Introduction
The Christian worldview has accepted secular philosophy on its own terms. The word is autonomy, it is the crux of the entire debate. Worse than leaving the field of philosophy to agnostics, the Church has attempted to reason on the same epistemological footing as secular philosophy. In a desire for neutrality, the Church sought to build upon the borrowed foundations of Enlightenment thought(or even older Classical thought, but the results have been the same). Much like Lot’s wife, the Church has turned back to look at Sodom, as a result it has lost cultural influence, a far greater price than turning into a shaker of salt. The Church has fallen epistemologically for the same sin as the vain philosophers, the desire to know truth apart from God. The original conspiracy was the desire to know right and wrong apart from an autonomous God(Genesis 3:5, Colossians 2:8).
The conflict in the Church over epistemology is at the root of the issue, it has been this way, at least since the days of Thomas Aquinas. This battle was fought historically in the Enlightenment’s self-conscious backlash against the Reformation, it is specifically obvious in works of John Calvin and Rene Descartes.
The remark has been made that history is the successive triumph of science over religion, as science progresses, religion recedes, and mysticism is removed from man’s mind. While science has made incredible strides, religion isn’t on the ropes, it has merely taken a new name. The significant shift isn’t from religion to science, but rather it’s an epistemological shift of autonomy from God to man. That shift of autonomy is shown most clearly in a comparison of the writings of John Calvin and Rene Descartes. The Enlightenment is a pivotal moment in history, its reverberations are still with us.
In my next blog post I will try to lay out a few of the epistemological truths that Calvin held and later I’ll contrast those ideas with Descartes.