World History Instead of Western Civ?

Further to my last post, I note with sadness but not surprise that my former university, Crandall University in Moncton, NB, has replaced its first-year Western Civilization course with a World History course. Here are my musings on that event.

What is world history anyway? I teach a Christianity and Culture course in which I teach the rise and fall of Western civilization. It is a fourth year course that builds on our first-year Western civilization courses. Teaching Western civilization in a Christian liberal arts college is a natural thing to do because the West arose as a result of the powerful flowing together of Greek philosophy, Roman law and Biblical revelation. Because these currents allowed people to discover truth, modern science was made possible in this civilization (and nowhere else on earth). Many other great and glorious things were also inspired by Christendom: classical music, natural law, English parliamentary democracy, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, free enterprise, individual liberty and the list goes on.

Modernity is both an era and a project. Central to Modernity has been the failed Enlightenment Project in which a noble, but doomed, attempt was made to preserve both science and morality without revelation. The culture of death into which late modern, Western culture has fallen and the crisis of truth which characterizes the post-Enlightenment West is stark testimony to the fact that Christianity is the soul of the West and Western civilization minus Christianity is a declining and decaying civilization rather than a dynamic and growing one. Christianity is the central narrative that makes sense out of Western civilization.

But what narrative makes sense of world history? Augustine wrote a world history in City of God, but he fashioned most of it out of salvation history. If you reject salvation history - which goes without saying in the late modern West for getting rid of Western civilization courses is one of the final steps in turning your back on the Christian West - then how do you make sense of the history of the world?

It seems to me that there are two options: (1) the modern one and (2) the postmodern one.

The modern option is to pretend that the Enlightenment is not a failure and to use a "cave man to space man" narrative to show that progress occurs by the shuffling off of religion and superstition and the embrace of science. This approach would best be described as "Scientism" the belief that science explains all and is totally sufficient for the good human life. In this narrative Richard Dawkins stands at the summit and peak of all human evolution. (Shudder!)

The modern option, however, is less intellectually compelling with every passing year. The Enlightenment has failed and morality has been reduced to emotivism - as writers as varied as C. S. Lewis, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Bentley Hart, Benedict XVI, Christian Smith, Walker Percy and Aldous Huxley agree. Nietzsche has not been answered and his disciples dominate the humanities and social sciences in the late modern university. Relativism, existentialism and the will to power are now the prevailing winds. Hitler lost the war, but the philosophy that drove him survived and flourished. Eventually, it will likely triumph.

Late modern man has lost his confidence in philosophical realism and thinks that morality cannot be derived from reality itself. It is only a matter of time before a similar loss of faith in mathematics occurs. Already Aristotelian logic is out the door. In the social sciences the idea of mathematically describable laws of nature are in question. Can science itself survive much longer?

World history in the second, postmodern option is basically nothing more than, in the words widely attributed to Henry Ford just "one damn thing after another." That is, there is no meaningful narrative that connects the dots and gives meaning to the myriad of interesting but essentially unrelated details. Nominalism applied to history is not a pretty sight, as Richard Weaver shows in his classic: Ideas Have Consequences.

World history is not the study of one particular culture with all its strengths and shortcomings. It is the study of everything. And everything, strictly speaking, cannot be studied without reference to Biblical revelation. There is no way to give world history meaning without understanding it in an Augustinian manner as the history of God's fallen creation in the process of being redeemed.

But when a culture decides to abandon its own history the chances of it embracing Biblical revelation as the key to understanding world history are slim. An Augustinian course in World History would be welcome, but I'm not holding my breath.

The Devil's Delusion

David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (NY: Basic Books, 2009) is a delightful piece of polemical writing: witty, concise, clear, funny and devastating. It is a relatively easy book to read, considering the amount of highly technical and abstract theoretical physics and advanced mathematics it treats.

Berlinski takes no prisoners and pulls no punches; he dares to call the bluff of leading scientists as to why, given that science seems more and more to point to a Creator, they insist that this must not be allowed to be admitted. As a secular Jew, Berlinski himself is not actually arguing for theism. Instead he is arguing that it is abuse of science to claim that science either disproves God's existence or renders God's existence irrelevant to cosmology. It is the pretentiousness of turning science into a faith system - which is really little more than old-fashioned village atheism - that offends Berlinski's sensibilities. Why should such a grand and glorious human achievement as modern experimental science be degraded in this way? His answer is that it ought not to be so.

Berlinski's explanation of the Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe is perspicuous and suggestive (pp. 69-78). But what is utterly fascinating is the discussion of the reaction of physicists to the obvious fact that what science has discovered about the beginning of the universe looks exactly like what the Book of Genesis says about the beginning of the universe, or, as Berlinski carefully phrases it: "The hypothesis of God's existence and the facts of contemporary cosmology are consistent."

The response of scientists was to assume that there had to be a way to explain the beginning of the universe without resorting to that hypothesis. The Church of Atheism needed to do apologetics against the believers' inferences from the facts of science. Berlinski stresses something that anyone who believes in original sin would never think to deny: that personal motivations function in the directions of theoretical thought chosen by individuals. Yes, there are facts; but there are many ways to explain those facts.

Berlinski discusses the Anthropic Principle and the theory of multiple universes (the Landscape) in order to show the degree to which some scientists are willing to go to avoid "You Know Who." One of the most interesting questions discussed in the book is the one posed to Neil Turok by Joel Primack: "What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the laws?" (p. 132) Obviously, something seems to compel physical objects to obey the laws of nature. But, as Berlinski notes, "neither compulsion nor obedience are physical ideas."

Anyone familiar with St. Augustine's Christianized Neoplatonism would not only know the answer, but also would recognize that a science which purports to be hot on the trail of the unified "theory of everything" should not omit a search for the answer to this question. It is time for Christian theology to move from the defensive to the offensive in the war between naturalism and theism. Science is on our side; scientism is not science. And if scientific fact is best explained with reference both to physical and theological ideas, well, what else would a Christian expect?

The Devil's Delusion is a terrific book and I highly recommend it.

The Reductionist Fallacy

It is hard not to be condescending and sarcastic when confronted with a story like this one from the Daily Mail sent along by a reader who thought I might want to blog about it. Sure, like I want to bang on about this dreary village atheist stuff.

This is really basic village atheist stuff, so make sure you get it and you won't be taken in by sophistry.

The article is titled: "Scientists discover moral compass in the brain which can be controlled by magnets." Ooh . . . wow! You can control a person's morality with magnets! It was "discovered" and by "scientists" so it must be 100% true.

Listen to the writer, who obviously gets a tingle up his leg just contemplating the possibilities:

"Scientists have discovered a real-life 'moral compass' in the brain that controls how we judge other people's behaviour.

The region, which lies just behind the right ear, becomes more active when we think about other people's misdemeanours or good works.

In an extraordinary experiment, researchers were able to use powerful magnets to disrupt this area of the brain and make people temporarily less moral.

The study highlights how our sense of right and wrong isn't just based on upbringing, religion or philosophy - but by the biology of our brains."

So here we clearly have an entry in the "Stupidist Argument to Get Published This Year" contest. We have a perfect example of why reading newspapers makes you less intelligent.

So what do we have here?

1. The brain is affected by powerful magnets.

Of course it is also affected by electric shocks, alcohol and LSD. But let's stay with the argument; this is a "discovery" after all.

2. A certain region of the brain gets active when we think about moral evaluation.

Well, you wouldn't expect the brain to be utterly inactive when thinking, would you?

3. The scientists were able to use magnets to disrupt brain activity and cause abnormal behavior.

Again, one wonders if these "scientists" have ever been to a bar. Brains get disrupted by all sorts of stimuli and wierd behaviour results. It happens every night of the week. Did they get a grant to discover this? But so far, this has been relatively lucid, if banal, and a true statement of facts. But now it suddenly gets utterly loopy.

4. The study highlights how our sense of right and wrong isn't just based on upbringing, religion or philosophy . . .

Say what? The fact that you can use some sort of physical force (from a magnet to a club to a perfume to a sight to a whatever) to alter brain activity and cause unusual behavior means what again? That morality is not inscribed on our brains by upbringing, religion or philosophy?

OK, this is totally off base. First, of all, my upbringing involved a swat side the head from time to time that inscribed on my brain some pretty basic morality involving not torturing smaller siblings pretty effectively. So the magnet thing is not exactly much of a surprise. I'm quite sure if my mother had had magnets she would have used them too. Second, the fact that a malignant, foreign force acting on your brain makes you act funny has nothing whatsoever to do with how you acted prior to the magnet - alcohol - LSD or whatever hit you. And it has nothing to do with the origin of the moral beliefs you held.

5. The study highlights how our sense of right and wrong isn't just based on upbringing, religion or philosophy - but by the biology of our brains.

So morality is "nothing but" brain chemistry because a part of our brain is involved in the thought process of moral discrimination. Isn't that kind of like saying that making the winning move in a chess game is "nothing but" the physical process of tendons and muscles causing the hand to pick up a Queen and put on another square? Really? It is nothing but brain chemistry? Just because we use our brains to think about morality?

Some poor scientists out there are so desperate to prove there is no God or natural morality that they go into spasms every time we discover a new fact about the way God designed us or a new way to re-wire and screw up the well-designed human body. Why? Because they think that as long as we have a comprehensible material and efficient cause for something, we are justified in ignoring the formal and final cause of it.

I refuse to think about final cause. Hum, hum, hum . . . I can't hear you.

Very deep.