{"id":1415,"date":"2025-08-16T22:00:31","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T21:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/?page_id=1415"},"modified":"2025-08-17T13:45:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T12:45:38","slug":"the-nature-character-and-purpose-of-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/phd\/the-nature-character-and-purpose-of-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nature, Character, and Purpose of Philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>2\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Nature, Character, and Purpose of Philosophy<\/h1>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/a>2.1\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Overview<\/h2>\n

In our previous discussion we minimised the distance between science and philosophy and inferred that science is inherently philosophical and vice-versa.\u00a0 \u00a0We concluded it is more a question of language and audience than a fundamental difference in the subject matter.\u00a0 We also concluded that philosophy and science are both knowledge bearing and have a referent of the entirety of human disciplines, not just the empirical sciences. \u00a0However, as confidence in the power of science was challenged by a decay in culture and world conflicts which were increasingly technologically sophisticated but no less barbaric, we recognised that the postmodern malaise had entered philosophy and science, arguing that rationality was largely arbitrary.\u00a0 In response, we recognise that this makes it imperative that Christian apologetics is able to offer a coherent answer to this scepticism, cynicism, nihilism and irrationality but in a manner consistent<\/em> with the faith it is defending, which our thesis will argue can only be presuppositional.<\/p>\n

Thus, we now need to explore how philosophy has<\/em> been conceived and then decide how it should<\/em> be conceived in that presuppositional, robust fashion that our worldview is both warranted scientifically and<\/em> philosophically. \u00a0In this chapter we deal with the former \u2018has\u2019, the next chapter deals with the latter \u2018should\u2019. \u00a0We will undertake here an historical and thematic analysis of philosophy, focussing particularly on the analytic turns of the 20th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 This is not because \u201ccontinental\u201d philosophical perspectives such as phenomenology, existentialism or post-modernism have nothing to teach us or were not of equal importance,<\/a>[150]<\/a> but simply because it would not be possible to give an account with sufficient depth of deep and complex thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre or Lyotard.<\/a>[151]<\/a>\u00a0 Our final conclusions are also not weakened by our failure to consider these; we could have based our analysis on the continental schools and come to very similar conclusions as to their failures to be coherent or adequate in the demands we want to make of philosophy in our thesis.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>2.2\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Origins<\/h2>\n

Philosophy is commonly<\/em> conceived of in the \u201cWestern tradition\u201d as starting with Thales of Miletus circa 626BC, the first of the pre-Socratic sages of Ancient Greece.\u00a0 However, it is more accurate to state that he was the first of the proto-naturalist<\/em> philosophers that attempted to explain phenomena with a reference only to what was found in nature with no recourse to supernature.\u00a0 Unsurprisingly, for Thales, on an island surrounded by water, everything was posited, naturally<\/em> enough, to be constituted of water.\u00a0 However, among his philosophical peers in his direct succession, it was not long before the implicit monism of this position fractured to give rise to a more elemental<\/em> view drawn from nature, where the basic elements became air, fire, and water.\u00a0 As strange and bizarre as the formulations of these philosophers were, these thinkers are almost universally revered with unadulterated awe as captured here by an enlightened contemporary one-time physicist:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe roots of all physics, as of all Western science, are to be found in the first period of Greek philosophy in the sixth century B.C., in a culture where science, philosophy and religion were not separated.\u00a0 The sages of the Milesian school in Ionia were not concerned with such distinctions.\u00a0 Their aim was to discover the essential nature, or real constitution, of things which they called \u2018physis\u2019.\u00a0 The term \u2018physics\u2019…meant…originally, the endeavour of seeing the essential nature of all things\u201d.<\/a>[152]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Effusive as this is, it might seem implausible to assert that all<\/em> of Western science (which we should also note included philosophy and religion) owes so much, but Professor Jonathon Barnes, once eminent professor of Ancient Philosophy at Geneva in a standard text on Early Greek philosophy offers a scholarly corrective to such critical reticence:<\/p>\n

\u201c[T]he importance of the Presocratic thinkers [lies] in their astonishing ambition and imaginative reach.\u00a0 Zeno\u2019s dizzying \u2018proofs\u2019 that motion is impossible; the extraordinary atomic theories of Democritus; the haunting and enigmatic epigrams of Heraclitus; and the maxims of Alcmaeon\u2026the thoughts of these philosophers seem strikingly modern in their concern to forge a truly scientific vocabulary<\/em> and a way of reasoning<\/em>\u201d.<\/a>[153]<\/a> (emphasis added)<\/p>\n

Now, leaving aside that Zeno made an elementary error in not distinguishing infinite time slices and finite distance; or that Democritus\u2019 atomic theories bear only a pauce linguistic similarity to chemical theories <\/a>[154]<\/a> or that the \u201cperpetual flux as taught by Heraclitus is [intellectually] painful , and science\u2026.can do nothing to refute it\u201d<\/em>;<\/a>[155]<\/a> or that the extant maxims of Alcmaeon are very few indeed; we seem to be ignoring the great philosophers of other ancient civilisations such as the Indo-Chinese empires (the advanced epistemologists Dharmottara and Ga\u1e45ge\u1e65a spring to mind <\/a>[156]<\/a> ) and the Babylonian empire (known for their astronomical measurements, not just their astrology) and the broader traditions of the Eastern \u201cwise men\u201d and sages (the \u2018wise men of the East\u2019 <\/a>[157]<\/a> ), fragments of whose literature <\/a>[158]<\/a> still survive; we must ask ourselves \u201cWhy the Greeks?\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 The answer is in that other element of ancient Greek philosophy that made it so paradigmatical for all that followed in its wake, it was its \u201cdiscovery\u201d of \u201chumanism\u201d.\u00a0 The autonomous spirit which distinguishes it is seen in the famous maxim of Protagoras (485 – 415 BC) who famously asserted \u201cMan as the measure of all things\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 This was in direct contrast to the behest of the gods, or some other supernatural composite and it is this combination which inspires such worshipful adoration from all those who crave autonomy and freedom from divine discipline or sanction.<\/p>\n

Now, the objection might be made that the designation \u201cproto-naturalism\u201d for these opening eras of Greek philosophy was anachronistic.\u00a0\u00a0 It is certainly true that I am not implying by using this designation that is does not<\/em> mean that \u201cGod\u201d or the \u201cgods\u201d disappeared from the vocabulary of these thinkers though it seems clear that by the time of the post-Socratic Epicurus it had matured into a strong materialism identified as a characteristic of modern naturalism.\u00a0 It is correct that the pre-Socratics Thales, Heraclitus, and Democritus all employed the \u201cgods\u201d as an explanatory principle, but it was to give a nominal metaphysical justification for something they were positing.\u00a0 Democritus, for example, wanted to explain the \u201cswerve\u201d in the fire atoms in terms of the activity of the gods; Thales and Heraclitus equated motion and change with divine activity evident of the immanent, animating presence of something \u201cgod\u201d or \u201cdivine\u201d in the matter itself.\u00a0 Kenny notes that Heraclitus was famous for his Logos<\/em> principle but unlike the apostle John, his logos was not personal but \u201cdivine\u201d in some abstract fashion, categorically distinct from Zeus.<\/a>[159]<\/a> \u00a0That is, the \u201cGod\u201d principle was not conceived of on the basis of a person with whom one communed or had any kind of moral obligation to, even when in the case of Heraclitus there were hints of a \u201cdivine law\u201d that should inform political<\/em> practice, the first hint of a law within nature itself.\u00a0 This is certainly of interest to us within this thesis and it is to Heraclitus\u2019 credit that he shares that ethical concern for some<\/em> kind of firm foundation for reasoning, but his Logos<\/em>, his divine principle was a logical<\/em> necessity to complete the system or to provide a fix where all rational attempts had failed, or where the light of reason had not yet been able to penetrate the metaphysical or epistemological darkness.<\/p>\n

Thus, it was only in desperation that Plato resorted to the myth of the demiurge to backfill his system of which he had been the most effective critic to prevent a total collapse and a re-surrender to the relativism and moral cynicism of the Sophists.\u00a0 His project, on this level endorsed by Aristotle, was the attempt to offer a systematic and coherent philosophy of reality to arrest what they saw as the terminal decay of Greek culture in light of the disaster of the Peloponnesian war.\u00a0 Yet he maintained a contempt for the mythology of Greece which he saw as an amplification of human traits<\/a>[160]<\/a> and not as a model of ethical purity; his famous Euthyphro dilemma was a polemic directed to address the moral scandal of the behaviour of the gods.\u00a0 Certainty regarding the objects of knowledge and the nature of reality was a prerequisite to their programme of reviving Greek culture and to counter the relativism and moral cynicism of the Sophists, but God was an addendum after the fact, an account was sought in nature and by human reason alone wherever possible.<\/a>[161]<\/a>\u00a0 Many centuries later, Pascal was to criticise Descartes in a similar manner in the period conceived of as being reanimated with the glory of Greek philosophy:<\/p>\n

\u201cI cannot forgive to Descartes that in all his philosophy he would have liked to dispense with God, but he did not accomplish to contrive to forbear God\u2019s hand in giving ever so slight a push to set the world in motion. After that, Descartes had no use for God\u2026\u201d <\/a>[162]<\/a><\/p>\n

So, in summary, we are using the term \u201cproto-naturalist\u201d to characterise the mood and general drift of Greek philosophy rather than as a precise analytic term; naturalism is unequivocally a notoriously elastic term.\u00a0 Even when qualified as one of many, mutually exclusive naturalisms, it evades coherence. \u00a0Thus, the noted philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen,<\/a>[163]<\/a> who I would argue distilled down naturalism into a single phrase like \u201cthere is no such being as God\u201d<\/em> and writing later in a Christian context, it was a specific<\/em> conception of God which would consequently classify as \u201cnaturalisms\u201d many forms of thought that would claim to have a theistic basis or would use the word \u201cGod\u201d.<\/a>[164]<\/a>\u00a0 That is, \u201cGod\u201d much like Feuerbach was to assert, was a projection or an abstraction from the natural world; theology was \u2018merely\u2019 anthropology, though for Feuerbach \u2018Humanity\u2019 was<\/em> a legitimate object of worship.<\/a>[165]<\/a> \u00a0So, religion was not supernatural, but natural.\u00a0 Thus, it is not a straightforward term, even for empiricists who believed they were assuming a \u2018naturalist\u2019 context.\u00a0 Our main point in using this designation is that there seems an unreasonable adoration of Greece on the part of its modern apologists who have forcefully but arguably, unsafely equated science with naturalism and consider the classical Greek philosophy as their inspiration.<\/a>[166]<\/a>\u00a0 We will see that Van Fraassen is joined by Van Til and Plantinga in rejecting forcefully that equation and I believe that rejection is persuasive, legitimate, and sound.<\/p>\n

However, let us end on a more positive and appreciative note for Greece.\u00a0 We must value that both Plato and Aristotle understood the need for a coherent system of philosophy that correlated metaphysics, epistemology, and a theory of values.\u00a0 Plato was seeking to avoid the ethical and political scandals of the Peloponnesian era by providing a sure foundation for knowledge.\u00a0 This he rightly saw would arrest the cultural and moral decay by providing an objective metaphysical and epistemological account, which in turn provides the basis for a normative ethic.\u00a0 Our thesis will basically concur with these categories and his cultural aims but by demonstrating that the Christian theistic basis will allow us to succeed where he failed. Thus, the point remains that these broad streams of humanism came to form what we think of as \u201cclassical\u201d Western philosophy and the spirit of modern secular science.<\/a>[167]<\/a>\u00a0 We will now proceed to examine in detail this conception of reason with a view to demonstrating its inadequacy and incoherence, to clear the way for our positive presentation of epistemological self-consciousness.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/a>2.3\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Can We Defend the Tripartite Division of Philosophy?<\/h2>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>2.3.1\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Division of Reason and The Egocentric Predicament<\/h3>\n

This post-classical conception of rationality asserted the requirement for a coherent theory of knowledge (epistemology) with a basis in an established theory of what is real (metaphysics); one can then decide how one should relate to and behave in the world (ethics).\u00a0 Philosophers have tended to label themselves as \u201cethicists\u201d, \u201cmetaphysicians\u201d or as \u201cepistemologists\u201d, but in contrast we are arguing that this is a basic error; these categories should not be thought of as hermetically sealed off from one another but are interdependent.<\/p>\n

For example, it is straightforward to express the prima-facie<\/em> interrelatedness and interdependence of the three components by considering that we cannot possibly have a theory about how<\/em> we know until we can fix what<\/em> we know.\u00a0 Succinctly, meta<\/em>-physics seems necessarily to precede the objects of physics<\/em>, the raw component targets of epistemological theories.\u00a0 Yet, in the reciprocal fashion, until we can understand how<\/em> objects are to be constituted (a theory<\/em> of objects), we will struggle to describe reality at all.\u00a0 Here, epistemology seems necessarily to precede metaphysics.\u00a0 Similarly, an ethical<\/em> action implies that we are relating to entities outside of ourselves and so we are assuming an ontological posture that accepts the existence of an external world and an epistemological position that assumes we can possess moral knowledge.<\/p>\n

We should not skip over the enormous philosophical import of the last paragraph \u2013 we have here captured some of the most fiercely contested ground in the history of philosophy.\u00a0 There are still those who argue we can never move beyond the egocentric predicament and establish with certainty any other existence but that of our own mind.\u00a0 This is known as solipsism<\/em> and is not as disreputable in philosophy as one might instinctively think,<\/a>[168]<\/a> with Thornton arguing that solipsism is not commonly argued only because \u201cphilosophers failed to accept the logical consequences of their own most fundamental commitments and preconceptions\u201d<\/em> which he takes as \u201cabstraction from \u2018inner experience\u2019 \u201d.<\/em><\/a>[169]<\/a>\u00a0 If inner experience is conceived of as subjective, then moving outwards to a real, objective<\/em> world presents a major problem, perhaps the<\/em> problem of philosophy.<\/a>[170]<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/a>2.3.2\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Epistemic Rights and Epistemic Necessity<\/h3>\n

In this respect, and of particular interest to the Christian philosopher, is that Plantinga took the unusual strategy in one of his earliest full-length books <\/a>[171]<\/a> to argue that belief in God was on the same level of rationality (or certainty) as belief in other minds.\u00a0 We do not believe it is irrational to believe in other minds though we cannot prove<\/em> it in a non-circular fashion; hence, it is<\/em> rational to believe in God.\u00a0 This was proved not to be a transitionary doctrine on Plantinga\u2019s part, in writing the new preface to the 1990 edition he maintained, with some qualification,<\/a>[172]<\/a> his conclusion was \u201cquite correct\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Just how distinctively \u201cChristian\u201d such a strategy is, is most certainly an interesting debate with some within the Reformed community such as Butler <\/a>[173]<\/a> criticising him of falling short of the requirement to demonstrate the necessity<\/em> of Christian belief as the presupposition for the intelligibility of philosophical and scientific thinking.<\/a>[174]<\/a>\u00a0 This criticism is pertinent and we examine the detail of it, but I do believe Plantinga\u2019s work should be viewed as a whole to mitigate the force of it somewhat; that is, he pushed the boundaries of Reformed thought <\/a>[175]<\/a> but started and finished in Calvin college which he described as his \u201cspiritual home<\/em>\u201d.<\/a>[176]<\/a>\u00a0 In his early period, he was known for his analytic rigour in meeting the unbeliever on their own ground and demonstrating that more was being claimed than is logically possible from their arguments.<\/p>\n

Thus, the believer was thus within their \u201cepistemic rights\u201d even on the unbelievers\u2019 terms, i.e., rational <\/em>to continue to believe as they did.\u00a0 This, quite correctly, can be perceived of as a negative apologetic and is vulnerable to the charge of being a sophisticated scepticism.<\/a>[177]<\/a>\u00a0 However, in his middle period during the early 1980s, he strengthened this position as part of the Reformed Epistemology movement and closed out that period in the next decade with a three-volume opus, the final volume of which can be viewed as the most mature and positive presentation of a sophisticated apologetic for the rationality of Christian belief.<\/a>[178]<\/a>\u00a0 Though his account relied on a naturalistic epistemology <\/a>[179]<\/a> it was backed by a supernaturalistic metaphysic; thus, Plantinga certainly viewed his own work as within the Reformed Augustinian school of philosophy <\/a>[180]<\/a> despite freely admitting he did not believe it was possible to demonstrate philosophically<\/em> that Christian belief was necessarily<\/em> true.<\/p>\n

Thus, Plantinga self-consciously limits his apologetic (and it seems the scope of any<\/em> apologetic philosophy) as to demonstrating the reasonableness<\/em> of Christian belief rather than its necessity.\u00a0 As one of the key tasks of the thesis, we will be demonstrating how it is possible to move beyond this terminus using a specific version of transcendental reasoning associated with the apologetic system of Cornelius Van Til.<\/p>\n

<\/a>2.3.3\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Struggle for Metaphysics<\/h3>\n

To consider carefully the legitimacy of the classical categories of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, especially in the light of the seemingly insoluble problems of circularity and interdependence we have noted above, is an obvious prerequisite of any argument we might seek to build on them.\u00a0 Some philosophers have advocated abandoning these categories in favour of alternative conceptions. Still others have abandoned reason altogether and looked to emotion, intuition or some other variation of subjectivity, fideism, or relativism.\u00a0 Similarly, others have considered reason irrevocably chastened and assigned it a subsidiary role.\u00a0 We will encounter some of those philosophers and their positions in later sections to analyse and evaluate their positions but it is the working hypothesis of this thesis that we can immediately admit the legitimacy of ethics and epistemology without too much hesitancy, there is a prima facie<\/em> case that we require a theory of knowledge and a theory of how to behave towards others, even if we considered it purely a pragmatic or conventional matter, or part of our psychology.<\/p>\n

However, of the three areas, metaphysics has had the most sustained attack on it as a legitimate branch of philosophy.\u00a0 Metaphysics is concerned with the most important questions of existence and reality.\u00a0 For this reason, it has often been characterised with speculative, mystical, religious, and irrational thought with the early British empiricist <\/a>[181]<\/a> David Hume, characterising the metaphysical tradition thus:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion\u201d.<\/a>[182]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

It is often argued that Hume was the father of such disdain for metaphysics in the 18th<\/sup> century and that the subsequent \u201csuspicion\u201d amongst natural scientists regarding any philosophical position that invoked metaphysical authority originated with him.<\/a>[183]<\/a>\u00a0 However, this seems to be overplaying Hume\u2019s influence, particularly during his lifetime.<\/a>[184]<\/a>\u00a0 In essence, a desire to be free of metaphysical dogmas, particularly the religious kind, was distinctive of the period beginning with the Renaissance, through the Reformation and into the early modern period, generally accepted as constituting what is called the Enlightenment,<\/a>[185]<\/a> but each iteration of the Enlightenment project had modified metaphysics to a more palatable form in its own image.<\/p>\n

Rather, it was only with the paleopositivism of Comte and the Darwinism that had been influenced by it, which then found mature expression in the logical positivism and the \u201cNew Physics\u201d of the early 20th<\/sup> century (which explicitly rejected Kantian and Hegelian metaphysical idealism), that metaphysics faced its largest challenge.\u00a0 The metaphysical religious narratives were being fundamentally challenged and accused of being false under the weight of common-sense, empirical \u201cscience\u201d.\u00a0 It was only then that Hume became a late-canonised saint for all the positivist and post-positivist movements, with his insights providing a limiting, psychological threshold of understanding beyond which the \u201cnew\u201d science and a \u201ccleaned-up\u201d philosophy could not legitimately progress.<\/p>\n

In essence, during the early part of the 20th<\/sup> century after the massive expansion of natural, empirical<\/em> science following its successes during the 19th, there was a concerted attempted by the logical positivists and their fellow-travellers in the new analytic philosophy <\/a>[186]<\/a> to finally dispense with \u201cmetaphysics\u201d on the basis that it was misunderstanding the structure and the function of language and was thereby logically non<\/em>-sense.\u00a0 Ayer, the first to popularise the position in the English language, stated this position thus:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026our object is merely to show that philosophy, as a genuine branch of knowledge, must be distinguished from metaphysics\u2026We\u2026define a metaphysical sentence as a sentence which purports to express a genuine proposition, but does, in fact, express neither a tautology nor an empirical hypothesis.\u00a0 And as tautologies and empirical hypotheses form the entire class of significant propositions, we are justified in concluding that all metaphysical assertions are nonsensical\u201d.<\/a>[187]<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a>2.3.4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Principle of Verification<\/h3>\n

However, this basis of the logical positivist conception of meaning, the principle of verification<\/em>, that held a proposition was only meaningful if<\/em> and only if<\/em> it was, in principle,<\/a>[188]<\/a> empirically verifiable, was fundamentally untenable as it excluded all types of propositions which clearly had meaning but had no direct connection with the natural world or did not rely<\/em> on the natural world for verification or falsification.<\/a>[189]<\/a>\u00a0 It also had the radical consequence of dispensing with much of ethical theorising as \u201cnon-<\/em>sense\u201d, a position which even Bertrand Russell, perhaps the most well-known member of the positivist movement <\/a>[190]<\/a> and the figure which dominated philosophy in the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century, was careful to qualify:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere remains\u2026a vast field, traditionally included in philosophy, where scientific methods are inadequate.\u00a0 This field includes ultimate questions of value; science alone, for example, cannot prove it is bad to enjoy the infliction of cruelty\u201d.<\/a>[191]<\/a><\/p>\n

However, the most devastating critique of the verification principle was that the principle itself was not based on any process of empirical verification.\u00a0 In other words, it exempted itself from its own criteria and was shown to be nothing more than a dogma<\/em>, and, paradoxically, a metaphysical<\/em> one at that.\u00a0 Thus, in Neurath, metaphysics could indeed \u201cdisappear without a trace<\/em>\u201d <\/a>[192]<\/a> but he failed to perceive that the denial of metaphysics was paradoxically a metaphysical plank which he would also allow a priori<\/em> as a building block for his famous raft of human knowledge.<\/a>[193]<\/a>\u00a0 It suffices us to say at this point that when adjustments were attempted to the principle, including by Ayer himself then ten years later after his initial statement of it in response to the criticism of it, he had to concede that metaphysics could not so simply be deleted from philosophy as \u2018nonsense\u2019:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026although I should still defend the use of the criterion of verifiability as a methodological principle, I realize that for the effective elimination of metaphysics it needs to be supported by detailed<\/em> analyses of particular<\/em> metaphysical arguments\u201d.<\/a>[194]<\/a>\u00a0 (Emphasis added).<\/p>\n

That is, Ayer is here conceding that there is nothing fundamentally<\/em> irrational or \u2018non-sensical\u2019 with metaphysically based arguments but rather, as we should all reasonably accept, it is the actual quality<\/em> of the metaphysical argument made that needs to be evaluated with whatever rational criteria is required for that domain.\u00a0 Ayer had attempted to respond <\/a>[195]<\/sup><\/a> to the fault-lines that were beginning to appear in the positivist edifice that had up to that point near dominated post-war scholarship across a variety of disciplines.\u00a0 However, within seven years of this revision of 1946, it was to suffer the devastating critique of Quine <\/a>[196]<\/a> which demonstrated emphatically that logical positivism rested paradoxically on metaphysical dogma.\u00a0 Thus, despite this totalising faith of the logical positivists, who had considered themselves the most rigorous and consistent of the empiricists, their presuppositions came to be seen as crudely inadequate philosophical views, being established on a principle that is asserted independently of experience and is thus self-refuting in the most basic, logical sense.<\/a>[197]<\/a><\/p>\n

As a result, metaphysics was slowly rehabilitated into philosophical discourse, with the positivist school fragmented by the end of the 1950s.<\/a>[198]<\/a>\u00a0 However, positivism passed on much of its basic methodology onto the naturalism that was its direct successor, and the metaphysical approach of scientifically minded philosophers is significantly different than the speculative metaphysics which was so loathed by the empiricists such as Hume and rejected by the positivists.\u00a0 Thus, introductory texts on metaphysics such as Mumford earnestly seek a kind of methodological respectability which owes most of its inspiration to a respect for the scientific method, even when they assert it goes beyond the capability of science.<\/a>[199]<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a>2.3.5\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Conclusion<\/h3>\n

Thus, in conclusion, for the purposes of our study we can conclude that metaphysics is defensible as a legitimate discipline of philosophy and so we have preserved philosophy in its tripartite understanding.\u00a0 This is not to deny there seems to be some circularity in our definitions and there will be some problematics to work through. \u00a0However, it is our position that the Christian scriptures provide a unique resolution of this circularity in the biblical narrative and so we will build our worldview with this understanding.<\/p>\n

<\/a>2.4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Nature – Analysis and Synthesis<\/h2>\n

After the fall of logical positivism, a mature and reflective Ayer, freed from the passionate zeal of his youth some 30 years earlier that had concluded that logical positivism was the only<\/em> true way of philosophising, noted insightfully:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is especially characteristic of philosophers that they tend to disagree not merely about the solution of certain problems but about the very nature<\/em> of their subject and the methods<\/em> by which it is to be pursued\u201d.<\/a>[200]<\/sup><\/a> (Emphasis added).<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, despite this new-found charity to his fellow-philosophers, Ayer remained committed<\/em> to the same fundamental mode of philosophising of his youth and should be credited as to never have become completely apostate from his totalising faith in empiricism.<\/a>[201]<\/a> \u00a0As we have seen, empiricism holds that all knowledge derives from our senses and so is a comfortable bedfellow to naturalism which deals with nature as the measure of all things.\u00a0 Ayer was adamant that philosophers should not consider themselves as doing any kind of \u201cresearch\u201d but were merely \u201cto clarify the propositions of science by exhibiting their logical relations\u201d<\/em> <\/a>[202]<\/a> and, as we saw in the previous section, that the only meaningful<\/em> propositions were ones which could be verified<\/em> by reference to the physical universe.<\/p>\n

The effect of this tendency was to radically rarefy philosophy (and science) to replace it with scientism<\/em>, the belief that the only genuine<\/em> questions (as opposed to linguistic confusions) were questions that science<\/em> could answer or alternatively, the only questions worth<\/em> asking were the questions that science could<\/em> answer. \u00a0This is thus revealed as a normative ethical position and really approximates a religious commitment on behalf of its advocates. \u00a0Thus, as Ayer believed in nailing his colours somewhere and should be commended for doing so, I, with similar brotherly zeal in direct opposition to this rarefied view of 20th<\/sup> century empiricism, believe the process of critical interpretation, evaluation, alongside the solving of human dilemmas and the presentation of solutions, is<\/em> the business of philosophy and the philosopher.<\/p>\n

Yet, it must be immediately admitted, perhaps because of the enormous influence of this empiricism of the positivists in the disciplines of science and with the post-Kantian and post-Kuhnian scepticism of the Humanities in 20th<\/sup> century philosophical thought, it is a model of philosophy that has had few supporters in the contemporary or popular conception of philosophy.\u00a0 That is, it has few supporters in either the analytic or the continental perspective after the revolutionary changes in philosophy and culture generally at the start of the century.\u00a0 In the words of the most influential Anglo-American of the first half of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell, my vision of the task and practice of philosophy is a \u201cpretentious\u201d<\/em> and \u201cdogmatic\u201d<\/em> conception.<\/a>[203]<\/a><\/p>\n

However, we can disarm Russell\u2019s criticism by considering what has become of the modern analytic tradition of which Russell was a founding member.\u00a0 That tradition has virtually abandoned the synthetic function for mere \u201cclarification\u201d of the issues we might discuss, or \u201ctherapy\u201d rather than a \u201csolving\u201d of the problems we clarify.\u00a0 To refute this and to defend the synthetic task as essential to the philosophic task, we need look no further than to the eminent G.E. Moore, Russell\u2019s fellow insurrectionist in the fight against idealism and one\u2019s who\u2019s rigorous analytic method provided the inspiration for a generation of philosophers.<\/a>[204]<\/a>\u00a0 Moore recognised that synthesis was a basic, necessary function of philosophy: \u201c[one of the tasks of philosophy is to present] a general description of the Universe\u201d.<\/em><\/a>[205]<\/a>\u00a0 Here we understand \u2018description\u2019 was not mere enumeration of phenomena but also the wider interrelations and a reasoned account of reality.\u00a0 Moore was a committed realist, and that realism was for working with the world, not to suffer in subjection to it in ignorance.\u00a0 Thus, we must proceed on Moore\u2019s basis and accept the challenge of giving a rational account of our world and our place in it.<\/a>[206]<\/a><\/p>\n

In summary, mere analytic \u201cclarification\u201d is most unsatisfactory for the conception of the work of a philosopher unless we can progress to offering salvation from those problems.\u00a0 We can also with inquisitorial curiosity wonder how philosophy once stripped of my \u201cdogmatic pretensions\u201d<\/em> might possibly for Russell be able to \u201csuggest and inspire a way of life\u201d.<\/em><\/a>[207]<\/a> \u00a0It seems incoherent because elsewhere Russell had:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Insisted philosophical problems had <\/em>been solved <\/a>[208]<\/a> and that he had further solutions (though few in the philosophical world seemed to agree with him leading to his gradual eclipse in post-War philosophy).<\/a>[209]<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. That the major problem of philosophic and cultural discourse was with the timidity of the clear-minded in being confident enough to argue with the absolutist bigot or obscurantist religious fundamentalist.<\/li>\n
  3. He complained later that logical positivists were too \u201cnarrow\u201d<\/em> in their outlook and that they had a \u201ctechnique which conceals problems instead of helping to <\/em>solve them\u201d.<\/em><\/a>[210]<\/a> (Emphasis added).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    All this shows that Russell himself<\/em> believed that a worldview<\/em> springing from one\u2019s philosophy was one of the purposes and goals of philosophy; in his pre-positivist apologetic for philosophy, he explicitly said so.<\/a>[211]<\/a>\u00a0 We might also observe that in his post-positivist work, which was from the 1950s onwards, that he was much more a political and cultural intellectual activist than an academic philosopher.\u00a0 To believe that he lived his life apart from his philosophical beliefs is implausible at best.\u00a0 The sheer volume and breadth of what he called his \u201cphilosophical work\u201d is captured in an authoritative anthology,<\/a>[212]<\/a> which would suggest the business of the philosopher is indeed a broad wrestling with the problems of culture, an analysis and a synthesis that moves us in the direction of solutions.<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/a><\/a>2.5\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Character \u2013 Correspondence, Coherence, Truth, and Objectivity<\/h2>\n

    We are arguing that any philosophical system or account should have the following set properties to be considered comprehensive:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Coherence<\/em>: in a philosophical system, this is the property that it is internally consistent, that the different parts are logical compatible with one another.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      For example, if it is asserted that there is no resident meaning in a text, but a text is used to communicate the content of your philosophy with a view to converting the readers to your way of thinking, you are being incoherent.\u00a0 Blackburn made that very clear in his critical discussion of postmodernism:<\/p>\n

      \u201c\u2026there are amusing episodes of radical postmodernists who suddenly forgot all about the death of the author and the indefinite plasticity of meaning when it came to fighting about copyright and the accuracy of translations of their own works\u201d.<\/a>[213]<\/a><\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Truthful<\/em>:\u00a0 as I wrote elsewhere, \u201cThere is not a subject in philosophy that has such a noble and contentious history than that of the subject of truth and how to reconcile reality (or nature) and our perception of it\u201d.<\/em><\/a>[214]<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Just what \u201ctruth\u201d is and its relationship to reality is a function of the philosophical system itself but the challenge to be \u201ctruthful\u201d is never far from the attention of a philosophical school, even for the philosophical iconoclasts like Rorty that would like to bury it without trace.<\/a>[215]<\/a>\u00a0 In contrast, I take a very strong view of the possibility and the reality of truth in this thesis, following Plantinga in this:<\/p>\n

        \u201cwe all really know (unless thoroughly corrupted) that there really is such a thing as truth (\u2018objective\u2019 truth, that being the only kind there is) and that it is of fundamental importance to us and foundational to our noetic structures\u201d.<\/a>[216]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Correspondence<\/em>:\u00a0 the property of describing the world in some way, a discernible set of states in the world or having an analogue in the world.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

           <\/p>\n

          This is not to deny that correspondence is a difficult concept and how problematic it might be when we admit degrees of correspondence; but there is a strong intuitive sense that there is such a concept that does useful work for us.<\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

            \n
          1. Objectivity<\/em>:\u00a0 The idea of objectivity, that there is a subject-independent world about which things can be said and to which our philosophy represents in some concrete sense, is essential to our view.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

             <\/p>\n

            However, objectivity can also be more abstract dealing with concepts<\/em> that are subject-independent.\u00a0 \u201cObjectivity\u201d, as noted in the quote from Plantinga above, is strongly associated with conceptions of truth, what is true independent of the subject or \u201ctrue\u201d for all of us, is that which is objective.<\/p>\n

            It is important each of these properties is present.\u00a0 For example, both Leibniz and Spinoza had coherence in their systems but are considered \u201cdream philosophies<\/em>\u201d in the sense they fail the objectivity or truth test, which might be conceived of as the twin test of correspondence and coherence.\u00a0 Unlike the conventional pitting of these theories as oppositional to one another,<\/a>[217]<\/a> we recognise with Bahnsen that the former deals with the metaphysics<\/em> of truth, i.e., what truth is<\/em>, how it is constituted and the latter deals with how we know something is true, that it fits into a wider theoretical framework, i.e., the epistemology<\/em> of truth. \u00a0Similarly, Blackburn is again helpful here, capturing both elements of the truth test:<\/p>\n

            \u201cIt is the things that explain my words that are their reference, and give them their truth. [Donald] Davidson went wrong by wondering what justifies a belief, in the abstract\u2026John\u2019s explorations and investigations, his situation, his observations, experiences, what he has seen and heard, smelled, touched and felt, are all potentially part of the answer\u2026The cure\u2026is to remember, and perhaps to practise, the practical techniques and skills of doing things in the real world…\u201d.<\/a>[218]<\/a><\/p>\n

            However, what is being argued here is not pragmatism in disguise (see \u00a72.6.6) but rather an appeal to what might be called a \u2018critical [-ly minded]\u2019 realism <\/a>[219]<\/a> that ties what we believe to the world we live in.\u00a0 Whatever our philosophy claims to be, it should be grounded, even mediated, in both our mental and physical experience of and existence in the world.\u00a0 In contrast, pragmatism formally emphasises the usefulness of any philosophy by its instrumental or practical utility but prejudges, like the positivist\u2019s questions relating to the real\/unreal\/ideal and the good\/bad\/moral\/immoral as irrelevant<\/em> pseudo-problems.<\/a>[220]<\/a>\u00a0 That is, they are problems too difficult<\/em> to solve and therefore cannot<\/em> be genuine<\/em> problems, for all genuine<\/em> problems admit<\/em> of a solution.\u00a0 They have camped by the sceptical gorge and consider it uncrossable.\u00a0 Yet to consider the challenges of scepticism as simply irrelevant is to disengage from the process of philosophy.\u00a0 Addressing the sceptical challenge is one, if not the key, challenge of philosophy for in answering scepticism we give reasons for what<\/em> we believe, why<\/em> we believe it and what we should<\/em> believe.\u00a0 It is to a more in-depth consideration of scepticism that we now turn.<\/p>\n

            <\/a><\/a><\/a>2.6\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Purpose of Philosophy \u2013 Responding to Scepticism<\/h2>\n

            <\/a><\/a>2.6.1\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Problem<\/h3>\n

            Modern Western philosophy might be said to have begun with Descartes who above all else positioned epistemology, in the sense of the basic possibility of self-consciousness or self-knowledge<\/em> and the relation of the self to the rest of reality (i.e., a metaphysic<\/em>), at the centre of the philosophical process.\u00a0 Descartes was famous in his method for proposing the<\/em> way of philosophising was the method of doubt:<\/a>[221]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 by considering what could be doubted one would intuit<\/em> <\/a>[222]<\/a> what is certain.\u00a0 Since then, scepticism has been reproduced repeatedly in all manner of senses such that we might conceive of philosophy as an attempt to answer the problem of scepticism or to collapse into it.\u00a0 Thus, for Descartes raising the problem, we can be thankful.<\/p>\n

            However, collapsing into a general scepticism hardly commends itself to a healthy intellectual life or even a practical honesty but scepticism has proven notoriously difficult to vanquish. \u00a0For example, Russell writing his last major philosophical work was disturbed by the metaphysical scepticism of the early 20th<\/sup> century and argued for a tempering of the Cartesian method of doubt rather than its implications being pushed to their logical limits:<\/p>\n

            \u201cThe fact that I cannot believe something does not prove that it is false, but it does prove that I am insincere and frivolous if I pretend<\/em> to believe it.\u00a0 Cartesian doubt has a value as a means of articulating our knowledge and showing what depends on what, but if carried too far it becomes a mere technical game in which philosophy loses seriousness<\/em>\u201d.<\/a>[223]<\/a> (Emphasis added).<\/p>\n

            However attractive Russell\u2019s intent and temper is to us, as a logician he could not have possibly justified this statement as settling the issue.\u00a0 His logician opponents certainly did not, pointedly ignoring him after the 1950s and he eventually admits elsewhere he can give no logical <\/em>refutation of such scepticism, \u201c<\/em>against the thorough going sceptic I can advance no argument except that I do not believe him to be sincere\u201d.<\/em><\/a>[224]<\/a>\u00a0 Thus, if we are searching for strong, logical certainties we remain extremely dissatisfied with the weakness of his final position.<\/p>\n

            Additionally and most seriously, a special kind of metaphysical scepticism, particularly associated with the post-Darwinian world and the nihilism of Nietzsche, objects to any possibility of there being objective moral<\/em> knowledge; that our attempts at defining normative behaviours are arbitrary social constructs and moral knowledge is an impossibility.<\/a>[225]<\/a>\u00a0 This had devastating socio-political consequences, \u00a0in the words of Abraham Kuyper, lamenting the descent of Europe into chaos and then war, \u201call eyes in Germany had turned to Nietzsche\u201d<\/em>.<\/a>[226]<\/a>\u00a0 The philosophies of Nazism <\/a>[227]<\/a> and Communism <\/a>[228]<\/a> that he and Hegel had inspired left an ethical void that American pragmatism and relativism needed to fill with at least some conventional or situational conception of socially constructed wisdom for the new democratic family, if all hope was not to be lost of reclaiming the Liberal consensus in the nations threatening to succumb to the rise of this totalitarianism. Similarly, Plantinga demonstrated to us the problems with the grounding of rationality on this basis means that there are those who argue that human knowledge is always<\/em> tentative and truth, or a true and complete science, remains forever beyond our reach.\u00a0 It should be obvious such a position is antithetical to a Christian ethic that maintains the present authority of a normative scripture.\u00a0 Consequently, it is of upmost philosophical and cultural importance to us that scepticism, if not completely refuted, is reduced to an indefensible scandal <\/a>[229]<\/a> as an epistemological position or a metaphysical stance and we will argue vigorously against it throughout the thesis. \u00a0Thus, let us consider the three figures that really set the contours of the debate over scepticism, and the track of Western philosophy ever since.<\/p>\n

            <\/a>2.6.2\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Descartes, Hume, and Kant<\/h3>\n

            Descartes\u2019 exercise of scepticism<\/em> was suitably moderated by the conviction of his cogito<\/em>, in which he had believed he had re-established the firm foundation for knowledge after dismissing Aristotelian metaphysics.\u00a0 However, Descartes\u2019 difficulties were many, even amongst those not immediately hostile to his programme for ecclesiastical reasons (both Catholics and Protestants), and the Cartesian programme, despite the efforts of his disciples and successors, was considered terminally devastated by the later Kantian critique of it.<\/a>[230]<\/a>\u00a0 Kant\u2019s \u201ccritical philosophy\u201d<\/em> <\/a>[231]<\/a> is considered as the \u201ccentral text of Western philosophy\u201d<\/em> <\/a>[232]<\/a> and Russell grudgingly wrote that even in the late 1940s Kant was \u201cgenerally considered the greatest of modern philosophers<\/em>\u201d.<\/a>[233]<\/a> \u00a0Interestingly, Kant in critiquing the Cartesian programme was doing so as part of the process of answering<\/em> the radical scepticism of his contemporary Hume who we noted was the first to formulate a programme that desired to excise metaphysics from philosophy and to turn epistemology into mere psychological habit.<\/a>[234]<\/a>\u00a0 We saw he had a particular dim view of the Rationalist <\/a>[235]<\/a> project, considering their work only fit for the flames.\u00a0 In contrast, he wanted to apply the empiricism found in Locke (1632 \u2013 1704) and Berkeley (1685 \u2013 1753) to the problem of knowledge.\u00a0 Empiricism held that all knowledge is perceptual<\/em> (that is, grounded in empirical experience) and he advocated for what he called the \u201c[Newtonian] Experimental Method of Reasoning\u201d <\/em><\/a>[236]<\/a> to the problem of human psychology and the processes of reason.<\/p>\n

            However, in his rigorous analytical consistency, he was driven to a catastrophic scepticism for he concluded that causal<\/em> reasoning, the basis for inductive science, was merely a \u201chabit of the mind\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 Hume had thus concluded that there was no reasonable (rational) grounding of reason, it was a tight circle of logical fallaciousness. We really could know nothing <\/em>in the sense there was no rational<\/em> basis to rationality, \u201creason when considered an abstract view, furnishes invincible arguments against itself\u201d.<\/em><\/a>[237]<\/a>\u00a0 Philosophy and science were to be dispatched to the Humean Crematorium for disposal, his scepticism threatened to unravel even the possibility<\/em> of knowledge which Kant appreciated would be devastating to science and he was determined to avoid. Thus, Kant was awoken from his \u201cdogmatic slumbers\u201d<\/em>, <\/a>[238]<\/a> whilst acknowledging the force of Hume against both the empiricist and rationalist conceptions of reason, he wanted to mitigate against Hume\u2019s conclusions:<\/p>\n

            \u201c\u2026it remains a scandal to philosophy, and to human reason in general, that we should have to accept the existence of things outside us (from which after all we derive the whole material for our knowledge, even for that of our inner sense) merely on trust<\/strong>, and have no satisfactory proof with which to counter any opponent who chooses to doubt it\u201d.<\/a>[239]<\/a> (Emphasis original).<\/p>\n

            The central feature of the Kantian \u201canswer\u201d to Hume was his division of reality into a noumenal realm beyond the human mind and a phenomenal realm of experience upon which the mind imposed its understanding.<\/a>[240]<\/a>\u00a0 Science was strictly phenomenal, but at least it was salvaged as a possibility.\u00a0 However, this had the consequence of forever putting the knowledge of reality as it was in itself (Ding an Sich<\/em>) as beyond the reach of the human mind and Kant\u2019s science was not discovery<\/em> of natural laws but imposition<\/em> by the psychological processes where the mind was the \u201clawgiver of nature\u201d<\/em>. \u00a0Kant\u2019s solution to the predicament might also be conceived of as a strengthening of the ego-centric one as he internalised still further Descartes\u2019 starting point of an awareness of his own existence.<\/p>\n

            This conception, Kant\u2019s \u201cCopernican revolution\u201d,<\/a>[241]<\/a> evoked a long sequence of 19th<\/sup> century philosophers who responded to Kant\u2019s critique either negatively, preferring in a Schopenhauer or a Kierkegaard mysticism to rationality,<\/a>[242]<\/a> or positively by \u2018rescuing\u2019 and \u2018improving\u2019 rationality as in Hegel.<\/a>[243]<\/a>\u00a0 The analytic schools that came to dominate 20th<\/sup> century philosophy rejected Kant\u2019s conception of a noumena and asserted phenomena was all we have. \u00a0We will now examine the distinctive streams that flowed from the various responses to Kant, giving specific attention to that analytic tradition.<\/a>[244]<\/a><\/p>\n

            <\/a><\/a>2.6.3\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Fallibilists<\/h3>\n

            The central issue when dealing with the sceptic is that they can argue that the attempts to defeat scepticism always assume what they the sceptic is not prepared to grant and thus are deemed to be \u201ccircular\u201d in some way.\u00a0 As Russell freely admitted, he could see no way of escape from Hume\u2019s scepticism and the naturalist too will always have that predicament.<\/a>[245]<\/a> \u00a0Thus, one \u201csolution\u201d to scepticism is to accept its presence but to mitigate its force in some way.\u00a0 This has been the favoured approach of contemporary scientifically orientated epistemology and is known as fallibilism<\/em>, which can be conceived of in a number of different ways, but which we might usefully outline it in this way:<\/p>\n

              \n
            1. The principle that knowledge is not certain but is always open to revision in the light of new arguments.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              This is attractive as it recasts philosophy as contiguous with science in the sense of methodological equivalence<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                \n
              1. We can have knowledge on the basis of defeasible justification, justification that does not guarantee<\/em> that our beliefs are correct.<\/a>[246]<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                This is attractive because it wants to preserve a claim to knowledge rather than cede to scepticism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                However, there is a catastrophic weakness admitted by the school itself:<\/p>\n

                \u201cit is unclear how to formulate fallibilism precisely\u2026it is surprisingly difficult to describe the level of fallible justification required for knowledge in a clear and non-arbitrary way<\/em>\u2026fallibilism does not necessarily escape skepticism. A theory might be fallibilist while still espousing standards too demanding to be regularly met\u201d.<\/a>[247]<\/sup><\/a> (Emphasis added).<\/p>\n

                This clearly pinpoints incoherence at the heart of the concept, and it is of not much use to us to dwell specifically on the specific technical debates within the various inflections of fallibilism.\u00a0 It is enough for us that to a greater or lesser degree, fallibilism is assumed in most philosophical schools (which is one major factor in why we judge them inadequate) and we will often identify fallibilism implicit to a greater or less degree in the sections below.<\/p>\n

                <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>2.6.4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Realism, and the Role of Common Sense<\/h3>\n

                With the retreat of idealism at the beginning of the twentieth century there was the emergence of the analytical schools and confidence initially grew in the realistic view; that is, the world is both describable and directly knowable.\u00a0 For the realist, to argue otherwise was non-sensical, as Moore famously posited as he lifted up his hands and declared the external world to exist on the basis of common sense.<\/a>[248]<\/a>\u00a0 This was to be repeated with great sophistication by Moritz Schlick who dismissed the entire Kantian thesis at the end of a gloriously constructed critical argument in one sentence:<\/p>\n

                \u201cThinking does not create the relations of reality; it has no form that it might imprint upon reality.\u00a0 And reality permits no forms to be imprinted upon itself, because it already possesses form\u201d.<\/a>[249]<\/a><\/p>\n

                However, all was not well in this newly rediscovered \u201creal\u201d world and Schlick conceded seconds after its triumph that realism is found in philosophy by degree <\/em>only:<\/em><\/p>\n

                \u201c\u2026we are bereft of any hope of arriving at absolute certainty in the knowledge of reality.\u00a0 Apodictic truths about reality go beyond the power of the human faculty of cognition and are not accessible to it.\u00a0 There are no synthetic judgments a priori\u2026<\/em>\u201d.<\/a>[250]<\/a><\/p>\n

                This last proposition was to prove particularly problematic and unravelled under the weight of criticism within a few decades of its positing, being defended only by the logical positivists in their most vociferous period.\u00a0 As Kenny noted, the possibility of and the nature of synthetic judgements a priori<\/em> was a, if not the<\/em> principal problem of philosophy <\/a>[251]<\/a> and is implicitly assumed by most hypothesising and patterns of reasoning.<\/p>\n

                Consequently, there was something also profoundly unsatisfactory <\/a>[252]<\/sup><\/a> for realism to be so easily confounded by the sceptical challenge in Schlick\u2019s formulation after he conducted such a painstakingly careful argument.\u00a0 Likewise, many found Moore\u2019s defence of common sense compelling.\u00a0 However, a na\u00efve or \u201ccommon sense\u201d realism is easily shown to be untenable, particularly for the believer despite its popularity amongst evangelical Christians.<\/a>[253]<\/a>\u00a0 We can understand this better by considering that one reaction to Hume was in his contemporary Reid\u2019s \u201ccommon sense\u201d realism that posited that our senses and perceptions were God-given and thus basically reliable.<\/a>[254]<\/a>\u00a0 That led to the view that \u201ccommon sense\u201d could be a guide for science and rationality.\u00a0 The early American colleges <\/a>[255]<\/a> were founded by Protestants that were heavily influenced by this view and there is a direct lineage to the evidential apologetic school.<\/a>[256]<\/a>\u00a0 The main problem with it arose when \u201ccommon sense\u201d was given expression by Darwin\u2019s hypothesis which he had allegedly formed on the basis of his voyages and empirical studies.\u00a0 The force of common sense seemed to undermine the claims of scripture with the result of a rapid secularisation or liberalisation of many of the protestant colleges.<\/a>[257]<\/a>\u00a0 This was not just an American problem but was repeated in many Christian centres in Europe and missionary centres further afield.<\/p>\n

                <\/a>2.6.5\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Therapeutic Conception of Philosophy<\/h3>\n

                The therapeutic conception responded to the fallibilist turn of analytic philosophy during the 20th<\/sup> century and redefined philosophy as simply a<\/em> way of thinking about matters, rather than as a substantive research project that establishes<\/em> the limits and content of human knowledge. \u00a0\u00a0Schlick reading and collaborating with Wittgenstein during the period 1927-1933 had progressively developed an understanding that the purpose of philosophy was not knowledge about<\/em> the world in the sense of metaphysical theories but knowledge of<\/em> the world through empirical methods.<\/p>\n

                Wittgenstein\u2019s Tractatus <\/em>had famously instructed one to only speak on what could be spoken about <\/a>[258]<\/a> which was taken by Schlick to dismiss metaphysics or otherwise speculative thought from philosophy in favour of the \u201cnew philosophy\u201d of clarification.<\/a>[259]<\/a>\u00a0 Ayer labelled Wittgenstein\u2019s middle period as \u201ctherapeutic positivism\u201d and other scholars also interpreted Wittgenstein in this way during the 1940s.<\/a>[260]<\/a>\u00a0 However, Wittgenstein had written to Ayer protesting this interpretation and in his later period distanced himself publicly from positivism and this early understanding of his work. Monk makes the case that this was a secular appropriation of Wittgenstein who was far more mystical in intended sense, if not in the grammar, of the conclusion of his Tractatus.<\/em><\/a>[261]<\/a> \u00a0That said, it was also clear he had been attracted to Schlick\u2019s Circle and its positivism as a way of doing<\/em> philosophy during his early phase, despite expressing dissatisfaction with their interpretation of the Tractatus.<\/em><\/a>[262]<\/a><\/p>\n

                Whatever its origin in Wittgenstein and its relationship to the logical positivists, the therapeutic conception has had an enormous and long-lasting influence on the analytic philosophical movement.\u00a0 However, in its contemporary, somewhat diluted form, it is sometimes caricatured, accurately in my view, as a \u201cflight from certainty\u201d<\/em> or \u201can escape from [the necessity of] reason[ing]\u201d.<\/em><\/a>[263]<\/a> \u00a0It merely diagnoses and does not treat the terminal patient, considering it improper a treatment should be prescribed but holding we might learn something from observing their death. \u00a0That is to say, it is considered so inappropriate within academic philosophy to suggest that philosophy and philosophers, firstly could<\/em> and secondly should <\/em>generate solutions to the problems they seek to clarify.\u00a0 Thus, it is perfectly acceptable<\/em> to discuss the philosophy of religion in some abstract sense, but it is totally inappropriate<\/em> to assert that one conception deserves the attribution of truth and thus our intellectual submission to it, whereas the others do not.<\/p>\n

                Whilst this would immediately be of concern to most Christian philosophers who above all else should<\/em> be seeking to establish the legitimacy of a Christian ethic based upon Christian knowledge founded on a Christian metaphysic, it is by no means a concern unrecognised outside of the Christian community.\u00a0 Philosopher and educator Paul Arthur Schilpp <\/a>[264]<\/a> addressing the American Philosophical Society in a presidential address of 1959 had his address reported thus:<\/p>\n

                \u201cSchilpp\u2019s address accused philosophy in the analytic tradition, which then (as now) dominated the philosophical profession, of a \u201ccontemptuous dismissal of ethics and of social and political philosophy\u201d<\/em>, which he saw in turn as a manifestation of a broader \u201creluctance\u2026 to make any contribution to man\u2019s existing dilemmas\u201d<\/em>. Philosophers, Schilpp argued, have a duty to help guide society by offering it the best available ethical and political wisdom. \u201cMost of the great thinkers of mankind\u201d<\/em>, he said, \u201cseem to have believed wisdom was a good thing not merely for living the good life, but necessary for the development and running of society and of the state. This being the case, ethics and social and political philosophy occupied a considerable portion of their interest and work\u201d \u2026<\/em>\u201d.<\/a>[265]<\/a><\/p>\n

                Thus, for Schlipp, the philosophical task should<\/em> be conceived as of giving a general account of the interrelationship between the three traditional categories; what, in the language of this thesis, we have already designated as a \u201cworldview\u201d – a coherent account of our place in the universe and our relationship to it.<\/p>\n

                So, in summary, we can see that the therapeutic conception of philosophy does not, after all, offer us any mitigation of scepticism but seems rather to have surrendered to it.\u00a0 There is a tacit, if not explicit assumption that we cannot be certain but maybe we can be clear on what we can perhaps we cannot be certain about.\u00a0 Stated this way, we can see there is an incoherence running through this conception for we can never truly be clear<\/em> in our understanding unless we can give an account<\/em> of the objects of our perception.<\/p>\n

                <\/a><\/a>2.6.6\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Pragmatic Conception of Philosophy<\/h3>\n

                It is with William James and John Dewey that the pragmatic movement is most strongly associated though the pragmatic maxim had initially been posited by Pierce,<\/a>[266]<\/a> a logician and an experimental scientist by training and practice.\u00a0 James was an accomplished anatomist who proceeded to become a professor of psychology and then progressed to a professorship in philosophy.\u00a0 He was thus a formidable intellect who made major contributions to both psychology and philosophy.\u00a0 However, his focus remained psychological in orientation, in the explication of belief formation which clearly intersected all kinds of philosophical issues regarding warrant and truth.\u00a0 He also had a motivation to defend a certain view of moral and religious thought where he posited that we often believe and are compelled to act with insufficient theoretical grounds but that in itself did not delegitimise our actions.\u00a0 Central to his conception was the evaluating of the practical effects of a course of action.<\/a>[267]<\/a><\/p>\n

                Thus, the fallibilism and sophistication of James is very clear, and he influenced Dewey significantly.\u00a0 However, his ongoing influence was muted by Dewey\u2019s innovations regarding the pragmatic maxims and the fact that he was also defending a Victorian pietism which was intellectually falling out of fashion. \u00a0In contrast, Dewey grew up in an evangelical environment but was apostate by the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century from his early attempts at developing a Christian philosophy.<\/a>[268]<\/a> \u00a0That said, some view him as secularising aspects of Christian ethics, replacing divine prerogatives and duties with human ones and he believed passionately, and some would say religiously, in the connection between philosophy and life.<\/a>[269]<\/a><\/p>\n

                Building on the pragmatic maxim, he asserted that the traditional epistemological \u201cproblems\u201d of philosophy aiming to supply a coherent account of knowledge were irrelevant.\u00a0 Dewey and the pragmatists who followed him <\/a>[270]<\/a> considered words like \u201ctrue\u201d, \u201cfalse\u201d, \u201cgood\u201d, \u201cbad\u201d not to be objective in reference but subjective and relativised by considering their effects and the fallibilism present is implicit in the renunciation of the traditional categories.\u00a0 Dewey, indeed, went further judging the utility of philosophy as to how it enables us to reach \u201cour goals\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 What mattered was whether we had a set of intellectual tools with which we could control our environment and solve our socio-political problems.<\/a>[271]<\/a>\u00a0 Dewey\u2019s \u2018version\u2019 of pragmatism he preferred to call instrumentalism<\/em>; his view was a broad application of the pragmatic maxim to all the problems of society providing us with \u2018instruments\u2019 to control and shape our environment.\u00a0 Dewey\u2019s emphasis could thus be perceived as sociological, and some refer to him as a sociologist though his work was of far wider scope and depth, his influence on American and Western democratic culture generally was substantial, some would say the dominant undercurrent of modern statism.<\/a>[272]<\/a><\/p>\n

                The logical problem, though, as with all American pragmatism, which is also another critical weakness for all<\/em> non-Christian philosophy, was the philosophical problem of defining what should <\/em>be \u201cour goals\u201d.<\/a>[273]<\/a>\u00a0 This necessarily needs to be done outside of the pragmatic maxim as it deals with conceptions of necessity and value<\/em>.\u00a0 It is an ethical <\/em>question.\u00a0 Similarly, it is paradoxical that Dewey himself argued for a particular<\/em> view of education, i.e., an educational theory<\/em> and asserted that the proper<\/em> conception of education (what should<\/em> be the end) was in accordance with that theory.<\/a>[274]<\/a>\u00a0 In arguing for a particular<\/em> conception, he was asserting it in a theoretical fashion and thus outside the pragmatic maxim that judges on results.<\/p>\n

                It is on this point that pragmatism fails the coherency test for it can never on a pragmatic<\/em> basis have a self-evident conception of \u201cends\u201d, it is always begging the question.\u00a0 Rather like Russell expressing a view that by admitting a single<\/em> principle outside of empiricism we can establish empiricism (whereas we would effectively deny the \u2018-ism\u2019 of empiricism), Dewey and the pragmatists want to define \u201cour goals\u201d and then proceed but effectively bankrupt their position in doing so.<\/p>\n

                <\/a><\/a>2.6.7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Positivist Conception of Philosophy<\/h3>\n

                Kant\u2019s account of science as \u201cimposition\u201d rather than \u201cdiscovery\u201d was becoming progressively implausible as natural science emerged strongly and grew in confidence in the period following his death.\u00a0 By the middle of the 19th<\/sup> century, the influence of Comte\u2019s paleopositivism <\/a>[275]<\/a> and the phenomenalistic emphasis of the early twentieth century saw Schlick\u2019s emphatic rebuttal of Kant in asserting reality imposed its form on our mind rather the Kantian mind imposing its categories on the world.<\/a>[276]<\/a>\u00a0 This Kantian posit was viewed as most unsatisfactory because it separated humanity from the possibility of objective knowledge and rested on the doctrines of transcendental psychology.\u00a0 This reliance on transcendental psychology was judged as particularly problematic in Kant\u2019s thinking which even modern neo-Kantians such as Strawson now deem as unsafe, his derivation of the categories and his choice of formal categories as open to debate.\u00a0 There was also an awareness that there is something fundamental unintuitive in Kant\u2019s conception of science as the imposition<\/em> of modes of understanding on the world.<\/p>\n

                That is, \u201cscience\u201d, if it is anything, is generally accepted to be a process<\/em>, it was considered by its practitioners as a process of discovery<\/em> rather than imposition.\u00a0 It was difficult to describe the work of Faraday regarding electricity, which was to revolutionise the world, or the mathematical equations of Maxwell modelling the propagation of electromagnetic waves that provided the basis for modern communication technology, as somehow not \u201cdiscoveries\u201d about nature but rather the imposition of the mind of humanity on them.\u00a0 Thus, as natural science developed and technology was produced by the application of such science in second order disciplines such as engineering, it became increasingly apparent that to view science as the mind imposing<\/em> order on the world seemed more dogmatic than an authentic philosophical account.<\/p>\n

                Yet Schlick, even in his triumphant refutation of Kant, in a very important manner strengthened Kant\u2019s metaphysical agnosticism to outright atheism, jettisoning apodictic truths as \u201cbeyond the power of human cognition<\/em>\u201d.\u00a0 In rejecting metaphysics, he argued that the knowledge of particulars was all we had.<\/a>[277]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Subsequently, the logical positivist movement (of which Schlick was the major founder), rarefied philosophy as they sought empirical purity and threatened to cull even ethics as a philosophical category, reducing it to mere emotion without literal meaning.<\/a>[278]<\/a> \u201cPositivism\u201d seeks to bypass the need for a metaphysical basis for philosophy (in that sense they might be considered extreme global sceptics regarding metaphysics) by simply positing that the methodology of philosophy (modelled after science) <\/a>[279]<\/a> seeks merely to organise<\/em> the phenomena of nature on the basis of the objective evidence of the senses, and not to \u201cexplain\u201d it in any fashion. \u00a0Thus, Sir Isaac Newton, who revolutionised the scientific world of his day is sometimes considered as the protopositivist on the basis of his remark that he would not \u201cdare to feign a hypothesis\u201d<\/em>.<\/a>[280]<\/a><\/p>\n

                The idealised version of his method was allegedly to provide just a sufficient model to explain a particular \u201cfact\u201d of nature from the empirical evidence and to postulate no further. \u00a0The scientist merely \u201corganises\u201d phenomena gathered on the basis of observation or experimentation rather than attempting to explain it beyond what the evidence permits. \u00a0Thus, an implicit assumption of this school is the supremacy of empirical methods, they are considered more reliable and safer than the deductions of the rationalists. \u00a0Positivism thus attempted to mitigate scepticism by describing the traditional \u201cbig\u201d, conceptual problems of philosophy as \u201cpseudo-problems\u201d<\/em>, that disappear once we tidy up our language.<\/a>[281]<\/a>\u00a0 However, as we found in \u00a72.3.4, the glaring anomaly of this metaphysical position that rejected all other metaphysical positions, was that the postulate of verifiability was not a criterion that was itself empirically<\/em> verifiable. \u00a0They had rarefied philosophy of its most important content, eventually replacing all speculative metaphysical dogma with a single metaphysical dogma of there being no metaphysics.<\/p>\n

                Additionally, the logical positivists had a similar ethical<\/em> problem to Dewey and his instrumentalism.\u00a0 Though they wanted logical rigour and the application of the scientific<\/em> method to the problems of society, positivism could not justify<\/em> as to why the scientific method applied to our social problems should<\/em> be desirable.\u00a0 This was even more so the case after the bloodthirstiness of the \u201cscientific\u201d regimes of Communism <\/a>[282]<\/a> and Nazism <\/a>[283]<\/a> which, ironically, also led to the effective disbandment of the school as many members of the school became Jewish exiles to the US.<\/a>[284]<\/a>\u00a0 Yet, the positivists believed their manifesto, alongside the humanist manifestos of the same period, were \u201cbetter\u201d than what went before but on their own criteria, there seems no possible justification for why<\/em> we should think it so.\u00a0 Their ethical position is thus arbitrary and question-begging.\u00a0 However, we have already indicated that the catastrophic deconstruction of logical positivism was to come from within their own ranks.\u00a0 In 1953 Quine <\/a>[285]<\/a> (an intimate collaborator in his early period with Carnap) published an epoch-making paper <\/a>[286]<\/a> in which he demonstrated that logical positivism was founded on two dogmas, analyticity <\/em><\/a>[287]<\/a> and reductionism.<\/em><\/a>[288]<\/a>\u00a0 This was to prove terminal for the movement though it heavily influenced the methodological naturalism that emerged from the philosophical naturalism of Darwinism that we will examine next.<\/p>\n

                <\/a><\/a>2.6.8\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Post-Darwinian Naturalist Conception of Philosophy<\/h3>\n

                For the major schools of philosophy in the first part of the 20th<\/sup> century, the bottoms fall out of what we might call an ethical<\/em> theory of what and why we should value as a culture or how and why we should behave in a particular way.\u00a0 This is primarily because any conception of ethics seems to require a non-natural, metaphysical assumption about the character of reality, the relations within it and the flow, even the meaning or purpose of it, which had traditionally been provided by some non-scientific meta-theory, i.e., a philosophical theory of \u201cnature\u201d or a religious view of \u201ccreation\u201d.\u00a0 However, Darwin postulated that natural selection<\/em> was the mechanism of a natural process<\/em> of evolution,<\/a>[289]<\/a> providing prima facie<\/em>, a scientific<\/em> and a naturalistic meta-narrative.\u00a0 With an evolutionary view of humanity, Darwin made it possible to be \u201can intellectually fulfilled atheist\u201d <\/em><\/a>[290]<\/a> (as reported in Professor Dawkin\u2019s words to A.J. Ayer over a candlelight dinner at an ancient Oxford college founded to train preachers). <\/a>[291]<\/a>\u00a0 As positivism and pragmatism waned, naturalism turned more explicitly to the Book of Darwin to be the missing intellectual piece that allowed the atheist to have a \u201ccoherent\u201d worldview and for eminent philosophers such as Quine to \u201cfind hope in Darwin\u201d<\/em> that blind chance is hurtling us towards an inevitably better world.<\/p>\n

                Ethics is explained in terms of \u201cevolutionary advantage\u201d for those who are moral. \u00a0However, there lies the problem. \u00a0As G E Moore demonstrated, it is a logical fallacy in naturalism to believe we can move from what is<\/em> to what ought<\/em> to be the case.\u00a0 The self-vitiating nature of naturalism was also demonstrated forcefully by Lewis <\/a>[292]<\/a> and Plantinga concurred – if all<\/em> we have is naturalism, there is no reason<\/em> or necessity for us to believe that what nature tells us is neither good nor bad; <\/a>[293]<\/a> it becomes at best an arbitrary choice or preference.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Plantinga captures the problem of naturalism and the possibility of knowledge perfectly:<\/p>\n

                \u201cDespite the superficial concord between naturalism and science \u2013 despite all the claims to the effect that science implies, or requires, or supports, or confirms, or comports well with naturalism – the fact is that science and naturalism don\u2019t fit together well\u2026there is deep unease, deep discord, deep conflict\u2026<\/em>\u201d.<\/a>[294]<\/a> (Emphasis added).<\/p>\n

                The basic problem with any naturalistic argument is that it is self-vitiating with regards to rationality; reason gets subsumed into behavioural or cognitive science or evolutionary necessity.\u00a0 There is absolutely no reason to believe in the authority <\/em>of the pronouncements of reason when we drill down into its foundations and find they are naturalistic any more than we would trust the \u201creasoning\u201d of a monkey.\u00a0 Thus, it should be evident that the conception of truth in naturalism is problematic and for those philosophers who seriously considered it, such as Quine, a rarefied disquotational view of truth is all that remains.\u00a0 As Quine puts it, \u201c\u2018snow is white\u2019 is true, if and only if, snow is white\u201d<\/em> \u2013 unquoting p<\/em> is true gives us p.<\/em>\u00a0 Further, as he was apt to do, Quine felt this foreclosed the matter for further philosophical discussion:<\/p>\n

                \u201c\u2026there is surely no impugning the disquotation account\u2026Moreover, it is a full account: it explicates clearly the truth or falsity of every sentence\u201d. <\/a>[295]<\/a><\/p>\n

                In fairness to Quine, he then proceeds to distinguish between truth and warranted belief,<\/a>[296]<\/a> where the latter might be seen to impugn on the traditional content of philosophical debates about truth, allowing Quine to assert that truth is simply a matter of two valued logic.<\/a>[297]<\/a><\/p>\n

                As with much of Quine\u2019s method of philosophising, we gain clarity at the cost of rarefying the content but cannot help to feel we have just deferred the discussion to a later section or my next book on that subject. \u00a0However, Quine is refreshingly candid in places regarding the rather knotty problems of philosophy, \u201cI have no definition of empirical content to offer for such theories, but it seems<\/em> to make reasonable<\/em> intuitive<\/em> sense\u2026\u201d <\/a>[298]<\/a> (emphasis added).\u00a0 The remarkable lack of precision and commitment to subjective idealism implicit in these remarks should be of comfort to those so burned by Quine\u2019s projects to naturalise both epistemology and ontology.<\/p>\n

                <\/a><\/a>2.6.9\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fallibilism and Modern Science – Universe or Multiverse?<\/h3>\n

                2.6.9.1\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Intellectual Challenge of the Concept of Chance<\/h4>\n

                We began by noting that fallibilism is an attempt to deal with scepticism by admitting that our knowledge will be incomplete or partial but still has sufficient warrant.\u00a0 However, we have found that fallibilism in practice under pressure from the uncompromising sceptic capitulates to and in effect, compounds the deadly, general scepticism of the 20th<\/sup> century, forming what North described as the \u201cepistemological crisis\u201d<\/em> of the \u201cnew\u201d university.\u00a0 In its practice of denying certainty, a unity of human knowledge, a devaluing of \u201cknowledge for knowledge\u2019s sake\u201d <\/em><\/a>[299]<\/sup><\/a> and most recently in the 21st<\/sup> century, profitability over academic expertise, we find fallibilism a grossly inadequate underpinning for either science generally or epistemology specifically.\u00a0 On this basis, the modern university has been described as an anti<\/em>-university, actively promoting chaos, contingency, and chance as the only \u201csure\u201d principles of reality.<\/a>[300]<\/a> \u00a0We need to consider why such an unintuitive and seemingly anti-intellectual position has maintained the ideological credibility it has.\u00a0 This we shall explore by considering and evaluating its most exotic form, the multiverse<\/em> postulate.<\/p>\n

                2.6.9.2\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The New Physics<\/h4>\n

                Most remarkably, this disunified and unordered conception of reality was given its initial intellectual plausibility by the \u201cnew physics\u201d of the early 20th<\/sup> century which seemed to show stochastic processes,<\/a>[301]<\/a> indeterminacy, and subjectivity at the sub-atomic level.\u00a0 This was found attractive by those who, for various ideological reasons, wanted to generalise and characterise all<\/em> of reality as contingent and subjective. \u00a0Quantum processes also seemed to be affected by the process of observing, i.e., they were asserted as lacking objectivity in an absolute sense, they were by nature subjective.\u00a0 In quantum speak, the act of observation seemed to \u201ccollapse the wave function\u201d<\/em> to \u201cactualise\u201d<\/em> a \u2018particle\u2019 in a particular location. \u00a0Famous experiments such as the double slit experiment seemed to show the presence of a particle in two different places at the same<\/em> time and demonstrate a wave-particle duality,<\/a>[302]<\/a> i.e., it had a \u201cfuzzy\u201d ontological status.\u00a0 One interpretation of this physics <\/a>[303]<\/a> asserted that it denied the Law of Excluded Middle, one of the tenets of classical logic. \u00a0With logic consequently viewed as purely conventional and faulty, reality was apparently elusive, fluid, and un-fixed.\u00a0 This also flowed well with the postmodern Zeitgeist of the age in which the dogmatic religious metanarratives were collapsing under the weight of various pluralist and liberal responses to Darwinism.\u00a0 That is, some of the postmodern narrative tended to cast existence as \u201cironic\u201d \u2013 meaning that all our conceptions of ourselves (and reality generally) are tentative, we should not take life that seriously and we should abandon the foolish project that seeks a comprehensive understanding.<\/a>[304]<\/a><\/p>\n

                However, the \u201cextended meaning\u201d (we might say philosophical implications) of such physical theories cannot reasonably be appropriated to the deconstructionist cause in defence of chance, contingency, and chaos. \u00a0It is certainly correct that there are two basic positions regarding the ontological status of the proposed quantum states i.e., are they actualised<\/em> or just a convenient model<\/em>. \u00a0Penrose firmly asserts the \u201cobjectivity\u201d of the quantum state vector <\/a>[305]<\/a> as telling us something about the real world whereas Hawking denied quantum physics offers us anything other than convenient models.<\/a>[306]<\/a>\u00a0 However, both<\/em> Penrose and Hawking feel able to write popular accounts of the history of the Universe; that is, Hawking clearly believed there is a meaningful<\/em> story to tell about the Universe.<\/p>\n

                In contrast, for the thorough going deconstructionist, it is a staple that there can be no<\/em> history for it is not possible to understand the world from the outside, there is no objective position with which to view the world.\u00a0 However, the logical fallacy is plain, just because we cannot be close enough to every historical account to give a fully objective account does not mean we cannot be close enough to understand the various dynamics at play and to assert a reasonable account with the expectation of a good degree of objectivity.<\/a>[307]<\/a>\u00a0 Historical analysis and synthesis remain a worthwhile endeavour that is ignored at the price of the future; even our folk wisdom teaches us that if we ignore the mistakes of the past, we will repeat them.<\/p>\n

                However, there is a far more substantive and robust refutation of the deconstructionist position that can be made. \u00a0Theories of the \u201cvery large\u201d, that is the cosmological or relativistic theories, were showing a remarkable amount of \u201ctuning\u201d of the universe which was taken as strengthening the case for determinism in natural law, for it appeared the universe was necessarily<\/em> as it was.\u00a0 For example, Wilkinson describes how Martin Rees\u2019 Just Six Numbers<\/em> had indicated a remarkable<\/em> tuning in the basic physical constants of the universe and that all <\/em>these constants not only needed to be the values they were but needed<\/em> to be that as a group.<\/a>[308]<\/a>\u00a0 Anyone with an understanding of probability appreciates the near impossibility of such an event as the individual probabilities, themselves considered infinitesimally small, are multiplied together for the overall probability.<\/a>[309]<\/a><\/p>\n

                2.6.9.3\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cosmological and Teleological Arguments<\/h4>\n

                As Polkinghorne also noted, this was prima facie<\/em> attractive to those seeking evidence for divine design and still features predominantly in evidential style apologetics.<\/a>[310]<\/a>\u00a0 I do not intend to consider these \u201cclassical\u201d proofs in any detail for I believe they all share a fundamental logical<\/em> weakness, and this can be explicated quickly here. \u00a0Any \u2018design\u2019 arguments (also known as cosmological or teleological arguments) are logically very weak as they do not necessarily<\/em> point to a single<\/em> designer and even if they did, it would not necessarily be to the specific \u201cGod\u201d the monotheist would require.\u00a0 Design arguments also suffer from the problem they are attempting to postulate something about the supernatural world from the natural world which as Kant put it, is also logically fallacious \u2013 we could only move to a designer that is part of the natural world or there would be more in our premises than in our conclusion.<\/p>\n

                That said, design arguments do<\/em> work for the believer<\/em> in a devotional sense,<\/a>[311]<\/a> serving as evidence from natural revelation because we already<\/em> have the correct presuppositions and can give glory to God for his creation.\u00a0 That is, in my view, they work as exegesis for believers but are weak as logical proofs for unbelievers, i.e., they are not a medium for natural theology.\u00a0 This is not to say that they are still very popular in apologetic settings and are capable of a sophisticated defence,<\/a>[312]<\/a> but I do believe they have insoluble logical problems.<\/p>\n

                2.6.9.4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Fine-Tuning Problem<\/h4>\n

                However, the undeniable finetuning of the universe did (and does) present an enormous logical<\/em> challenge to the physicalist, the evolutionist, and the general naturalist.\u00a0 As the case for finetuning got louder, the need for a response got stronger.\u00a0 It came in a particular interpretation of quantum theory which posited that any possible<\/em> state does<\/em> exist, and each combination would be a \u201cuniverse\u201d dimensionally isolated from the another, each with their own laws of physics.<\/p>\n

                That is, the intoxicating feature of the multiverse concept for the physicalist is the proposition that all possible<\/em> worlds (each resulting from a particular combination of quantum states) do<\/em> exist but in a disconnected fashion.\u00a0 \u201cReality\u201d was conceived of as a collection of universes, i.e., a multiverse<\/em> and because there was considered an infinite plurality of quantum combinations, one combination would generate a universe like our own with the conditions for life. \u00a0If \u201cnothing\u201d can split into \u201cmatter\u201d and \u201cantimatter\u201d <\/a>[313]<\/a> we have an entire materialist conception of the universe that has no requirement for \u201cGod\u201d to even \u201clight the touchpaper of the universe\u201d<\/em>.<\/a>[314]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Thus, the fine-tuning problem is \u201csolved\u201d: our<\/em> universe, despite its remarkable fine \u201ctuning\u201d must<\/em> exist if anything<\/em> exists at all, even if classical probability theory had suggested the near impossibility of that state.<\/p>\n

                This is obviously supremely attractive for the atheist materialist, but Wilkinson cites the problem with it well:<\/p>\n

                \u201c[T]he exceedingly indirect nature of the evidence probably means the multiverse will remain at the furthest border of speculative science<\/em> for some time to come. As for the fine-tuning problem, the Lewis\/Tegmark infinite multiverse idea seems to solve it, but anything more specific such as string theory <\/a>[315]<\/a> just deflects the problems up to the next level of speculation\u201d.<\/a>[316]<\/a>\u00a0 (Emphasis added).<\/p>\n

                This is a loaded criticism, \u201cspeculative\u201d science is hardly the rigorous, \u201chard science\u201d the physicalists want to pretend physics is.\u00a0 It hardly demands epistemic submission because of its compelling evidence.\u00a0 It is arguable, as Penrose asserted, that there is no<\/em> evidence, just pre-theoretical \u201ctoy theory\u201d<\/em> <\/a>[317]<\/a><\/sup> conjecture and it is difficult to imagine any path that would turn that conjecture into a theory that would even be granted the status of reasonable verisimilitude.<\/a>[318]<\/a><\/p>\n

                We should also note that there are deep philosophy of physics issues skipped over with barely a nod here in these exotic accounts. It sidesteps the definition of \u201cmatter\u201d and \u201cantimatter\u201d which are extremely problematic with antimatter possibly better described as a \u201cvirtual\u201d mathematical construct with no physical analogue.<\/a>[319]<\/a>\u00a0 It is also worthy of note here that the matter\/anti-matter\/dark-matter problems were motivators that prompted Hawkins to propose a \u201csteady state\u201d model of the universe <\/a>[320]<\/a> rather than an inflationary-deflationary one that he had famously formulated with Penrose in 1970.\u00a0 On the inflationary universe hypothesis, 98% of the required mass of the universe demanded by the theory appears to be \u201cmissing\u201d.\u00a0 \u201cDark matter\u201d was added as a concept to provide a cosmic fix for the model \u2013 matter that has not been detected but must be there for the theory to be tenable; black holes were once thought of as favourite candidates as reservoirs.\u00a0 However, as more was learnt about black holes, this has not been maintained.<\/p>\n

                The dark matter problem was a driver for new cosmological theories that dispense with it.\u00a0 Hawkings was not able to de-convert many of his peers to the non-inflationary view, after the forceful elegance of his work with Penrose (most still hold an inflationary model), though he asserted that early quantum effects removed the need for the \u201csingularity\u201d at the start of the inflation and the end of the expansion, a phase which was still necessary to generate the multiverse with suitable characteristics for life.\u00a0 Further to this case in point, we find that Hawking advertised himself in the more serious literature as a \u201cpositivist\u201d because he did not view his work as describing reality in any sense but merely as a model and it was irrelevant<\/em> as to whether there was a corresponding physical object,<\/a>[321]<\/a> i.e., the universe as it is in itself might be completely different from that predicted by his theories.<\/p>\n

                This is illustrated with brutal clarity by the philosophical weakness of the \u201cinfinite universes\u201d position admitted in Hawking\u2019s final paper before his death, in which Hawking described his revised multiverse theory as still a \u201ctoy model\u201d. \u00a0His motivation for offering a revised version was to limit the required number of universes so that the theoretical problems of the \u201cinfinite\u201d universe requirement could be mitigated.<\/a>[322]<\/a>\u00a0 However, by weakening the possible<\/em> universes, he aided the plausibility of those who favoured some kind of design hypothesis which the infinite model had initially served to counter after Rees\u2019 probability analysis.\u00a0 So, despite Hawking being famous for and advertising a \u201ctheory of everything\u201d<\/em> <\/a>[323]<\/a> it seems there is actually very little but speculative conjecture of a vastly simplified model of the universe which is expressed in complex mathematics that did not convince his most able peers.<\/p>\n

                Thus, Penrose after a full decade of debate with Hawkings describes the ultimate paradox of modern physics, \u201cit is a common view among many of today\u2019s physicists that quantum mechanics provides us with <\/em>no picture of reality at all\u201d<\/em> <\/a>[324]<\/a> (emphasis original), an opinion remaining confirmed 13 years later from within quantum physics in a most emphatic manner by Glatfelder.<\/a>[325]<\/a>\u00a0 We might thus feel distinctly unimpressed and unthreatened if this is the worldview of the most creative minds in the philosophy of physics, particularly if the best explanation of \u201cwhat there is\u201d has but the status of a \u201ctoy theory\u201d. \u00a0We must assert it is a metaphysical presupposition that motivates such a position, not a discursive scientific process.\u00a0 Goff admits this bluntly:<\/p>\n

                \u201cIf, in the earliest period of our universe, our laws were shaped by the right kind of probabilistic process, the many worlds theory could furnish us with enough variety of laws across the many worlds so as to make it likely that one would be fine-tuned. We don\u2019t yet have evidence that our laws were shaped by such a process<\/em>. But if the alternative is the postulation of a supernatural creator, then this seems like the more plausible proposal<\/em>.\u201d <\/a>[326]<\/a>\u00a0 (Emphasis added).<\/p>\n

                Goff here is appealing to nothing other than naturalistic prejudice as the basis for his \u201cplausibility\u201d, which mirrors the evidentialist believer\u2019s preference for a supernatural creator hypothesis. \u00a0Neither possesses superior logical force.<\/p>\n

                2.6.10 \u00a0\u00a0<\/a>Certainty and Reasonable Verisimilitude<\/h3>\n

                In our brief account above, it is evident that we have ample prima facie<\/em> warrant to reject both scepticism and fallibilism as a normative basis for our epistemology, surprising ourselves that the latter offers an unworkable alternative to scepticism, either suffering from arbitrariness of criteria when defining its position or being vulnerable to scepticism when it makes strong knowledge claims.\u00a0 This is not to deny that it might indeed be true that secular and non-presuppositional epistemologies, including those claiming to be theistic, are forced to conclude \u201cwe are all fallibilists now\u201d<\/em>,<\/a>[327]<\/a> as any attempt to ground epistemology on infallible criteria seems impossible on a non-circular basis and sometimes viciously so.<\/a>[328]<\/a>\u00a0 We will seek to substantiate this prima facie<\/em> warrant into the philosophical necessity for epistemological self-consciousness as we progress through the thesis, but our point here is that to fully grasp the significance of Schlipp\u2019s criticism of analytic philosophy noted above is the challenge to not be philosophically timid and for us to reengage with the big problems of philosophy once again.\u00a0 Concisely, it is to understand the possibility of certain<\/em> knowledge and the ability to apply it.<\/p>\n

                That said, there might indeed be, and I would say there definitely are, domains of knowledge where our knowledge is always perceived of as developing or limited and might, in a sense, be argued as \u201cuncertain\u201d.\u00a0 Yet, that admission is not an imperative for scepticism, rather our basic philosophical and psychological orientation remains epistemologically self-conscious and scientific in the sense we believe our knowledge is always progressing towards the truth;<\/em> truth remains a legitimate goal of our enquiry.<\/a>[329]<\/a>\u00a0 The important philosophical distinction here is that we can claim certain<\/em> foundations for our claims to the possibility of knowledge, whilst recognising we do indeed learn <\/em>through analysis and experience such that our knowledge grows<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                Thus, critical realists (CR) like to call this basic orientation \u201creasonable verisimilitude\u201d<\/em> (RV) and Polkinghorne makes this the centrepiece of his approach.<\/a>[330]<\/a>\u00a0 Polkinghorne\u2019s work demands serious engagement for as a senior scientist who then trained as a priest but who also remained scientifically and theologically engaged, he brings a refreshing perspective, and he provides a persuasive case, contra Hawking, that the \u201ctrue Theory of Everything\u2026is trinitarian theology\u201d<\/em>.<\/a>[331]<\/a>\u00a0 He is also a committed realist in that he believes the experimentally driven physical research, does indeed \u2018discover\u2019 something that is really<\/em> there.\u00a0 This presents quantum physics with a far more objective sense and helps us escape from the meandering conjectures and exotic fantasies surrounding quantum physics that seem to gain intellectual respectability because the speaker once did something for science.<\/a>[332]<\/a><\/p>\n

                Yet, he does believe his approach is \u201cmediating between postmodernism and modernism\u201d<\/em> so his knowledge claims, though he considers them as having strong ontological significance and truth value, are unlikely to refute the self-conscious sceptic.\u00a0 Where to draw this line between modernism and postmodernism, if it is accepted as a legitimate possibility, cannot be seen as an objective process.\u00a0 Polkinghorne leaves himself open to critique on this basis and vulnerable to claims of subjectivity.\u00a0 It would appear the CR\/RV position gets pulled into the black hole of fallibilism if the sceptic pushes hard enough.<\/p>\n

                2.6.11 \u00a0\u00a0<\/a>Conclusion<\/h3>\n

                In our analysis above of the various recapitulations of the fallibilist positions, we find that when they are driven to epistemological self-consciousness, these \u2018scientific\u2019 formulations are seen to be woefully inadequate and unsatisfactory as to the nature of reality and a theory of knowledge.\u00a0 Their associated ethical implications which became plain in the generalisation of a \u201cchance\u201d principle and the denial that any certain moral knowledge is possible, are thus also brought into question.\u00a0 Thus, our intermediate conclusion must be that the messianic promises made of empirical \u201cscience\u201d in all these philosophical forms are ill-equipped to deal with scepticism and cannot form a firm foundation on which to build a society.\u00a0 The clarity we have obtained at this juncture also demonstrates the effectiveness of our methodology of moving them to epistemological self-consciousness.\u00a0 Thus, we will now consider some of the more rationalistic concepts that emerged in post-Reformational and Enlightenment modes of thought, that is, both secular and Christian innovations, and apply the same critique to them with a view to providing a bridge into our wider programme of epistemological self-consciousness.<\/p>\n

                <\/a><\/a><\/a>2.7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Imperative for Epistemological Self-Consciousness<\/h2>\n

                <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>2.7.1\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Quest for Common Ground<\/h3>\n

                The Renaissance and Enlightenment mindsets drew heavily on the Greek mindset, literature, and philosophy with which we began our discussion.\u00a0 The era is often popularly conceived of and taught as a \u201crediscovery\u201d of this classical or \u201cgolden age\u201d of Greek culture with its emphasis on humanism and autonomy in contrast to the Catholic hegemony.\u00a0 However, it should be noted that the relationship with the Catholic church during the Period was not always adversarial, there was a large patronage of universities by the Church and some of what was considered the Christian Renaissance was acclaimed as some of the best work of the period, but it was<\/em> true that the lack of progress in science was the exception to the general advancement in other parts of culture.\u00a0 Rather paradoxically, this was not so much to do with the catholic hegemony but rather with the dominance of Aristotelianism within the academy.<\/p>\n

                Yet it certainly remains defensible that it was with the work of Plato <\/a>[333]<\/a> (429\u2013347 BC) and his pupil Aristotle (384-322 BC), that the Western Early Modern tradition owes so much.\u00a0 It was also true that later thinkers such as Epicurus (c.300BC), in whom we see the first strong articulations of naturalism and atheological scepticism which were to feature in some Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume.\u00a0 Hume found Epicurus\u2019 atheological argument from evil compelling, \u201cEpicurus\u2019 old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?\u201d <\/em><\/a>[334]<\/a>\u00a0 Pelagius believed he was following Augustine when he answered that question with the concept of human freedom <\/a>[335]<\/a> and it has had some forceful defenders in our contemporary generation of philosophers.<\/a>[336]<\/a><\/p>\n

                It should be of no surprise then that we see a series of Catholic philosophers, who like some of the early church Fathers, were heavily influenced by Greek thought and imported that conception of reason.\u00a0 Leaving out the long historical sequence before him, this \u201cscholastic\u201d tradition was seen to have its most articulate and rigorous working out in St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) but Aquinas, in some of his innovations, himself precipitated a radical departure from his own position which was moderated by his theological commitments.\u00a0 In apologetics it is asserted that it was Aquinas\u2019 appropriation of Aristotle that sets the basic orientation of Catholic thought that continues to the present <\/a>[337]<\/a> with, it is said, its general principle of a common<\/em> reason providing the grounding for apologetic argument, the outreach and appeal to the unbeliever is on the basis of discursive argument, the claims of Christianity will be demonstrated to them through direct arguments with premises that can be accepted by both sides.\u00a0 Thus, Aquinas\u2019 \u201cFive Ways\u201d from his Summa <\/a>[338]<\/a> being the archetypal examples of the method, all being variations on the cosmological principle, providing the foundation to what came to be called natural theology \u2013 a proof for God\u2019s existence derived from nature alone.\u00a0 However, this does need some important clarification and qualification to correctly understand the track from Aquinas into what might be called natural theology and the evidential method of apologetics if we are not to misrepresent Aquinas, there is some question regarding whether natural theology is an innovation from his work rather than an expression of it. <\/a>[339]<\/a><\/p>\n

                Prima facie<\/em> it is not difficult to recruit a traditional understanding of Aquinas to the evidentialist cause. For example, in his Summa contra Gentiles<\/em> he argues he \u201cmust have recourse to natural reason, since the gentiles do not accept the authority of scripture\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 The first four books of the Summa<\/em> make no appeal to \u201crevelation\u201d other than to confirm the conclusions reached by reason<\/em>.\u00a0 We might be tempted to argue that we had already seen a similar pattern in Anselm (b.1033, d.1109) who argued impressively on the basis of \u201creason alone\u201d for \u201cfaith seeking understanding\u201d but in an important sense, for Anselm as most certainly with Augustine, faith was seen to precede reason. \u00a0The traditional interpretation of Aquinas in many Reformed accounts of Thomism (and indeed many conservative Thomist thinkers for the best part of five centuries <\/a>[340]<\/a> ) was that he reversed this priority, i.e., that reason provides the grounding for faith.<\/p>\n

                This traditional account of Aquinas asserts that we know by revelation through grace or by reason and that God can be known in both ways, but with God in His essence considered as incorporeal, proof of God through reason will always be indirect.\u00a0 Aquinas was empirical in orientation and had no desire to appeal to intuition to substantiate the rational knowledge of God, it is through the senses that reason mediates the world.\u00a0 God\u2019s essence was considered as incorporeal and consequently cannot be directly known by reason but must be known by analogy and remotion.<\/a>[341]<\/a>\u00a0 Thus, the famous arguments early in his Summa<\/em> proceed backwards through the chain of causality to God.<\/a>[342]<\/a>\u00a0 His core argument was that if all objects were contingent, by definition there must have been a time where they did not exist; but because they do exist there must be some necessary object (which we will assign to be God) that caused them to come into existence.\u00a0 These contingent objects were the objects of nature which Aquinas enveloped such that they had a functional separateness and independence from the divine nature, i.e., suggestive of a theory of natural law.\u00a0 It is this conception of a realm of \u201cpure nature\u201d which was to precipitate what became both a theological and a scientific revolution.<\/p>\n

                Dupr\u00e9 describes his innovation as developing in subsequent thinkers in terms of a theory of secondary causes, \u201ca conception of nature as fully equipped to act without divine assistance\u201d<\/em>.<\/a>[343]<\/a> \u00a0However, this must be considered an innovation rather than an exegesis of his account as Aquinas was always careful to avoid the separation into two independent or parallel accounts, the two constituted a single reality directed towards a supernatural end.\u00a0 This elucidates the alleged tension in Aquinas that had so disturbed Russell.<\/a>[344]<\/a>\u00a0 For Russell, Aquinas\u2019 appeal to reason was \u201cinsincere\u201d because the conclusion was \u201cfixed in advance\u201d, i.e., from revelation<\/em>. \u00a0Aquinas seems to be being accused by Russell of being Augustinian.\u00a0 However, equally, Aquinas in his dependence on Aristotle was vulnerable to the criticisms of Aristotle\u2019s conception of the universal as embedded in the particular, where the active intellect extracts the universal from the particular and that \u2018form\u2019 was held, instantiated, within the intellect.<\/p>\n

                This was philosophically problematic; it was at best paradoxical to assert the presence of a universal in a particular by definition and there was a search for how such a position could not just be mitigated but avoided altogether.\u00a0 To deal more effectively with the problem of universals and particulars, there was a movement towards nominalism<\/em> where the universal is merely considered a convenient linguistic label.\u00a0 When combined with a voluntaristic account, first articulated by Scotus but radically in Ockham, a division between nature and grace was making a naturalistic account not just possible but the foundation upon which, according to Dupr\u00e9 both Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinistic thought was to unconsciously proceed.<\/a>[345]<\/a>\u00a0 Thus, it was in the work of Aquinas\u2019 interpreters Cajetan and de Suarez in the 16th<\/sup> century that formalised this division between nature and grace, with a priority given to naturalism, to the near exclusion of the spiritual.\u00a0 It is this naturalistic form of Thomism that characterises evidential apologetics within a Catholic, a Reformed or an evangelical context.\u00a0 This Lubac wishes to expose as a faulty exegesis of the thoughts of Aquinas whilst simultaneously acknowledging that it was a dominant conception within Thomist theologians only facing a concerted reappraisal in the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/a>[346]<\/a>\u00a0 Lubac\u2019s thesis was that that a return to an Augustinian foundation would be compatible with a correct reading of Aquinas, <\/a>[347]<\/a> thus it is this \u2018aberrant\u2019 version of Thomism that lends itself to evidentialism.\u00a0 Rather provocatively then we might consider the implicit reformation of Lubac as compatible with our own aim of restoring the properly Christian foundations of rationality, though this would be something that would need to be examined further in a separate thesis.<\/p>\n

                Thus, it becomes more interesting for us that Plantinga identifies the \u201cgerm\u201d of what Calvin labelled the sensus divinitus<\/em> in Aquinas and he described his own epistemological model <\/a>[348]<\/a> as the Extended Aquinas\/Calvin (A\/C) model, in preference to the earlier \u201cReformed Epistemology\u201d moniker.\u00a0 It must be noted that though he spent a considerable period at Catholic Notre Dame after Calvin <\/a>[349]<\/a>, it is still implausible this change of nomenclature may have been merely a concessive political gesture. <\/a>[350]<\/a>\u00a0 It is certainly contrary to Plantinga\u2019s personal testimony in response to anticipated criticism when joining Notre Dame in which he endorsed Notre Dame as being home to some of the finest Protestant thinkers also.\u00a0 That is, the traditional demarcation between Catholic and Reformed thought is not as clear-cut as many accounts suggest.\u00a0 It should also be noted that the pre-eminence of reason is not peculiar to the neo-Thomist apologetics challenged as heterodox by Lubac, and it is readily found in Reformed thought.\u00a0 They become issues of emphasis rather than substantive difference and this is one of the reasons that Van Til was so forceful in his rejection of it, or at least in the priority given to evidences.\u00a0 Evidences are not self-<\/em>evidential, facts are not \u2018brute\u2019 facts, so evidences are founded on a philosophy of evidences.\u00a0 These important issues we consider later in the thesis.<\/p>\n

                So, in summary, despite the complexity of the theological landscape we have sketched above which denies the simple separation of Catholic and Reformed thought, history still teaches us that it is on the naturalistic assumption which theologians and philosophers have proceeded and which we will demonstrate is unsupportable.\u00a0 Implicit in this position is that the \u201cprinciple of reason\u201d<\/em> was considered general and universal, there was a \u201ccommon intellectual ground\u201d<\/em> on which an argument could be undertaken and worked through on the basis of reason alone.\u00a0 However, with Lubac we can concur, \u201cthe dualism engendered by an obsessive notion of \u2018pure nature\u2019 was not without its uses\u201d<\/em> <\/a>[351]<\/a> if for no other reason than to confute artificial teleological accounts which had hampered the progress of natural science.\u00a0 It was thus in the wake of the Reformation proceeding as Dupr\u00e9 hinted in a mode friendly to pura naturalis<\/em> assumptions, that there was a major expansion of science as Aristotelianism lost its grip even amongst the Catholic scientists.\u00a0 It was rather the papal<\/em> reaction to Galileo that caused serious complications for the Catholic scientists, the censuring of Copernicus was actually after his work had been assimilated to a large degree by the lower levels of the Church.<\/a>[352]<\/a>\u00a0 Similarly, Lubac was first censured by Pope Pius XII in 1950 seeking to articulate what was already a nascent repositioning in Catholic thought,<\/a>[353]<\/a> a decision effectively reversed when Pope John Paul II appointed him a cardinal in 1983.<\/a>[354]<\/a>\u00a0 So, much as secularists like to set in opposition science and religion, or the sectarian Reformed want to castigate the Catholic hegemony for their stifling of science, the situation was and is far more complex and nuanced.\u00a0 The battle is rather at the worldview level independent of sectarian allegiance, and it is that which we are seeking to articulate ultimately in our thesis.<\/p>\n

                <\/a>2.7.2\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Beyond Common Ground<\/h3>\n

                Thus, it should be apparent to us that a more sophisticated rationality was required to support orthodox Christian premises whilst maintaining the important contact with the real world. This was not to be found in the Fundamentalist movement that emerged as a reaction to the Liberalism of the academy, who chose instead to withdraw from mainstream academic life for close to half a century until the early 1970s.\u00a0 Similarly, the American Reformed Christian world splintered into various denominations after the reorganisation of Princeton by a denomination seeking to liberalise their theology and it was to be from Calvin college, a locus of the Dutch-Reformed tradition, that something of a renaissance in Christian scholarship emerged out of the philosophy department, particularly in the figures of Alvin Plantinga and Cornelius Van Til, who both studied under Harry Jellema, recognised by both as a highly influential teacher of Christian philosophy.<\/p>\n

                Plantinga\u2019s work can be seen as analytic philosophical theology developing a far more robust reliabilism with a careful and sophisticated development of Reid. In Plantinga we see that alongside a metaphysical commitment to realism, there is not a denial of the interrelatedness of the subject, their world, and the world around us.\u00a0 There is the ethical presupposition of standing in God\u2019s world and being accountable.\u00a0 This avoids the lapse, like the positivists and the naturalists, into scepticism, scientism, or both.\u00a0 In contrast, Van Til was in the broad Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition and his philosophical theology can be seen as seeking to build upon the seminal work of the great Christian theologian and statesperson of the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> century, Abraham Kuyper.<\/a>[355]<\/a>\u00a0 Kuyper had recapitulated a Calvinist philosophy of life fitted for modernity whilst vigorously rejecting the various faces of modernism.\u00a0 He argued with great force against the Darwinist, Liberal and the emerging socialist metanarratives, that had come to dominate the philosophical Zeitgeist and the wider cultural milieu which we have considered earlier when discussing the influences of Darwinism and modern naturalism.\u00a0 However, with the backwash of Arminian revivalism, the obscurantism and cultural ghettoism of the dispensationalist premillennialism of the emerging Fundamentalist movement, it made his profound and intellectually rigorous message anachronistic and unappealing to the wider anti-intellectual Christian consciousness, even at the time he was expounding it.<\/p>\n

                In contrast to this emergent \u2018New Evangelicalism\u2019, Van Til offered an orthodox, Reformed but sophisticated development of Kuyper whilst simultaneously arguing for the objectivity of Christianity, which was distinctive of the \u2018rival\u2019 Reformed Princetonian Warfieldian view, developing his position from the mid-1930s onwards.<\/a>[356]<\/a>\u00a0 He was to lay the ground for a dramatic re-entry of conservative Christianity into the public square without ever being directly involved in the Reconstructionist movement he spawned.<\/a>[357]<\/a>\u00a0 He had helped develop the epistemological basis for the programme to counter the inadequacy of the Christian consciousness, which had been ill equipped to counter the flow into either mysticism or liberalism, and the subsequent loss of political influence to the pragmatism of John Dewey in the US and to far worse in Europe.\u00a0 As we have already seen, the old Liberalism of the European empires disintegrated as the rational nihilism of Nietzsche was given teeth in the Nazi movement.<\/p>\n

                Thus, with Plantinga and Van Til there was to be an intellectual turning point in the early 1950s.\u00a0 Plantinga was just beginning his career, Van Til was maturing into popularising his position.\u00a0 Their influences were felt in very different spheres but with both being Reformed thinkers arguing for Christian philosophy from Christian premises.\u00a0 We will examine in detail in future sections what they brought to the table, but we have already intimated in our preliminary discussion that we will need to follow first Plantinga and then Van Til if we hope to salvage any hope for a rational<\/em>, Christian philosophy.<\/p>\n

                <\/a>2.7.3\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Holism<\/h3>\n

                In our survey above, we have found that the basic problems with fallibilism are that of incoherence<\/em> and arbitrariness<\/em>, displayed both in philosophy and so-called scientific conjecture.\u00a0 If you cannot mitigate scepticism at a basic logical level, the sceptic will always defeat you as the lines you need to draw for your theorising they can legitimately reject.\u00a0 Thus, it is no wonder that Schilpp, addressing the APA at the intersection of the pragmatic, positivist, and naturalist philosophies, was so scathing in his criticism of modern analytic philosophy and why this thesis will continue to argue antithetically to tolerating the scandal of scepticism.<\/p>\n

                Even the finest naturalist philosophers such as Quine retreat into fallibilist language at points of difficulty but then proceed past the difficulty on the basis that the difficulty is solved by \u201creasonable intuitions<\/em>\u201d.<\/a>[358]<\/a>\u00a0 If the intuition really is<\/em> reasonable, it might reasonably not qualify as an intuition but as a judgment; just as Quine\u2019s use of the term \u201cintuition\u201d elsewhere <\/a>[359]<\/a> has a qualified, technical meaning distinct from the somewhat irrational implication of the term. However, he does seem arbitrary in sometimes using it in the sense of something beyond our conscious reasoning process as more of an \u201cinformed guess\u201d, so much for rigour! \u00a0<\/em>We are not being rude to Quine here but merely imitating the master who famously dismissed modal logic and various other important problems of philosophy with the phrase, \u201c<\/em>so much for X\u201d<\/em>.<\/a>[360]<\/a>\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

                Yet there is something very profound and important to be found in Quine.\u00a0 In his emphatic repudiation of logical positivism, Quine reopened the door to metaphysical questions as legitimate questions and brought into sharp focus the richness of our cognitive picture and the elaborate taxonomy of our rationality.\u00a0 One of Quine\u2019s arguments in two dogmas that was so revolutionary was his \u201cholism\u201d.\u00a0 It was the whole<\/em> of our statements about the external world that should be confirmed or infirmed and not the individual statement \u201ctaken in isolation from its fellows\u201d.<\/em><\/a>[361]<\/a>\u00a0 This was a radical break with the atomism that had been characteristic of the empiricist movement in the 20th<\/sup> century up to that point.<\/p>\n

                This he was to describe concisely in a textbook for young students <\/a>[362]<\/a> and it serves as a concise primer on modern rationality conceived of in terms of a scientific holism.<\/a>[363]<\/a>\u00a0 He uses the \u201cweb\u201d as a metaphor and it is a particularly well-chosen metaphor, the web is multifaceted but has a centre that is the most important section, giving it its coherence and strength, with every part of the web is linked to it.\u00a0 It provides the lens through which all else is interpreted and evaluated.<\/a>[364]<\/a>\u00a0 The web can suffer substantial damage to the periphery but retains strength and offers coherence provided its core remains undamaged.\u00a0 Thus, although a naturalist and an atheist,<\/a>[365]<\/a> Quine is of great interest to us because he talks in his work about a \u201cview of nature\u201d which, in the semantics of our thesis, we will call a \u201cworldview\u201d.\u00a0 Thus, taken with the work of Kuhn in the following decade and perhaps foreshadowed in the work of Popper a decade before, we consolidate our conclusion reached in our discussion of fallibilism that modern \u201cscience\u201d struggles not just to define itself,<\/a>[366]<\/a> but also its fundamental arbitrary nature and its weak claims to objectivity.\u00a0 We confirm that an idol has been made of \u201cmodern science\u201d as the oracle of truth when its inner circle knows its own reality is very different.<\/p>\n

                <\/a><\/a>2.7.4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Unity of Apperception<\/h3>\n

                The challenge we are repeatedly seeing in our discussion above is the problem of the construction and the unity of knowledge which Kant was unable to reconcile.\u00a0 When Kant\u2019s famous aphorism gets quoted:<\/p>\n

                \u201cTwo things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me\u201d.<\/a>[367]<\/a><\/p>\n

                It is often with a sense that it is a profound mystical or religious insight.\u00a0 Perhaps there is an element of Kant\u2019s own religiosity there, but it is more readily understood as an admission of the total failure to reconcile the principles of the natural world with the principles of the inner, perceptual world.\u00a0 This is owing in part to the equally as significant insight that percept and concept were in a circular relationship to one another. \u00a0He recognised that the unity of apperception, that process of explaining how knowledge gets structured in the mind, had been dealt with poorly by philosophers. \u00a0His solution to Hume\u2019s scepticism by simply reflecting Hume\u2019s despairing conclusion as the answer to Hume, turned out to be no solution at all, he pours concrete around his feet and forever separates the noumenal, phenomenal and noetic realms with the implausible thesis that all minds conform to the transcendental categories.\u00a0 Even for the contemporary neo-Kantians such as Strawson, this thesis was too psychological and problematic.<\/p>\n

                Thus, for the Van Tillian, Kant\u2019s motivation of attempting to establish the transcendentals of human understanding was the correct project but ultimately succumbed to and formalised the scepticism that had awoken him from his dogmatic slumbers only to sleep twice as soundly.\u00a0 In contrast, Van Tillians agree with him that the stakes are high for the possibility of knowledge; for Hume\u2019s deconstruction of reason, captured in his conclusion \u201cwhen considered as an abstract view it furnishes invincible arguments against itself\u201d<\/em>, <\/a>[368]<\/a> destroyed the possibility of knowledge. \u00a0There seemed to be no rational basis for rationality, and we can<\/em> formally agree with Hume that considering reason as the abstract, or the autonomous<\/em> human reason, will indeed destroy the possibility of a coherent theory of knowledge. \u00a0Thus, we will work through the argument that Van Tillian transcendentalism using the transcendental of the ontological Trinity as a transcendent transcendental seeks to provide the solution to this problem of knowledge where Kant\u2019s transcendental failed.<\/p>\n

                That is, what we seek to work through is that the imperative for epistemological self-consciousness is that we can be certain that our metaphysical claims about the nature of reality, those claims being guaranteed by the inscripturated Word and the character of God.\u00a0 We are not direct foundationalists in the autonomous sense of scientism but are foundationalist in the indirect, transcendental sense when \u2018transcendental\u2019 is interpreted in a specific Christian context with a specific referent.\u00a0 Only then can the problem of knowledge be solved.<\/p>\n

                <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>2.7.5\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Epistemological Self-Consciousness and Uncertainty<\/h3>\n

                For the Christian philosopher, and we have endeavoured to show for any<\/em> philosopher wishing to be critical and aware of their own presuppositions, the main divisions of philosophical enquiry are not hermetically sealed off from one another and that intellectual coherence is only obtained when one understands this interrelatedness and can articulate it. \u00a0That is, they have come to a place of epistemological self-consciousness<\/em>.\u00a0 This does not minimise the role or necessity of analysis as articulated so strongly by Russell, but rather presses it into the service of the synthetic function as articulated by Moore.<\/p>\n

                That is, without synthesis, analysis is rarefied and bare, the philosophy it produces is sterile or at best, shallow, reducing in Rorty\u2019s words to \u201cpoetry\u201d or \u201ccultural politics\u201d rather than a body of knowledge and understanding.<\/a>[369]<\/a>\u00a0 By \u201cshallow\u201d we do not mean it is without merit or significance, but for Rorty as the \u201cpost-analytic\u201d philosophical standard bearer of the \u201cpost-modern pragmatist\u201d movement,<\/a>[370]<\/a> philosophy is simply a matter of \u201cspeaking about\u201d the target subject matter in a particular way, the \u201csolution\u201d lies elsewhere.<\/a>[371]<\/a>\u00a0 Here we find the antithetical position to that argued in this thesis – much of modern philosophy seems to consider it as a \u201cgiven\u201d or of a matter of disciplinary orthodoxy that \u201cwe can be certain of nothing\u201d<\/em>, except of course that we can<\/em> be certain<\/em> that we can be certain of nothing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                Now, for the purposes of clarity we have stripped down the sometimes exotic and complex formulations of the fallibilism at the centre of the perspectives above to get at thie logical core and expose its logical frailty, whilst hopefully avoiding the construction of strawmen.\u00a0 Sometimes we are<\/em> constrained to deal with probabilities<\/em> and reasonable verisimilitude<\/em> (as maintained by some critical realists), as well as the empirical methods of the Bayesian schools for interpreting new evidence.\u00a0 We can still acknowledge the value and worth of this work when working in the different spheres of life.<\/p>\n

                That is, accepting Kuyper\u2019s principle, we understand that each sphere or modality of life has a degree of autonomy and its principles; the religious does not dictate to them, but it is legitimate to stand as the ethical guardian and to robustly engage in critical challenge when necessary.<\/a>[372]<\/a>\u00a0 In contrast, it is the univocal naturalism<\/em> of these schools that we challenge that never permits them to move beyond discussions of probabilities rather than certainties<\/em> and we end up in that philosophical cul-de-sac of Neurath\u2019s sailors. \u00a0Such methods are plainly ill-equipped to deal with ethical questions such as value and moral knowledge.<\/p>\n

                Whilst we might not be able to ascertain complete confidence in our various sciences, that then does mean that our foundations, metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical, completely collapse.\u00a0 As Plantinga noted, just because classical epistemological foundationalism was found wanting that does not imply, as Rorty asserted, that all<\/em> foundationalism is refuted.\u00a0 In the same manner for ethics, Blackburn concurs <\/a>[373]<\/a> where he argues very strongly for the moral imperative based on a robust commitment to ethical knowledge on the basis of a convictions regarding right and wrong both historically and in our shared world.<\/a>[374]<\/a><\/p>\n

                <\/a>2.8\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Summary and Conclusion<\/h2>\n

                In this chapter, we began where it all began for philosophy (in the Western tradition at least) with Greece.\u00a0 We asked the simple question \u201cWhy the Greeks?\u201d\u00a0 We argued that the humanism, proto-naturalism, and autonomous or self-sufficient mindset of the Greeks was what made them the progenitors of the dominant stream of what reemerged in the Enlightenment rebellion against religious authority and has become the dominant intellectual temper of our time.\u00a0 We argued that naturalism needs to be understood as an imprecise category and as an elastic term.\u00a0 We stressed that a culture could still speak with language that sounded theistic but, in that context, God was a projection of human traits and could be considered naturalistic.\u00a0 We argued that naturalism is best taken as describing the drift of Greek culture into what we now call scientific naturalism with its empirical assumptions; we noted Epicurus was one of the first philosophers to articulate that view.\u00a0 We indicated that a strong critique has been made of this equation of naturalism with the scientific and it was our intention to explicate this.\u00a0 However, we did want to acknowledge the importance of the Greek taxonomy of rationality for us and we concurred with the tripartite view of philosophy as metaphysics, epistemology, and a theory of value (that is, ethics and aesthetics).<\/p>\n

                We then considered the most serious \u2018problem\u2019 with this conception, that there was a interdependence between the terms and that this circularity had led to an intense hostility to metaphysics and its attempted eviction from philosophy first by Hume and most recently by the logical positivists; we examined in some detail the presumptions of the positivists and the eventual reason for the failure of their project, being that its central principle, the Verification principle exempted itself from its own criteria.\u00a0 We could thus assert the legitimacy of metaphysics as a branch of knowledge. \u00a0We also saw that the \u201cproblem of other minds\u201d was one of the fundamental challenges for philosophy and this introduced us to how the issues of epistemology were central to Western thought.\u00a0 We saw how Plantinga exploited the tension to argue that a Christian could not be considered \u201cirrational\u201d because a belief in God was on the same level as the belief in other minds.\u00a0 We saw how this provided the backdrop to his overall \u2018Reformed Epistemology – Extended Aquinas\/Calvin\u2019 project which terminated in a sophisticated argument for the rational acceptability of Christian belief but with no necessity.\u00a0 This was also the first mention of Van Til\u2019s project to argue for the necessity<\/em> of Christian belief for rationality.<\/p>\n

                We considered how logical positivism after its fall gave way to scientism, the view that the only legitimate questions were questions that science could answer, or alternatively what we asserted was the ethical<\/em> view that the only questions worth asking<\/em> were the questions science could answer.\u00a0 This we noted was devastating for philosophy in that it reified it of content, converted ethics into a descriptive process and denied synthesis as a legitimate function of philosophy in favour of analysis or a mere description of relations.\u00a0 This helped us assert the need for a synthetic function of philosophy and our belief that one of the chief tasks of philosophy was to frame a worldview, a comprehensive account of reality and its relations.\u00a0 We also equated this with our stated aim at the start of the thesis that philosophy should be transformative<\/em>, we do not merely want to analyse and clarify problems but also to assist in solving those problems.<\/p>\n

                We then proceeded to map out what we should expect from a philosophical theory, we demonstrated a commitment to realism and an objective reality.\u00a0 We considered correspondence, coherence, and truth as necessarily objective, rejecting any subjective conceptions of truth as confusing warranted belief with truth.\u00a0 We understood how a commitment to realism helps distinguish philosophies between internally coherent \u201cdream philosophies\u201d and philosophies, using Wittgenstein\u2019s dictum, rooted in the practice of living in the real-world.\u00a0 Again, we are noting here the need for philosophy to be transformative and relevant to living in the world but not merely pragmatic; noting the fundamental weakness of pragmatism was a dogmatic commitment to a preconception of what was \u201cuseful\u201d or \u201cbeneficial\u201d.\u00a0 Recognising there were various problems with realism, we then took a deep dive into scepticism and argued that philosophy historically could be considered a series of responses to scepticism.<\/p>\n

                We considered that modern philosophy was founded on the methodological scepticism of Descartes but recognised that his scepticism was qualitatively different than the metaphysical scepticism that Hume was driven to in his desire to be rigorously empirical.\u00a0 We considered how Kant wanted to mitigate that scepticism and how the consensus amongst Kant scholars was that he did so by separating reality into the noumenal and phenomenal.\u00a0 Science was concerned with the phenomenal, the way things appear<\/em> to us and that was the limit of our knowledge.\u00a0 We might have useful posits such as God which belonged to the noumenal realm, but they were beyond proof or knowledge.\u00a0 We considered how Kant was the turning point of the subsequent philosophy, some argued for mysticism as the route to the knowledge of the noumenal in preference to his chastening of rationality, others rejected the noumenal realm and asserted phenomena was all that we had.<\/p>\n

                We considered the preference of twentieth century philosophy for fallibilism, the view that scepticism can be accepted but mitigated in some way.\u00a0 However, we noted the varieties of fallibilism, even in the sophisticated theories of modern physics that seemed to demonstrate indeterminacy and chance at a microscopic level, were not categorical or convincing arguments with the two giants of modern physics, Hawkings and Penrose, having mutually exclusive metaphysical conclusions.\u00a0 There was no \u201cscientific\u201d answer, but our very conceptions of reality are theory laden and have a fundamental metaphysical commitment that is pretheoretical.\u00a0 We saw that the most exotic naturalism of the multiverse postulate, was exposed as a metaphysical prejudice.<\/p>\n

                We then examined how we might structure our own Christian metaphysical commitment, and whether there was a possibility of a \u201ccommon ground\u201d with the unbeliever where we can meet and resolve our differences. \u00a0We found the traditional arguments of natural theology were logically fallacious.\u00a0 We saw that the principal issue was one of the relative roles of reason and faith, particularly which one was to be considered primary.\u00a0 We considered the Augustinian view that faith would provide the grounding for reason and the alleged reversal within the neo-Thomist position that faith should be first demonstrated to be reasonable.\u00a0 The latter was shown to be the catalyst for a view of nature as in a distinct realm subject to its own laws, which in turn would lead to the dominance of a non-spiritual view of reality and the retreat of Augustinian apologetics.\u00a0 This became cemented as a \u201ccommon sense\u201d rationality and was the context for the emergence and domination of evidentialist and classical apologetics which were empirical and naturalistic in their approach.\u00a0 However, the same epistemological commitment became catastrophic to Christian philosophy when Darwin published his findings which seemed to indicate that on the same commonsense basis, the metaphysical accounts of Christian scripture were at best mythical. \u00a0This led to a rapid liberalisation and secularisation of previously conservative colleges, unable to refute Darwinism and the consequent withdrawal of conservative and orthodox Christian influence from the public square.<\/p>\n

                We noted that both within the Catholic communion in the work of Lubac and from within the Reformed communion in Van Til and Plantinga, there was a renewal of the Augustinian view which precipitated a movement towards epistemological self-consciousness.\u00a0 Lubac challenged the concept of a pure nature, that could be understood independent of God\u2019s revelation and providence. \u00a0Plantinga demonstrated the weakness of the Darwinian position, in that its naturalism was self-vitiating; where is the rationale for believing what nature tells us?\u00a0 We noted that within philosophy generally there was a rejection of positivist dogma and the acceptance of the theory-laden principle; a gradual rehabilitation of metaphysics, with philosophers like Quine arguing for a holism and an interconnected web of beliefs. \u00a0We understood that with Van Til this holism is given a scriptural and a Christian context and that he asserts that only transcendental reasoning is able to mediate the truthfulness of rival worldviews and deal with the unity of apperception problem that Kant had been unable to resolve.\u00a0 In contrast, Plantinga argues that the way forward is with a radically overhauled Reidian foundationalism; a commitment that the world really is as it appears to us and that our faculties will give us knowledge of the world.\u00a0 Whilst this does not provide an objective philosophical proof, it is internally coherent and rational.\u00a0 Thus, we begin to see a Christian philosophy is possible and indeed desirable, the consensus amongst the fallibilist was that our rationality needs a rationale, but none could be found for it, we must offer one.<\/p>\n

                Thus, the next tasks of our thesis must be to demonstrate how Christian \u201cworldview\u201d philosophy, which is necessarily apologetic, provides that rationale.\u00a0 Yet, it is important to assert immediately that we are not arguing for a static view of knowledge, to replace pragmatism with dogma or requiring that one is forced to accept from a range of competing a priori<\/em> views of the world.\u00a0 Rather, we shall be arguing for the objective<\/em> reasonableness of the Augustinian (or Reformed) understanding of Christianity and seek to establish the view that it is the only<\/em> fully coherent and thus, truly rational<\/em> view to hold.\u00a0 We will be arguing transcendentally<\/em> that it provides the basis of all<\/em> rational thought and is implicit<\/em> in all<\/em> rational thought whether or not the subject recognises it.\u00a0 We will be arguing that all<\/em> human beings are creatures of God, made in His image and to the degree<\/em> that they behave and think rationally in conformance to that image, they are able to construct a scientific view of the world reflecting the revelation of the order in the mind of the Creator.\u00a0 This is the heart of an apologetic philosophy.<\/p>\n

                So, as we brought the philosophical positions considered above to a place of epistemological self-consciousness, it became evident that:<\/p>\n

                  \n
                1. They are inadequate as theories of reality.<\/li>\n
                2. Any attempt to dispense with metaphysics asserts a particular metaphysical dogma and is thus incoherent.<\/li>\n
                3. We must argue that only<\/em> a specialised conception<\/em> of the model reflected by the classical tripartite conception of philosophy, the Christian theistic worldview (and that further refined to the Augustinian<\/em> tradition), is the only<\/em> position that is not rendered incoherent and has a legitimate claim to rationality.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                  Regarding 1 and 2 we might find a broad, if grudging and an often hidden, implicit, acknowledgement within reflective philosophy, because we have indeed managed to generate such a diverse and wide range of philosophical perspectives to address this inadequacy and the incoherence.\u00a0 That it might be solved by 3 is what we must now turn to address for many would consider any reference to theistic solutions to the problems of knowledge as either a return to the past or \u201ctheology not philosophy<\/em>\u201d.\u00a0 However, it is only by establishing the theological foundation that we can rescue any conception of philosophy and to save it from the abyss of deconstructionism and paralogism.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[150]<\/a> In fact, it is arguable that existentialism (or a popular bastardisation of it) exerts an enormous influence on popular culture with its strident anti-authoritarian individualism. Similarly, the postmodern critique of modernism, dominated the last two decades of the 20th<\/sup> century in the academy, and continues to exert a strong influence, especially in the contemporary debates over race, gender, and sexuality, see Pluckrose & Lindsay (2021).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[151]<\/a> I acknowledge the critique of Professor \u00d3 Murchadha at this point, the cutting of my attempts in an earlier iteration at such a critique were because they were deemed inadequate and\/or tendentious in need of far more robust argumentation.\u00a0 However, the suggestion that my purpose could be served by only considering the analytic tradition was also made by him of which I am equally appreciative.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[152]<\/a> Capra, F. (2010 (1975)). The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism<\/em> (35th Anniversary Edition ed.). Boston: Shambhala., p22<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[153]<\/a> Barnes, J. (2001). Early Greek Philosophy<\/em> (2nd revised ed.). London: The Penguin Group., backmatter.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[154]<\/a> I still remember my \u2018O\u2019 level Chemistry revision book insisting Democritus\u2019 theory was the first atomic theory.\u00a0 Democritus actually has a completely different sense to his terms, and, in my view, it should not be considered a precursor to modern atomic theory.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[155]<\/a> Russell, B. (1991 (1961)). History of Western Philosophy<\/em> (2nd ed.). London: Routledge., p.65.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[156]<\/a> As Nagel (2014), p.58 notes, Dharmottara anticipated the Gettier problem with specific<\/u> examples of his own; Ga\u1e45ge\u1e65a gave a detailed causal theory of knowledge. \u00a0It is thus an interesting example of cultural imperialism that both theories were considered exemplary products of modern 20th<\/sup> century scholarship.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[157]<\/a> Cf. Job 1:3; Mat 2:1 (NAS).\u00a0 NAS note is interesting on this verse, \u201c<\/em>Pronounced may-ji, a caste of wise men specializing in astrology, medicine and natural science.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[158]<\/a> The book of Job is recognised as the most ancient biblical composition and may have a relationship with the \u201cBabylonian Job\u201d, an earlier composition meditating on the righteous and suffering.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[159]<\/a> Kenny (2012), A New History of Western Philosophy<\/em> (Single volume (Impression 2) ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press., p18<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[160]<\/a> Bahnsen (1993) notes with some humour that the problems of the gods were human problems, Zeus\u2019 nagging wife but one.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[161]<\/a> Frame, J. M. (2015). A History of Western Philosophy and Theology. Phillipsburg: P & R Publishing., p.177, 179-180.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[162]<\/a> Sainte-Beuvre, C. (2004). Port Royal.<\/em> Paris: Robert Laffront., p.1052.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[163]<\/a> Van Fraassen is credited with \u201crestoring respectability to anti-realism in science\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 His theory of constructive empiricism presented in his 1980 book The Scientific Image<\/em> which provoked a lot of discussion which can be found in Churchland & Hooker (1985). This is a noteworthy compendium as Van Fraassen offered a 55-page reply to his realist critics in that work.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[164]<\/a> Van Fraassen, B. C. (1999). Haldane on the Past and Future of Philosophy. New Blackfriars, 80<\/em>, 177-181.\u00a0 This is a particularly cogent and interesting response article.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[165]<\/a> So, Feuerbach was perfectly willing to agree with his contemporary Schleiermacher that the experience of \u201ctotal dependence\u201d on an object outside of yourself was<\/em> the essence of religion but the object of that dependence and worshipful adoration for Feuerbach was the natural potentiality of humanity itself, not a supernatural God.\u00a0 Marx and Engels were greatly influenced by Feuerbach in their naturalisation of religious experience.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[166]<\/a> Van Fraassen, B. (2015). Naturalism in Epistemology. In R. N. Williams, & D. N. Robinson, Scientism: The New Orthodoxy<\/em> (pp. 63-96). New York: Bloomsbury.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[167]<\/a> Again eulogised in Barnes, p.xviii.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[168]<\/a> Bertrand Russell relates some personal correspondence where the person he was writing to wrote back with surprise that there were not more solipsists like herself; empiricists have commonly had problems with justifying the external world and other minds, needing to rely on explanations from analogy \u2013 \u201cI have a mind, you seem to be behaving like me, so you must have a mind\u201d<\/em>; they are hardly convincing and are certainly vulnerable to criticism.\u00a0 Some also consider Berkeley to be arguing for a form of solipsism and Descartes starting point to be solipsistic.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[169]<\/a> Thornton, S. P. (n.d.). Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds.<\/em> Retrieved 11 27, 2022, from Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: https:\/\/iep.utm.edu\/solipsis\/.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[170]<\/a> Kenny (2012), pp.616-619 posits this in the context of a discussion of Kant\u2019s \u2018synthetic a priori\u2019.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[171]<\/a> Plantinga, A. (1990 (1967)). God And Other Minds<\/em> (1990 pbk. ed.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press., p.xii.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[172]<\/a> It was actually quite a major qualification concerning the distinction between justification and warrant that he developed to full expression in his mature work on epistemology, but he maintained the conclusion was \u201cquite correct\u201d within the conception of rationality as matters of justification<\/em> rather than the stronger sense of warrant<\/em>.\u00a0 We consider this conception in some detail in a future section.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[173]<\/a> Butler, M. (1997). Religious Epistemology Seminar. On Plantinga<\/em> [MP3 Set \/ MB200-MB210]. Nagadoches, Texas.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[174]<\/a> We will develop this line of criticism as well as Plantinga\u2019s positive apologetics in a future sections.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[175]<\/a> His formulation of a \u201cFree Will\u201d defence regarding the problem of evil (1974) was considered objectionable in conservative Reformed circles.\u00a0 However, Plantinga was arguing as a logician here and was contesting the claims of leading atheologians that the presence of evil disproved the existence of a good, omnipotent, and omniscient God.\u00a0 He dismissed the argument on its own terms, he was judged to have succeeded in this regard, even amongst the serious atheists.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[176]<\/a> He spent the years 1963-1982 there and from 2010 as Emeritus Professor.\u00a0 Interestingly, he spent 1982-2010 at Notre Dame which as a Catholic university seems an unusual choice for the member (now an elder) of a Reformed church.\u00a0 However, he defended ND as an institution as having some of the finest protestant thinkers also and diplomatically wrote on Christian<\/em> scholarship rather than in sectarian terms.\u00a0 However, he maintained the Augustinian understanding of the relation between reason and faith, i.e., faith precedes reason.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[177]<\/a> As a reviewer printed on the backmatter of the 1990 edition of God and Other Minds<\/em> noted.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[178]<\/a> At this point (2000) he preferred to describe it not as \u201cReformed Epistemology\u201d (perhaps because of its sectarian ramifications as he had moved from Calvin to Notre Dame) but as the \u201cExtended Aquinas\/Calvin (A\/C)\u201d model.\u00a0 In fairness, it owes far more to Calvin than to Aquinas but is uniquely his as it drew criticism as to just how \u201cReformed\u201d it was, some (e.g., Jeffreys (1997)) asserting his use of Calvin\u2019s term sensus divinitas<\/em> was distinctly different from Calvin\u2019s use and understanding of the term.\u00a0 This is probably correct, but Plantinga freely admitted he was \u201cextending\u201d the concept.\u00a0 Jeffreys had also written his critique before the final volume of Plantinga\u2019s trilogy in which he dealt specifically with Christian belief and where Plantinga had presented his fullest account of the concept in a Christian context.\u00a0 To my knowledge, Jeffrey\u2019s did not respond further in lieu of this more comprehensive account.\u00a0 Others like Butler that did respond, argued he had departed fundamentally from Calvin.\u00a0 See \u00a73.3.7.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[179]<\/a> It was naturalistic in the sense he argued for it as a faculty of perception, i.e., as a part of the human person apart from any supernatural regeneration of the person.\u00a0 The presence of sin affected its operation but did not prevent it.\u00a0 However, the faculty was considered God-given<\/em> which is a rather different context for naturalism to operate in; indeed, Plantinga claimed that the supernaturalistic metaphysics was required for a naturalistic science to have grounding.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[180]<\/a> Plantinga, A. (1992). Augustinian Christian Philosophy. The Monist, 75<\/em>(3), 291-320.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[181]<\/a> We must immediately qualify our designation of Hume as an empiricist.\u00a0 Hume was accused by Russell of a \u2018destruction of empiricism<\/em>\u2019 (Russell, 1991, p.646) in the sense that Hume\u2019s desire to be a pure empiricist drove him to scepticism and a rejection of the principle of induction upon which empiricism and much that counts as scientific reasoning rests upon.\u00a0 However, as Russell rightly notes, Hume in practice<\/em> wanted to maintain a reasonable<\/em> approach to understanding the world rather than provide a justification for the irrationality of those like Rousseau, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who had been quick to exploit his deconstruction of reason as unable to provide grounds for its own reasonableness to advocate a preference for emotion, irrationality and a \u2018will to power\u2019 as the essence of the human condition.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[182]<\/a> Hume, D., & Steinberg, E. (1977 (1777)). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding<\/em> (2nd (Annotated), Kindle Edition). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., loc. 2399.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[183]<\/a> Hume, D. (1948 (1779)). Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.<\/em> (H. D. Aiken, Ed.) New York: Hafner Press.\u00a0 Interestingly, this was published posthumously by his nephew in 1779 despite being completed by Hume as his last piece of work in 1761.\u00a0 Hume had declined to publish wishing to \u201clive quietly and keep remote from all Clamour<\/em>\u201d for the closing years of his life after frequent confrontations in his career, as the contents were considered incendiary by all who knew of the work, see Aiken\u2019s Introduction to Hume\u2019s Dialogues<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[184]<\/a> He had been involved in serious disputes and censure through much of his career and deferred to publish what was considered the most incendiary of his works, his Dialogues on Natural Religion<\/em>, expressing the wish to \u201clive quietly and remote from all clamours\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[185]<\/a> For example, Francis Bacon, a century and a half before Hume had elegantly identified many of the metaphysical \u201cidols\u201d of the human tribe and originated a worldview in which \u201cscience\u201d (meaning empirical science) was idealised.\u00a0 Inductive, empirical science was seen as salvation from prejudice and tyranny, as he wrote both in his philosophical treatise of 1620, the Novum Organon<\/em> and in his utopian novel, The New Atlantis.<\/em> Bacon, in many ways, was far more influential than Hume, second only to Newton in developing a distinct conception of the practice and application of a scientific philosophy; that is, a worldview.<\/p>\n

                  Both Bacon and Newton were not merely concerned with a theory of nature or a mere description of it but in the reconstruction of human life in line with the principles of the natural world which in some way were to be considered reflective of the mind of God, each fact in perfect coherence with one another.\u00a0 That is, they did not find the concept of God objectionable in principle, even the Christian one, though both were arguably theologically heterodox and had little tolerance for clericalism and dogmatism as was the case with most early moderns.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[186]<\/a> Analytic philosophy is often conceived of emerging as a distinctive school with Moore and Russell at the turn of the century; with Frege and his revolutionary work on the logic and language as the historical precursor.\u00a0 See Glock (2008), ch.1.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[187]<\/a> Ayer, A. J. (1952 (1946)). Language, Truth and Logic<\/em> (2nd ed.). New York: Dover Publications, Inc., p.41.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[188]<\/a> This concession was made by the \u201csofter\u201d logical positivists to permit scientific theories where the verification was logically possible but practically improbable or very difficult to accomplish (as with many physical theories).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[189]<\/a> This was the essence of Wittgenstein\u2019s criticism of it which should carry particular weight as the verification principle itself was initially known as Wittgenstein\u2019s<\/em> verification principle (Monk (1991), pp. 286-7).\u00a0 Wittgenstein radically changed his conception of how language worked, remarking that in his early work he had over-emphasised the \u2018language game of science\u2019 which he came to believe no longer had the exclusive right to the designation \u201crational\u201d.\u00a0 That is, there are other meaningful ways of talking about the world which would not be considered \u2018scientific\u2019 but would<\/em> be considered meaningful and rational.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[190]<\/a> Some care does need to be exercised with too readily appropriating Russell into the movement.\u00a0 It is undeniable he was a foundational member of the Vienna Circle out of which logical positivism came and self-identified as a member of that school (Russell, 1991, p.789).\u00a0 However, he is probably more properly designated as someone who believed the method of \u201clogical analysis\u201d as employed by the positivists was useful in \u2018solving\u2019 philosophical problems.\u00a0 His conception of philosophy as needing more than just<\/em> logical analysis sets him apart though.\u00a0 The affinities and differences between himself and the positivists are seen in the essay \u2018Logical Positivism\u2019 (1950) which in its closing pages also describe its own inconsistency and inability to justify its own presuppositions.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[191]<\/a> Russell, B. (1991 (1961)). History of Western Philosophy<\/em> (2nd ed.). London: Routledge., p.788.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[192]<\/a> Neurath, O. (1983 (1932)). Protocol Statements. In O. Neurath, & R. Cohen, Philosophical Papers 1913-1946<\/em> (pp. 91-99). Dordrecht: Reidel., p.92.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[193]<\/a> Logical positivists such as Schlick were robust in dismissing even the possibility<\/em> of synthetic a priori knowledge, see Schlick (1925), p384.\u00a0 All knowledge was knowledge of particulars gained through experience or analytic propositions.\u00a0 Neurath, Carnap and Schlick were sometimes considered as rival factions within the positivist movement because of Schlick\u2019s commitment to realism (Neurath and Carnap both considered the realism-antirealism debate a \u2018pseudo-problem\u2019, i.e., a problem caused by linguistic confusion and thus without content), though the untimely death of Schlick curtailed the influence of those that favoured his approach.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[194]<\/a> Ayer, A. J. (1952 (1946)). Language, Truth and Logic<\/em> (2nd ed.). New York: Dover Publications, Inc., p.16.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[195]<\/a> In the second edition of Language, Truth, and Logic <\/em>(1946), he acknowledged in the introduction (p.5) the youthful excesses of the first edition.\u00a0 Whilst in the second edition he maintained that the viewpoint was \u201cstill substantially correct<\/em>\u201d, he was later to reflect in later work that it was \u201cpredominantly incorrect<\/em>\u201d but had served a \u201cvaluable cathartic purpose<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[196]<\/a> Quine, W. V. (1980 (1953)). Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View<\/em> (pp. 20-46). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[197]<\/a> It should be noted that its successor, methodological naturalism (MN), suffers from precisely the same problem \u2013 if all<\/em> there is, is nature, why do we believe what nature tells us?\u00a0 This is sometimes called \u201cDarwin\u2019s doubt\u201d.\u00a0 We will examine this problem in more detail.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[198]<\/a> Ayer (1959) wrote his introduction to Logical Positivism<\/em> as editor with the view that the post-positivist philosophy of Quine and Goodman, and the continuing work of members of the logical positivist school such as himself, Carnap, Neurath, and Hempel were a development of the position.\u00a0 However, logical positivism is generally considered to have been devastatingly critiqued by Quine in his Two Dogmas<\/em> (1953) and should be taken as marking the end of the movement.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[199]<\/a> Mumford, S. (2021). Metaphysics – A Very Short Introduction.<\/em> Oxford: Oxford University Press., pp.98-108.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[200]<\/a> Ayer, A. (1966 (1959)). Editor’s Introduction. In A. Ayer, & P. Edwards (Eds.), Logical Positivism<\/em> (Paperback ed., pp. 3-30). New York: The Free Press., p.9.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[201]<\/a> Ayer edited a second edition of a compendium of logical positivist thought in 1966 (despite Quine\u2019s dismantling of it in 1953) and clearly regarded that the naturalism of his contemporary philosophers had in a large measure been shaped by the logical positivist programme.\u00a0 Plantinga (2011) in discussing the tenor of naturalism in the early chapters of his book, concurs with this.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[202]<\/a> Ayer, A. J. (1952 (1946)). Language, Truth and Logic<\/em> (2nd ed.). New York: Dover Publications, Inc., p.32, p.33.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[203]<\/a> Russell, B. (1991 (1961)). History of Western Philosophy<\/em> (2nd ed.). London: Routledge., p.789.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[204]<\/a> The Journal of Philosophy<\/em> (Dec 22, 1960, Vol. 57, No. 26) was substantially a memorial edition paying homage to Moore after his death.\u00a0 It contains contributions from a number of significant philosophers of the 20th<\/sup> century who are not so much expressing agreement with Moore\u2019s positions but championing his rigorous method and the quest for clarity in philosophical discourse.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[205]<\/a> Moore, G. (2015 (1953\/1958)). Some Main Problems of Philosophy.<\/em> London: George Allen & Unwin Limited., p.1.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[206]<\/a> Much more could (and should) be written to justify this conception of philosophy and subsequent sections will offer some justification for it, but perhaps not give it the space it would warrant in a dissertation focussing just on metaphilosophy.\u00a0 As mentioned previously, Wang (1985) offered an insightful critique and an appeal for the broad philosophical project from within the analytic tradition whilst urging a position beyond it, perhaps captured in his words \u2018From how I know to what we know<\/em>\u2019 (\u00a7. 19).\u00a0 He considered modern naturalism to be answering the former question and neglecting the latter, which he viewed as the most important and the truly philosophical one.\u00a0 He believed G\u00f6del to have made progress with the latter.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[207]<\/a> Russell, B. (1991 (1961)). History of Western Philosophy<\/em> (2nd ed.). London: Routledge., p.789.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[208]<\/a> Russell, B. (1991 (1961)). History of Western Philosophy<\/em> (2nd ed.). London: Routledge., p.752.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[209]<\/a> Russell, B. (1997 (1959)). My Philosophical Development.<\/em> London: Routledge., pp.9-11.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[210]<\/a> Russell, B. (1956). Logical Positivism. In B. Russell, & R. C. Marsh (Ed.), Logic and Knowledge (Essays 1901-1950)<\/em> (pp. 365-382). London: George Allen & Unwin., pp.380-381.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[211]<\/a> Russell, B. (2007 (1912)). The Problems of Philosophy.<\/em> New York: Cosimo, pp.111ff.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[212]<\/a> Russell, B. (2009 (1961)). The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell<\/em> (Routledge Classics ed.). (R. E. Egner, & L. E. Denonn, Eds.) Abingdon: Routledge.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[213]<\/a> Blackburn, S. (2006). Truth – A Guide for the Perplexed<\/em> (Kindle ed.). London: Penguin., p.170.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[214]<\/a> Macneil, M. (2019, May). Feeling Good About Truth.<\/em> doi:10.13140\/RG.2.2.18266.39362<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[215]<\/a> As captured in the title \u201cTake care of freedom and truth will take care of itself \u2013 Interviews with Richard Rorty<\/em>\u201d, a collection of interviews with Rorty spanning over two decades.\u00a0 See Rorty (2006).\u00a0 For Rorty truth was \u201cmerely a property of individual sentences\u201d<\/em> and there was \u201cnothing of philosophical interest that could be written about it\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[216]<\/a> Plantinga, A. (1998)., Afterword., p.357.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[217]<\/a> For example, idealists who held that the \u201creal\u201d was the \u201cmental\u201d or the \u201crational\u201d had historically favoured a coherence theory of truth \u2013 all the elements of their elaborate system needed to cohere as an account of reality.\u00a0 Similarly, realists who emphasised a physical world apart from our mental life that is mediated to us through our senses (though some na\u00efve realists deny that experience is \u201cmediated\u201d through our senses as that implies a rational process) had favoured a correspondence theory of truth, each propositional claim is tested against the world.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[218]<\/a> Blackburn, S. (2006). Truth – A Guide for the Perplexed<\/em> (Kindle ed.). London: Penguin., pp.169-170.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[219]<\/a> We intentionally avoid the term \u201ccritical realism\u201d which has a technical meaning and might itself be considered a moderate response to scepticism.\u00a0 We examine critical realism more closely in a future section.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[220]<\/a> Carnap made the phrase \u201cpseudo-problem\u201d famous as a sub-essay in his Aufbau <\/em>(1928).\u00a0 However, Dewey wrestled with many of the same problems and came to similar conclusions, who cares<\/em> about Hume\u2019s scepticism as a theoretical<\/em> problem, what matters is that we can solve \u201cthe [practical] problems of the public\u201d (the title of one of his famous essays).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[221]<\/a> Descartes\u2019 published the method informally to the general populace (in French) in his Discourse on the Method<\/em> (1637) and more formally in Latin for the academy and for his ecclesiastical critics in his Meditations on First Philosophy<\/em> (1642).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[222]<\/a> Descartes in his cogito<\/em> did not consider himself to be merely presenting a syllogistic proof, which many, including his immediate contemporaries all the way through to Bertrand Russell in the 20th<\/sup> century judged him to be doing so.\u00a0 In that understanding he is plainly guilty of the logical fallacy of circular reasoning but rather, for Descartes himself, \u201c[one] does not deduce existence from thought by means of a syllogism but recognises it as something self-evident by a simple intuition of the mind\u2026if he were deducing existence by means of a syllogism, he would have to have had previous knowledge of the major premise<\/em>\u201d (AT 7.140; Cottingham et al, 2008, p.100).\u00a0 I, in agreement with Butler (1994), believe it could be argued that his cogito<\/em> was a conceptual transcendental argument rather than a syllogism.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[223]<\/a> Russell, B. (2009 (1948)). Human Knowledge – Its Scope and Limits.<\/em> Oxford: Routledge., p.161.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[224]<\/a> Russell, B. (1956). Logical Positivism. In B. Russell, & R. C. Marsh (Ed.), Logic and Knowledge (Essays 1901-1950)<\/em> (pp. 365-382). London: George Allen & Unwin., p.382.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[225]<\/a> Dallas Willard (2018) offered perhaps the most detailed analysis of how this view became normative in 20th<\/sup> century philosophy then provided a substantive rebuttal of it.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[226]<\/a> Abraham Kuyper was one of the most underappreciated intellectual pioneers of the Victorian era who founded a political party, a university and served as premier of the Netherlands whilst modernising Calvinism for the modern world.\u00a0 See Macneil (2017) for an examination of his cultural philosophy of which exerted a great influence on Van Til.\u00a0 This thesis might legitimately be considered broadly \u201cKuyperian\u201d in outlook.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[227]<\/a> Nietzschean scholars, as seen in Diethe (2007) and Holub (1995), are at great pains to distance his thought from that of the Nazis, blaming his sister Elisabeth F\u00f6rster-Nietzsche, for being \u201ccentrally responsible for Nietzsche’s reputation as a belligerent and proto-Fascist thinker.\u201d<\/em> \u00a0One of the apocryphal stories is that Hitler gave Mussolini copies of Nietzsche\u2019s works to him as a birthday present on his 60th<\/sup> birthday in 1943.\u00a0 Whatever the truth of that, it is clear Hitler thought well of Nietzsche\u2019s work and mourned his sister at the shrine she built to her brother, though we should equally recognise this is an ad hominem argument that does not logically connect Nietzsche with Nazism.\u00a0 Personally, Professor \u00d3 Murchadha made it clear to me that Nietzsche had spoken against German nationalism, and it is a tendentious argument to make to link Nietzsche with Nazism.\u00a0 I accept the substantial force of this but would still argue that however the relationship is conceived, Nietzsche provided a rich source for the \u201cphilosophers\u201d of National Socialism as Holub (p.96) himself acknowledges.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[228]<\/a> Marx had appropriated Hegel\u2019s basic metaphysical position of history as moving towards a great consummation.\u00a0 There were also \u201cright wing\u201d Hegelians who emphasised the role of the State as the salvation of men; Hegel had asserted the State was \u201cGod walking on Earth\u201d.\u00a0 They might have secularised the concept but kept its messianic function, devolving the salvation of men to the State.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[229]<\/a> Cf. Plantinga (2000), p.219n29: \u201cAnd this leads to the scandal of scepticism:\u00a0 if I argue to skepticism, then of course I am relying on the very cognitive faculties whose unreliability is the conclusion of my skeptical argument\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[230]<\/a> The dismissal of the cogito<\/em> is seen first at A348\/B406 of Kant\u2019s Critique of Pure Reason<\/em>, \u2018[the cogito] with respect to its achievements we cannot entertain any favourable anticipations<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[231]<\/a> Kant\u2019s philosophy was called \u201ccritical\u201d philosophy because his most famous work was a trilogy of \u201cCritiques\u201d:\u00a0 Critique of Pure Reason<\/em> (1781\/1787), Critique of Practical Reason <\/em>(1788) and Critique of the Power of Judgment<\/em> (1790).\u00a0 Further, much of his work post the publication of the first critique was a clarification and occasionally a reworking of the first critique in response to reviews (or the lack thereof because of their prolix and obscure form of the originals).\u00a0 Of particular note here is the Opus postumum<\/em> which Kant considered his most important work, but which remained unstudied until the second half of the 20th<\/sup> century only reaching publication in a critical edition by the University of Cambridge in 1993.\u00a0 The editorial introduction is itself an exemplary exercise in Kantian scholarship and the context of the work. This bears no semantic closeness to the modern uses of \u201ccritical\u201d theories, e.g., Critical Race Theory (CRT) or Gender Theory, which are normally neo-Marxist appropriations of the term, i.e., \u201cMarxist\u201d thought extended beyond the historical boundaries of Marxism.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[232]<\/a> Kant, I. (2007 (1781\/1787)). Critique of Pure Reason<\/em> (2nd ed.). (M. Weigelt, Ed., & M. M\u00fcller, Trans.) London: Penguin., back matter.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[233]<\/a> Russell, B. (1991 (1961)). History of Western Philosophy<\/em> (2nd ed.). London: Routledge., p.677. \u00a0My own undergraduate philosophy lecturer told our class that he had an entire examination paper just on Kant.\u00a0 Kant was also frequently on my own Dad\u2019s lips during his studies during the 1970s and early 1980s.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[234]<\/a> It is of note that Quine some 300 years later also took refuge in psychology, but this time the behaviourist version, to try and deal with the knowledge and science problem.\u00a0 We will consider the details of Quine\u2019s naturalisation of epistemology and ontology later.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[235]<\/a> After Descartes, modern Western philosophy divided at two major views \u2013 Continental Rationalism and British Empiricism.\u00a0 It is helpful for us in our historical survey of reason to understand the basic differences and what Kant was trying to accomplish in mitigating the catastrophic weaknesses of both positions which came into particular focus in the sceptical conclusions of Hume.\u00a0 The Rationalists believed that rationality was possible on the basis of deduction from self-evident truths to the non-obvious. \u00a0It ran into a credibility problem because the three great Rationalists Descartes (1596 \u2013 1650), Spinoza (1632 \u2013 1677) and Leibniz (1646 \u2013 1716) all came to significantly different metaphysical conclusions about nature, despite substantive thematic connections between them.<\/p>\n

                  That is, Spinoza admired Descartes project and defined a similar priority of terms such as substance and God, and all three favoured mathematics as the language of rationality. Spinoza also wanted to give priority to God to the degree God is the whole of nature or the whole of nature is God, a pantheistic posit of which there is no analogue in Descartes though we might want to assert some formal similarity between Leibniz and Spinoza for Leibniz was concerned to be perceived as orthodox in Christian theology despite the innovations of monadology.\u00a0 Both Leibniz and Spinoza believed God was logically constrained to create the world as it is, an important point of metaphysical contact perhaps displaying far more unity than might at first be admitted.<\/p>\n

                  As was suggested by Professor \u00d3 Murchadha in a critical examination of the argument I make here, perhaps the distance can be narrowed still further by considering Leibniz\u2019s presentation as astute politicking, demonstrated both in the matter of his dispute with Newton over the calculus and disguising his support for aspects of Spinoza\u2019s heretical position in the eyes of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants.\u00a0 However, the point remains clear that dualism, monism and monadology are of a fundamentally incommensurate nature, which militated against their account and methodology being a convincing or a compelling one, though that does not mean there are not valuable insights within them all that with the benefit of distance we can appreciate far more than the British Empiricists of which Hume was to become the most famous and influential.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[236]<\/a> This was the original subtitle to Hume\u2019s A Treatise of Human Nature<\/em> (1739).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[237]<\/a> Hume, D. (1998). Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion with Of the Immortality of the Soul, Of Suicide, Of Miracles<\/em> (2nd ed.). (R. H. Popkin, Ed.) Indianapolis\/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company., p.7.\u00a0 Hume had this sentence in the mouth of Philo who is not generally assumed to be representative of his views, but the consensus amongst Humean scholars was that this was the inevitable terminus of the sceptical view that Hume followed to where it led.\u00a0 His conclusion has since been a thorn in the side of all empiricists and rationalists alike; his challenges cannot be met without the transcendental of God\u2019s existence making sense of reason as we shall see in the later sections of our thesis.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[238]<\/a> Kant\u2019s Critique of Pure Reason<\/em> was intended to be his answer to Hume as noted in his
                  \nProlegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science<\/em> (2004 (1783) ), loc.813.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[239]<\/a> Kant, I. (2007 (1781\/1787)). Critique of Pure Reason<\/em> (2nd ed.). (M. Weigelt, Ed., & M. M\u00fcller, Trans.) London: Penguin., Bxln.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[240]<\/a> Scruton, R. (2001). Kant – A Very Short Introduction.<\/em> Oxford: Oxford University Press., pp.57-59.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[241]<\/a> Kant used this allusion in the Preface to the Second Edition<\/em> of the Critique of Pure Reason<\/em>, Bxvi by which he indicated his radical reversal of the priority of the object and the understanding.\u00a0 The object conformed to the understanding, rather than the understanding conforming to the object.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[242]<\/a> The existentialism of Kierkegaard is sometimes considered a conscious capitulation to the subjectivism in Kant but owes more to his reaction to Hegel.\u00a0 Kierkegaard was especially disgusted by Hegel, considering his work idolatrous, arrogant, and conceited.\u00a0 Schopenhauer too reacted strongly to Hegel, even attempting to hold lectures at the same time in direct competition to him but is noted for failing miserably in the attempt.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[243]<\/a> Hegelian philosophy is sometimes characterised as the \u201clast word in idealism\u201d, the view that the real is the rational, i.e., it is the relations of thought rather than perception of an external physical world that constructs reality.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[244]<\/a> \u00a0\u00a0As I noted previously, this is not because there were not (and indeed still are) substantive responses in the Continental tradition, particularly as witnessed in the phenomenological, existentialist, and postmodern turns but simply because my competency is chiefly in the analytic school. \u00a0Thanks are due again at this point to Professor \u00d3 Murchadha to focussing this section.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[245]<\/a> Both Schlick and Carnap considered Hume as somehow asymptotic\u00a0to a theory of knowledge, and the weakness of their verificationism was a testament to their surrender to it.\u00a0 Schlick removed most of his defence of induction from the second edition of his General Theory of Knowledge<\/em> viewing it as inadequate in his preface to the 2nd<\/sup> edition.\u00a0 Carnap in his Aufbau<\/em> (tr. The Logical Structure of the World<\/em> (2nd<\/sup> revised edition 1961, original 1928)) also admitted the weakness of induction (sec. 105) and considered Hume as correct in denying causality as anything but a functional description of the perceptual world.\u00a0 It is of note that Russell did not find the account of Carnap persuasive, despite Carnap having referenced Russell\u2019s account of Cause.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[246]<\/a> See, for example, Hannon, M. (2021). Skepticism, Fallibilism, and Rational Evaluation. In K. Wallbridge, & C. Kyriacou, Skeptical Invariantism Reconsidered (pp. 172-194). Oxford: Routledge.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[247]<\/a> Hannon, Skepticism, Fallibilism, and Rational Evaluation<\/em>, p.173.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[248]<\/a> Moore\u2019s famous proof of the external world is worth repeating:\u00a0 MP1 If hands exist, then there is an external world. \u00a0MP2 Here are two hands. <\/em>Conclusion: There is an external world<\/em>.\u00a0 Of course, this is a summary of a much fuller argument presented in Moore (2006), ch.9.\u00a0 The argument was defended as recently as in Ortero (2013).\u00a0 Moore was also highly influential in bringing Wittgenstein in from the philosophical cold in 1929, precipitating what was to become one of the most epoch-shaping periods of his thought; Wittgenstein repeatedly indicated he valued Moore for his conversational power and in particular his interrogative style.\u00a0 See Monk (2020) for a salient retrospective.\u00a0 Moore is one of the few men to have had an entire issue of the Journal of Philosophy<\/em> (Dec. 22, 1960, Vol. 57, No.26) dedicated to him at his passing.\u00a0 He was most famous for his rejection of idealism and his defence of common-sense realism.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[249]<\/a> Schlick, M. (2002 (1925)). General Theory of Knowledge<\/em> (2nd revised (reprint) ed.). Peru (IL): Open Court., p.384.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[250]<\/a> Schlick, M. (2002 (1925)). General Theory of Knowledge<\/em> (2nd revised (reprint) ed.). Peru (IL): Open Court., p.384.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[251]<\/a> Kenny, A. (2012). A New History of Western Philosophy<\/em> (Single volume (Impression 2) ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press., p.618.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[252]<\/a> Blackburn (2006) contains an excellent and accessible account of the various forms of realism as responses to sceptical criticisms.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[253]<\/a> Bahnsen (1993) rather pointedly makes the point that nobody defends na\u00efve realism today except the evangelical church and all the na\u00efve realists are in the evangelical church.\u00a0 Though overstated, the popularity of the \u201cclassical\u201d proofs despite their serious philosophical shortcomings, demonstrates well the problems of a na\u00efve realism.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[254]<\/a> Hence, it is also known as reliabilism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[255]<\/a> Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and most of the \u201cIvy League\u201d colleges (analogous to the UK \u2018Oxbridge\u2019 status) were all founded by Protestants.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[256]<\/a> The great Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield were heavily dependent on this view.\u00a0 Hodge explicitly asserted that \u201cProvidence\u201d (or a Christian context) was not necessary to underpin a belief in common sense; it really was \u201ccommon\u201d to all humanity.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[257]<\/a> Some moved first to Unitarian positions or to liberal theology, whilst others fully secularised.\u00a0 Kuyper\u2019s Free University of Amsterdam had secularised by the 1930s barely 50 years after its founding as a Christian university.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[258]<\/a> Wittgenstein, L. (2007 (1922)). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.<\/em> New York: Cosimo Classics., \u00a77.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[259]<\/a> Oberdan, T. (2022, September 29). Moritz Schlick.<\/em> Retrieved from Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/schlick\/<\/a>, \u00a77.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[260]<\/a> It was certainly fashionable for a time to consider W\u2019s \u2018method\u2019 in this way, see Farrell (1946a, b).\u00a0 There was no \u2018theory\u2019 to be feigned but simply a clarification of what was being said and what was meant in the specific context.\u00a0 However, Wittgenstein himself had replied strongly to Ayer in a personal letter unfavourably in regard to this assessment (Monk (1991), pp.356-7) although Ayer does not mention it, even in his own intellectual biography of Wittgenstein (Ayer, 1985).\u00a0 It is fair to say that Ayer\u2019s biography of Wittgenstein was the least hagiographical of those that were produced.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[261]<\/a> Monk, R. (1991). Ludwig Wittgenstein – The Duty of Genius.<\/em> London: Vintage., pp.255-298.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[262]<\/a> See Macneil (2014b) for more consideration of the relationship of Wittgenstein to the positivist movement.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[263]<\/a> These were the themes explored in an accessible manner in a series of essays by Schaeffer, compiled in Schaeffer (1990).\u00a0 Schaeffer was sometimes eschewed by the secular academy as a pseudo-intellectual because he refused to write for the academy, preferring a direct and popular apologetic style.\u00a0 However, his insights were recognised by important figures such as Van Til, Bahnsen and Packer within the Christian academy even if they disagreed with him or criticised his lack of accuracy and rigour in places.\u00a0 Bahnsen, in particular, devotes substantial space (Bahnsen (2008), pp.272ff.) to critiquing Schaeffer\u2019s version of presuppositionalism as wanting, whilst recognising Scaheffer\u2019s immense insight into the general drift of intellectual history.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[264]<\/a> It may be unfair to judge Schilpp as outside of the Christian community.\u00a0 He remained a Methodist minister until the end of his life but was also known for his radical internationalism, governing role in the ACLU (of whom John Dewey was the first patron), and his championing of world government.\u00a0 As I have argued in Macneil (2021), such a conception of government should surely be considered antithetical to a biblical view of government.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[265]<\/a> Willard, D. (2018). The Disappearence of Moral Knowledge.<\/em> (S. L. Porter, A. Preston, & G. A. Ten Elshof, Eds.) New York\/Oxon: Routledge., pp. xii-xiii.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[266]<\/a> Pierce believed the pragmatic maxim best explicated scientific theories to the degree Pierce preferred the term \u201cpragmaticism\u201d to distinguish himself from James.\u00a0 However, James and Peirce were good friends and Dewey had been taught by Peirce.\u00a0 This was thus an amicable family squabble, all three made central to their thinking the same pragmatic maxim that it is the practical effects of an object or action that need to be considered in understanding it and evaluating it.\u00a0 Russell (1991) in discussing pragmatism cuts the cake rather differently but groups all these men together adding in F C S Schiller to the mix but noting he was a minor actor; it is with James and Dewey he was primarily concerned.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[267]<\/a> This was seen vividly in his response (1896) to Clifford\u2019s Ethics of Belief<\/em> and applied generally to religious belief.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[268]<\/a> For the decade 1884-1894 John Dewey worked with the church in Ann Arbor and the Christian Student Association at the University of Michigan.\u00a0 Rockefeller (1991) is considered one of the best accounts of Dewey\u2019s complex relationship to religion.\u00a0 The review by Shea (1992), a Deweyan scholar, of Rockefeller is also an excellent source of information on Dewey\u2019s basic orientation with regards to religion.\u00a0 Shea makes the important point that Dewey never had much enthusiasm for orthodox Christian doctrine despite his evangelical upbringing, being a \u201cperfect case\u2026for [J Gresham Machen\u2019s] thesis that theological liberalism is not Christianity but\u2026the religion of secular uplift<\/em>\u201d (p.75).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[269]<\/a> Shea (1992) describes Dewey\u2019s religion as replacing God with the problems of the Public and the clergy or fellow believers with the naturalists and the humanists.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[270]<\/a> Dewey was probably the major influence on American culture generally, particularly in political philosophy.\u00a0 Logical positivism was far more influential in the philosophy of science though there was substantial common ground between them. \u00a0Pragmatism had a revival of sorts beginning in the 1970s and still has supporters amongst the top tier of American philosophers such as Putnam and Nagel.\u00a0 It is very much an American movement.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[271]<\/a> Dewey, J. (2016 (1927)). The Public and Its Problems: An Essay In Political Inquiry.<\/em> Athens: Ohio University Press.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[272]<\/a> Rushdoony, R. J. (1986). Christianity and the State<\/em> . Chalcedon\/Ross House Books. Kindle Edition., loc. 466ff.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[273]<\/a> Russell makes a very similar point in discussing John Dewey in Russell (1991), p.778.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[274]<\/a> Dewey, J. (2016 (1916)). Democracy and Education<\/em> (Kindle ed.). Jovian Press.,<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[275]<\/a> \u201cPaleopositivism\u201d is used to distinguish it from the \u201clogical positivism\u201d of the 20th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 Whilst Schlick\u2019s and Carnap\u2019s adoption of \u201cpositivism\u201d as a designation was a deliberate choice in deference to Comte, logical positivism had little in common in detail with paleopositivism other than its elevation of science into scientism with their respective manifestos.\u00a0 Positivism rejected any conception of the noumenal<\/em> (which was Kant\u2019s way to leave the door open to a moralistic religious faith), thus privileging phenomena and dismissing theocentric religion.\u00a0 Comte was unapologetic in advocating for a new religion of humanism (interestingly he had acknowledged the failure of the French revolution because he viewed its brutal socialism as inadequate in its view of the sensitivities of the human subject) and exerted substantial influence on Darwin and many proto-naturalists.\u00a0 There still exist positivist \u201cchurches\u201d in some countries committed to a moral reformation.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[276]<\/a> It is clear at this early point in his career Schlick was a realist.\u00a0 In later years his realism weakened owing to the influence of Carnap who considered the realist\/anti-realist problem a pseudo-problem caused by a confusion of language.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[277]<\/a> Schlick, M. (2002 (1925)). General Theory of Knowledge<\/em> (2nd revised (reprint) ed.). Peru (IL): Open Court., p.384.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[278]<\/a> Ayer, A. J. (1952 (1946)). Language, Truth and Logic<\/em> (2nd ed.). New York: Dover Publications, Inc., pp.102ff.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[279]<\/a> Russell, B. (1991 (1961)). History of Western Philosophy<\/em> (2nd ed.). London: Routledge., pp.783, 789.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[280]<\/a> The interpretation and ambiguity surrounding this remark and the doubt that can be cast on it as a manifesto for strict positivism is discussed accessibly in Carey (2012).\u00a0 It must be pointed out that Newton\u2019s legacy was not in experimental science but for his grand mathematical theories and his \u201chypotheses\u201d regarding light and gravity.\u00a0 Even if his intention was to be experimental and positivistic, his practice stood in stark contrast to that intention, something that is frequently missed when people talk about \u201cNewtonian science\u201d as a model of experimental science.\u00a0 Again, see Carey (2012) who also gives references to particular studies regarding the context of Newton.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[281]<\/a> This is in large part inspired by Wittgenstein\u2019s Tractatus<\/em>, see 6.5ff; especially note 6.521 \u2018the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem\u2019<\/em>.\u00a0 It was developed and expressed much more forcefully by Carnap (1928) who had been \u201cexcited\u201d after a conversation with Wittgenstein.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[282]<\/a> A first order primary source for Communism and its relation to Nazism is found at the Weisbord archive<\/em>, https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/weisbord\/index.htm.\u00a0 Albert and Vera Weisbord were American Communist revolutionaries, noted for their education and activism.\u00a0 The archive section on philosophy explicitly exegetes the \u2018scientific\u2019 vision and advocates positivism.\u00a0 Albert\u2019s discussion of the origins of National Socialism are elucidating as he was writing whilst it happened and in retrospect.\u00a0 A far more subdued and revisionist account is given at https:\/\/morningstaronline.co.uk\/article\/f\/marxism-scientific-and-what-scientific-socialism<\/a>.\u00a0 Here \u2018science\u2019 is a far more imprecise and general term reflecting the indefensible nature of the early Marxist claims, but which interestingly also demonstrates how Marx and Engel\u2019s use of the term was far more nuanced than the communists who took up their programme.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[283]<\/a> Stein (1988) explicates with great detail how biological science was foundational<\/em> to the Nazi view of humanity and their political programme.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[284]<\/a> Carnap, like many members of the Vienna Circle, took refuge outside of Europe in the US as Nazism took hold in Europe.\u00a0 He made a point of working on a Sunday because it was a religious day; the Nazis had at times appealed to the Christian scriptures (especially the book of John, which could be easily misinterpreted with its extended polemical tone against \u201cThe Jews\u201d) and theologians such as Luther, to justify their actions against the Jews and had deep connections with sections of the catholic hierarchy, who later helped senior figures escape to South America.\u00a0 It was thus not surprising that many of the Jewish members of the Vienna Circle rejected religious metaphysics and Christianity in particular, forcefully.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[285]<\/a> Quine generated a large corpus over nearly fifty years and was arguably one of the most influential of the post-positivist \u201cscientific\u201d philosophers of the second part of the 20th<\/sup> century known for his behaviourism, his rigorous logicism and his naturalism.\u00a0 Quine (1995) was a concise distillation of his views, published just 5 years before his death; he continued being philosophically active to shortly before he died.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[286]<\/a> Quine, W. V. (1980 (1953)). Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View<\/em> (pp. 20-46). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[287]<\/a> Analyticity was defined in this paper by Quine as \u201ctruths\u2026grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[288]<\/a> Reductionism was defined in this paper by Quine as \u201ceach meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[289]<\/a> This is an important point regarding the questionable status of evolutionary theory as a scientific<\/em> theory.\u00a0 Evolution has a prehistory almost as ancient as philosophy itself.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[290]<\/a> Dawkins, R. (2006 (1986)). The Blind Watchmaker.<\/em> Oxford: Penguin., p.6.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[291]<\/a> The primary purpose of most academies at the ancient universities was initially to educate preachers for the ministry, see Rivers, I., & Wykes, D. L. Dissenting Academies<\/em>.\u00a0 The Wikipedia article sections on Cambridge University and its relation to Oxford at its founding is also an excellent read, https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/University_of_Cambridge.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[292]<\/a> Lewis, C. (2015 (1948)). Miracles – A Preliminary Study<\/em> (EBook ed.). London: Harper Collins., ch.3.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[293]<\/a> Lewis, C. (2015 (1948)). Miracles – A Preliminary Study<\/em> (EBook ed.). London: Harper Collins., pp.17-36; Plantinga, A. (2011). Where The Conflict Really Lies – Science, Religion and Naturalism.<\/em> New York: Oxford University Press., pp.309ff.\u00a0 Plantinga acknowledges his debt to Lewis (and others) here.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[294]<\/a> Plantinga, A. (2011). Where The Conflict Really Lies – Science, Religion and Naturalism.<\/em> New York: Oxford University Press., pp.309.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[295]<\/a> Quine, W. V. (1992). Pursuit of Truth (Revised Edition).<\/em> Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press., p.93.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[296]<\/a> We consider Plantinga\u2019s conception of \u201cwarrant\u201d when we consider epistemology proper, see \u00a74.3.7.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[297]<\/a> Quine, W. V. (1992). Pursuit of Truth (Revised Edition).<\/em> Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press., pp.93-94.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[298]<\/a> Quine, W. V. (1992). Pursuit of Truth (Revised Edition).<\/em> Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press., p.95.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[299]<\/a> North, G. (2001 (1976)). The Epistemological Crisis of American Universities. In Various, & G. North (Ed.), Foundations of Christian Scholarship – Essays in the Van Til Perspective<\/em> (pp. 3-26). Vallecito: Ross House Books., pp.3-4.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[300]<\/a> Ibid. \u00a0North\u2019s essay is an exposition of this viewpoint, opening with quoting Snow\u2019s blind faith in chance.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[301]<\/a> A \u201cstochastic\u201d process is a seemingly random one but is capable of characterisation.\u00a0 I did an entire module as an undergraduate Electrical & Electronic Engineer on \u2018Stochastic Processes\u2019 \u2013 two good examples are \u201cwhite noise\u201d and \u201cpink noise\u201d so called because of their frequency distribution in an allegedly random process.\u00a0 There is also detailed mathematical description possible for such processes, see Rodrigues & O\u2019Reilly (2003), the latter being the lecturer for my course who could make extremely complicated and seemingly arcane mathematics understandable (and interesting).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[302]<\/a> See Polkinghorne (1991), pp.85-98 and Polkinghorne (1984) for accessible accounts of these issues from a theological perspective.\u00a0 His views are particularly interesting as he spent most of his life as elementary particle physicist but resigned his chair at Cambridge to train as a priest.\u00a0 The 1984 book was described by Penrose, arguably considered with Hawking as the most influential of the mathematical physicists, as \u2018a delightful book written at a popular level without any misleading over-simplifications\u2019<\/em>.\u00a0 Part of Polkinghorne\u2019s motivation in his early accounts was to counter the appropriation by Capra (1975) and Zukav (1979) of quantum physics as evidence for a view of the Universe more aligned with Eastern religious thought, see also Macneil (2011), esp. ch.4, for a discussion of this issue.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[303]<\/a> Associated most directly with Neils Bohr, the Danish physicist and is also known as the \u201cCopenhagen Interpretation\u201d of quantum theory.\u00a0 Bohr was especially interested in the philosophical implications of quantum theory though his philosophy is considered of a far poorer quality than his physics.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[304]<\/a> Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony and solidarity.<\/em> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., pp.73-4.\u00a0 See also \u00a73.3.2.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[305]<\/a> Penrose, R. (1989). The Emporer’s New Mind.<\/em> Oxford: Oxford University Press., p.268.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[306]<\/a> Hawking, S., & Penrose, R. (2010 (1996)). The Nature of Space and Time<\/em> (With a new afterword by the authors ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press., p.1.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[307]<\/a> There is much more to say about history, subjectivity, and objectivity.\u00a0 See Blackburn (2006), ch.8 as to why we can maintain a positive epistemic attitude and confidence where complete certainty might be improbable.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[308]<\/a> Wilkinson, T. (2012, Mar\/Apr). The Multiverse Conundrum.<\/em> Retrieved from Philosophy Now: https:\/\/philosophynow.org\/issues\/89\/The_Multiverse_Conundrum.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[309]<\/a> That is, if there were six events with an individual probability of occurrence of 1 in 6 (1\/6), e.g., rolling a die and it turning up a \u201c1\u201d; the probability of rolling six dice and all<\/em> of them turning up 1 at the same<\/em> time is 1\/6 x 1\/6 x 1\/6 x 1\/6 x 1\/6 x 1\/6 = 1 \/ 46,656.\u00a0 One of the major problems with conventional evolutionary theory is that the probability of a functioning cell emerging by \u201cchance\u201d was estimated by mathematicians as 10e-300, i.e., 0 followed by 300 decimal 0s.\u00a0 For all intents and purposes, this is an impossible event, even allowing for the geological timescales commonly employed in evolutionary theory.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[310]<\/a> As found in \u201cOld Princeton\u201d apologetics associated with names such as B.B. Warfield and E.J. Young. However, they are also associated with St Thomas Aquinas and form the default mode of Romanist apologetics.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[311]<\/a> It has been argued that Aquinas\u2019s use of these arguments should be understood in his theological context.\u00a0 That is, he was not arguing, as it is often understood, that by considering his arguments as an un-<\/em>believer you could be converted to a believer by the force of reason alone (St. Anselm in the 1100s believed he had come up with arguments of that kind, but these did not withstand critical examination, commendable and impressive though they were).\u00a0 Rather it is a rational argument for a believer who already has the correct presuppositions.\u00a0 For this reason, Plantinga (2015) considers that Aquinas and Calvin had much more in common epistemologically than is normally permitted in either Protestant or Roman dogmatics, such that Plantinga refers to \u201cChristian knowledge on the A\/C model\u201d. \u00a0See \u00a74.3.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[312]<\/a> For example, in Swinburne (2011).\u00a0 As Plantinga notes, he has progressed the case for natural theology beyond its classical boundaries.\u00a0 However, it remains a staple of Reformed thought (of which Plantinga is one of the greatest expositors), that a natural theology is not possible.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[313]<\/a> The point being that the combination of matter and antimatter results in annihilation and a null energy state.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[314]<\/a> This was a phrase used by Stephen Hawking in an interview I watched which follows the contours of Hawkings (1996), ch.8.\u00a0 He proceeded to explain this did not disprove the existence of God but simply made him redundant as a required<\/em> feature of the cosmos, the universe was \u201cself-sustaining\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 It is very correct that he was referring specifically to the view that God in some way \u201ccaused\u201d the Big Bang but to a greater or lesser degree then left the universe to its own evolution, a concessive position of some theists and fully developed within some forms of deism.\u00a0 However, Hawkings later renounced any belief in an inflationary-deflationary model of the universe that he had first developed with Penrose, favouring a \u201csteady state\u201d model of the universe that was consistent with the non-theistic and naturalist conceptions.\u00a0 As highlighted shortly in the main text, it is of note few of his peers followed him in this, despite its atheological attractiveness.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[315]<\/a> It should also be noted that Stephen Hawkins was less than enthusiastic about string theory at the time of his debate with Penrose, claiming it lacked predictive power.\u00a0 It may well have disappeared into obscurity if it had not been for the \u201cgraviton\u201d equation, established independently, emerging from string theory during its application to another problem.\u00a0 Consequently, we might still hear of \u201cstring theory\u201d, or perhaps more correctly a particular<\/em> version of string theory (M-theory) in the philosophy of physics today.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[316]<\/a> Wilkinson, T. (2012, Mar\/Apr). The Multiverse Conundrum.<\/em> Retrieved from Philosophy Now: https:\/\/philosophynow.org\/issues\/89\/The_Multiverse_Conundrum<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[317]<\/a> \u201cToy theory\u201d might seem to make it trivial (and some comments on the term by researchers are in that vein) but technically refers to a radically simplified cosmological model dealing with only the details the researcher is trying to explicate and ignoring all else.\u00a0 Such radical simplification, even if backed by impressive mathematics, hardly seems compelling as a comprehensive account.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[318]<\/a> \u201cReasonable verisimilitude\u201d or RV is a designation favoured by \u201ccritical realists\u201d such as Polkinghorne to any theory that cannot be proved apodictically but is nevertheless considered as approximating the truth.\u00a0 In Macneil (2011) sec 2.3.4 I offer a brief but salient account of critical realism, as does the Conclusion in the same work.\u00a0 Although my thought has clearly moved on, there are still plenty of similarities between the arguments made in both this and that work.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[319]<\/a> Penrose, R. (2005). The Road To Reality – A Complete Guide To The Laws of the Universe.<\/em> London: Vintage., p67.\u00a0 His popular account of his revised view is given in Hawkings (2006).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[320]<\/a> Paradoxically, \u201csteady state\u201d models were common in medieval religious models that viewed the universe as created.\u00a0 As I understand it, Hawkings later model is a steady-state view but with a beginning quantum era as he describes in the revised version of his A Brief History of Time<\/em> (1996).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[321]<\/a> Hawking, S., & Penrose, R. (2010 (1996)). The Nature of Space and Time<\/em> (With a new afterword by the authors ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press., p.1.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[322]<\/a> Hawking, S., & Hertog, T. (2018). A smooth exit from eternal inflation? Journal of High Energy Physics<\/em>, 147.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[323]<\/a> Hawking, S. (2006). The Illustrated Theory of Everything<\/em> (Special Anniversary Edition ed.). Beverly Hills: Phoenix Books.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[324]<\/a> Penrose, R. (2005). The Road To Reality – A Complete Guide To The Laws of the Universe.<\/em> London: Vintage., p782.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[325]<\/a> Glattfelder, J. B. (2019). Ontological Enigmas: What is the True Nature of Reality? In Information\u2014Consciousness\u2014Reality<\/em> (pp. 345-394). Springer-Cham. doi:https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-3-030-03633-1_10<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[326]<\/a> Goff, P. (2018, May 7). Did the dying Stephen Hawking really mean to strengthen the case for God?<\/em> Retrieved from The Guardian: https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2018\/may\/07\/stephen-hawking-god-multiverse-cosmology<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[327]<\/a> Hannon (2021), Skepticism, Fallibilism, and Rational Evaluation<\/em>, p.174n3.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[328]<\/a> Quine when discussing the problem of induction in the Web of Belief<\/em> openly admits that \u201cscience\u201d justifies induction but that \u201cthe sciences\u201d themselves are founded inductively.\u00a0 Ayer when discussing induction in LTL describes it as \u201csuperstition\u201d that a philosopher would require a justification for induction.\u00a0 Both Schlick and Carnap cut discussions of induction from later editions of their works on knowledge.\u00a0 Many attempts to reimagine science are, in fact, motivated by the inability to justify the notion of induction.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[329]<\/a> Polkinghorne, J. (2007). Quantum Physics and Theology – An Unexpected Kinship.<\/em> London: SPCK., p.1ff.\u00a0 This was also the title of a famous paper by Donald Davidson, contra Rorty\u2019s attempted reading of him as sympathetic to postmodernism.\u00a0 Of course, as a disciple of Quine, his conception of truth needs careful explication.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[330]<\/a> Polkinghorne, J. (2007). Quantum Physics and Theology – An Unexpected Kinship.<\/em> London: SPCK., p.6.\u00a0 This is useful as it contains additional references to his other expositions of both CR and RV.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[331]<\/a> Polkinghorne, J. (2007). Quantum Physics and Theology – An Unexpected Kinship.<\/em> London: SPCK., p.110.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[332]<\/a> For example, see Goswami (2000).\u00a0 There is a significant movement that endeavours to \u2018combine Western science with Eastern mysticism [to create] a new scientific paradigm<\/em>\u2019 (backmatter).\u00a0 Lewis in his science fiction fantasy That Hideous Strength<\/em> had the sub-text that it is only a short step from a strong commitment to \u201cscience\u201d to a mystical view of the universe as somehow possessing a soul or to \u201cscience\u201d taking on a God-like character.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[333]<\/a> Alfred North Whitehead, one of the most eminent philosophers of the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century wrote thus:\u00a0\u201cThe safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them<\/em>\u201d.\u00a0 (Whitehead (1985), p.39)<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[334]<\/a>\u00a0 Hume, D. (1998). Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion with Of the Immortality of the Soul, Of Suicide, Of Miracles<\/em> (2nd ed.). (R. H. Popkin, Ed.) Indianapolis\/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company., p.63.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[335]<\/a> \u00d3 Murchadha, F. (2022). The Formation of the Modern Self<\/em> (Kindle ed.). London: Bloomsbury Academic., p.30.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[336]<\/a> Plantinga (1977) was considered a milestone in a modern defence of the argument in mitigating the criticisms of Mackie and Flew which had dominated the non-positivistic atheism-theism debate in the first two decades after WWII.\u00a0 Flew caused a scandal in the atheist community when in 2004, after 50 years of atheological scholarship, he announced he had changed his mind.\u00a0 I distinctly remember my first philosophy lecturer in 2006 commenting that \u201cit demonstrates that he is still thinking\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 The story is told in Flew (2009).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[337]<\/a> For example, Leo XIII in 1879 made it mandatory for Catholic institutions that taught philosophy that Aquinas \u201cto be taught as the only right one\u201d<\/em> and Russell had offended many Catholics by a BBC broadcast when he criticised Aquinas (Russell, p.444).\u00a0 Russell was writing that in the 1930s and some reforms and councils have softened the dogmatism since somewhat, especially since the 1960s Second Vatican Council.\u00a0 However, Pope Benedict as a philosophy professor (though he was perhaps better known as a theologian), maintained a strict division at the \u201cmodern\u201d philosophy, which he said began with Descartes.\u00a0 He was also noted for rolling back some of the reforms of the 1960s that had muddled some of the catholic dogma.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[338]<\/a> Summa theologiae<\/em>, his most important and well-known work, composed 1267\u201373.\u00a0 An authoritative, online English translation is found at https:\/\/www3.nd.edu\/~afreddos\/summa-translation\/TOC.htm<\/a>.\u00a0 His second most important work was the earlier Summa contra gentiles <\/em>(1259-65), a parallel Latin-English version is found at https:\/\/isidore.co\/aquinas\/ContraGentiles.htm<\/a> .<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[339]<\/a> Again, I acknowledge the criticism of Professor \u00d3 Murchadha and the subsequent improvements in this section.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[340]<\/a> De Lubac, H. (2000). Augustinianism and Modern Theology<\/em> (2000 ed.). New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company., pp.113-114.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[341]<\/a> This is sometimes known as the \u2018Via negativa\u2019 (\u201cthe negative way\u201d), proceeding to the knowledge of God by what he is not.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[342]<\/a> Butler, M. (1997). Religious Epistemology Seminar. On Plantinga<\/em> [MP3 Set \/ MB200-MB210]. Nagadoches, Texas., Pt.3.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[343]<\/a> Dupr\u00e9, L. (2000). Introduction. In H. De Lubac, Augustinianism and Modern Theology<\/em> (2000 ed., pp. i-xv). New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company., p.xii.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[344]<\/a> Russell (1991), pp.452-454<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[345]<\/a> Dupr\u00e9, L. (2000). Introduction. In H. De Lubac, Augustinianism and Modern Theology<\/em> (2000 ed., pp. i-xv). New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company., p.xi.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[346]<\/a> De Lubac, H. (2000). Augustinianism and Modern Theology<\/em> (2000 ed.). New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company., pp.112-115.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[347]<\/a> De Lubac, H. (2000). Augustinianism and Modern Theology<\/em> (2000 ed.). New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company., pp.275-278.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[348]<\/a> Plantinga 2000, 2015.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[349]<\/a> He returned to Calvin in 2010 after spending 1982-2010 at Catholic Notre Dame, in the college\u2019s words that claim to be his own, \u201chis intellectual and spiritual home\u201d<\/em> as Emeritus and first Harry Jellema chair of philosophy, he was still teaching part-time in 2012.\u00a0 He was awarded the Templeton prize in 2017.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[350]<\/a> Plantinga (1994) does, however, demonstrate an acute sensitivity to his Catholic context.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[351]<\/a> De Lubac, H. (2000). Augustinianism and Modern Theology<\/em> (2000 ed.). New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company., p.275.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[352]<\/a> I discussed this more fully in Macneil (2014a).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[353]<\/a> De Lubac (2000), ch.9. is an historical justification of his position as a position more correctly orthodox than the accusation by the traditionalists of his heterodoxy.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[354]<\/a> Though Lubac himself asserts there was never any formal papal sanction and goes as far to quote it positively, though rather cryptically, in De Lubac (2000), p.274.\u00a0 However, his order most certainly viewed the cyclical as a censure, and he was forbidden from publishing or teaching as a Catholic.\u00a0 See Hulse Kirby (2023) for a modern perspective on the specifically contentious issues.\u00a0 As a Catholic theologian noted, the Catholic church never rescinds its previous papal buls (pronouncements of executive decisions by the Pope) because the Pope is considered inspired by God and can thus not err, they simply issue new ones which override them.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[355]<\/a> Kuyper was a truly extraordinary person, founding a political party, a new denomination, a university and two newspapers as well as serving as Primeminister for the Netherlands (1901-1905).\u00a0 For a representative reader, see Bratt (1998) and for a more general view of his cultural philosophy, Macneil (2017).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[356]<\/a> Kuyper and Warfield were contemporaries and had met when Kuyper had lectured when visiting Princeton, they were good friends.\u00a0 However, Warfield had written a preface to a colleague\u2019s introduction to apologetics in which he had criticised Kuyper\u2019s presuppositionalism.\u00a0 Kuyper and Warfield were the opposite poles of the Reformed community with respect to apologetics, but both were enormous intellectual figures in neo-Calvinism.\u00a0 We will examine the differences between the two and Van Til\u2019s novel synthesis in \u00a73.5.5.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[357]<\/a> This was the subject of my Master\u2019s dissertation, Macneil (2016).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[358]<\/a> Quine, W. V. (1992). Pursuit of Truth (Revised Edition).<\/em> Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press., p.95.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[359]<\/a> Quine, W., & Ullian, J. (1978). The Web of Belief<\/em> (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill., p.92.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[360]<\/a> Needless to say, not everyone agreed with him on those \u201cso much for<\/em>\u201d points, especially when they had just written a whole book on modal logic, see Plantinga (1982), Appendix 1.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[361]<\/a> Quine, W. V. (1980 (1953)). Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View<\/em> (pp. 20-46). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press., p.43.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[362]<\/a> Quine, W., & Ullian, J. (1978). The Web of Belief<\/em> (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.\u00a0 This is probably the best primer on scientific naturalism ever written, it was originally written as an English course but proved so popular that the authors rewrote it as more of an introduction to philosophy.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[363]<\/a> Quine believed that philosophy and science were coterminous.\u00a0 Thus any \u2018non-scientific\u2019 philosophy was not really philosophy at all as it could add nothing to human knowledge which Quine had defined as the \u201cwhole of science\u201d.\u00a0 There is much more that will be said of Quine\u2019s philosophy as some of his conclusions are pertinent to this study, but it is of immediate note that Quine recognised the circularity<\/em> of this position but considered such circularity inevitable considering all genuine problems as soluble by scientific methods.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[364]<\/a> We will later refer to this as an interpretative principle or a \u201cpresupposition\u201d.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[365]<\/a> Invaluable reading in this respect is his Quine, W. V. (1986a) which is a highly compressed and lucid autobiographical account.\u00a0 The full autobiography The Time of My Life <\/em>(published by MIT Press) grew to over 500 pages.\u00a0 As Quine explains in a postscript to this shorter version, it took around 12 years for the Festschrift like volume in which this was included to come to Press by which time the full autobiography was about to be published so he did not update it.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[366]<\/a> Mahner, M. (2007). Demarcating Science From Non-Science. In D. M. Gabbay, P. Thagard, & J. Woods (Eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Science: General Philosophy of Science – Focal Issues<\/em> (pp. 515-575). Elsevier.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[367]<\/a> Kant, I. (2015). Critique of Practical Reason<\/em> (Revised ed.). (M. Gregor, Ed., M. Gregor, & A. Reath, Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., p.129.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[368]<\/a> Hume, D. (1998). Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion with Of the Immortality of the Soul, Of Suicide, Of Miracles<\/em> (2nd ed.). (R. H. Popkin, Ed.) Indianapolis\/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company., p.7.\u00a0 Hume had this sentence in the mouth of Philo who is not generally assumed to be representative of his views, but the consensus amongst Humean scholars was that this was the inevitable terminus of the sceptical view that Hume followed to where it led.\u00a0 His conclusion has since been a thorn in the side of all empiricists and rationalists alike; his challenges cannot be met without the transcendental of God\u2019s existence making sense of reason as we shall see in the later sections of our thesis.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[369]<\/a> Rorty, R. (2007). Philosophy as Cultural Politics – Philosophical Papers Volume 4.<\/em> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., pp.ix-x.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[370]<\/a> The way others see Rorty and how Rorty saw himself using terms such as postmodern, pragmatist, post-philosophical and bourgeois liberal is captured well in the interviews in Rorty (2006).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[371]<\/a> Rorty was described by Blackburn (a peer and one of his severest critics) as \u201cunusually well informed\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 See https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/richard-rortys-iconoclastic-deconstruction-of-philosophy\/<\/a> \u00a0for a brief comment on his iconoclastic philosophical project which began after the publication of his Mirror <\/em>(1979).<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[372]<\/a> Kuyper, A. (1998 ). Sphere Sovereignty. In J. D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper – A Centennial Reader<\/em> (pp. 461-490). Cambridge: Paternoster.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[373]<\/a> A concise summary is found in Blackburn, S. (1998). Ruling Passions – A Theory of Practical Reasoning.<\/em> Oxford: Clarendon., pp.279ff.\u00a0 The position is applied to the problem of truth in Blackburn, S. (2006) at many places in that work.\u00a0 He also specifically singles out Rorty\u2019s position as ethically bankrupt.\u00a0 Rorty had acknowledged Blackburn\u2019s critique in footnotes in later compilations of his papers.<\/p>\n

                  <\/a>[374]<\/a> This same commitment to \u201cmoral knowledge\u201d is found in the much-neglected work of Dallas Willard, see Willard (2018).\u00a0 Willard\u2019s views are more than a passing interest for us as he supervised Bahnsen\u2019s doctorate (as well as 31 other PhDs), whose work features prominently in this thesis.<\/p>\n

                  \n
                  \n
                  Introduction<\/a><\/div>\n
                  A Christian Conception of Philosophy<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
                  \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                  2\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Nature, Character, and Purpose of Philosophy 2.1\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Overview In our previous discussion we minimised the distance between science and philosophy and inferred that science is inherently philosophical and vice-versa.\u00a0 \u00a0We concluded it is more a question of language and audience than a fundamental difference in the subject matter.\u00a0 We also concluded that philosophy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":972,"parent":1391,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1415","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\r\nThe Nature, Character, and Purpose of Philosophy - Planet M Blog<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Nature, Character, and Purpose of Philosophy - THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS PROJECT\" \/>\r\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\r\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/phd\/the-nature-character-and-purpose-of-philosophy\/\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Nature, Character, and Purpose of Philosophy - 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