"Worldview in Conflict
Pt. 5"

Psalm 14:1-3 “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, They have done abominable works, There is none who does good. 2 The LORD looks down from heaven upon the children of men, To see if there are any who understand, who seek God. 3 They have all turned aside, They have together become corrupt; There is none who does good, No, not one.”

Introduction

In previous articles we have discussed the development of western world-views from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. The Renaissance successfully dislodged God from the center of the Western worldview, redirecting focus from a transcendent Creator-Sustainer-Redeemer to temporal man. While the Renaissance was a shift to humanistic mysticism, as it developed, the religious aspects of this humanism were discarded and the age of the Enlightenment emerged. The influence of Deism, faith in the power of human reason, confidence in technological advancement, and the conviction that all truth can be discovered through reason and scientific evaluation brought about a major shift concerning the Western world’s prevailing convictions about God, the world, and man. The Enlightenment worldview differs significantly from the Christian worldview on certain key issues (see fig. 1).

The Issue	Christian Worldview	Enlightenment Worldview
The Dilemma	A Holy God and Sinful Man	Ignorance
The Saviour	Christ	Education
The Truth	God's Revelation	Human Reasoning
The Goal	Please God	Worldly Happiness
The Hope	The Coming of Christ (looking to the future eternal)	Human Achievement-Technology (looking to the temporary and immediate)

Figure 1

The Enlightenment and United States

While some founding fathers of the United States were conservative Christians, some of the most influential men in the history of our government were Deists committed to “Enlightenment” philosophy. Thomas Jefferson edited his own edition of the Bible to better suit his philosophy. Benjamin Franklin, the father of modern American pragmatism, openly claimed to be a Deist. Thomas Paine, although a Deist, was so extreme he was accused of being an atheist. He was infatuated with the concept of “the rights of man” and authored the pamphlet, “Common Sense,” a widely circulated tract credited with encouraging the Declaration of Independence.

These men believed in a God who is transcendent, but not imminent – a sort of absentee landlord. They saw nature as a self-sustaining system with a self-contained meaning waiting to be discovered. For these founding fathers, human reason and potential was the hope of the future – the only way to bridge the gulf between the aloof, inactive God and a humanity struggling to advance.

However, among critical thinkers, the Enlightenment could not sustain such a view of human reason. Soon, its limits began to surface. In 1781, Emmanuel Kant published “The Critique of Pure Reason,” challenging both the Enlightenment view that God could be known through a self-contained system of nature and the Christian view that God could be known through Scripture. He proposed that a human being can only know by experience. That which lay beyond a person’s experience is unknowable. Such things can neither be affirmed nor denied for they cannot be scientifically demonstrated. Therefore, according to Kant, God cannot be known. There is an impassable barrier between the spiritual world (if it even exists, for it cannot be scientifically demonstrated) and the sensory world in which human beings live. Thus, in Kant’s estimation, neither human reason nor biblical revelation could yield truth.

Conclusion

The influence of Kant and philosophers who followed in his steps plunged society into an abyss of skepticism. Ironically, Kant himself believed that human beings must assume that God exists for the sake of society. Without belief in God, chaos would erupt. Nonetheless, his philosophy planted the seeds that would yield the a crop of dominant Secularism.

Next month, we will consider the rise of Secularism and its influence upon society.

- Stan McGehee Jr