2.09.2006

Giving philosophy the raspberry

For my philosophy friends:

This is Doug Wilson reviewing Stanley Grenz' book-length review of post-modernism: "A Primer On Postmodernism." Grenz is considered a mainstream evangelical scholar.


"[Rene Descartes - basically the founder of modern philosophy in the 1600s] begins with radical doubt, and discovers that he cannot effectively doubt that he is doubting, and so he must be there to be doubting in the first place, and that he ought to have said, "Dubito ergo sum." This was bad whiskey for a number of reasons, but the first effect of it was that it placed the individual at the conceptual starting point. No longer was the life of the mind to begin in Christ. But Scripture says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. It does not say that the fear of the Lord can be safely set aside in order to conduct our philosophical investigations."



"'To this end, [Immanuel Kant - major philosopher of the late 1700s] proposed a bold hypothesis: the mind is active in the knowing process' (p. 76). Okay, I'll bite. How active? 'He maintained that space and time are not properties that inhere in things but are rather parts of the ordering that the mind imposes on the world it encounters' (p. 76). Whoa. Pretty active. And here, in the confines of my mind (the brain of which weighs a few pounds), I summon up my god-like powers, and bestow on the universe the much needed categories of space and time. Before breakfast."


Maybe these guys have been taken seriously for centuries for other ideas, because these are patently ridiculous to any thinking Christian who believes the Bible, aren't they?

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