History of Philosophy and Christian Thought - Lesson 43

Dr. Ronald Nash
History of Philosophy and Christian Thought
th620-43
Postmodernism
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:02] I always quote one sentence from the critique of pure reason because it is so funny. Now, none of you are going to laugh, but it is the funniest sentence ever written in the history of philosophy. Can't, says the following. This is what I have destroyed. Reason In order to make a room. I'm sorry for faith. Now, in order for you to see how funny this is. I command you to read one paragraph from the critique of pure reason. I don't care what paragraph it is. Okay. I guarantee that paragraph will be absolutely unintelligible. Okay. But what Cat is saying in this sentence is the critique of Pure reason is an apologetics book. He wrote this book to defend the Christian faith. Let me tell you, with friends like cop. The Christian faith needs no enemies. Okay. This is deserving of several comments. First of all, Conte was a was the leader of the German Enlightenment and Enlightenment. That means that Conte typified the modern world. That is the that is opposed by postmodernists. Postmodernists are enemies of the Enlightenment. They are enemies of modernity. And modernity translates roughly into the Enlightenment. And one of the objections that postmodernists have to the Enlightenment is it's too much reason, it's too much rationalism. Here is one leader of the Enlightenment who tells us that he wrote the critique of Pure Reason in order to destroy reason so as to make room for an irrational, utterly subjective, theologically content loss of faith. This is postmodernism right here. Postmodernists. Don't know who the enemy is. The answer is they are the enemy. All right. Postmodernists have no idea what the Enlightenment was all about. There is a sense in which the postmodernists are really ultra modernists. Now, this is also related to conch wall.

[00:03:10] I didn't really talk about this last week, and I guess I you're going to have to go back to the word of God in the mind of man book. Okay. If people would only pay attention to the ways in which the worst features of the Enlightenment have become incarnated in the absurdities of postmodernism. That's. That's crazy. Which once again, which once again gives added impetus to my claim that I am the world's first post post modernist. You will hear people say that I am and other people like me are dinosaurs. We're trying to move the world back 200 years to the Enlightenment. No, we're not. We are ahead of the curve. We represent the future. You've never heard that before. We are not trying to go back in earlier than postmodernism. We're trying to get out of this maze that foolish people have put us in. Okay, post postmodernism. Now, the next point I want to make here is point to contest. Quote quote, provides support for my claim that when postmodernists describe themselves as enemies of reason, they don't know what they're talking about. They do not know what they're talking about. And so I want to give you a little discourse on the word reason in the context of the Enlightenment and the context of postmodernism and in the enlightened concept of post postmodernism. That's a beautiful sentence I just said there. Okay. There are two meanings of the word reason. Two meanings of the word reason. In sense, one reason really means the laws of logic, the laws of logical thinking, which are objective, universal, and so on. Okay, The laws of logic apply to everybody, just like the laws of mathematics apply to everybody. The laws of logic, the law of non contradiction.

[00:05:42] It is objective. It is universally true. It is necessarily true. Now listen to me. No one during the Enlightenment used the word reason. In this sense, no one during the Enlightenment be It can't be a David HUME who was of the Scottish Enlightenment, be advised, tear the French Enlightenment, be a John Locke, the English Enlightenment. So we've covered the German, the Scottish, the French, and the British English Enlightenment. None of those people attacked or or or had anything really to say about logic. That's what I want to talk about. That's what I want to say here. When those people attacked Christianity and they did, David HUME did, Kant did, Voltaire did. John Locke came to the place where he too attacked Christianity. They didn't attack Christianity because it was illogical. They attacked Christianity because of a different sense of the word reason, which is best described with the substitute word reasoning. The reason why the members of the Enlightenment rejected Christianity was because their minds couldn't accept miracles. But that's not the laws of logic. This is simply subjective reasoning. What they were basically saying is, I think Christianity stinks. That's what they were saying in the Enlightenment. Okay. Now, here is one of the great ironies in the history of non thinking. Postmodernists mistakenly think that it was this kind of logic that constituted the basis for the rejection of Christianity by Enlightenment figures like convert HUME and so on. They are wrong. It was this sense of reason that constituted the basis for their rejection of the Christian faith. They basically said, I reject Christianity because I don't accept this kind of reasoning. It was purely subjective. But now we come to the year 2000, 2001, and our postmodernist friends, and they're not our friends.

[00:08:32] All right. Still have it wrong because what they're doing, the postmodernists, they're rejecting logic. They are rejecting objective laws of reason, which never was a part of the Enlightenment case against Christianity. And you know what the postmodernists are are defending in place of the laws of logic. They're defending the same kind of subjective reason that was the heart and essence of the Enlightenment. If you don't see that irony. This is the kind of reason that Enlightenment figures used to reject the Christian faith. And this is the kind of reason that is part and parcel of present day postmodernism. How can you regard postmodernists as the enemies of modernity when they are simply carrying the essential tradition of modernity into our own age? Ooh, ooh, ooh. And I proved that you can. I mean, if there's anything in cart that is clear, it is his proposition that I have destroyed reason in order to make room for faith. And you find that in HUME as well. Thank you for listening to this lecture brought to you by biblical training, dawg. Feel free to make copies of this lecture to give to others, but please do not charge for these copies or alter the content in any way without permission. We invite you to visit our website at W WW dot Biblical training dawg. There you will find the finest in evangelical teaching for use in the home and the church. And it is absolutely free. Our curriculum includes classes for new believers, lay education classes, and seminary level classes taught by some of the finest seminary teachers drawn from a wide range of evangelical traditions. Our mailing address is Post Office Box 28428. Spokane, Washington 99228 USA.