The Precursors of Dominion Theology
Introduction
The argument I am making in this chapter is that by thoroughly analyzing the changes, tensions, and contradictions within the metanarratives of the Western culture over the last two centuries, it becomes inevitable that a Christian counterculture of dominion theology would emerge. I was emphatic in the introduction regarding the importance of a cross-disciplinary approach to properly understanding the context and emergence of dominion theology. Consequently, this chapter is more like a mountain climb than the trail-walking of the previous chapters, but it should be a rewarding climb if you persevere. It is probably the most difficult chapter in the book and the most technical one and, as such, is probably not suited to every reader, so feel free to skip forward as required or even omit it altogether if your interest is more specifically with dominion theology.
Theology, Philosophy, and Culture
The first point to make is that it is a frequent fallacy of evangelical theologians to pay insufficient attention to the zeitgeist of their situation in time and to give an ahistorical account of the church in time, sometimes ingeniously described as “prophetically energized interpretation of historical facts.”[1] Divine providence becomes a means by which one sidesteps their culture, whereas I have previously argued theology is strongly associated, influenced, and influences the intellectual and cultural milieu.[2] It is also an error of the late modern period, with its mythological evolutionary scientism, to desire to reinterpret the entire past in terms of the present with nothing but the “autonomous mind of man.”[3]
We will comment more on this at the end of the chapter, but for now, the point we are making is that both modernism and postmodernism, modernity and postmodernity, collided in this era, and it is for this reason that this chapter undertakes a philosophical overview of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to properly provide the historical context and intellectual diagnosis of the era.[4]
The Rise and Fall of Science
The early decades of the twentieth century in the Western academy were marked, perhaps defined, by the analytic philosophy of Moore and Russell, which argued for a rigorously empiricist theory of knowledge and was forcefully dismissive of any “higher way of knowing” by religious experience.[5] Russell went on to be a key personality within the Vienna Circle during the 1930s and in the development of the anti-metaphysical tenor of its logical positivism, which downgraded religious experience as non-cognitive nonsense.[6] The Circle had issued a manifesto entitled (when translated into English) “The Scientific View of the World.”[7]
Science was to be elevated to scientism, and it was the application of the principles of logical positivism, the (not “a”) scientific view of the world, which would solve all the problems of humanity by liberating it from its bondage caused by the metaphysical pollution of culture.[8] So, Russell was to assert in his apologetic that questions of fact can only be decided by the empirical methods of science . . . questions that can be decided without appeal to experience are either mathematical or linguistic.[9]
This was a form of what became known as the “verification principle” that a proposition in any sphere of culture (not just religion and science) was meaningful if and only if it was capable of empirical testing. This was a cathartic, intoxicating, and radical principle that, from the mid-1930s for the next two decades, exerted a huge influence across the humanities and the sciences; any proposition or theory that failed this test was jettisoned as “non-sense.” Any talk of theological and spiritual matters obviously failed this criterion, an empirical test for God or for God’s action in the world was precluded by the very concept of God, and the positivist summary of religious thought was it makes “non-sense” to talk about a being called God or of God acting in the world. However, the principle also caught the theories of the softer social sciences and the speculative or mathematical sciences, who struggled to find empirical ways of understanding their disciplines that they might be on the side of “sense.” The purge was on, and it was real, but that was the price to pay to enter the New Age, where science was to reign.
Yet, its thousand-year reign was abridged to but twenty years with the forceful demonstration of Quine, one of the movement’s own philosophers, that the principle itself was self-defeating. It had exempted the principle itself from the criteria asserted by the principle—we cannot go into nature and find a “verification principle,” so on that basis, it makes no sense to talk about a verification principle.[10] In fact, and this became a general realization amongst many of the critics, any rational principle was problematic on the verificationist basis, and attempts to relax or reformulate the principle to admit the common idioms of analytic thought and scientific practice were seen to either exclude too much or were too rigid, voiding its efficacy as a methodological basis for distinguishing science from “non-science” and “non-sense.” In other words, logical positivism itself was exposed as a “thorough going metaphysics [denying] all metaphysics.”[11]
It must be emphasized that Quine had, from within empiricism, offered this comprehensive rebuttal of logical positivism. He had demonstrated that the verification principle required working outside of the empiricist framework; it was a brutal self-contradiction, a metaphysical dogma.[12] Quine’s essay really marked the end of the movement and the “tyranny of empiricism”; even though Quine himself remained a sophisticated empiricist, he argued that no theory could reach the level of sufficient attestation that it could be considered “true” in an objective sense, but as long as it was useful in solving problems or explaining the world, the theory might be maintained.[13] Quine’s influence was itself enormous in the postpositivist era, with his development of scientific naturalism and epistemological holism, where he asserted that we always “see the world” in terms of a theory of nature. Furthermore, there are many possible theories of nature that have equivalent claims as adequate explanations of phenomena; as the “data” of phenomena builds up, some theories may no longer be adequate and can be dispensed with. This was a radical departure from the mythology surrounding a science as the sole source of truth.
In short, there was a plurality of possible theories of nature: each might be considered “empirically adequate” in describing phenomena; none could be asserted ahead of time as being the “true” account. Equally importantly, other philosophers of science contemporary to Quine, such as Kuhn, further undermined the claim that only the scientific was synonymous with the rational. Kuhn had argued persuasively that science operated within a specific cultural context, was non-linear, and had unavoidable subjective dimensions; it was not the truth but merely represented milestones on the way to a better understanding of the world.[14]
That is, something of the “tyranny of science”[15] was arrested during this era, with many of the softer sciences and the humanities liberating themselves from the physicalism of positivism and the scientific naturalism that was replacing it. The argument had been reframed to a far more restrained and measured discourse regarding philosophical and “scientific” naturalism, arguing that any concept of God is unnecessary and irrelevant in understanding or describing the natural operation of the universe in the latter half of the twentieth century; science was in fact “neutral” on metaphysical questions—it was beyond the competency of science to answer those questions.[16]
Yet, those questions were still asked elsewhere in the academy and one of the dominant critiques of religious thought originated immediately after the positivist era in the non-positivistic analytic atheism in the philosophy of Flew and Mackie.[17] Flew and Mackie were not so much “scientific” in their critique but were evidentialist and rational in their intellectual approach, arguing that the beliefs of theists and Christians, specifically, were irrational. Both had argued this on the basis of the argument from evil, that the existence of a good, omnipotent God was logically incompatible with the presence of evil in the world, a position first argued by Epicurus around 300 BC and emphatically restated by E in his Natural Religion.[18]
Their work was immediately attractive to the subsequent philosophical naturalism, so that even if scientific naturalism could be neutral, it was seldom true in practice by virtue of the prejudices of the practitioners, and they quickly began incorporating these critiques as part of the continuing assault on the plausibility of the God hypothesis. As religious groups began asserting their rights to be heard in the public square during the 1970s and 1980s, culture generally never tired of pitting the enlightened practice of “science” against the bigotry of the religious fundamentalist.[19] It was not long before the duel with philosophical and scientific naturalism was given crude expression in “New Atheism”[20]—a “strong scientism,” the belief that science provides the “only . . . source of knowledge of the world, or alternatively, that the only questions worth asking were those that science could answer.”[21] For all intents and purposes, the academy and its apologists had reverted to the working premise of logical positivism that the concept of God was irrational and incoherent.
However, such dogmatism struggled for credibility in the postmodern world; few, now, find such scientism persuasive or compelling and New Atheism is already considered a historical movement, barely making it a decade in the public consciousness.[22] Most philosophers now admit sources of knowledge outside of the constraints of scientific naturalism. Indeed, Plantinga demonstrated forcefully that the premises of philosophical naturalism do not even support theoretically a comprehensive science but mitigate against it. Plantinga, in his critique, made much of “Darwin’s doubt”; we might paraphrase it thus: If our reasoning, hence our science, is but a natural process, why should I believe the conclusions of my reasoning any more than that of the reasonings of a monkey? Or put another way, the boundaries of nature ensure we can never get outside of nature to establish an abstract science explaining nature.[23]
Instead, epistemological pluralism and holism now stand in stark contrast to the crudeness of New Atheism. Most philosophers are far more cautious regarding the scope of our problems, which science might have the competence to solve, and for the purposes of our argument here, it was certainly no longer “unscientific” or “irrational” to hold to the Christian worldview.[24] Modern naturalistic science destroys itself as a system or purveyor of knowledge and reduces to logical nonsense. It is of little surprise that cultural confidence in science had collapsed to a large degree by the middle of the 1990s.[25]
The Collapse of the Liberal World Order
Disillusionment following the Balkan wars of 1912/13 and then World War I in 1914 in Europe precipitated the collapse of classical liberal optimism and utopianism, being replaced by the Nietzschean “will to power” as the replacement metanarrative in the cultural powerhouse of Europe, the German republic.[26] Even though Germany had been defeated in WWI and the settlement after had deliberately disadvantaged Germany, it only succeeded in radicalizing its intelligentsia and enabling the rise of the National Socialists, who then dramatically rebuilt the nation, economically and politically. It is a paradoxical fact that though the Allies went to war again with Germany, Lord Keynes agreed with the Nazi critique of Western economics and adopted it as fundamental to his economic thought postwar.[27]
The core belief was that totalitarianism was a natural and efficient means of delivering a new humanist world order free of bourgeois sentimentalism.[28] The universalizing ideologies of Nazism and Communism came together in a pact during the 1930s, precipitating the Holocaust as rite of passage. Their central modern premise was a complete belief in the power of reason to “create an ordered world in which the unpredictability and chaos of [irrationality] would give way to paradise.”[29]
The New Humanist World Order
In this context, it is not accidental that Roosevelt’s willingness to cede Eastern Europe to a friendly Soviet Union indicated the strength of his implicit support of its humanism.[30] An uncomfortable, barely remembered fact is that Soviet dissidents post-Second World War experienced mass deportations from the West to Russia after the Yalta agreement, regardless of their personal wishes, and more Russians died at the hands of Stalin because of this agreement than were ever killed by the Nazis.[31]
With such a common unity of purpose to create a New World Order, it is no longer a bare economic fact that American loans to the Eastern bloc communist regimes during the Cold War are evidence for many dissidents that “America was the greatest ally to the Soviet Union.”[32] Rushdoony was able to describe at book length why “Washington is as humanistic as Moscow.”[33] Western capitalism had lost its Christian humanitarian roots of creating and sustaining wealthy cultures, and by 1947 it became simply a means of generating as much profit as possible; the Western dream became one of unprincipled and unbridled materialism.[34] A militant secular humanism had become entrenched in both the Western and communist blocs, and it was inevitable that a reaction within Christian thought was to emerge.
Late Modern Christian Thought
Theology was in a state of flux as it wrestled with theological liberalism during the nineteenth century. The rise of an alleged scientific “rationalism” and the metanarrative of Darwinism in the West during this period had precipitated the crumbling of past religious certainties.[35] The choice was clear: embrace the new scientific world order or retreat into allegorizing Scripture and existentialism in an attempt to hold onto faith despite the “overwhelming” scientific evidence against it.[36]
Barthianism resembled the latter; fundamentalism was the “scientific” response of conservative Christianity.[37] Fundamentalism, once it had moved beyond its anti-intellectual populist beginning period, was characterized by one commentator as “modernists swimming against the tide.”[38] It was rigorously methodical and rational with, in Warfield, a ring-fenced doctrine of inspiration that was beyond refutation, being based on an impeccable modern logical position bereft of any substantive appeal to religious experience.[39] It was about doctrinal purity and demanded, like the political movements, rigorous and uncompromising commitment to the normative creed.
However, ultimately, the effort was unsuccessful as modernism collapsed into totalitarianism and the Fundamentals of 1917 became the final statement of conservative academic theology within the mainstream universities before leaving the harlot Babylon to her inevitable judgment.[40] There followed cultural ghettoization and intellectual withdrawal of the dispensationalist fundamentalist movement proper from social and intellectual action for approximately the period of 1920–1970.[41] The Reformed seminaries did not fare much better with the split of Machen from Princeton over its embrace of theological liberalism and then the subsequent splits from Machen over even finer points of doctrine, leading to a fragmentation of Presbyterianism in the US; and it was again to be the 1970s before Rushdoony was to offer his reformer’s vision.
Politically and culturally, secular humanism and its stepsister, the “social gospel” movement, were having it mostly their own way, and if there was an evangelical vision for culture “as a whole,” it was simply to facilitate the preaching of the gospel by any means necessary before the imminent return of the Lord. Rushdoony describes this place of Christian history thus:
Scripture is stripped of its total message and reduced to a soulsaving manual. Matters of law respecting crime, the use of the land, money, weights, property, diet, civil government, and all things else are set aside to concentrate on soul-saving only. If now Christian schools are started by some of these groups, too often their essential purpose is to further soul-saving.[42]
The Rise and Collapse of Postmodernism
So, in summary we see that within the political culture generally, the story of the early twentieth century for the West was an emphatic rejection of the religious metanarrative and a radical embrace of humanism and modernism in various forms as the century progressed. Yet, such positions were sustained only by what can be described as an irrational confidence in the absolute rationality of reason, and it was soon to be challenged:
But what if reason or rationality itself rests on belief? Then it would be the case that the opposition between reason and belief was a false one, and that every situation of contest should be recharacterized as a quarrel between two sets of belief with no possibility of recourse to a mode of deliberation that was not itself an extension of belief.[43]
The “post-modernists” who first began to appear in the 1960s recognized this implicit circularity of an unqualified confidence in reason and balked at this as epistemological totalitarianism.[44]
So, who and what were the postmodernists? “Postmodernism,” especially philosophical postmodernism, is sometimes considered as a post-WWII movement, but it had been used first in schools of art, which Lyotard, the philosopher of the later movement, claimed went all the way back to Duchamp in 1912. Duchamp posited that a painter need not make a painting to be an artist. Similarly, if the location of an object was in an art gallery, the institution of the gallery bequeathed upon it the status of “art”; it could indeed just be a pile of bricks or an empty room where the light switches on and off.[45] In other words, in common parlance, talk of “modern art” often refers to postmodern art.
However, philosophical postmodernism began finding its philosophical feet during the 1970s and was brought into focus and mainstream Anglo-American academia (it was already well-established in the “Continental” academies) with the 1984 publication of the English translation of Lyotard’s La condition (Fr. 1979). At around the same time as Lyotard published in French, American Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty’s Mirror (1979) was published as a repudiation of modern philosophy; he became one of postmodernism’s most colorful, forceful, and iconoclastic advocates.
It was no surprise that the intellectual rebellion of the postmodernists came to the fore in the postwar period. It had just been preceded with the carnage of Nazism and Communism, and it was clear that modernism was having its own crisis by pursuing its own secularizing and universalizing presuppositions to their inevitable and logical conclusion in the Holocaust. The radical intellectual flight from reason in reaction to these failed promises of modernism gave special impetus to postmodernism in the postwar period. It first manifested in the rebellion and optimistic cultural spontaneity of the economic boom of the 1960s but rapidly descended into a sharp cynicism that was distinctive of the recession that followed in the West during the 1970s. Lyotard, considered the seminal thinker of philosophical postmodernism, would have surrendered all hope of certainty on principle (if he thought there were any principles to be had) but wanted us to stay hopeful nevertheless: “It must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.”[46]
Lyotard’s cryptic and uncommitted aphorism is perhaps representative; postmodern discourse became exemplified in finding a way to use a lot of words to not really say anything formally, but that was the point.[47] It was the organic process of philosophizing that the conceivable might appear. Derrida’s lectures became known for their long, rambling nature—if you were looking for a “point” to the lecture, you were already missing the point. As Lyotard makes clear, the rambles are still allusions to that which cannot be presented; paralogism was endorsed as philosophical method.[48] By design, we are supremely subjective and eschew even the possibility of objectivity as bourgeois false consciousness.[49]
Thus, this can readily be catastrophic to scholarship, with its implicit vagueness and renunciation of analytic clarity, perhaps demonstrated well by the “Sokal hoaxes,” where fake papers advancing bizarre “postmodern” theses were accepted for publication in leading postmodern journals. “Sokal squared” was a similar recently repeated exercise concentrating on the nascent gender and CRT disciplines. Despite the ridiculousness and lack of critical peer assessment exposed by the fakery (it would indeed be difficult to understand what the process of peer review might mean for the postmodernist journal other than censoring works with a cogent argument as bourgeois), the academics were unrepentant, labeling it “an attack of the Right.”[50]
In what might be seen as the desire to avoid such excesses, Rorty took a different track than the abstraction of the Continental postmodernists and was the focus of an “Americanization” of the postmodern movement by combining it with Deweyan pragmatism. Rorty also demonstrated a strong desire to generate some kind of ethical program despite initially becoming and remaining famous as at the vanguard of the crusade against truth.[51] Lyotard was said to be unhappy with this turn but with Rorty, pragmatism, pluralism, and relativism entered the cultural mainstream and the denial of the possibility of objective truth became the working hypothesis of the academy. Rorty, I would argue, was the patron saint of postmodern philosophers (whereas Nietzsche might be considered the patron saint of postmodernism in general[52]). Liked and loathed in equal measures, he was the most-cited philosopher by the early 1990s, becoming known for his rejection of “truth” and a disdain of his own discipline. He migrated into a new field combining literary criticism and philosophy but remained the favorite philosopher of the Left up until his death (2007).[53]
Though Rorty tried to mitigate the Continental postmodern deconstructionism so influential in literary criticism by moving postmodernism in the direction of pragmatism, Rorty himself had described the human condition as one of “irony.”[54] However, for those less sophisticated in thought than Rorty, this “irony” all too readily decayed into a despairing negativity that life just happens, and we are powerless in any real sense to understand and shape the world. Of course, the supreme irony for the postmodernist is that implicit within their view is the reciprocal form of the very same truth fallacy from which they were seeking to escape: to deny any concept of truth is stated as an absolute truth.[55] This then functions as an effective axiom of their postmodernist framework.[56]
With all this paralogism celebrated and on full display, Lyotard prophetically foresaw that despite this effervescence of postmodernism during this period, there was a desire for the terror of the modern illusion of analysis, certainty, and objectivity to return, and the counterreaction of modernism, as postmodernists prophesied of its demise, was swift.[57] It was a particular totalizing and caustic counterreaction of modernism to its alleged demise, borrowing from postmodernism the dispensing of the nicety of reasoned discourse, to be replaced with, as we have previously seen, a relentless polemic and mockery of one’s opponents. This was exemplified by the New Atheist polemic against any and all religion. Yet, now, there were the additional dimensions of cultural Marxism: deplatforming and censorship. Postmodernists were also identified with a refusal to challenge critically, with those opinions deemed unacceptable on unargued but “deeply held” a priori criteria. Indeed, with subjectivity as central to our understandings of ourselves, your position was valid because it was your position and any attempt to argue from principle against you was equated with a refusal to permit your fundamental right to psychic calm and was therefore “violence.” The point being that if my belief was “deeply held,” you have no right to challenge it, and it was “violence” to attempt to do so.
In other words, as postmodernism decayed into this crude cultural form, it manifested in identity politics and dispensed with the need to argue and justify your position. For the Marxist, verbal “violence” could be met with physical violence as a form of self-defense. Mixed with this kind of cultural Marxism, the most demanding of modernisms, this quickly degenerated into the simple division of “oppressed” and “oppressor” and the “othering” of those with whom you disagree. The postmodern component is the belief that you are so “othered” from me that we can have no argument because our language and worldviews are incommensurate.[58] The Marxist component is that this “othering” is your way of keeping me in a state of perpetual oppression and I must resort to revolutionary action to overthrow that, and we certainly do not have to have a debate about it.
This provided a lens through which to view all interpersonal and international relations, and the oppressed could use any means necessary, including violence, to liberate themselves. Thus, far from being a tool of hope and pluralism, freeing thought from modernist tyranny, postmodernism had paradoxically become an instrument of neo-Marxist apologetics that obviated the imperative to have an argued position and, instead, divided people on the basis of their immutable and incommensurate characteristics.
Put another way, the problem for the postmodernist is rather like the problem Wittgenstein (who is often viewed as helpful to the postmodernist cause in other respects) posited at the end of the Tractatus, that we have used this ladder to climb up to this place but then have to pull the ladder up after us because we realize that if what we have concluded is true, then it is illegitimate to have climbed up using the ladder that we did. This point was not lost on some postmodernists, who readily subscribe to a paralogical conception of reality, because starting from “logical” presuppositions, as Wittgenstein did, nevertheless terminated in self-contradiction. Life (and philosophy) is clearly more than logic, and I will architect it myself.
In summary, then, as a positive, postmodernism has some valuable insights that serve to reign in the totalizing modernisms of the twentieth century (such as fascism and communism). In its most holistic mode, work in the humanities and, to a significant degree, the sciences can be usefully assessed for its sensitivity to postmodernity and postmodernism; in such a mode, its influence is now much more measured, and it serves now to help us to recognize “the limitations of our modern premises.”
However, as an overwhelming negative, postmodernism, when combined with cultural Marxism, as it often naturally has been, being a movement predominantly of the Left, has paradoxically exerted a coercive rather than a liberating influence on scholarship. It is woefully inadequate and poorly defined as a system of thought in itself as it denigrates “systems of thought.” Rorty’s attempted combination of postmodernism with American pragmatism provides something of a way forward for postmodern thought beyond the abstract, intellectual Continental deconstructionism. Yet, few in the movement have the erudition or intellectual nuance of Rorty, who, in later years, was content to be described as a “bourgeois” thinker and presumably an enemy of the movement he nurtured to adulthood. Rorty was an embodiment of the postmodern dilemma; it is rather like trying to argue that breathing is illegitimate, though all that time you are breathing whilst you delegitimize breathing through breathed words. So, in Docherty, for example, he describes postmodernism as a “mood, not a period,” and woe to us if we are swayed too easily by moods![59] There is still plenty of postmodernism in culture at large, but it is philosophically incoherent (with some postmodernists “reveling” in this very feature), its limitations now well exegeted, especially by those whose disciplines it criticized so severely.[60]
Thus, if the choice before us is one of logic, or perhaps better, logos versus postmodern paralogism, then we, as Christians, must surely choose logos, and this is freely admitted as a metaphysical commitment— my faith informs my reason at this point.[61] Similarly, as an analytic philosopher, I argue you need to understand how to live according to the design plan correctly—yes, I believe in objectivity—to live a long life; you understand the rules of the game and play it according to those rules.[62] As a Christian, I view those “rules” as the law of God, and following those, you will succeed. This is part of the case we build in the subsequent chapters and is fundamental to the philosophical and theological underpinnings of dominion theology.[63]
Concluding Summary
This has been the most demanding and complicated chapter of the book so far, as we have been very ambitious in trying to decode the philosophical and cultural milieu of the last two hundred years. There will be plenty with the chronology and inferences that we have made that some will readily object to, but far fewer will argue with what we conclude here as we gather our thoughts. The state of human civilization as the new millennium approached was characterized by “autophagic capitalism” and the bloody Marxist wreckage of the “rotting offal of modernity.”[64]
This absolute descent of secular civilization into two world wars, multiple further conflicts along ideological lines, the Cold War, the bankruptcy of academia, the rootlessness of postmodernity, and the correlative pessimistic and cynical turn of evangelical Christian eschatological thought demanded a response. The emergence of Rushdoony’s Reconstructionism in this period was the movement in which intellectual and social discontent turned to action. It is to his role in the Reconstructionist movement and its formative nature for dominion theology that is the subject of the next chapter.
The Emergence of Modern
[1] C. Peter Wagner, “Foreword,” in Hamon, Eternal Church, 12. Though this book has much to commend it, it has a single sentence on Reconstructionism—hardly an adequate assessment of a major realignment in theology of the church.
[2] Macneil, “Scripture and Post-Darwinian Controversy.”
[3] Rushdoony, Mythology of Science, 1–4; Rushdoony, Limits of Reason, loc. 88.
[4] “Modernity” and “modernism” are readily separated as distinct categories—modernity refers to the technologies of the era, those sociological aspects that result from the innovations of the era; modernism refers to the set of ideas and philosophy. With “postmodernity” and “postmodernism,” this separation has not been maintained; most writers use the terms indiscriminately. See Lyon, Postmodernity, 6–7.
[5] Russell’s basic philosophical text that served as a primer for a generation of philosophy students is The Problems of Philosophy. Moore was famous for his rigorous analytic method and his Defense of Common Sense. He had an entire issue of the Philosophy journal published in his honor at his death; it was his rigorous method rather than his conclusions that had generated such admiration. See also Russell, Western Philosophy, 789.
[6] It is important to distinguish logical positivism from the “paleopositivism” of Auguste Comte a century earlier, but both forms of positivism emphatically rejected metaphysics and elevated science to scientism (“the only questions that are legitimate and are worth asking are those that science can answer”); Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 56–58.
[7] Carnap et al., Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, 75–116. This is the English translation of the original by Stadler and Uebel.
[8] This supreme confidence of the logical positivists that they were right and the last word in philosophy (Wittgenstein had famously retired from philosophy after “solving” all of its problems in his Tractatus) is captured in Ayer’s foreword to the 2nd edition of his Language, Truth and Logic (1946). He had introduced logical positivism to the English-speaking world in 1936 after he had attended meetings of the Vienna Circle, who themselves had developed the ideas of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Russell’s logicism. He admits to being overzealous in the first edition and still later was to retreat from the veracity of most of what he had written therein but maintained it had served a “valuable cathartic purpose.”
[9] Russell, “Logical Positivism,” 367.
[10] Quine, “Two Dogmas.” This is generally considered to be one of the most influential papers published in the twentieth century and is still mandatory reading for philosophy of science students and, in my experience, those of many other disciplines.
[11] Rushdoony, Limits of Reason, loc. 111.
[12] Quine was mentored by and collaborated with Rudolf Carnap, one of the most influential of the logical positivists. See Macneil, Foundations, where there is substantial attention given to Quine.
[13] Though a point more suited for the philosophical discussions of my Foundations, Quine was arguing for something distinct from pragmatism, though you might argue the practical implications of his position would be similar. He was rather making a rational proposition: he was arguing that no one need ever relinquish their theory; they could always “reinterpret” any fact or new data to fit in with the framework of their theory or modify their theory in some way to accommodate anomalies and new facts. This absolutely destroys any claim that scientific theories give you objective accounts or truths about nature, or that one theory is implicitly better than another on a purely rational basis; the theory is always tested against the world.
[14] By “non-linear,” it is meant that many traditional accounts of science had (and still do) present scientists as building on one another’s work, e.g., Einstein built on Newton, who himself had said, “If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants” (letter to Robert Hooke on Feb. 5, 1675, in the archive of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania). What was so radical in Kuhn was that he had asserted that Einsteinian physics had usurped Newtonian physics, and Copernicus had usurped Ptolemy, replacing the previous theory with an entirely new paradigm, frequently contradictory and unrelated to what went before it—it was a revolution of thought, not an evolution. Kuhn fully expected Einsteinian physics to be usurped by another revolution within the scientific community.
Kuhn’s Scientific Revolutions is another example of required reading for the philosopher of science, and its basic thesis has been adopted by many outside of the discipline of science to “protect” their discipline from the tyrannizing instincts of the academic scientists. It is somewhat ironic that Kuhn’s lasting legacy has been felt outside of science in the humanities, as subsequent philosophers of science highlighted the ambiguity, the implicit relativism, and the imprecision of his language in the Revolutions. However, it was cogent and persuasive enough to have been seen as broadly applicable to the other disciplines in defending them against the charges of irrationality in their rejection of the primacy of a “scientific” methodology for the grounding of their discipline. See my Foundations for a broader discussion of Kuhn.
[15] A term most immediately associated with another highly influential and controversial philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend. It was a theme he returned to repeatedly during his colorful career, stated first in his Against Method and in his last publication (a composite of a lecture series) the Tyranny of Science, before dying prematurely of a brain tumor. Few assaulted the elevated mythology of science in our culture so directly and described the dangers of unfettered scientism as Feyerabend, and he, too, is required reading for philosophers of science.
[16] Plantinga, Science, Religion and Naturalism, ix.
[17] Flew’s Theology and Falsification is generally thought (and in his own words in the retrospective, There Is a God, ixv–xv) to mark the rebirth of analytic atheism and, paradoxically, analytic theism by pioneering a post-positivist manner of speaking about God. See also Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” 200–212. This was considered a rebuttal of the staple “free will defense” of the theist for the existence of evil; the issue that remains part of the atheist critique of Christian thought especially, though most philosophers would consider now Mackie’s rebuttal itself successfully rebutted by Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga in his God, Freedom, and Evil. See also Macneil, Augustine and Plantinga.
[18] Epicurus’s dilemma is stated thus: “If God is good, he would want a world free of evil and if he is omnipotent, he would use his power to remove it. The fact there is evil in the world, indicates either that God is impotent, or that he is unwilling, and therefore not good.” Many a Calvinist would resolve the dilemma by adding in an additional premise to resolve the paradox, arguing if there is evil in the world, it is because it serves the purposes of God and God permits it. The how or why evil is permitted in that way remains hidden in the purposes of God, that is the extremely psychologically uncomfortable terminus (particularly from the perspective of those who witness or have endured severe abuse or hardship), which would also seem to be the central message of the magisterial book of Job.
[19] Professor James Barr published his Fundamentalism in 1977, with a substantive revision in 1982. This was perhaps the defining critique of the era, being freely quoted in many subsequent publications critical of “conservative evangelicalism” both academic and popular. Despite his substantial reputation, his analysis in this work was flawed in important places, and he failed to distinguish fundamentalists from other conservative evangelicals (considering the terms synonymous) as we were careful to do at the beginning of our discussion in this book. See also: Macneil, Fundamentals and Fundamentalism.
[20] Taylor, “New Atheists.”
[21] Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens were affectionately known as the “Four Horsemen of the [atheist] apocalypse.” New atheism was known for its supreme confidence in its views and its derisive dismissal of all who disagreed with them, even if their opponents, too, were arguing on an atheological basis about different models of evolutionary theory. See Macneil, Foundations, §3.3.5, 68.
[22] It is even more noteworthy that Dawkins now describes himself as a “cultural Christian,” in preference to the alternative of radical Islam.
[23] For a much fuller discussion of these philosophical issues surrounding science, see Macneil, Foundations, §3.3.7.
[24] However, much more would need to be said as to why the Christian worldview is the only fully rational worldview rather than just a competitor in the postmodern marketplace. This argument was the subject of my doctoral studies and is developed in my Foundations.
[25] In the era of television advertising, certain domestic appliance advertisements removed the “scientists” with their white laboratory coats because of the public suspicion over science. The COVID pandemic was also another example of what happens when science gets tyrannical and out of control; see Macneil, “Great COVID Caper.”
[26] Nietzsche, Wille zur Macht. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche bridged the divide between Nietzsche and Nazism by assembling this work from fragments of Nietzsche’s unpublished work. It should be noted than many Nietzschean scholars object to this association of Nietzsche with Nazism, citing his sister’s “Nazification” of his work, but is undeniable that Nietzsche had a willing audience amongst the Nazis and the fascist movements, including Hitler and Mussolini. Kuyper was to write after the close of WWI, “The rising sun to the up-and-coming generation of Germany . . . today everything revolves around Nietzsche” (Kuyper, Blurring of the Boundaries, 366).
[27] Quoted in Rushdoony, “Money, Inflation, and Morality.”
[28] The pervasive influence of Darwinism here should not be underestimated, both biologically (in the eugenics movement, that still had strong, open support in the 1960s as a foundational ideology to the family planning movement), in historicism (in Marxism), and here, sociopolitically. Some, indeed, saw the working out of evolutionary processes with almost a metaphysical or religious pretheoretical commitment to Darwin, with one of the greatest evolutionists of the modern era, Stephen Gould, writing in his Punctuated Equilibrium, “It is a metaphysical commitment we make” (145).
This means that the evidence for evolution is that there is no evidence (Gould, Punctuated Equilibrium, 116).This was in response to the embarrassment, he describes, that the fossil record with all its large gaps does not support a view of a gradual change of species. He used the Marxist concept of “revolution,” that the jumps in the record were periods of rapid change, followed by quiet periods of no change—hence the gaps in the fossil record. As I noted in my Foundations, §3.3.5, this is a master class in sophistry being beyond both proof and refutation, and the bitter feud between Dawkins, Gould, and their disciples continues to this day, despite Gould passing in 2002. Thus, my conclusion expressed there is that evolutionism is a metaphysical dogma in its entirety, despite its cosmetic dressing in scientific clothes.
[29] McGrath, Passion for Truth, 182–83.
[30] Dallek, “Roosevelt’s Relationship [sic] Stalin,” para. 1.
[31] Bethell, Last Secret. Nicholas Bethell is better known as Baron Lord Bethell and was a hereditary pier in the British House of Lords until his death in 2007. See also, Rushdoony, “Christian Reconstruction 1 and 2.”
[32] Rushdoony, “Humanist Order.”
[33] Rushdoony, Christianity and the State, loc. 1430.
[34] Cope, “Business and Economics.”
[35] Bahnsen, “Calvin and Postmillennialism,” para. 1–5.
[36] Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology, 35–44.
[37] It is perhaps more accurate to argue that academic Protestantism generated a scholarly response to theological liberalism in what became the 4-volume set edited by Torrey (1917) but had been published in various journals previously. This was eponymously named “The Fundamentals,” but this does not seem to be the origin of the term “fundamentalist,” which was rather coined by newspaper columnists around the same time and referred to a particular style of populist, non-academic evangelist. Many of the first generation of “fundamentalists” were anti-intellectual and vocally opposed to the academy as an expression of the harlot Babylon, which provides good evidence that the academy was not the origin of the term. I examine the issue of fundamentalism in my “Scripture and the Post-Darwinian Controversy.”
[38] Lawrence, Defenders of God, 27.
[39] It should be noted that Warfield (contra Barr) was not a fundamentalist himself but an orthodox, conservative Presbyterian of Princeton Theological Seminary. However, his defense of the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture became formative for the fundamentalist position. Additionally, the commonsense realism, so influential in the Princeton epistemology, meant it was very sensitive to the imperative of having a scientific respectability for the apologetic; see Macneil, Foundations, §3.5.4–3.5.6. See also Warfield, “Inspiration,” in Writings.
[40] Torrey and Dixon, Fundamentals.
[41] Lloyd-Jones, What Is an Evangelical?, 49; Stott, Involvement, 13.
[42] Rushdoony, God’s Plan for Victory, loc. 185.
[43] Fish, Free Speech, 135.
[44] For an excellent primer on postmodernism by someone observing it somewhat critically rather than being part of the movement, see Butler, Postmodernism. He echoes Docherty, whom we quote later as saying postmodernism is a “mood” rather than a movement, but brings out the link with Marxism concisely and well as “the Marxist presupposition that we are all in any case the victims of a ‘false consciousness’ brought about by ‘bourgeois’ discourse” (111).
[45] Both of these are famous examples of “postmodern art” exhibits that won prestigious prizes. See Butler, Postmodernism, 1–4.
[46] Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81.
[47] A fine exemplar of dense, postmodern prose is also found in the essay accompanying the English translation of Lyotard listed in the bibliography.
[48] As a further point of philosophical criticism, if they are “allusions,” it suggests there is still something presentable awaiting a suitable, analytic, alternative narrative. It is difficult to find coherence in Lyotard’s assertion here.
[49] Butler, Postmodernism, 2. Butler makes the point that the movement is a movement of the political left; hence, most of what is produced has a political message and that, perhaps, is its point.
[50] I give the details on the Sokal hoaxes and explore the issue of peer review more fully in Macneil, “Fake (but Peer-Reviewed).”
[51] Rorty, Ethics for Today.
[52] A case argued effectively by Blackburn in Truth, §4: “Nietzsche, the Arch Debunker.”
[53] The movement was sometimes characterized as philosophers writing poor literary criticism, and literary critics writing equally poor philosophy.
[54] Rushdoony, Limits of Reason, loc. 91; McGrath, Passion for Truth, 163–200.
[55] Rushdoony, Limits of Reason, loc. 1005–50; Fish, Free Speech, 135–36.
[56] Rhodes, “Absolute Truth.”
[57] Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81–82.
[58] Lyotard codified this in his work The Differend (1983). He considered this his most important work, but it did not find its way into English until 1990.
[59] Docherty, “Postmodernist Theory,” 479.
[60] For examples, see Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 327–48; Blackburn, Ruling Passions, 279–310. Blackburn’s Truth (2006) contains perhaps one of the most far-reaching critiques of the postmodern view, his critique even reaching as far as a footnote in Rorty’s own work.
[61] As many Christians will know, Jesus is described as the “Logos” (“Word”) in the original Greek of John 1:1. It has an obvious relation to the word “logic,” sharing the same root but is rather stronger. It refers to an overall rational principle of the universe, first appearing as a similar concept in the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 500 BC). The personification in Jesus of the concept is in line with what is stated in Col 2:3, 9 (NET): “In whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. . . . For in him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form.” You might also say “essence”—what it is about God that makes him God dwells in Christ.
[62] Macneil, Foundations, 222. Here, I discuss the relation of the Plantingian term “design plan,” which connects our knowledge of the world with the faculty of reason. The basic idea is that for cognitive functions (including our reason) that are working correctly in a suitable environment according to the way God intended, they could be relied on to give you knowledge about the world.
[63] Revisiting this section a decade later after it was first written allowed me to reorganize, tidy up, and update what is an extremely compressed account of postmodernism, but even in this updated form, it might raise more questions than it answers for the philosophy student. However, in my defense, a critique of postmodernism was not the subject of this book, I am only seeking to draw out specific themes relevant to dominion theology, which could be investigated further by the reader if desired and are argued more fully elsewhere. In that respect, a great primer on postmodernism and its relation to faith, the interest of this book, is found in Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 327–348. For issues of Christian philosophy specifically, I would be amiss not to recommend my Foundations based on my doctoral studies.
[64] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 230.