democracy and as an abstraction would be worshipped as is found in a centralized bureaucratic federal machine. This situation expresses our condition in all perimeters of our culture from Washington, D.C. to our local school boards. God has become trivialized. The Christian faith is purely private, i.e., it has no public significance!

Darwinian Freedom Fused with Attacks by German Idealism: The emergence of mechanistic views of nature found in Lamarck, Comte and the French materialists of the latter part of the 19th century has added pessimistic fury to such attack. Without Darwinianism, German idealism and French materialism could not have achieved such a victory in Western thought. Darwin popularized the preceding evolutionary scientists and at the same time gave added strength to the evolutionary philosophy of Hegel and his successors. Such biological theories as the unconscious transmission of acquired characteristics, and the survival of the fittest, rests upon a deterministic view of nature and natural law.

It is evidentially futile to deny that Darwin was not a determinist. The very fact that John Fiske and other scholars found it necessary to combat this widely held interpretation should be sufficient evidence that Darwinism was believed to rule out any divine role in the unfolding of the process of evolution (this includes the futile attempts of all species of Process Philosophy to fuse Christianity and evolution; see esp. The Philosophy of John Dewey. ed. Paul A. Schilpp (Peru, IL: Open Court Pub. Co., 1989).

Search for Freedom/ Meaning Banished His Evolutionary Determinism: Determinism, whether it be of the idealistic philosophical version or whether it has its origins in a deterministic concept of nature, can only be irrational in its nature and bring with it irrational consequences when it is applied to the political, social, economic or cultural life of man. This irrationalism must deny to men any meaning of purpose in human life even as determinism denies these to nature itself. Thus, freedom is banished from the human scene as evolutionary determinism is enthroned as the new deity before which men are called to worship. This new form of worship promises that man will be freed from the theological shackles of Christian obstruct from which modem scientism has freed them. All forms of 19th century search for freedom is all but destroyed by the ubiquitist acceptance of naturalistic evolution as an interpretative schema.

Darwinian Impact of Social Irrationalism: The immediate effects of Darwinism in the United States had not been confined to the realm of the biological sciences, but, it quickly infected the areas of Theology, Psychology and the Social Sciences. Political Economy was the first of these to be invaded and Sociology appeared on the scene as a result of the writing of Lester Frank Ward. Into the maze economics as a separate discipline, had its beginning with William Graham Sumner. However a new school of economic thought developed under the leadership of John Bates dark, Richard T. Ely, and Simon N. Pattern, which was much closer to Ward in its outlook than to Sumner. Sociology and Economics became the area in which Darwinism would be applied to American business and social life. Under the guise of rationalism and social improvement, a strident social irrationalism gained a foothold in American thought under the leadership of these Darwinians. (See George Sabine, A History of Political Theory) 3rd edition (NY: Henry Holt, 1961); see my papers, "Narrative Displacement in Sociological, Psychological

28 and Economical Interpretive Schemes"; also "Narrative Displacement in Legal Theories"; also Schumpter, History of Economic Analysis).

William James (1842-1910) and Pragmatic Psychology: James preferred to call his system "radical empiricism" and preferred to restrict the "pragmatism" to the methodological approach which he used in his approach to psychology and philosophy. In his The Meaning of Truth, he wrote, "Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate, next a statement of fact and finally a generalized conclusion." (W. James, Pragmatism selected from The Meaning of Truth (NY, 1943). At the age of thirty in 1873, he was appointed to teach physiology at Harvard Medical School, but he soon became interested in physiological psychology. In 1890 he published his Principles of Psychology, a book which he began in 1878. James traced the achievements and weaknesses of European psychologists, as well as his American predecessors, until his own day. His work presented the most fully developed evolutionary psychology which had yet appeared. James' radical approach viewed the human mind as a functional instrument of adaptation to its environment. James regarded the mind as a process rather than a thing. Thinking was a process, a function of the brain. Thinking, for him, was a biological function of the brain. As breathing is the biological function of the lungs, so is thinking the biological function of the brain. This clearly places James within the atmosphere for repudiating the classical separation of mind and matter and its ensuing dualism.

His new paradigm of brain function structured a lethal blow against the empirical tradition which started with Locke. James totally adopted the theory of evolution and held that the brain or mind was a product of this process. James finishes the devastating attack which Hume had launched against Locke a century before. James denied that the mind was a tabula rasa. In its stead James' "mind" fused "sense data" with the "mechanical laws of association" to combine these simple ideas into complex ideas. James substituted Locke's view of human consciousness for a "stream of consciousness." He denied that consciousness was a separate faculty, as Locke believed. James thus regarded the mind not only as a product of evolution but as a part of the evolutionary process as an active instrument of human adaptation and survival. At this juncture, James' irrationalism enters his view. As the mind selects and rejects certain stimuli it is also ideological in its activities and is able to choose the means by which it will attain its goal. James' weakness is apparent in his radical empiricism. How do sensations, arising in an impersonal and materialistic world, convey any concept of purpose and how is the mind thus able to formulate purposes and choose appropriate goals for their achievement? All forms of empirical epistemology logically forbids any knowledge of the future and any possibility of a knowledge of goals, since they lie beyond the ability of the senses to comprehend or format them. We must never forget in our journey to narrative displacement, radical empiricism, i.e., sense based knowledge can rationally produce no knowledge of either the past, future, cause or teleological relationship of physical and historical events, (e.g.. design/purpose, Behe's Darwin's Black Box: teleology and complexity is at the heart of genetics; see Sprigge, James and Bradley, American Truth and British Reality (Open Court Press, 1993)

James is largely known for his pragmatic concept of truth and a corollary of his whole position known as the "will to believe." What is the empirical status of the "will?" James located truth in his pragmatic form of reference and defines it as "the attitude of looking away from first things,

29 principles, categories, supposed necessities; and of looking toward bad things, fruits, consequences, fact." (James, Pragmatism, p. 54-55)

For James, the ideas are to be regarded as true if they can be assimilated and validated by men. (What assimilates and validates? and what men?) "Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true. It is made true by events." (Ibid., p. 201) It is evident that for James truth was closely related to the usefulness of an idea, to its "pragmatic value." For him an idea was "useful because it is true and true because it is useful." Such a view of truth should lead to intellectual and social anarchy!! His irrational pragmatism is surely self evident. Certainly this would be the logical conclusion to his dictum that only as truth has some agreeable consequence or consequences in the experience of an individual, does this idea have truth value. How can James' irrational pragmatism choose between a pluralism of competing ideas? What is the rational criteria of "it works" and for whom? It is for the person in "power." How can this irrational epistemology adjudicate between alternatives in order to initiate the testing event? Surely selection must be made! Why does X work and not Y? There can be no pragmatic criteria for selection from a pluralism of alternatives!! This failure surely would immobilize the testing event. What is agreeable to one person may/will not be agreeable to another! Our post modem epistemological maze of a pluralism of alternatives with no meta narrative for critical evaluation is incapable of deciding which of 'objectionable results' will rule the individual or social unit!!

This applies not only in the realm of pleasure, but equally forcefully in the realm of duty and moral obligation. But James' irrational pragmatism, i.e. "Radical Empiricism" knows no truth except to either duty or obligation. Inevitably this variety of truth resulting from individual experiences leads to conflicting truths and truth itself as a concept vanishes into the area of undecideable relativity. This is solipictic narcissism! His concept of "the will to believe" also precludes a rational resolution. According to James, those ideas which agree with the evidence are verified; those that are contrary to the evidence are, by the same token, to be regarded as false. But there is a third category of ideas according to James, those that lack sufficient evidence to be regarded as true, and yet there is not sufficient evidence to declare them false. It is at this point that the "will to believe" comes into the picture if the idea is useful to us. This is simply an extension of utilitarianism in the realm of religion and it was on this basis he justified varieties of religious belief. The ultimate basis for believing Christianity was the prospect that this particular view point would be fruitful and meaningful. His Varieties of Religious Experience grew out of this utilitarian application of the "will to believe" in the area of religion (for the implication of James for multicultural Churches is my paper, "Beyond Mere Diversity").

James was basically a humanist and naturalist in his approach to philosophical, psychological and religious problems. His utilitarianism is the logical deduction from his basic assumption of the sovereignty of the human will. How could a radical empiricist claim that a “will” exists? Mind reduced to brain and brain activity is caused by the will is irrationalism in the name of one of the most creative minds in the 20th century.

His approach to knowledge and truth through pragmatism is simply another application of his basic non-empirical presupposition of the autonomy of the human personality. His "will to believe" fits well in our post modem pluralism of ReIigions Cafitereas, His irrationalism is grounded in Darwin's scientific methodology. Darwinian determinism has no place in the "will to

30 believe." In psychology Dewey and his group, and in our era. Skinner and his group, claims kinship with James.

Dewey and Skinner Rise to Haunt James: (See Chomsky's The Case Against Skinner) In his educational psychology, Dewey rises to haunt James. James prepared the way for a peculiar reception of Freud when he appeared in this country. The road from James to Dewey to Freud opened Western culture to intellectual despair and moral anarchy. He banished God from the American scene in philosophy and psychology and opened up the possibility of post modem American religious pluralism.

James' pragmatism also contributed to the decline of constitutional government and law in our post modem cultural maze. The inseparable children of Darwinian evolution—Pierce, James and Dewey's pragmatism and the resultant mutant utilitarianism—these voices rang loud and clear that "everyone should do his own thing." America's pseudo corrective to our moral/cultural chaos is no corrective in any sense of the word.

The 20th century has endeavored to overcome the defects of an anarchistic political, social and economic philosophy by turning to a political absolution, this post modem absolutism is also basic on the premise that man is autonomous and not under the restraints of the moral law from scripture. The Death of God, Death of Man, Death of Meaning, Death of History, Death of True Truth, Death of Science, and the Death of Culture are a fearful price to pay. These influences represent an intellectual crisis and post modernism has no answer to 20th century awareness of the crisis without remedies drives man toward Gomorrah once more. The very developments which were meant to solve our personal and cultural problems have actually produced our agonizing cultural darkness. Is there no hope? Yes, but only the Judaeo-Christian world life view can constructively engage the Principalities and Powers!'

The Iceman Cometh! The Coming ofAnti Christian Influences into The Academy: The later decades of the 19th century nurtured the anti intellectualism and irrationalism inherent in the very systems which had arisen as the offspring of Descartes and Locke. In spite of this cultural/intellectual maze the last decades of the 19th century were characterized by an optimism which was beyond the ability of the learned to understand. There was still a heritage of biblical theism which precluded descent into the arms of unrestrained irrationalism. America was no match for the influence of Darwin, Marx, Wagner and Nietzsche (see esp. C. Gregg Singer, A Theological Interpretation of American History (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1964); Paul E. Bollen, American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism. 1865-1960') Chicago. 1969); R.J. Wilson, Darwinism and The Intellectual (Homewood, IL, 1967).

The influences of German trained teachers brought their Hegelian variety of Darwinians to Harvard, et al. At Harvard the theory of coalition had taken hold even in the 1860s under the sponsorship of Asa Gray. He and others sought to apply it not only in their disciplines, but to the whole of the intellectual, religious and social life of the West including Russia. The supported optimism, expressed by the "Inevitability of Progress Thesis" was supposed to reach fruition of all the hopes and dreams of previous eras; that war, disease and poverty would be banished and that mankind would enter a new secular millennial age. The coming of World War I hardly dented the irrational optimism. Pacifism was a prominent aspect of the unlimited optimism

31 which pervaded Western thought. Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt made glowing predictions for the future during the political campaign of 1912.

These rosy predictions were hardly phased by the 1914 outbreak or the American involvement in 1917. Wilson's impassioned pleas and promises for the effectiveness of the League of Nations rekindled the hopes for a Utopia. The great war was fought to make the world "safe for democracy." In a little more than a decade did the demands of unrelenting realism bring its harvest of despair in the 1930s.

Transitional Voices: One of the transitional links between the two eras was Henri Bergson (1859-1941, not the boundaries of Darwin's Origins of Species and World War II) who also plowed the ground of irrationalism. Bergson's fusion with John Dewey set the stage for irrationalism in education. Both of these men based their whole system on an attack on the possibility of conceptual knowledge in the manner which are reminiscent of that of Schopenhauer. The heart of the debate centered over Vitalism over Materialism. Bergson denied the capacity of human reason to know "inner" reality and held that such a reality could be known by intuition alone. In his earlier years Bergson devoted himself to science as the only valid approach to the meaning of reality and to positivism as the only correct philosophical system based upon the scientific methodology (e.g.. Freud). He soon became aware that neither Comte nor Marx had faced the question of the origin of human consciousness. Matter was no source to ground the question. His response was Intuition which caused him to break with the received evolutionary philosophy which was widely held among sociologists, psychologists as well as biologists. His major work. Time and Free Will (1889) launched an attack on the Kantian concept of reality and his view of the origin of human consciousness was expressed in his Matter and Memory (1896), and more fully developed in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1903). Basic to Bergson's whole position was set in his concept of consciousness or intuition of self.

"I find, first of all, that I pass from state to state, I am warm or cold, I am merry or sad, I work or I do nothing.... I change then without ceasing. .. . Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also is there no limit to its preservation. ..." (Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Trans. NY: Holt, 1911), p. 22)

The basic question is how does Bergson know that man is not the chief goal of the evolutionary process? How could he affirm that man is the agency liberated from matter? What is matter? Bergson provides no satisfactory answer to these questions.

The difficulties of his position are even more clearly visible when we examine his moral and religious positions which is the theme of his last major work. Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). In his effort, Bergson declares "that morality and religion have two different sources. One is the eternality of creative force. The eternal creative force results in dynamic religion and open normalized morality. ... in which the morality of obligation and law are the chief characteristic." (Bergson, Two Sources, p. 271) Perhaps Coates and White provide the best summary of Bergson's conclusion that "in deifying life he justifies everything that happens in life." (Wilson H. Coates and Hayden V. White, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism (NY, 1970), p. 277). The result of this was a negation of man's moral responsibility and an admission that what

32 has happened in history is simply because it has taken place. Bergson's moral and ethical theory leads to dismal failure, "cosmic irrationalism." Bergson as a Jew ultimately turned to the solace of Roman Catholic theology and Church in search of peace.

Max Weber (1864-1920) Leader of the Western Mind: Coates and White describe him as "a scholar who turned to the place of the irrational-the life of civilization." (Ibid., p. 262) In his basic assumption that irrationalism is the essential ingredient of human life, he created his own dilemma which he never solved, for he also believed that reason is the tool through which man should and could attain his irrational drives. For Weber, man's reason is the means for the realization of the irrational. He held that religious or magical behavior or thinking should not be divorced from normal daily conduct on the ground that "even the need of religious and magical acts are predominately economic." He did claim that the Reformation brought with it a new relationship between he economic and political life of man in that these institutions were freed from the idealism which had unified them to the Church during the Middle Ages. Thus, both the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism were instrumental in bringing to Western culture a new spirit which had the effect, according to Weber, of "dispiritualizing" the Western mind.

That Weber grossly misunderstood both Lutheranism and Calvinism is clear from reading The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. Weber completely denied the doctrine of the Sovereignty of God which grounded both Lutheranism and Calvinism. Weber's hostility to classical Christianity and his evolutionary views of all religions lay at the very heart of his writings and thus allies of the very irrationalism which he was indicating in his works. His reliance on science and the scientific methodology and the evolutionary approach to life brought him to an impasse. Weber held the masses in contempt. His political agenda would be controlled by a bureaucracy staffed by groups of specialists trained for the various functions of government. The ultimate flaw in Weber's theories was that there is an ultimate irrationalism in both masses and trained specialists. It is thus no accident the modem welfare states such as Sweden, Great Britain, France, Italy and the United States are plagued by bureaucracies which are the fruits of Weber's thinking. Each of the bureaucracies bear the stamp of irrational pluralistic bureaucracies. All forms of modem and post modem Liberalism bear the mark of irrationalism.

Coates and White have summarized Weber's contributions to our era with a diagnosis which can only spell death to the patient. "There were no absolutes in the world, and so each man constantly had to measure his responsibilities to his own personal ethic of ends against the more general ethic of responsibility to his calling. In the interplay of irrational drives and rational apprehension of the real, human life staggered to a final fate of which only the gods were certain." (Coates and White, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism, (pp. 269-279)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Prophet of Irrationalism: Psychology as a discipline was rather late in becoming a major factor in the life of the Western mind. Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1900) was a pioneer in experimenting with animals and established the first psychological laboratory for experimenting with animals. His work was continued by Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) who used dogs to prove that animals are presumably human beings and can be conditioned to respond to stimuli. The implication of these early experiments was that men do not have freedom of the will, but are subject to external environmental conditions. The work of these men, however, was overshadowed by investigations in the area of psychotherapy by Sigmund Freud, whose

33 conclusions proved to be even a greater challenge to the long held assumptions concerning the rational nature of man and his ability to make intelligent decisions on that basis.

The enormous influence which Freud has exercised over the Western mind/world view during the 20th century can hardly be exaggerated:

"Many facets of modern thought have been traced in Sigmund Freud . .. rationalism, scientism, romanticism, primitivism and Darwinism, among others. Beyond all the movements, Freud is basic to them all; as to Freud, is the Enlightenment, and we are told Freud belongs to The Age of The Enlightenment." (Abraham Kaplan, "Freud and Modern Philosophy," in Benjamin Nelson, ed., Freud and The 20th Century (NY: Meridian Books, 1957), p. 226)

Yet, Freud by no means shared the basic assumptions of the Enlightenment regarding the nature and man. The Enlightenment had replaced classical Christianity with a faith in and worship of nature. There can be no doubt that Darwin, Marx and Freud are the culmination of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Freud was a determinist and a thorough going materialist.

Freud held that there was no distinction between man and other animals. Any high faculties possessed by humans derived from evolutionary development. Freud applied the Darwinian model to the "mental" and "spiritual life of men."

All of Freud's psychology rests on the concept of acquired characteristics. The essence of Freud's thesis is "If nothing is acquired nothing can be inherited." To introduce another mechanism is to introduce the supernatural in disguise. This issue is of special interest to those who espouse "creative evolution" or "progressive evolution." The heart of this "disguise" is to retain respectability of science and of Christianity. Basic to their position is the denial of the creative act in favor of a creative process. Progressive creationism or creative evolution must be described as at least incipient dialectical theology. This thesis is espoused by the American Scientific Affiliation symposium edited by Russell L. Mixer, Evolution and Christian Thought Today (1959; the centennial of Darwin's Origin of Species. 1859; and Duquesne University Symposium on Evolution (Pittsburgh, 1959). This work espouses Roman Catholic congeniality to evolution. Both of these works express Christian acceptance of evolution). The appearance of Darwin's thesis was the appearance of an alternative revelation to the Bible.

George Bernard Shaw expresses his gross caricature of God; "If you realize how insufferably the world was oppressed by the notion that everything that he opened was an arbitrary personal act of an arbitrary personal God of a dangerous, jealous and cruel personal character, you will understand how the world jumped at Darwin (e.g., Arnold Lunn, Introduction to Is Evolution Proved? (Lox, Hollis and Carter, 1947, p. 4)

The alternative to creationism is evolution and Darwin has led to Marx and Freud to materialism and agnosticism and, as M. Stanton Evans has noted, to the "annihilation of value derived from Nietzsche, James and Dewey. These are the root precepts of classical liberal philosophy and theology." (M.S. Evans, The Liberal Establishment (NY: Deon Adair, 1965), p. 178).

34 The scientific and technological developments have not destroyed God but man. Man is no longer a "person" but a robot electronically controlled. As a result man is no longer responsible, but a product of a long evolutionary history and environment. Man is no longer a sinner but a victim. Man can be changed only by changing his environment. Man has to be reconditioned, (e.g.. B.F. Skinner's "Operant Conditioning" and Noam Chomsky, The Case Against B.F. Skinner. 1962) This means a Pavlovian world. When man is regarded as a product of his environment, he ceases to be of much importance either as a person or in his thinking (see my papers "Loss of the Person in Post Modem Science"; and "The Christian Stake in The Human Sciences." C.F. Weizsackers observed that "Science today is the only thing in which men as a whole believe: it is the only universal religion of our time." (quoted in Evar Shute, Flaws in The Theory of Evolution (London: The Temside Press, 1961), p. 228). Darwinian chancism is affirmed as the mechanism of evolution in order to avoid God. "Who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever." (Romans 1.25)

The destruction of the Christian view of God at the hands of Weber, et.al., logically led to the destruction of the biblical view of man. Freud's hatred of his own Jewish background with devotion and ferocity has not been equaled even by Marx and Engels, or the extremists of the French Revolution. Though the human sexual drives are a pivotal theme in Freudian thought the central theme is guilt, a guilt from which man can never be freed. Freud's concept of guilt was totally divorced from sin, yet how can there be a sense of guilt if there is no God? In his work, Totem and Taboo. Freud vainly attempted a solution by elaborate sociological and anthropological conceptions of the origin of the feeling of guilt. Freud's naturalistic perspective is no answer for how human conscious is violated. Freud found the answer to the problem of sin in the past—incest, cannibalism and other beastly acts. Freud's reinterpretation of sin and guilt is found in what he called the Oedipus Complex (see Totem and Taboo in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (Modem Library. NY. 1938). pp. 916ff: esp. p. 945)

Freud's reliance upon an evolutionary interpretation of anthropology as well as his psychology for an evolutionary explanation of man is crucial for his interpretation. Freud rejected the conclusion of previous schools of psychology as to the component aspect of human personality substituted his own concept, the Id, the Ego and the Super Ego (this theme is clearly developed in his An Outline of Psychoanalysis and The Ego and The Id (NY: ET, 1960). This division of man's personality was really Freud's attempt to formulate a materialist-secularist doctrine of a trinity within man with the Id replacing God, the Ego replacing Christ and the Super Ego taking the place of the Holy Spirit in the inner self.

There is one other aspect of human personality which needs discussion if we are to understand Freud's unrestrained irrationahsm. This is his theory of the libido. Freud defined the libido in such a way as to insist that man's instinctual energy (found in the Ego) is sexual by nature. It is at this point that it becomes clear why Freud concludes that the causes of neurosis are to be found in the sexual life of man. The result is conflict arising over the continual effort to repress libido, and this repression in turn produces anxiety. One does not need to look far to see the sex revolution of the 1960s stemming from his perspective that sexual repression is destructive and sexual expression is healing.

35 Freudian influence has extended far beyond psychology. It has furthermore achieved a dominant influence in the administration of justice, including the Supreme Court, in sociological theory and practice, in educational circles and in many pulpits. Robert Mower charged that American psychology had been "biologized" and that Freud, following Darwin held that neurosis is the result of moral and religious interference with normal psychology's (e.g. Physiology) instinctive processes (e.g. Robert Mower, The Crisis in Psychology and Religion (NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1961), esp. p. 57); and Richard La Pierre, The Freudian Ethic (NY, 1959). Even as a non-Christian, Mower admitted his lack of understanding as to why Protestant leaders could easily accept Freud (Ibid., p. 159). Freudianism has inundated many courts of the land which has contributed to the breakdown of justice in the American judicial system. Freud is largely responsible for the breakdown injustice and public education (e.g. Goals 2000 and Outcome Based Education) and for providing adequate treatment for mental illness ? (see my paper "Outcome Based Education: Fad, Failure or Fiction"; and "Whoever Controls The Soul of Education Controls the Soul of The Land.") The irrationalism of the post-modem mind derives from the demise of authoritarianism and replacement by non authoritarian religion that virtue is self realization. In other words, this non authoritarian religion is democratic in its nature. The heart of this perspective is the doctrine of human autonomy.

Transitional Thinker: John Dewey (1859-1952): John Dewey's thought is the offspring of 19th century thinkers. He merely redirected and popularized what he had learned from his predecessors. His Instrumentalism insisted that true education must have a social value. Dewey is responsible for the downfall of the public schools of the nation and turned them from their traditional function of serving as educational institutions. His philosophy of education directed the schools into becoming institutions whose chief purpose has been the manipulation of young people into being willing tools and supporters of a democratic totalitarianism of a socialist type. His total influence was in this direction. There are two basic facets of his philosophy. (1) He began his professional career as a teacher with hostility toward Christian theism; (2) He had a profound conviction that the proper use and application of the scientific methodology could fashion a philosophy which would solve all the intellectual, political, educational and social problems of the day. For Dewey the scientific method was the new epistemology which would lead to a kind of ultimate knowledge. This new philosophical system has become known as Instrumentalism, i.e.. Pragmatism. His hostility to religion is exposed in the opening pages of his Common Faith in which he would work out his new conception of the nature of the religious phase of experience which would separate it from the supernatural and the things that have grown up about it. "I shall try to show that these deviations are encumbrances and which is genuinely religious will undergo an emancipation when it is relieved from them; that the religious aspect of experience will be free to develop freely on its own account." (John Dewey, A Common Faith (NY: Yale University Press, 1934), p. 2)

Dewey, in his introduction to his argument in this work, makes it supremely clear that he is no theist and has little or no use for historic Christianity. He proposes that Christianity itself is part of an evolutionary process in the development of religious experience (Ibid., see esp. pp. 6, 13, 15, 17, 23, 24, 31). Dewey's common faith becomes no faith at all in the supernatural. A man becomes religious by "doing" and not by "believing." Dewey held that the discoveries of astronomy, geology, biology and anthropology have had a tremendous impact and have largely dispelled the "myths" upon which Christianity was founded. "Psychology is already opening to

36 us natural explanations of phenomena so extraordinary that once their supernatural origin was, so to say, the natural explanation." (Ibid., p. 31) These discoveries for Dewey could have but one meaning and one result—a new final authority in a world of flux from which absolute truth had been banished as an obsolete conception (Ibid., p. 32). What then is left of religion, of Christian theism? He condemned religious liberals for their willingness to surrender what they at one time held to be basic religious truth on the ground that a doctrine, now no longer tenable, never was an intrinsic part of religious belief. On the other hand, he commended the fundamentalists of his day for their insight that the basic issues did not concern various items of religious belief but "centers in the question of the method by which any and every item of intellectual belief is to be arrived at and justified." (Ibid., p. 32)

Paradoxically for Dewey, thought was a product of the process of evolution or absolute change, and absolute change of an evolutionary character, and this became his ultimate absolute. This conclusion is surely Hegelian. Dewey's relativism had no satisfactory answer to these vital questions. Dewey's philosophy precluded any quest for first causes or ultimate purposes in human life. "Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and specific conditions that generate them." (J.R. Hallowell, Main Currents in Modem Political Thought (p. 548 quoted from John Dewey's The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy NY: 1918) p. 10)

Why search for values which do not and cannot exist? Dewey, like James, was essentially a pragmatist. But Dewey's Instrumentalism insisted that knowledge empirically or pragmatically obtained, must ultimately be tested by its usefulness, not for the individual, as in James, but for the community. All knowledge must be socially practical! He then rejected intuition as a source of knowledge and depended upon the collective experience of society to achieve or discover its warranted assertibilities." Thus for Dewey the purpose of human life was power, power over its environment. This power must be achieved through the proper kind of education. He had to confer upon his irrationalism a veneer of rationality borrowed from Christian theism. Dewey's instrumentalism is crucial in decoding the implications for the political, social, economic and educational life of the American people (see esp. Irving Edman, ed., John Dewey: His Contribution to The American Tradition (NY, 1968); and esp. The Philosophy of John Dewey. 3rd ed. Paul A. Schilpp (Open Court, 1989).

"An organism does not live in an environment, it lives by means of an environment. . . . The processes of living are enacted by the environment as truly as by its organism, for they are an integration." (Edman, Ibid., p. 225) Dewey sought in vain to escape from the obvious determinism involved in such a definition." (Ibid., pp. 230-231); Gordon, Clark, Dewey (Presbyterian and Reformed, p. 13) Dewey based his entire ethical system on evolutionary principles. (Dewey, Logic Theory of Inquiry (NY: Harper and Row, 1938), p. 216)

He felt that a system of morality arising from such a perspective would be much better than an alien code of ethics not arising from actual human needs (e.g.. origins of "needs culture").

"The intelligent acknowledgment of the continuity of nature, ? and society will at once secure a growth of orals which will be serious without being fanatical, aspiring without sentimentality, adapted to reality without conventionality, sensible without taking the form of calculation of

37 profits, idealistic without being romantic." (Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (NY: Holt, 1922), p. 13)

Dewey is calling man in his moral dilemma back to Darwin's concept of the "survival of the fittest." Dewey's morality and political implications of his Instrumentalism precludes his escape from alliance with the totalitarian regimes of the day (Hitler's Nazism, et al.).

Dewey's Influence on Education (e.g. Dewey and Skinner are high priests in the temple of Outcome Based Education and Goals 2000): This category is perhaps the most important aspect of his whole system, for it was through his influence on the teacher's college of Columbia University that his philosophical system as a whole gained credence over the nation at large. Because of its virtual monopoly for the training of teachers, which it gained after 1920, this institution was able to disseminate Dewey's philosophy in every state of the nation and in virtually every school district.

It is impossible to overstate the influence of Columbia's Teachers' College on the educational system of the entire nation. Nearly every school district of the nation worked in harmony through professional associations to realize Dewey's basic aims for education and for the nation (the National Association of Education, Goals 2000). The key to his views of education and its close relationship with the reforming of human personality according to his preconceived pattern of what it should be, is found in his book. Democracy and Education (NY, 1916); note Skinner's influence of "operant conditioning". In a brief preface Dewey stated his aim in writing the book and the philosophy which underlay his efforts. In brief, it was to relate the ideas implied in a democratic society to the problems of education. He freely admitted that his philosophy of education connected the growth of democracy with the development of the experimental methods in the physical and biological sciences, particularly with the theory of education and is found in the area of biology (Ibid., p. V). He also extended his Instrumentalism to the problems of industrial organization. Dewey clearly aspired to the use of the scientific method in the schools to produce a Socialist Society!!! Dewey's determinism was expressed in his idea of the necessity of control, through the back door, in his definition of education. Defining it as a means for maintaining the social continuity of life, he suggested that by its very nature this kind of education involves as its collateral the necessity of control; the control of the more mature exercised over the less nature. This analysis led him to the conclusion that education must, therefore, be a socialist function. To "socialize" the young members of any society is to control its goal and its purpose (dark. Dewey. p. 19. Dewey's control was not coercion). Dewey's Instrumentalism is a total repudiation of the biblical doctrine of "sin" and that it supposes the "inherent goodness of man" — all men.

Dewey's antagonism to all forms of classical discipline merely replaced it with a new form of discipline. The new teachers were prepared with a new type of discipline, which would be induced and encouraged by the teachers, who would then be preparing their students for the manipulative process which Dewey clearly had in mind (e.g., the coming of Big Brother in education; Orwell's 1984 and Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited: Spock's Child Raising and The Demise of Discipline was to be in schools and courts). Obviously this approach to education demanded a radical change in the curriculum. Traditional subject matter must be banished along with traditional methodology, for they formed one parcel and they must suffer a

38 common banishment. The new methods also set forth new material in the courses (e.g., it took five decades for multicultural pluralism to reach our educational departments).

Curriculum was reduced to an almost meaningless and empty form. This procedure was necessary as a part of the manipulative program inherent in Dewey's program for reaching the American political system into a vehicle suitable for the introduction of Socialism into the country. Our post-modem American culture is shaped by Dewey's Democratic Socialism! In essence Dewey's irrationalism was no more irrational than that of William James, Max Weber and other shapers of Western post-modem culture. Dewey's lasting contribution was his influence of the American educational-cultural system. Instead of producing good citizens and the great society, it has produced our post-modem era which denies the existence of absolute truth and yet which at the same time, sets itself up as the absolute before which all else must bow in abject submission. This new god, the creation of Dewey's Instrumentalism, cannot tolerate any other gods before it. To worship the God of creation in place of the god of the evolutionary process is gross idolatry in the eyes of the Deweyites and therefore cannot be tolerated as an educational model.

Emil Durkheim: 1858-1917 (Durkheim and Weber are the fathers of Modem Sociology): Durkheim, the prominent French sociologist, played an important role in the development of sociology as a separate discipline and gained for it respect as an area of intellectual activity. Durkheim was Darwinian and looked up to science as the source for such an approach to sociological inquiry. Durkheim's irrationalism is clearly declared in his role of religion in human history. He firmly anchored his analysis of the rise of religion within the evolutionary hypothesis.

His philosophy of religion was based upon humanistic presuppositions interwoven with a naturalistic outlook. The source of his religion was in evolutionary thought. He found the origin of religion in two sources which he called the need to understand and sociability, but he felt that sociability was the determining factor in the rise of religious sentiments (E. Durkheim, Selected Writings (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 219). Durkheim felt that theory would explain why the superstitious natural philosophy of religion is obligatory while the scholar is not. The origin of religion is found in the group consciousness, according to Durkheim. For Durkheim all religions were inherently human phenomena, and the resulting deities were cut in the image of their creators (Ibid., p. 211). Thus, prayer and religious worship are simply psychological experiences (Ibid., p. 225). This is obviously a statement of the pragmatic need for religion. Social evolution would bring about the demise of "religion." (Ibid., p. 245) For his sociological millennium Durkheim looked to the past rather than to the future. Along with Max Weber he may well be considered the founder of modem sociology. (His main writings are The Division of Labor in Modem Society (1893); Rules of Sociological Method (Free Press, 1950); Suicide (Free Press, 1897) and Elementary Forms of Religious Life (E.T. Free Press, 1954). Using the chemical elements to produce substance which became quite different from its original constituents in its properties, Durkheim then applied this principle to sociology. Let us apply those principles to sociology. "... If.. .this synthesis constituting every society yields new phenomena, differing from those which take place in the individual consciousness, we must, indeed, admit that these facts reside exclusively in the very society itself which produced them, and not in its parts, i.e., its members ... we have established between psychology, which is

39 properly the science of the mind of the individual and sociology." (see esp. Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method, pp. xiviii-xlix)

Durkheim was insisting that both psychology and sociology are subject to the evolutionary process, but the laws of evolution do not apply to both of these sciences in the same way. There is absolutely no scientific evidence in behalf of this unsupported presupposition. Durkheim's social theory rests upon its irrational operation within a given society. If this be the case, how can a collective consciousness somehow emerge from many unconscious individuals? Durkheim had no answer for this all important question. The denial of an individual consciousness must, by its very logic, be a denial of the doctrine of moral consciousness and responsibility. Logically, moral anarchy could only be the result of such a definition of man. Durkheim's futile "moral compulsion resident" in the "collective will" would have to grow out of a state of individual unconsciousness on the part of those who instituted this new social fact, so does a power of moral compulsion rise out of this anarchistic concept of man. His concept of collective compulsion is both irrational and politically dangerous. Both Durkheim and Weber committed themselves to unmitigated irrationalism in the same way they committed this discipline to the cause of political tyranny and the destruction of human political, social and economic freedom. Durkheim's efforts to maintain civil order are dead in the water. (See another insoluble contradiction in Durkheim's thought, Ibid., p. 196)

Durkheim insists that the only solution to the problem is for the individual to recognize that he has no inherent rights, inalienable because they are God given, and to accept the fact they are the gift of the state, and in some mysterious way this recognition will advance both individual freedom on the one hand and the role of the state as the champion of collective freedom on the other (e.g.. this is clearly the Hegelian view of freedom. For Hegel, the state conferred personality and rights upon its citizens).

It is crystal clear that this kind of thinking was part of Roosevelt's strategy in the 1932 presidential campaign, when he was able to defeat Herbert Hoover. In Roosevelt's "common club" address he made it clear that he wanted the kind of a political democracy which Durkheim favored. His irrational political philosophy was suited to the cultural chaos of the age.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) and His Public Papers (1928-1932), pp. 742-756: Durkheim, Stalin and their followers had solved the problem by dethroning, in their own thinking, that sovereign God who instituted him in government for the proper regulation of human affairs (Romans 13.1-8). The invasion of political affairs by sociology has given a new strength to the irrationalism inherent in modem/post-modem political thought and a new impetus to run government according to these sociological dictums which are extremely dangerous. Because of the tendency of government officials to be more attentive to the pronouncements of sociologists, psychologists and pollsters and less attentive to the demands of the constitution and legal requirements, the irrationalism which has inundated the areas commonly known as the social sciences has spread like an uncontrolled cancer over the whole of the body politic— throughout our Global Village. The irrational foundations of our federal government can only bring down the social house.

40 Post-modem sociology vies with post-modem psychology and philosophy for being the most irrational of the academic disciplines. Which discipline should win the first prize in this dubious contest is challenged by Revisionist History and anti science in our cultural wars?

Vilfredo Pareto (1849-1923), Prophet of Irrational Political Philosophy: Pareto was born in Paris, France, but his parents had fled to Italy. He was another voice which expressed the conclusion that most human activity was not the product of rational thinking, but of sentiment. In brief, human history is the story of the irrational acts of men who try to find a rational justification for what they have already done. Pareto decided to write a sociology devoted to this principle of irrationalism (see Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind of Society. 4 volumes (NY, 1935). The key to the understanding of Pareto was his concern for social order in a world of irrationality. His The Mind of Society was devoted to the achievement of such a goal. While he was not a Freudian and did not find sexual activity to be the dominant drive in human life, he nevertheless held in contempt the Christian view of sex. His attitude became crystal clear in his discussion of prostitution: "It is one of the dogmas of present day religion that prostitution is an absolute "evil" and like other dogma, it is not debatable." (The Mind of Society. Vol. II, pp. 863-864).

His disdain for human nature and the law's estimate of the human race dominated his sociology. His views were the logical and necessary consequences of his acceptance of Darwinism. He was a thoroughly disillusioned liberal. Pareto's own efforts were an exercise in futility John Hallowell has given to us a magnificent insight and criticism of Pareto's whole system of thought.

"A disillusioned liberal, Pareto's work is premised upon cynicism and a frank contempt for human personality. In this prophet of irrationalism we see one more person using reason to justify irrationality. . . . That rational justification for such a view of man should be thought either necessary of possible is itself a refutation of the conclusion that intellectuals seek by rational arguments to persuade others to accept." (J. Hallowell, Main Currents in Modem Political Thought (NY 1950), p. 542) The irrationalism of Western philosophy produced the irrationalism inherent in the post-modem totalitarian states.

Alfred North Whitehead (1866-1952): Whitehead's goal was to interpret philosophy in the light ofEinsteinian physics. He was trained in 19th century philosophical liberalism. Whitehead's long life provided many opportunities for him to bridge between the two eras—modem Darwinian liberalism and scientific revolution. His ideas of events set man above the classical static notions of science. It is thus true that his idea of event enabled Whitehead to avoid "paying metaphysical compliments" to God. Surely, few perceive his view "as the foundation of the metaphysical situation with its ultimate activity." (Whitehead, Science and The Modem World (NY, 1925) p. 179) His earlier, incomplete view of God is developed in his later works and most importantly in his Religion in The Making (1929), Process and Reality (1929). Adventures in Ideas. (1933). and finally in his Modes of Thought (1938).

The tragic nature of his regard for religion appears most strongly in his concluding chapter of Process and Reality, in which he wrote: "Throughout the perishing occasions in life of each temporal creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of itself into everlasting

41 in the being of God .... be refreshed by the ever present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live forevermore." (Process and Reality, p. 413)

Whitehead's tragic affirmation of a kind of immorality which is man made and which arises only out of his desire for some kind of immortal existence was the logical conclusion to his view of God which precedes the definition of religion and immorality. Whitehead's god has a finite nature. His theology or process philosophy and its correlative of the Great Chain of Being, is a form of pantheism, albeit a confusing form, and a futile effort to prevent atheism from creeping into his system, his Process Theology represents a futile effort to explain the universe without reference to the Judaeo-Christian God, Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, Lord of Heaven and Earth. The universe of creation is unavailable in Whitehead's thought!!! Every actual occasion exhibits itself as a process; it is a "becomingness." (Whitehead, Science and The Modem World (p. 152) Whitehead's god is enmeshed in a quagmire of sheer relativity and the search to find him could only be a hopeless quest, but certainly not the final good. The irrationality which permeates this definition lurks beneath and sometimes rests on the surface of his total thought. His denial of thought could hardly produce anything else but the irrationalism which grips his system and presses it into meaningless confusion.

Human freedom vanishes into despair. With it the freedom of men disappears into a sheer determinism resulting from the impersonality of his deity and the relentless forces of nature before which Whitehead bowed in abject submission. Though Whitehead's influence is minimal in our post-modem maze, no study of the decline of Western thought can be complete without paying due attention to him as one of the architects of its fate. (See my papers "Process Theology, and Process Christology," and esp. The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. ed., P.A. Schlipp: Open Court Press, 1957)

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Linguistic Analysis/Logical Positivism: Another architect of post-modern irrationalism is unveiled in the work of Russell. His career began as an idealist, but by 1903 Russell turned from idealism and became a dualist, believing that mind and matter were the only realities. His entire academic life was a search to bring order to the muddled world of philosophy. Morris Weitz is probably correct when he concludes that there is in Russell's career as a philosopher a unity which lurks beneath these changes, and that unity was the "justification of science, considered as a body of knowledge and not as a set of techniques or principles." (M. Weitz, "An Analysis of The Unity of Russell's Philosophy" in Paul A. Schlipp, ed.. The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (NY: Open Press, 1963), vol. II, p. 103)

In his early years, Russell was primarily concerned with the problem of reducing mathematics to a finite set of logical relationships and to show that, viewed in this light, this discipline was the only correct method of representing reality. This endeavor put him on a course to construct an ideal language that would make it possible to translate any proposition into a logically correct form. In collaboration with Whitehead, his own professor at Cambridge University, he offered a solution to the problem in Principia Mathematica (1913). Russell's philosophical system came to be based upon the assumption or conviction that the structure of language is the key by which we can be led to understand the structure of the world. (Bertrand Russell, Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth (Edinburgh, 1940), p. 341) Further development in Russell's philosophy led to Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism made any meta narrative and any reliable knowledge equally

42 impossible. Its basic presupposition is that the correspondence existing between words and the things those words represented must be verified in terms of itself.

Three Devil's Advocates—Existentialism (Sartre), Evolutionism (Darwin) and Pragmatism (Dewey); Russell rejected four modem theories concerning truth: (1) The warranted assertibility concept as it had been set forth by John Dewey; (2) The theory of probability; (3) The theory which defined truth as coherence, advocated by the Hegelians and some Logical Positivists; and (4) Russell boldly set forth the view known as correspondence theory of truth, "according to which the truth of basic propositions depends upon their syntactical relationship to basic propositions." (Ibid., p. 289; see esp. pp. 289-347, e.g. enters his influence in Wittgenstein's "Language Game")

Russell's correspondence view is irrational, i.e., anti-intellectual and could not find Truth. He sought to fuse proposition derived from experience and experience derived from fact, "though if they are not related to experience they cannot be known. Thus the two forms of the correspondence theory differ as to the relation of "truth" to "knowledge." (Ibid., p. 289) Neither his logic nor his epistemology allows him to believe in truth as an unchanging absolute. Not even Dewey's vacillating "warranted assertibility" could satisfy Russell. His discussion of theories of knowledge in regard to nature of truth entailed "meta" foundation for evaluation and critique.

Russell seemed to be unaware that his position could easily lead to a complete agnosticism as for the achievement of any certain knowledge or possible truth was concerned. His view of the origin and function of language he embedded in the anti-intellectualism and irrationalism which haunted the efforts of Wittgenstein and his group to attempt the formulation of an epistemology on the basis of Linguistic Analysis. The brilliant work of Nida and Pike critically responds to the linguistic irrationalism of these developments (Noan Chomsky's Language Acquisition contra empirical explanation of language acquisition).

Russell endeavored to free contemporary man from the shackles imposed upon him by the ignorant voices of the past by which he meant the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. His voice is an echo of Nietzsche who proposed a similar slavery in the name of freedom (see his. Why I Am Not A Christian and "The Essence of Religion" in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, ed. R.E. Enger and L.E. Denonn (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961), esp. p. 565)

Russell's hopeless pessimism is expressed in his Mysticism and Logic (London 1917, NY 1929). Russell's life was one "long day's journey into night" as he searched for certainty, hope, meaning and purpose, for man is doomed by the tramping march of an unconscious power. As Russell had adjudged all Western philosophy as "merely intellectual." His journey exposes the liberalism of the Renaissance in all its stark nakedness, naked of any awareness of the meaning and purpose in human life in collective history. The sickness of degrading intellectual realities of the 19th century are etched in what passes for philosophy, which is no direction toward the city of God!

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952): All members of the intellectual elite were not cynical pessimists. Benedetto Croce was one of those observers who were thoroughly aware of the plight of Western culture at the beginning of the 20th century and sought a remedy for this cultural impasse. He completely rejected all rational efforts to explain the irrational. He was interested in finding a

43 basis for rational thought which would exclude the worship of the irrational as the foundation for Western culture.

This quest led Croce back to the humanism of the Renaissance. He was convinced that the Renaissance provided a meta narrative which could address the maze of Western culture. Croce centered his attention and literacy efforts towards presenting an interpreting of history which has been called a fully developed "philosophy of the ? which was intended to comprehend all aspects of human achievement—art, history, science and philosophy—into a world and life view which he later came to call Historicism. At first he preferred the term "critical or realistic idealism." By this he did not mean the "historical relativism" of Troeltsch, Dilthey, et al. Historicism had been used to destroy the belief in the Scriptures as God's revelation in history, it could be used and was used, to deny any absoluteness to history and secular historians. But the historicist blade fell both ways. Historizing secular historians also entailed relativizing the biblical record as historical.

Croce insisted that man's cultural heritage from the past could not be properly used as evidence in a meaningful, philosophical inquiry. The weakness in Croce's approach to history through philosophy lay in his Hegelian concept of "spirit" or Freud's use of the "unconscious" or Bergson's assumption of "elan vital" as moving force in history. Even more than Bergson's "elan vital," Croce's "spirit" has no goal or purpose and is as impersonal as Freud's concept of unconscious as a force in human life. Croce's humanism has broken down into an ultimate impersonalism which, to a degree, echoed Hegel and perhaps even Kant.

Croce's critique of Western cultural illness was sound, but he was a victim of the same illness. We see very clearly the direction in which his thought was headed when we look at his definition of truth, which was an early form of Existentialism. We are still engaged in his intellectual impass. If Newton was correct, then were not the previous interpretations of the nature of the universe in error? If post Newtonian, Einsteinian, Plank, Heisenberg's interpretation is correct, then Newtonian interpretation was false. The deluge which had been gathering force in the 19th century broke with unabated fury upon the era which had been looked upon as the beginning of a humanly created and sustained millennial existence on earth.

20th Century-Narrative Displacement: We enter the maze of the 20th century in which Narrative Displacement from modern to post-modem is taking place. Post-modernism is resurgent Gnosticism which also denied: (1) True Truth, (2) History as a science of truth, (3) Language as a vehicle and (4) The demise of truth claims.

The creative minds of the 19th century did not do their work in a vacuum but produced a crop of followers who not only developed their irrationalism to greater lengths, but who like John Dewey, were able to permeate the thinking of large and important segments of American culture (see my bibliography on Post-Modernism, "Idolatrous Absolutes: God, Man and Nature;" "Carl Sagan's Universe" and "Whatever Happened to True Truth?"

The 20th century presents an open break with classical Judaeo-Christian theism as an interpretive view of reality. The century exposes the logical consequences of the narrative displacement from Christian theism to naturalism as the new Weltanschauung of our post-modern culture.

44 Humanistic naturalism based upon the theory of evolution has been saturated. The theme which was to be that of the present century was stated clearly in the following declaration of human independence:

"We are now able to erect for ourselves a philosophy that can find a natural and intelligible place for all human interests and aims, and can embrace in one natural world, amenable to a single intellectual method, all the realities to which human experience points. Symphonies as well as atoms, personality as well as reflex action, religions consecrates as well as the law of motion or the equation of the field theory. (Yervent Krikorian, Naturalism and The Human Spirit (NY; Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 369)

This humanistic epitaph of Western culture is written and viewed—"As these irrationalists gaze upon the coffin, they must indict themselves for their participation in bringing about the death of the culture of which they expected so much and from which they garnered so little." (C. G. Singer, From Rationalism to Irrationality (Presbyterian Reformed Press, 1979), p. 258)

The insistence that the rational must be irrational, was to become the dominate feature of the cultural deterioration of the 20th century! Here we experience the Visigoths redividus!! The bitter attitude toward the Judaeo-Christian world view was explicit in writers like Marx, Freud and Nietzsche and by the 20th century the stream of revolt was at full tide as expressed by postmodems like Quine, Rorty, L -yotard, Bernstein, et al.

Kierkegaardian Irrationalism (1813-1855): All social institutions fell victim to the cancer of this false ideology which promised much and failed miserably in producing a scientific utopia. The evolutionary spirit was expressed in The New Republic and The Nation. These were the voices of the new liberalism. Transitional figures multiply as the new voices express Western culture on the brink of irrationalism. The maze of new movements, rebellious against Hegel, find their roots in Kierkegaard, while others look back to either Kant or Hegel for their inspiration. The burden of irrationalism was found in Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript: see esp. William Barrett's, What Is Existentialism? (NY: Grove Press, 1964), esp. pp. 8-12) Existentialism is a vigorous, if not hostile, opposition to the idea of truth as an intellectual system. In his reference to "system" Kierkegaard had Hegel in mind and took issue with Hegelian efforts to explain the course of history by means of a comprehensive system of logical relations. Kierkegaard was merely yielding on the program of Kant. The philosophy of Kierkegaard is a form of Kant's ethical dualism and ethical monism. His purpose of excluding any philosophical system had as its necessary correlative the negative of historical truth. Kierkegaard expresses the demise of the "Self and "history."

Kierkegaard's insistence that faith is not knowledge has very dangerous implications for classical Christianity, and this danger must not be minimized. His ethical freedom requires pure possibility for its environment. Without this pure possibility it is impossible for man to develop itself according to its own purpose. Irrationality cannot be confined to either philosophy or theology or science. Kierkegaard believes that man is spirit. But what is the spirit which is the essence of man? Kierkegaard responds—"Spirit is the self." Then the question must arise —"What is the self?" "The self is a relationship which relates itself to its own self, for it is that in the relation (which accounts for it) that the relation relates itself to its own self: the self is not the

45 relation but (consists in the fact) that a relation relates itself to its own self." (Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1931), p. 17)

How then can Kierkegaard assert that free man must express his freedom, his self, through nature? Thus, the free man stands in a dialectical relationship with nature: "The self is freedom." (Ibid., p. 43) In Kierkegaard there cannot be "absolute truth" in the classical meaning of the term. Kierkegaard's irrationalism will gain victory of the American mind after World War II. Evolutionary theories, pragmatism and positivism helped prepare the Western mind for the acceptance of existentialism (see my paper, "Kierkegaard's Search for Transcendence in The Maze of the Existential Angst"). Kierkegaard was not the only 19th century source for existentialism. Nietzsche, Kant, Darwin, and most centrally. Naturalistic Evolution. All existentialist thinkers betray a haunting dissatisfaction with modem philosophy and an emptiness of spirit which they seek to overcome. Most of them describe this as a feeling of alienation (see my "Hegel's Phenomenology of Alienation" and "Marx's View of Alienation").

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and The Rejection of Classical Christianity: Alienation and dread are the only common unifying themes in the he existential school. This common rejection of Christianity becomes very evident as we examine the position of the leading existentialist thinkers in regard to the doctrines of God, creation, man, truth, sin, evil and redemption, time and human history! Heidegger and Jaspers, following Kierkegaard, pay him some attention and a limited recognition in their systems but Sartre is truculent in his dogmatic denial of this fundamental Christian doctrine. Even the so-called Christian existentialists failed to make the classical Judaeo-Christian God the focal point in all of their thinking. Heidegger disavowed any great interest in God's existence because of his preoccupation with "Being."

Heidegger's casual dismissal of the God of Christianity as a possible being unworthy of serious philosophical attention necessarily influenced his entire outlook and his total system. In his work, Sein und Zeit. he attempted to develop a universal ontology, but his approach necessitated an existential analysis of the Dasein, which he defined as the "human being there." But Dasein does not represent the ontology of man. His Dasein is only an abstraction of his existence, and the natural aspect of human existence such as number or space motion or even life itself are part of this Dasein. The essence of his Dasein is its existence. At this point, Heidegger is asserting that human reality cannot be defined because it is not "given" (e.g. Kantian constitutive power of the Transcendental ego). Man's choices are his possibilities. Man's existence is not accidental but is a necessity of thought, by which he means that the world as man finds it is constitutive of his existence (virtual reality). This is the basic meaning of Dasein in Heidegger's works. Dasein is the source of possibilities confronting man and confers intelligibility upon the world. (See my paper, "Heidegger's Hermeneutics") This intricate view of man is pure conjecture and raises many important questions, the answers to which leave his system in shambles. Heidegger cannot fuse the pure chance, the contingency of mere possibilities and at the same time maintain that the Dasein is also constituted (determined) by its relations with external objections. The Dasein cannot be known by rational thought; therefore, its existence claims must be irrational!! This is perhaps the most complex post-modem system of irrationality which is irrational in itself! For Heidegger, man is a pathetic creature, devoid of meaning and purpose, an irrational being cast adrift in an irrational universe, doomed to death which ultimately denies even the tenuous existence which he does not enjoy so much as endures. He is a prisoner of fate, for he cannot

46 escape and is the product of chance, over which he has no control. How could this intellectual, morally and spiritually devastating mode of thought be able to gain such a hold on the modem and post-modem mind? (see esp. Paul Edwards, Heidegger and Death (Open Court Press, 1979)

Karl Jaspers (1889-1969), Pseudo Christian Existentialist (see esp. The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. Paul A. Schilipp, Vol. IX (Open Court Press, 1980) Jaspers' primary concern was with the nature of being, but he insisted that being in general cannot be defined. Man is confronted with three kinds of being: (1) I-Itself comprises things realistically known independent of man's mind via science. Science is necessary for acquiring this level of being. Man is forced to come to grips with the object world through the empirical process. (2) Being- Object of those things which can relate to the person as a subject (relates to man as the subject). (3) Being-I found only in man, which includes being and being known. Dasein is man's self- consciousness. Man is conscious of objects external to him and of himself. This kind of consciousness cannot be achieved through science, psychology or logic, but only through philosophy

J.M. Spier summarizes the difficulty present in Jasper's thought regarding man-qua-man must transcend himself even as he is also his own origin and creator. "As an existential person I am the origin of myself, the creator of the actualization of my potentialities. In my existential being I transcend myself. I go beyond my factual being, my being in the present, but I protect myself into the future." (Spier, Christianity and Existentiality (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian Reformed Press, 1953), p. 20)

According to Jaspers, existence, as such, can never be perceive, and for this reason we cannot perceive or observe the existence of another person; Jaspers basic irrationalism underlies his entire approach. This approach precludes the use of rational language entirely in his writing. To be sure, they employ such terms as thought, science, reality, experience, being and essence, but their logic should preclude such an indulgence. They use logic to propose irrationalism. They use language to deny linguistic access to reality. This is irrational solipsism! This is resurgent Gnostic and Visigoth irrationalism. (See my "Resurgent Post Modem Gnosticism" and "Remember The Golden Age: From Future Shock to Future Schlock."

The one redeeming feature in existentialism is its negation of prepositional or absolute truth. If there is absolute truth then it must follow that existentialism cannot be true! The use of the euphemism falsehood does not change the consequences. The irrational falsehood proclaims the autonomy of human reason and will. It is the assertion, common to all existentialism, which accounts for the popularity of a philosophy which is utterly irrational and meaningless and which degrades man to the level of animal life. In seeking to enthrone his own autonomy, post modem man has committed himself to a philosophy which denies to him the ground for believing in that autonomy and dignity.

John Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Guru to the Counter Culture of the 1960s-Atheism the Overriding Passion: Implicit in Heidegger, inherent in Jaspers and in Sartre, Atheism became the overriding passion which permeates their various writings. In Sartre the accumulated antagonism to classical Christianity both Protestant and Roman Catholic, comes to its own with a vitriolic intensity almost unmatched in other existentialist literature. All the latent hostility

47 inherent in the existentialist position finds open expression in Sartre, which makes him somewhat different from his contemporaries. The debate whether or not Sartre is a typical existential is a futile enterprise. At least one modem commentator insists that Sartre is a typical French intellectual (H.J. Blackham, Six Existentialist Thinkers (London, 1961), p. 110). Perhaps the descent to irrationalism has its origin in Descartes, Hegel and Freud. Although Sartre became famous in France and elsewhere for his Being and Nothingness, his brief statement is found in Existentialism and Humanism (NY: Philosophical Library, 1947), esp. The Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, ed. Paul A. Schilipp (Open Court Press, 1981). Sartre defines existence as pure contingency. In his thinking it means "to be there." This is an inseparable relationship between Sartre's definition of consciousness and his understanding of the absolute. The absolute contains both being in itself, en soi, a self sufficiency, and also consciousness, pour soi. At this point irrationality takes over his thinking. The en soi and pour soi are also two modes of consciousness. However, the Absolute Being cannot possibly exist. This material being of the world possesses en soi, being in itself, and is therefore contingent and absurd. Consciousness cannot be deduced from this world, which is independent and self sufficient, but the world can be deduced from consciousness. In short, consciousness is related to the objective world and dependent upon it. We must conclude that this is true, because that of which Sartre speaks is pour soi, independent of this world. This is not the case. Sartre's consciousness is constantly seeking a "self-sufficiency or self realization" which it can never achieve. He seeks to realize or achieve the idea of God, but this human consciousness can never achieve this goal. Thus, for Sartre, human existence is a continual pursuit of an illusion which can never be achieved. Man is driven by a useless passion for the unobtainable. It is obvious that Sartre has plummeted to the depths of Irrationality. Sartre denies the possibility of true knowledge of the external world and the existence of absolute truth.

Surely Sartre is post modern! Quine, Rorty, Bernstein, et.al. have been tutored at Sartre's feet. Sartre's insistence that man is always becoming and never arriving or achieving has tremendous implications for his views on truth and ethics. For him there can be no absolute of any kind of a prepositional nature. No existential can yield the possibility of the truth of an existential moment. To be conscious of the other person is to render him unreal. This solipsistic narcissism is a cosmic insane asylum! Sartre declared that the ultimate philosophical question was, why not commit suicide? Why not, if the world is meaningless and without true truth?

Sartre cannot provide a system of ethics possessing meaning and authority in a world devoid of truth. His influence on The Counter Culture of the 1960s and post modem Generation X is crystal clear. Sartre cannot produce an ethic based in irrational freedom or that he has/can present a meaningful theory or view of freedom, (e.g., Gabriel Macel (1889-1973) became a Roman Catholic in 1929 but never surrendered to Thomism nor the new Kantianism of the Vatican II. His Christian humanism is a contradiction given a biblical thesis. His rejection of all classical argument for God's existence places him on the irrationalism mode.) All species of Existentialism has added momentum to the process of intellectual deterioration taking place within post modern multicultural pluralism.

Existentialism has now fused horizons with Marxism and Freudianism as one of the three greatest enemies of classical Christianity. These three systems have embodied irrationalism and anti intellectualism in the name of rationalism in our post modem Western culture. How/Why

48 use Logic to attack Rationality? Spier is correct in affirming that Existentialism is naturally foreign to the God of revelation. Sartre's vain effort to place Jaspers and Marcel within the Christian camp by insisting that Existentialism is not only atheism but declares even if He does exist it could not make any difference if He should somehow exist. (J.P. Sartre, Existentialism) Why were Dewey, Freud, Weber and Durkheim able to impact the Western mind? The invasion of Darwinianism and Marxism fused with Theological Liberalism by the fourth decade of the 20th century had already gained a firm footing in the irrationalism.

Neo Orthodox Domain with Irrationalism: Those individuals who still cling to the faith of organized Christianity found in neo orthodoxy and its appropriation of existentialism a haven or refuge made for the secular minded. Existentialism proved to be a voice of organized doubt and despair for which they had been seeking. Existentialism offered philosophic justification for their disillusionment, and they joyfully claimed it for their own. Widespread totalitarianism and devastating world war were quickly followed by wars in almost every quarter of the globe. The counter culture imbibed on a multitude of efforts to escape from life by the use of drugs, the glorification of unmarried sex, the radical redefinition of marriage and family and left wing activism of the past five decades. In literature, art, music and historical thought existentialism left its mark. The legacy of the 19th century with Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre and their colleagues were vehicles which they used to give expression to this new post modem world view (see my paper, "The Counter Culture: Toffler, Reich, Marcuse—Three Prophets of Irrationalism"). Andre Malraux used the novel as a vehicle for the expression of his philosophy which bears the stamp of his activities in Cuba during the revolutionary upheavals which took place in that country during the 1920s. He abandoned his Roman Catholic heritage and imbibed on the Communist ideology. In two earlier works. Temptations of The Occident (1926) and The Conqueror (1928). his attraction to Communism is quite evident. In these novels he attacks the classical structure of Western civilization. In the latter novel he argued that a new conception of man and the meaning of human life could be achieved if Marxism were successful in Russia and China. But in his Man's Fate (1934), his mood shifted away from his earlier optimism, and he no longer believed that the success of the revolution in these nations would guarantee the emergence of a new man (E.T., NY, 1934). The basic theme of his novel is the death of the old order known as Western civilization and the emergence of a new one to replace it (Post modern multicultural pluralism). (See my paper "Beyond Mere Diversity" and Ruth Benedict, the prophetess of cultural relativism, in her book. Patterns of Culture (1934)

Malraux's entire philosophy is perhaps summed up in the words spoken by a leading character in Man's Fate: "You know it takes nine months to make a man and a single day to kill him. We both know this as well as one can know it.... Nay, listen, it does not take nine months, it takes fifty years to make a man, fifty years of sacrifice, of will... of so many things. And when this man is complete, when there is nothing left of him of childhood, none of his adolescence, when he is really a man ... he is good for nothing but to die." (Man's Fate, NY, 1934), pp. 395-360) Malraux's thought was that man was and is, engaged in a continuous struggle against nature. All of life is basically meaningless and both men and heroes have no meaning (see the book of Ecclesiastes and my paper "The Meaning of Meaning").

Malraux came to the conclusion in his art as Ideology that human life is absurd and can achieve nothing more than moments of existential meaning at times of intense personal danger; Malraux

49 vainly attempted to refute Spengler's deterministic view of history by insisting that art is a repudiation of fate rather than a fulfillment of it, as Spengler held assuming the essential irrationality of life and the absurdity of human existence, he struggled to find a rationale of life and the absurdity of human existence, he struggled to find a rationale to engage in revolution to struggle against fate. In fact, if reality is totally fatalistic and deterministic, how could anyone think that they could revolt against it? What would/could be the cause of such an idea and/or concern? Only God is strong enough to win in the cosmic conflict. We are engaged in mortal conflict with the Devil's advocate!

Albert Camus: 1913-1960, Another Devil's Advocate: Like Malraux, Camus reflects the consequences of existential decadence in French thought. The visible decline of French domination in European thought during the Middle Ages and The Modem Age was the outbreak of the revolution of 1789. This despair had its origin in Descartes turned inward.

Camus' novels are a stream of consciousness style. In so doing his characters speak for Camus himself, leaving no doubt concerning his own attitudes. He represents the irrationalism and despondency of the post modem French mind. His influence on the New Left was strong not only in France but throughout the world, especially in the United States. Sartre's influence went far beyond professional philosophy and literature. As a novelist and playwright his influence is difficult to exaggerate.

Basic to his thought is his rejection of Christianity. His hostility was less vitriolic than Sartre or Marx. In The Fall Camus wrote: "Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish; our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the last judgment. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgment of men." (The Fall. E.T, NY 1964), p. 111)

For Camus, the problem of evil and death are of overwhelming importance to which the problem of God must take second place. Camus says that suffering and death are the primary evidences for human existence. In The Stranger. Camus expresses his disdain for Christianity. Camus speaks through Meursault, a man condemned for murder and waiting for execution; he does allow the chaplain to visit in his cell, but replied that he did not believe in God and saw no point in troubling his head about the matter. (The Stranger (ET, NY 1973), p. 145)

Camus' view of God, evil and goodness lacks all reference to the biblical foundation. Man leads a dreary existence in an absurd world, and his only escape is in death. As with every specie of Existentialism, relativism has become the only absolute. Then there can be no absolute values to claim the loyalty of these irrational post modems (see the essence of The Rebel—only when one knows the reality of evil does the question of God's existence have any importance).

Existentialism thus becomes one of the two "big umbrellas" which have sheltered irrationalism in its various forms during much of the 20th century. These two forms of irrationalism have combined in their efforts to virtually destroy the fabric of the Western intellectual life and bring it to a depth of the chaotic confusion which we are experiencing in our post modem multicultural pluralism. Darwinian naturalism and existentialism have had a disastrous impact on Christian

50 thought. From Kant to Kierkeggard Western culture has been on a downward spiral. Richard Kroner is correct in asserting that there is nothing new in neo orthodoxy. Christians believe the logically impossible, (see esp. his Culture and Faith (Chicago, 1937), p. ix; see my paper "Soren Kierkegaard's Religion As The True Humanism")

Although Kierkegaard was vigorous in his reaction against Hegelian philosophy, he was never able to free himself from Kantian metaphysics and its anti super naturalistic implications. It is surely a fact that all 19th century liberal theological activity was, in one way or another, influenced by this Kantian dualism. Twentieth century neo orthodoxy falls neatly into this pervading pattern. Kant was not only the villain who developed irrationalism in modem philosophy, but is also the source of 19th/20th century movements in theology which fall into this pervading pattern.

For Kierkegaard, Christianity was primarily a matter of "personal religious" involvement rather than a matter of objective truth. Note this thesis in post modem epistemology and much neo evangelical denial of the prepositional foundation of Christian truth claims while opting for an "irrational consciousness of a community." What is the source of the consciousness? There is no content, i.e., truth claims which call for commitment, i.e., which produces community! (See my paper, "Christian Convictions in Our Pluralistic Cultural Wars")

What then, is the solution to the problem posed to the Christians of the 19th/20th centuries? If history is such a frail vessel for the communication of redemptive truth, how, then, can men of our day find Christ? Preaching the Gospel, Missions and Evangelism are at stake in the answer we give to this question. In our post modem culture not only is history rejected as a vehicle for truth claims but so is language, true truth and logic. Kierkegaard's answer to these questions is: "If the thing of being or becoming a Christian is to have its decisive qualitative reality, it is necessary above all to get rid of the whole delusion of after history, so that he who in the year 1846 becomes a Christian becomes that by being contemporaneous with the coming of Christianity into the world, in the same sense as those who were contemporaneous before the eighteen hundred years." (Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) p. 58)

Is there a fatal weakness in this argument? Brushing aside the intervening centuries between Christ and "us" does not mean that we draw closer to Christ. Men of the first century were close to Him historically but far away in their hearts. How can a post modem learner become an historical eyewitness? How are we to evaluate the reliability of the eyewitness? An eyewitness does not necessarily make a disciple! Was Kierkegaard insisting that no one has ever been directly confronted by Christian history; that although revelation is historical in its nature, it is not true that history is revelational. Is it odd that Kierkegaard has direct access to "Christ" in spite of the chaos in the strict Lutheran Church which structured his work? What "Christ" does Kierkegaard have access to? This sounds strangely like a "Gnostic Christ"!

Barth and his neo orthodox followers find their roots not only in Kant but also in Kierkegaard for Kierkegaard was carrying on the spirit of Kantian philosophy. The essence of the Kierkegaardian system is "his" conviction that there is no God who can give a final revelation of himself to man in history." (Van Til, Christianity and Barthianism (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Reformed, 1965),

51 p. 291) Thus Kierkegaard sought to attain a unifulness for Christ in terms of the idea of pure contingency. "And this idea of pure contingency of necessity has for its correlative the formal ideal of pure rationality." (Ibid.) The Hegelian and Kierkegaardian irrationalism and rationalism is that they allow for the loss of logic in order to allow for the exclusion of the truth of historic Christianity. Kierkegaard's god is indeterminate and an unknowable Christ. Kierkegaard's irrationalism was taken over by Barth and his neo orthodox followers into the very essence of neo orthodoxy. Thus some irrationalism runs deep in post modem neo-evangelicalism, e.g., Pinnock, Grenz, et al. (see my critique of their influence in post modem homiletics, "Narrative Displacement in Post Modem Homiletics") Barth declared that the words of the Bible are tinctured with a human fallibility. At the same time he also insisted that God's revelation does not take place behind, but in the words of Scripture. Yet, no document of history can ever be anything more than a witness to primal history. Thus, for Barth the true approach to theology must be existential, but this approach is not possible on any idea of direct revelation. Man must meet God not through any direct revelation, but by becoming contemporaneous with God in Urgeschichte. What could this possibly mean? According to the foundation, the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus Christ are not history in the ordinary sense of the term. Revelation Urgeschichte is free from ordinary historical continuity, for its unity is found in his concept of contemporaneity. (Post Modem Relevance to a solipsistic ego) How then, does man know God? He answers this important question in terms of his concept of Urgeschichte. God, the whole God, becomes man and man in response to this becomes a new subject. Because revelation on God's part is no revelation to ordinary history, so man as the "old subject" cannot receive true revelation (Earth's The Word of God and Words of Man and his K.D. Vol. I, The Doctrine of The Word of God). Barth, therefore, felt that man must know himself as non existent before he can hear The Word of God! Earth's dialectic derives from Kant and Existentialism. Berkouwer is surely correct when he said that "he who sets his feet on the way of subjectivism cannot suddenly stop himself from sliding into illusion." (B.D. Berkouwer, Barth)

Barth's lethal form of irrationalism has been let loose within the post modem seeker friendly church. In Barth's theology there is no room for creation to fall, historical incarnation, atonement on the cross in any "historical sense." Barth's Christ is not the Christ of Scriptures. (If Christ is under fire from his friends what could we expect from His enemies, e.g. the Jesus Seminar, et al.) Revelation cannot be a predicate of history! All historical evidence is banished by neo orthodox irrationalism. The name irrationalism finds expression in Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), Paul Tillich (1886-1965), H. Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr (1893-1971), Hans Kung (and many more Vatican II Roman Catholic theologians). What would we expect when Vatican II neo Thomists rediscover Kant!!! A greater farce has never been set before The Church in post modem times.

Post Modern Irrationalism in Media (e.g. MTV, Literature, Architecture, etc.) The irrational influence in our post modem culture is emphatically declared in every dimension of our pop post modem maze. In order to escape from Gothic or Colonial architecture newer church buildings deny that God instilled order of the created universe and instill it with pragmatic functionalism in a blatant form of naturalistic humanism's insistence that God has nothing to do with this world, even houses of worship. The pragmatic post modem architecture is a manifestation of post modem man to free himself from any remaining impact of Christian theism. All forms of pop post modem music, literature and architecture express the debris of a

52 Biblical world and life view. These devastating impacts are consequences of post modem irrationalism. The greatest irony is the use of Reason to displace Reason as a vehicle for attaining and evaluating True Truth in science, history, language, logic, art, media, music, and even Christianity!! Only God could survive this phenomena and its influences!! (see my papers "Revisionist History, Anti Science;" "Narrative Displacement in Homiletics," "Post Modem Epistemologies;" and "What Ever Happened to True Truth?: in light of Quine, Rorty, Bernstein, Lyotard and the Definitional Fallacy.")

All categories of science are imbedded in the cult of irrationalism in American political science. Democracy, and irrationalism. American political science, Irrationalism and Socialism had invaded America long before Roosevelt's "New Deal" plan and Oliver Wendell Holmes' Sociology of Law. Global Economics, and The Common Law (Boston. 1881). These developments began in Darwinian irrationalism. They were/are expressed in Kierkegaardian irrationalism, the therapeutic invasion from Freud, Jung, Adier, B.F. Skinner, et al. and multicultural pluralism.

Our brief trek tracing the decline of philosophy from the rationalism of Descartes through empiricism to existentialism must end for now. This trek into the realm of the irrational is shared even by theology. Western culture has traversed the same rocky path. By 1900 political thought is steering its course toward modem totalitarianism through the routes provided by Hegel and Nietzsche and by an equally dangerous pathway prepared by Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Stalin and contemporary Marxist thought and practice. In both cases Darwinism added a powerful incentive for the creator of an absolutism out of the remains of European liberalism. All modem and post modem political philosophies and forms of political government have either already ended in the embrace of some form of Despotism or are headed in that direction. Those who have placed their faith in Socialism as a safe form of Collectivism, which will also act as a safeguard in the defense of human rights, have been sorely disappointed to find that Socialism can lead only to Absolution, the absolution of a controlled majority. Those who have placed their faith and their hope for the future in Democracy are likewise doomed to disappointment. Post modem events loudly proclaim the solemn lament that humanism, in what ever form it takes in the political realm, with the ebb and flow of popular opinion and the general current has been moving steadily in the direction of an absolutist or totalitarian regime arising out of he ruins of the democratic state, which has already set the Constitution aside as a viable form of government for post modem men (e.g. the marginization of God in the Market Place and the redefinition of the first, fourth and forteenth amendments in our legal fiasco).

The Determinism in this Natural Law philosophy produced a relativism not only as the prevailing philosophy of government, but as we have seen, also brought relativism into the meaning of law (e.g. Sociology of Law via Oliver Wendell Holmes1 law has become a relative concept, framed in terms of what the country regards as socially useful or harmful, at any given time, rather than a reflection of the law of God in regard to human conduct. Modem sociology and psychology have contributed to this flexible concept of the nature of law and added to the legal confusion of the day. As a result, our courts, for the most part, no longer dispense justice, but rather state the prevailing attitude of the community on moral, social and political issues (e.g. solutions by taking polls, truth by statistics; for decision making, public attitudes about crime/criminals, potential war, etc.; we can get all the justice that we can afford)

53 The autonomy of the rational man has degenerated into the autonomy of an irrational society!!! In the realm of economic thought and practice a similar development or degeneration, has taken place. Is there a remedy for our post modem irrationalism? Authentic Christianity can engage our post modem irrational plight. Any theological system with even the vaguest reliance on a syncretic humanistic and/or naturalistic elements will not be sufficient to meet the cultural crisis now before us (see II Chronicles 7). Any proposed solution that does not acknowledge the sovereignty of the God of creation and redemption will be inadequate in resolving our dilemma. Only the God of creation and His providential government of His creation over every dominion can adjudicate our cultural crisis. Our fragmented multicultural pluralism cannot positively addressed by a syncretism of systems analysis, only the Judaeo/Christian world view can address the plethora of world views in conflict. This entails True Truth and Christian tolerance toward those of opposing alternatives!! Our fundamental challenge is to clearly state the non negotiable and negotiable elements confronting our global village.

Trends and Triage: From Rationalism to Irrationalism: The dilemma facing all participants in post modem culture is the tension between "Rationalism, Irrationalism and the Bureaucratic cage." Our brief trek through Western thought from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Modern and Post Modem periods has exposed a single thread running throughout these 700 years of Western intellectual activity, and that thread has been the recurring expression of irrationalism and that this irrationalism has been without exception the correlative of Philosophical Rationalism.

The concessions which Thomas Aquinas made to the Aristotelian thought of his day allowed rationalism to reappear in the philosophical thought of the West. This trickle became a system in The Renaissance; the fact that it was Platonic rather than Aristotelian in nature in no way sets aside the fact that the rationalism of Platonic thought during the Modern period brought in its wake a reinforced irrationalism.

Although the Reformation stayed the development of Rationalism as a major philosophical movement during the 16th century, it was not able to capture the mind of Europe to the extent necessary to capture philosophy for Jesus Christ, not even in those lands such as Germany where Lutheranism became a major, if not a dominant, influence. In France the Reformation ultimately lost out even though it gained a resemblance of a political victory with the issuance of The Edict of Nantes in 1898. The majority of the French were untouched by either Calvinism or Lutheranism.

Descartes sent French thought in a new direction in which it paid less and less attention to any Christian theology. The Cartesian rationalism brought in its wake a new irrationalism which, in turn, undercut the whole body of French intellectual endeavor. By the 18th century French philosophy, reinforced by Locke and his empiricists had become the prisoner of Deism and an equally irrational scepticism. In their developments Kant felt that he heard the tolling of the death knell for European philosophy. His majestic endeavors to rescue Western thought from this grave which the 18th century thinkers had unwittingly prepared for it, were a vain and feeble effort. Just beneath his system here lurked the ? irrationalism which had haunted the efforts of his predecessors. The quest for "philosophic certainty" was once again stymied by the failure of

54 Kant to answer the unanswered questions posed by both the rationalist and empiricist schools. Kant once again gave a new direction for philosophic endeavor but the path he charted for his successors in Idealism was as rocky and dangerous as that from which he had rescued his own generation. With Kant, irrationalism became more strident in all of its forms: more strident because philosophers were given a wider hearing than generally had been the case; more dangerous because Idealism, to a far greater degree than before, affected and infected the political, economical, social and educational thought of the era.

It influenced to an alarming degree the theology of the churches of Europe and America. There in both 19th century cultural activities and theology. Idealism contributed greatly to irrationalism as it found expression in the political life of the 19th century. The culture of both Europe and America during the 20th century has given rise to a new outburst of irrationalism in all areas of modem/postmodern life which threatens to destroy Western civilization. Post modem expression of irrationalism in the West finds its consumerism audience in Outcome Based Education, Rock music, Anti Science Movements and Revisionist History and death to Judaeo-Christian values in primetime television expresses post modem irrationalism.

What can be done to change the direction of our Western civilization? Is it doomed and hopeless? There is hope if post modem man will repent and turn to the Lord of heaven and earth as creator and redeemer! Spiritual revival alone will constructively address the dark hours of our cultural journey (see my paper, "Capturing The Culture for Christ: The Great Inversion;" "Fools for Christ;" "Meet the Grave Diggers;" "Remember the Golden Age: From Future Shock to Future Schlock;" "The Pagan Temptation;" The Cultural Maze in Our Post Modem Culture;" "An Autopsy of Six Deaths: of God, of Man, of Culture, of History, of Science, the Grave Diggers;" "The Greatest Debate in the 1990’s: Political Correctness and Illiberal Education.").

Effectively witnessing to our transforming Gospel of our crucified and risen Christ will not be an easy task in either Europe or America for post modem irrationalism is a tremendous challenge for the most dedicated leadership (requiring the leadership model of transformation, not transactional) possessed of the talents and wisdom necessary for the realization of such a goal. To aspire to less is to be found unfaithful in the totality of our stewardship. Our recovered theme must be "To take every thought captive!" (II Corinthians 10.4) (Study the Death of Truth and Literature and prayerfully read Acts 17; I Cor. 1; Romans 1.18ff)

We must avoid at all costs confusing Description with Explanation in our encounter with the Narrative Displacement from The Enlightenment to Post Modernism. The mere use of words like pre, anti, modem, etc., only describe narrative displacement; it cannot explain why or what caused the displacement. There is widespread use of these descriptive terms in Christian and non Christian contexts. This approach in no manner is an intellectual encounter with all the resident "isms" (see my paper "Narrative Displacement in "Isms" conflict/controversy").

Every Thought Captive: II Corinthians 10.4 Post Modernism threatens to discredit modernism and theism alike. Post modernism means "after modernism." "Post modernists believe that things like reason, rationality and confidence in science are cultural biases. They contend that those who trust reason and things based on reason like science, Western education and governmental structures . . . unknowingly act out their European cultural conditioning, thus

55 conditioning seeks to keep power in the hands of the social elite." Our challenge is to understand (1) Christian theism; (2) Modernism; and (3) Post Modernism.

Bibliographical Sources

Paul Boiler, American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Materialism, 1865- 1900 (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1969). Louis Bredvoid, The Brave New World of The Enlightenment (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961). Paul Carter, "The Idea of Progress in Most Recent Protestant Thought" 1930-1960, Church History xxii (1962), pp. 75-86. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, The Rise of Modern Paganism. Vol. I (NY: A.A. Knoff, 1966; also The Enlightenment. The Science of Freedom, vol. II (NY: A.A. Knoff, 1969. John C. Greene, Darwin and The Modern Mind (Baton Rouge, LA: University Press, 1961. Gertrude Himmerfarb, Darwin and The Darwinian Revolution (Norton Library, 1959. Margaret C. Jacobs, The Newtonian and English Revolution of 1689-1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). James A. Rogers, "Darwinian and Social Darwinism," Journal of The History of Ideas 33 (1972), pp. 265.288. Herbert W. Schneider, "The Influence of Darwin and Spengler in American Philosophical Theology, " Journal of The History of Ideas 6 (1945), pp. 3-18.

James D. Strauss Lincoln Christian Seminary Lincoln, Illinois 62656