The Problem of Origins In Academic Disciplines
Ellen Myers
Professors and students at most colleges and universities today are like the man robbed on the road to Jericho in Christ's story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37). They are neglected and bypassed by the Christian community at large as the robbed man was neglected and bypassed by priest and Levite. They have been stripped, wounded and left half dead by the ruling hypothesis of our age postulating a self-contained, evolutionist universe without beginning or end. God and the supernatural are excluded a priori from would-be-respectable academic thinking. Everything, including man, is reduced to mere matter in motion in the sway of determinist "forces." As one psychiatrist recently put it:
In fact, he (i.e. man) is like a molecule, randomly moving in all directions, bouncing off other pan ides which it encounters, and only predictable as to its direction when it is caught in a force field that keeps it on course. (parenthesis added) 1
We have reached the point predicted half in jest by Newman in 1852:
At length a professor is found... who takes on him to deny psychology in toto, to pronounce the influence of mind in the visible world a superstition, and to account for every effort which is found in the world by the operation of physical causes. .. Human exploits, human devices, human deeds, human productions, all that comes under the scholastic term of "genius" and "art", and the metaphysical ideas of "duty", "right", and "heroism", it is his office to contemplate all these merely in their place in the eternal system of physical cause and effect. (emphasis added) 2
Newman wrote seven years before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. Darwin's landmark book provided the undergirding, by scientifically plausible speculation, for Newman's "eternal system of physical cause and effect." By now general evolution has, officially or de facto, replaced the only alternative, a system with a non-physical beginning by supernatural creation, in established academic thought around the world.
Within this "eternal system of physical cause and effect" teachers of ethics despair of finding a meaningful ethics; for in a self-contained evolutionist - determinist universe man cannot be a moral agent. Rather he is simply a phenomenon. Ethics philosophers may cling with seeming inconsistency, or in spite of their own determinist beliefs to more or less traditional moral rules, or else devise "new" moralities which though carrying the name actually have nothing to do with true right and wrong. I am not thinking here of Fletcher's "situation ethics" so much as of what C.S. Lewis has called man's treatment of himself as raw material, as a mere specimen.3 Paul Taylor has a similar idea in his concept of the "future-oriented view" of responsibility:
Moral conduct is essential to a stable social order . .. Hence, we need to hold people responsible in order to ensure social stability. .. But holding someone accountable cannot be justified if it presupposes a kind of freedom that is inconsistent with causal necessity. Therefore, the only way to justify holding someone responsible is by showing that this is a cause that will bring about a certain effect, namely, getting the person to refrain from wrongdoing in the future... Thus, moral responsibility is reduced to a way of manipulating people, on a par with any method, however devoid of reason, for producing changes in human behavior. ~
Within this same "eternal system of physical cause and effect" professors of psychology despair of discovering grounds and meaning for the existence of man's mind and identity.5 If the conscious reflectivity and identity of man are merely recent appendages emerging slowly after countless ages of efficient but quite unconscious behavioral activity, then how can the mind of man be taken seriously as a causal agent. From this view mental life is only an epiphenomenon. Interesting perhaps, but hardly significant.
Teachers and students of modern literature and the fine arts in the grip of that same evolutionist-determinist mind set are reduced to express in language, music, painting and sculpture not relationships but alienation; not beauty, order and meaning but vileness and chaos; not jubilant life and peace but despair, suicide and slaughter; not awe and love but sneering, hate, rape, degradation of self and others; not content but a void.6 The list can easily be extended across the entire range of the social sciences and humanities.
Not only have we postulated an "origin-less" physical universe; we also forget, overlook or deliberately cut ourselves off from the more immediate historical origins of our various academic disciplines. The branching off of psychology, anthropology, sociology and all the natural sciences from the tree of philosophy from which they began to separate in the 19th century is a fact unknown to most college students today.7 Immanuel Kant argued in 1785 for separation of philosophy from the natural sciences:
All trades, arts, and handiworks have gained by division of labour... Where the different kinds of work are not so distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism. It might deserve to be considered whether pure philosophy in all its pans does not require a man specially devoted to it, and whether it would not be better for the whole business of science if those who.. .are wont to blend the rational and empirical elements together.. were warned not to carry on two employments together which differ widely in the treatment they demand. .
Kant seems to disparage what he calls "common rational knowledge" in the following statement:
.what distinguishes philosophy from common rational knowledge is, that it treats in separate sciences what the latter only comprehends confusedly... 9
By contrast, Newman, nurtured by the Christian faith through Scholasticism10 (whereas Kant was influenced by the skepticism of David Hume), puts the interrelationship of the various sciences thusly:
All that exists, as contemplated by the human mind, forms one large system or complex fact, and this of course resolves itself into an indefinite number of particular facts, which, as being portions of a whole, have countless relations of every kind, one toward another. Knowledge is the apprehension of these facts, whether in themselves or in their mutual positions and bearings. And as all taken together form one integral subject for contemplation, so there are no natural or real limits between part and part . All the sciences come to us as one,.. .they at! relate to one and the same integral subject matter,. . each separately is more or less an abstraction...needing the support and guarantee of its sister sciences, and giving in turn while it takes from which it follows that none can safely be omitted if we would obtain the exactest knowledge possible of things as they are..
Kant opted for separation per se, while Newman opted for temporary separation for the sake of fuller, more fruitful and indeed indispensable integration of the various academic disciplines. This writer emphatically sides with Newman. All that is left of such integrated learning today in most colleges and universities is the so-called core curriculum. It too is truncated, without origins or interrelations, a freshman smorgasbord picked up, digested and excreted with apathy or cynicism by most students. It is a fitting successor to the modern high school curriculum designed for "relevance" depending on the news event of the day rather than on integrated knowledge appropriate to a high school student's maturity.
The increase in subject matter or proliferation of data has been cited with some justification for the separation of originally unified disciplines and their sub-specialties. But where are any high school or college courses emphasizing the interaction and interdependence between even the sub-specialties of one particular academic discipline, much less between, for example, psychology and history, physics and biology, aeronautics and economics, philosophy and medicine, and between all these and all others with literature and the fine arts? Is Kant's "common rational knowledge" contemplating Newman's "one large system or complex fact" about to be analyzed out of existence?
We may be grateful, paradoxically, for the present quest for academic "relevance because it is a major symptom on the bankruptcy of the determinist - evolutionist world view permeating our educational establishment. Especially in our colleges and universities we are perhaps humbled enough now by the disintegration of learning all around us to be willing to listen to John Milton's words:
Alas, what can they teach and not mislead, Ignorant of themselves, of God much more, And how the world began, and how man fell.12
The solution to the educational and indeed existential crisis caused by the determinist-evolutionist world view cannot be found within the supposedly self-contained universe. It can only be found outside that universe and the point of contact, the starting point or point of return to meaning empirically is and can only be the origin of the universe.13 As stated earlier, there is only one alternative to the "eternal system of physical cause and effect" (perpetuum mobile, by definition impossible) system. It is a system with a non-physical beginning by supernatural creation.
Now all past and present religions of the world stand out with matter coexisting in more or less chaos together with their deities. This fact places them alongside the very world view from which we seek an exit. The God of the Bible alone is Re Who creates the heavens and the earth and all that is ex nihilo (or if you will, ex Deo). Therefore only this God is the "out" of matter-in-motion determinism. Only in His creating man in His image do we have identity and therefore meaning/relevance. And therefore only as our works, including our academic disciplines, express His image in us which is our identity, do our works and our learning also partake of meaning/relevance.
We need not be the first to take this step. In the generation of our fathers, less informed than we are today of the multiple evidences from the natural sciences for the soundness of the Biblical creation model of origins, a professor of Renaissance and Medieval Literature at Cambridge University, C. S. Lewis, dared, not quite to speak out for literal creation according to Genesis, but to warn against uncritical acceptance of evolution:
Everyone now knows about Evolution (though, of course, some educated people disbelieve it). (emphasis added)14
More to the point is his article The Funeral of a Great Myth.15 The Myth is popular Evolutionism which Lewis traces back to the beginning of the 19th Century:
... the doctrine of Evolution... may be shown, by later biologists, to be a less satisfactory hypothesis than was hoped fifty years ago16 ... But we must sharply distinguish between Evolution as a biological theorem and popular Evolutionism or Developmentalism which is certainly a Myth In making it Imagination runs ahead of scientific evidence .. . if science had not met the imaginative need, science would not have been so popular. But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it desires. 17
In the next paragraph we encounter a blockbuster:
According to (Professor D.M.S. Watson), Evolution 'is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or... can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible'. (Watson, quoted in Nineteenth Century (April 1943), 'Science and the BBC') This would mean that the sole ground for believing it is not empirical but metaphysical the dogma of an amateur metaphysician who finds 'special creation' incredible. 18
Soon after this, C. S. Lewis gives Evolutionism the coup de grace:
To reach the positions held by the real scientists ... you must in fact, treat reason as an absolute. But at the same time the Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended byproduct of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution? They say in effect `I will prove that what you call a proof is only the result of mental habits which result from heredity which results from physics.' But this is the same as saying: `I will prove that proofs are irrational': more succinctly, `I will prove that there are no proofs.' The fact that some people of scientific education cannot by any effort be caught to see this difficulty, confirms one's suspicion that we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought. But the man who does see it, is compelled to reject as mythical the cosmology in which most of us were brought up. 19
If our calling has led us into an academic discipline, then we who would bear the name Christians, like good Samaritans of our own day, must touch our neighbors' "radical disease in their whole style of thought" with the healing of the good news of our origin and of the origin of all our learning in the good will of our God Who created all things, and us in His image.
END NOTES
1 Cornelis B. Bakker, "Why people don't change," Psychotherapy' Theory Research and practice. Vol. 12, ~2, Summer, 1975, pp.164-172.
2 John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University. Doubleday & Co., Image Books, Garden City, New York 1959, pp. 91-92.
3 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. Macmillan Pubi. Co., Inc., New York, NY 10022, Thirteenth Printing 1975, pp.84-85.
4 Paul W. Taylor, Principles of Ethics: An Introduction. Dickenson Publishing Co., Inc., Encino, CA 1975, pp.171-172.
5 Paul D. Ackerman, Address before Great Plains Christian Teachers Convention, Kansas City, Mo., October 21, 1977.
6 cf Pitirim Sorokin, The Crisis of our Age. Dutton, New York, NY 1941.
7 In an informal survey of college students and graduates including some with postgraduate work during the Fall Term 1977 this writer found that about half did not know that "Ph.D." stands for Doctor of Philosophy (Philosophiae Doctor), nor why.
8 Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Joel Feinberg and Henry West, editors: Moral Philosophy, Dickenson Publishing Co., Inc., Encino, CA 1977, p.81.
9 Ibid. p. 82.
10 On philosophy and theology relations under Scholasticism, see excellent thumbnail description of Scholasticism in Dagobert D. Runes, editor, Dictionary of Philosophy. Littlefeld, Adams & Co., Totowa, NJ 1976, pp. 280ff.
11 Newman, op. cit., pp.82, 95.
12 Quoted in C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Grand Rapids, MI Reprinted August 1966, p.75.
13 The Bible also teaches this in Romans 1:19-23.
14 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Macmillan Publ. Co. Inc., New York, NY 10022, 24th Printing 1977, p.52.
15 C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, Eerdmans. Grand Rapids, MI 1967, pp. 82W
16 This prediction is being fulfilled in our time. Cf. Henry M. Morris, editor, Scientific Creationism. Creation-Life Publishers, San Diego, CA 92115, 1974.
17 C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, pp.83, 84, 85.
18 Ibid. p.85.
19 Ibid.. p.89.
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