Western Culture Videos

Immanuel Kant was a giant in the history of Western thought. In fact, one of Adam’s seminary professors claimed that many Christians have been influenced more by Immanuel Kant than by Jesus Christ. Kant was a pivotal thinker, standing at the end of an era of optimistic hope in reason and the beginning of an era of critiquing reason. Kant initially set out to rescue reason, science, and absolute certainty from Hume’s crushing skepticism. To do this, he shifted the focus of knowledge from the universe “out there” to our own minds “in here,” claiming that categories in our minds completely shape our understanding of the world. By doing this, he limited the reach of reason, deducing that we can only know with absolute certainty how things appear to our minds, not how they are in reality. Finally, Kant thought he had rescued faith by separating it from reason and placing beliefs in God or the afterlife beyond the reach of reason. However, he ended up redefining faith as being opposed to reason, an idea that is unfortunately still very influential in our culture today.

In the 18th century, philosopher David Hume shook the thinking of the Western world when he challenged the empiricists of his day and claimed that absolute certainty was not actually possible to attain. He claimed that “all knowledge degenerates into probability.” If empiricism was right in claiming that all knowledge comes through our senses, through our experiences, then in fact we can’t be absolutely sure about anything, even things like causality, the laws of nature, and especially religion. David Hume is sometimes known as the most famous skeptic in history because he proposed that reason is a dead end and that there are no ultimate answers. David Hume’s ideas were so influential that Immanuel Kant, usually considered one of the greatest Western thinkers, built his philosophy as a response to Hume’s skepticism.

Everyone seems to have an idea of right and wrong. We know that being loving and forgiving are good things to do. We know that it is wrong to murder or to rape. We all know about the existence of moral rules, such as "Thou shalt not steal" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." In philosophy, the study of these moral rules, of right and wrong, good and bad, is called ethics. So, what makes something good or bad? We might know what things are good and bad, but why is something good or bad? Who's to say that loving someone is good but hating them is bad? Where do right and wrong come from? In philosophy, this area of study is known as "metaethics," and in this series, Adam explores both theistic and atheistic theories of what makes something morally good or bad. Is God the foundation of morality, or is God not needed to explain the source of moral values and duties? What does it even mean to say that God is the "foundation" of morality?

In the 1600s and 1700s, modern Western culture tried to go down a path of using reason by itself. Descartes pushed Western philosophy from the pre-modern era into the modern era, and that gave birth to many new ideas. Descartes’ mistake was that he thought he could prove things with absolute certainty using reason alone. This led to a greater focus on science as the means of knowing reality, which led to scientism, the belief that scientific knowledge is the only type of knowledge that can be trusted to give reliable answers about the world. Scientism introduced a shift from thinking of science as a means to know God to merely a mechanism for human progress using only those things we can know through reason and nature. Because of this, the idea of deism became popular among Western thinkers. Deism is the idea that God exists but that He reveals truth to us only through nature, not through Scripture or special revelation.

The transition from the pre-modern era to the modern era began to take shape through the thinking of René Descartes (1596-1650) and his philosophy of rationalism and empiricism. Because of the uncertainty present in the attitudes of the culture of his day, Descartes set out in search of absolute certainty for his beliefs. To build a system to achieve absolute certainty, Descartes needed to find a foundation to build on: an idea that couldn’t be doubted. Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore, I am. Descartes concluded that you cannot doubt your own existence because if you’re doubting, you must be thinking, and thus you must exist. Based on this foundation, Descartes said we could be skeptical of everything else and only believe those things we can prove with absolute certainty. Eventually in Western culture, Empiricism became the method to accomplish this, by using the data from our physical senses. These ideas subsequently influenced philosophers and scientists such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Isaac Newton.

Two ancient Greek thinkers who had an immense influence on Western thought and philosophy were Plato and Aristotle. Plato is known for his belief that universal truths, such as good or beauty, existed in and of themselves, not just in our minds. Plato believed that these objective, universal, absolute truths existed in a transcendent realm outside of us. Hundreds of years later, Augustine was greatly influenced by the ideas of Plato and said that Plato didn’t know it, but what he was actually describing was the mind and nature of God. Whereas Plato emphasized the reality of a transcendent realm and thought the physical world was merely shadows, Aristotle disagreed and thought the physical world was also important and could be studied and understood. Hundreds of years later, Aquinas took Aristotle’s ideas to heart in believing that both the transcendent and natural realms were important and could be understood. These ideas, emphasizing that the physical world could be studied and understood, led to the Scientific Revolution.

Philosophy presents us with many ultimate questions about life. How do we find the answers to these questions? Thinkers have proposed both faith and reason as ways to answer them. Popular culture today presents faith and reason as if they are incompatible. Some say faith is just the failure of reason by choosing to believe something without evidence. Others say reason is inadequate and that we just need to make a "leap of faith." Is this true? Are faith and reason really in conflict? Two very influential Western thinkers, Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, would disagree. They both thought faith and reason could work together, that faith and reason worked best when they reinforced each other, not when they were separated. Join Adam as he talks about the ideas of these two great thinkers.

Metaethics is the study of what makes something good or bad. It is not the study of what is good or bad, but why there are such things as moral good and moral bad. What is morality? Where did it come from? There are many theories of what morality is; some think morality is subjective and depends on individual people, cultures, and circumstances. Others believe that morality is objective, that it is independent of human beings. Most theists think that morality comes from God, but many atheists claim that God is not necessary for morality. Non-naturalists, for example, believe that morality can exist objectively without God. Thinkers throughout Western history have defended many positions, both subjective and objective as well as theistic and atheist ones. Listen in as Adam gives an overview of the different metaethical theories.

What is philosophy? Philosophy can sometimes be a hard word to define since our culture uses it in many ways. However, the academic study of philosophy could be broadly summed up by three areas of study: the study of existence (metaphysics), the study of knowledge (epistemology), and the study of ethics. Philosophy deals with big ideas that shape cultures, including ours, and the ideas of our cultures shape how we think. Philosophy attempts to answer ultimate questions: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? If we want to understand how our culture thinks and why it promotes the ideas it does, we have to understand the philosophy that gave birth to those ideas and the history of how they came to be accepted.

Faith and Reason: Popular culture today presents these two things as if they are incompatible. Many claim that faith "fills in" where reason stops, or faith is just the failure of reason by choosing to believe something without evidence. Is this true? Are faith and reason really in conflict? In this talk, Adam explains the history of how we got to this place and how people have viewed truth throughout the pre-modern, modern, and now post-modern history of Western culture. He shows that, as the pre-modern thinkers thought, faith and reason really aren't enemies; in fact, they work together.