The Relevance of Philosophy

Over the course of our discussion on evolution and creation, the notion of intelligent design came up, which sounds like a reasonable way to work out all of these differences. Although I don’t think it will be a problem, let me clarify what I mean by intelligent design. Intelligent design is to say that there are things in the universe which exhibit a kind of complexity which is impossible, or at least infeasibly likely, to have come about by any random combination of elements, but appear as though a rational agent had designed it. AnswerinGenesis calls this information; information is inherently rational, and so cannot arise without a rational agent, but it can be lost and it can be reshuffled. This means that horizontal evolution of attributes is possible (and may even be a necessary explanation), but vertical evolution of complexity is not possible.


Once we accept the likelihood that the universe has intelligent design, then the argument has suddenly opened itself up to a lot of philosophical considerations, and it is from here that I would like to proceed. My experience is that a lot of people either cringe or dismiss philosophy as a lot of nonsense which isn’t relevant anyway. That it contains errors and inconsistencies I do not deny, but I challenge the notion that it does not mean anything. Francis Schaeffer’s “Escape from Reason” explains how post-modernism got to be where it is today, and I am going to summarize what he has to say. I strongly recommend reading it, regardless of any interest you may have in philosophy--or read “The God Who Is There”, which seems to cover the same things quickly and then moves further into application.


Western philosophy has been primarily built upon three things: unity, rationalism, and rationality. Note that rationalistic is to rationalism as rational is to rationality, but all four words are not related to the same idea. There is a dividing line, much like Plato’s, between the world of becoming, the particulars, and the world of being, the universals. Schaeffer calls the two realms nature and grace, respectively, and identifies God, heaven, the unseen, and the souls of men as part of grace, and earth, the seen, and men on earth as part of nature. Unity is the desire of philosophers to find a unified system of thought that could encompass both nature and grace. Rationalism is the method of doing so, in which “man begins absolutely and totally from himself, gathers the information concerning the particulars, and formulates the universals.” Rationality is the set of rules by which we apply reason, which is basically logic. It is grounded in the principle of antithesis, that either a statement is true or it is false. For those not familiar with logic, saying something is “partially true” is a semantic convenience. If a statement requires A AND B to be true, and only one of A and B are false, then the statement is necessarily false, but this is less informative than saying it is “partially true.”


The real problem with philosophy is rationalism. It is not that there is anything wrong with deriving understanding from other understanding, but the humanism of rationalism allows that man can discover God by reason alone, starting with himself as the foundation. This will not work, and Schaeffer explains why, but for now let’s assume it will not work. The history of philosophy has been many an attempt to find unity through rationalism, and each succeeding philosopher has thrown down his predecessors’ models with his own, only to have his thrown down later. Existentialism was the breaking point of this trend, in which man (rightly) gave up hope of ever finding unity in this way. Unfortunately, instead of throwing out rationalism, he has thrown out rationality when talking about grace. Without rationality, we can say whatever we want about grace, and there is nothing wrong with it being riddled with self-contradictions. This is how we end up with the silly notion of relativism, saying that one thing is “true for you” and its contrast is “true for me.” Truth has been denied its power of antithesis.


Therefore, I maintain that even though popular thought would have us treat philosophy as non-rational, there is no need to do so, and in fact doing so only lands us in trouble. As such, conclusions about the realm of grace actually mean something. I feel that this notion of intelligent design will be a good way to bridge the chasm in rationalism between man and God. We haven’t fully reasoned that the world is designed by an intelligent being, and I suspect we cannot and believe we do not need to do so. We have only some sort of innate intuition; we must presuppose that there is some intelligence in the realm of grace, and from this starting point I intend to reason further.