Fasten your seatbelt: you are entering part two. If you haven't read part one, I recommend you do so before continuing. The arguments and history contained herein may shock and disgust you. The world can be a horrific place; but take heart, we are allied with the One who has overcome the world.
Where Swanson wrote an entire chapter, I’ll write a paragraph. I’m not claiming to capture the entirety of Swanson’s argumentation, so if you have questions, read the book. In fact, I would recommend reading the book anyway! I’m just going to paraphrase Swanson’s general analysis of each philosopher so you can see the basic progression. Take heart: this is by far the longest of my five sections, and probably the heaviest as well, so bear with me!
Where Swanson wrote an entire chapter, I’ll write a paragraph. I’m not claiming to capture the entirety of Swanson’s argumentation, so if you have questions, read the book. In fact, I would recommend reading the book anyway! I’m just going to paraphrase Swanson’s general analysis of each philosopher so you can see the basic progression. Take heart: this is by far the longest of my five sections, and probably the heaviest as well, so bear with me!
Thomas Aquinas,
1255-1274
I know what you’re thinking.
Thomas Aquinas, model Catholic priest?
The Church’s greatest theologian and philosopher? Champion of the faith? Yes, the same Aquinas. Much of his work is indeed useful for the
defense of the Christian faith, but much more of it is fundamentally
flawed. He was certainly never
“apostate,” but Swanson calls him the intermediary link between the old
Christian Europe and the increasingly secularized West. Aquinas was the first to attempt to separate
life, thought, and knowledge into “sacred” and “secular” (or philosophical),
and faith from understanding. He did not
believe that man’s reason was significantly tainted by sin, and therefore
believed that man could build a reliable system of philosophical knowledge
apart from God, based on “human reason.”
Rene Descartes,
1596-1650
Descartes is often called the great father of modern
philosophy; it’s terrifying to realize that he lacked any personal moral
integrity and lived a life of fornication with no repentance. In his writings, he shifted the authoritative
guarantor of truth from God to man. His
philosophical journey to “truth” is an interesting one, wrought with logical
fallacies: he suspended all belief in God’s existence, then began with the
“fact” that he doubted his own existence.
He moved from “I doubt” to “I think, therefore I am,” then attempted to
use his own “proven” existence to prove the existence of God. He began with doubt and uncertainty and moved
to certainty – the entire humanist worldview is built on quicksand.
John Locke, 1632-1704
John Locke had an undeniable and sustainable influence in early
America: his writings on democracy and republicanism, inalienable rights, and
the protection of liberty had profound effects on America’s founding – it has
been argued that without John Locke, there might well be no United States of
America. However, raised a reformed
Protestant, Locke retreated from longstanding orthodox principles: he rejected
the doctrine of original sin, eschewed Biblical Old Testament ethics, and
doubted the verbal inspiration of the Bible.
He challenged any creed that could not be explained by human reason, and
maintained that only knowledge could achieve certainty – faith could not. These radical ideas began seeping into
America through the education systems: Harvard University for instance,
originally a seminary for New England’s pastors, was founded and succumbed to
Latitudinarianism in Locke’s lifespan. (Latitudinarianism tolerates variations
in opinion or doctrine – in other words, it allows latitude regarding even fundamental church doctrines.) While his political writings were beneficial,
his philosophical ideas were equally detrimental.
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, 1712-1778
The political, social, and educational systems of the modern
world were largely shaped by Rousseau, an original big-government
socialist. He told fathers they “owed
their children to the state,” thus setting a precedent for the modern statist
education system and compulsory attendance laws. Swanson writes, “Rousseau’s revolutionary
social system destroys family economies, family inheritance, family care for
the elderly, family charitable systems, family-based voting, and family
education.” (Swanson, p. 75) Put simply, Rousseau sought
to destroy the God-ordained, covenant relationships of family and church,
because these are impediments to the humanist vision of the authoritarian,
all-powerful state. “Our founding
fathers did not trust government with unlimited power because of a right
understanding and a fundamental mistrust of the nature of man,” writes Swanson.
“Rousseau did not share this anthropology, so he created a world of tyranny,
social disintegration, moral decay, and civil unrest.” (Swanson, p. 71) Rousseau’s humanist worldview maintains that
man is born free and is enslaved to society; it fails to deal with man’s
primary issue: our fallen, sinful nature.
It is terrifying to consider Rousseau's personal life. He
was the grandson of a Calvinist preacher; his mother died within a week of his
birth, and his father abandoned him to a boarding school at the age of ten.
Homeless and rootless at age sixteen, he began a long life of serial
fornication when he attempted to commit adultery with another man's wife.
When he was in his thirties, a life-changing and culture-changing event
occurred when his live-in girlfriend birthed his first child. Immediately,
Rousseau bundled the child up and deposited it on the steps of an orphanage -
in the dead of winter. The girl had a total of five children and each
received the same treatment. This same
girlfriend stayed with him for thirty-three years, despite the fact that
Rousseau made clear that he never loved her.
“Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the prototypical liberal hypocrite who kills
his babies in the morning and argues passionately for welfare redistributions
to the indigent in the afternoon.”
(Swanson, p. 66) He might have
been the most astounding narcissist who has ever lived; he was hated by
everyone who knew him personally, but most of the world loved him and followed
him as they developed their democracies.
If ideas have consequences, then the ideas of Rousseau brought about the
spirit of revolution, the guillotine, the reign of terror, the forced
redistribution of wealth, and 40,000 dead bodies. Rousseau’s ideas have
unraveled entire civilizations.
Jeremy Bentham,
1748-1832
Bentham was the original liberal. He made no secret of his steadfast opposition
to the Christian faith and his commitment to overturn the 1,000-year heritage
of faith in the West. He was incredibly arrogant – with him human
reason was enthroned, and unless God explained himself to the satisfaction of
human reason, he lost his right to exist!
Regarding civil government, Bentham rightly reprimands legislators who
go beyond their limits to fix things they should not fix. Biblical law imposes responsibility on the
populace, and maximizes liberty while punishing severe crimes of negligence
(Exodus 21:29); in the Bible, though, there are and ought to be laws against
homosexuality and other sins that destroy a society. For more on the issue of legislating morality,
see my March 24 post entitled The
Morality of a Nation.
“The road to Gomorrah is slippery, and it is coated with the Teflon of
utilitarianism and pragmatism, and those who exempt themselves from the slide
are few and far between. While the
masses wander in a wasteland of ethical confusion, sadly very few professing
Christians find an anchor in a Biblical standard.” (Swanson, p. 85)
Jeremy Bentham laid the ground work for “free” sex, no-fault
divorce, “liberated” women, abortion, and the destruction of the old
socio-economic system that was based on the nuclear family. It was Bentham who took up Aquinas’ challenge
to build up philosophical knowledge on human reason in the area of ethics; he
writes, “It is for pain and pleasure alone to point out what we ought to
do.” Aquinas would never have
embraced the sexual sins that Bentham endorsed according to these new moral
criteria.
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1803-1882
Emerson is widely recognized as “the leading voice of
intellectual culture in the United States.”
If God is the sovereign ruler of the universe, the source of man’s
ethics, reality, and truth, then Emerson wanted none of it: he self-professed
his desire to be god. In the old Christian world, there were sins
that were considered socially egregious, harmful to the fiber of a
civilization; in the 19th century, Swanson contends, the apostates
wanted the removal of Christian morals and social values – they wanted the destruction
of Christian civilization. At a time in
America’s history when homosexual acts were unmentionable in civilized society,
the greatest literary figure of the day was making light of and even inciting
these unnatural passions. His stories
glorified heinous sins that, at the turn of the 19th century, would
not have been found legitimized even in the worst dens of evil in Boston and
New York City. Now, 200 years later, the
homosexual culture is practically ubiquitous.
Emerson brought Eastern occultism to the forefront of
American philosophy. He obliterated all
distinction between Creator and creature, so that man becomes part of
“god.” The “one-ness of being” is the
essence of Eastern Hindu thought. Today,
a quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation. “Trust your heart” is the creed of American
religion; in philosophical terms, this creed advocates romanticism,
irrationalism, and relativism. For
Emerson, man was the only source of truth – and he assumed that since society
and the universe are in constant flux, truth and ethics must be in constant
flux as well. Emerson was the first of
the apostate philosophers to begin to spoon-feed these radical worldview shifts
to the general populace in the form of seemingly harmless and innocent
fictional stories.
Charles Darwin,
1809-1882
Raised in a devout Christian home, Darwin entered Cambridge
University intending to prepare for ministry, but soon began to doubt the
literal truth of the bible. He labored
diligently to eliminate the Christian faith from his thinking, referring to it
as “manifestly false,” and to God as a “vengeful tyrant.” He said the Bible is “no more to be trusted
than the beliefs of a barbarian.” By his
own admission, Darwin was a sadist and took great pleasure in the torturing and
killing of animals. From age 16, he
suffered from a long list of physical maladies and mental illnesses; he was
virtually incapacitated by age 28. ...Some
genius!
According to Darwin, a right understanding of reality is
dependent upon man’s improvement of his own reason and science. He rejects all distinction between man and
animal, which has frightening implications for ethics and morality! “Survival of the fittest” is often heard in
the context of animals – the finches who evolve with a longer or stronger beak
survive, and the others die out. But in The Descent of Man, he takes “survival
of the fittest” a step further than naturalist apologists would like us to
believe, and applies it to humans – a “live and let die” mentality that opened
the door for Karl Marx and Adolph Hitler.
He didn’t openly advocate genocide, but the implications are there.
The influence of this agnostic, racist,
mentally-ill sadist was titanic. He is
still considered the most influential person in the world. That doesn’t say
much about the character and judgment of the common man! The mid-19th century world was
looking for an escape from God and Christianity; Darwin introduced his ideas to
a very receptive audience. If The Origin of Species was a viable
explanation for the development of the complexity of biological life, it
rendered a Creator God obsolete! This
was a welcome idea for modern man who desired to rid himself of God. Darwin delivered man from the ultimate
Creator and Sustainer, and therefore freed him from all meaning purpose, and
absolutes. This allowed humanism to take
over education, science, culture, social systems, morality and faith.
Karl Marx, 1818-1883
In the past century, an estimated 85 million to 200 million
people have died at the hands of Marxist ideologues. The history of Karl Marx,
Lutheran-turned-atheist, is a living nightmare, with striking similarities to
the Bible’s record of the thoughts, intentions, words, and actions of Satan
himself. He seemed to be nothing short
of a madman; he openly mocked God and cursed mankind – Karl Marx made a pact
with the devil. He writes, “I wish to
avenge myself against the One who rules above.”
Without the prior erosion of the Christian West, brought about by
Descartes, Locke, and Rousseau, Marxist ideologies would never have taken
root. Of a host of philosophers who
planted the seeds of destruction, only Marx was purposeful enough to announce
his intentions to the world: HE FULLY
INTENDED TO DESTROY MANKIND AND CONSIGN THE WORLD TO HELL.
Marx praised Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest” as
a framework for his own theory of class struggle. He believed economic inequality was an
injustice that must be rectified by revolution and forced redistribution of
wealth; he opposed all forms of economic inequality, even if both the employer
and the worker agree to the terms of employment (Matthew 20:1-15). Marx’s “solution” brought about more slavery
and death to billions; he tried to rectify one injustice with a million more
injustices. Marx recognized that the
nuclear family and its commitment to direct the education and upbringing of
children is the one major impediment to the all-consuming state. With the abolishment of home education,
family bonds would weaken and the state would assume a more dominant role.
Soviet Marxism was implemented by a few revolutions and a
hundred thousand dead bodies. We are
seeing American Marxism coming about through fifty consecutive elections,
increasingly centralized education systems, a breakdown of the nuclear family,
and a slow but steady increase of dependence on the government.
Frederich Nietzche,
1844-1900
This son of a Lutheran pastor may have been the most
dangerous philosopher of the last millennium.
Nobody defied God with such force and vigor as Nietzsche. In him we find a remarkable composite of
unmitigated arrogance, unparalleled intellect, and an unimaginable, demonic
hatred for Christ. He openly admitted
that the idea of morality is impossible with no Absolute, then proceeded to
attempt to create a moral standard while battling the idea of a God. He denied the supernatural realm, then
participated in it with the other side of his mouth. If the world followed Nietzsche, they may
well have been following a demon.
Nietzsche justified the most tyrannical and cruel action
where the strong prey on the weak to produce a higher culture or race of men; he
paved the way for Hitler’s Nazi Reich, as well as empowered Lenin, Stalin, Mao
Tse Tsung, Pol Pot, and others as they racked up the body count.
Ultimately, Nietzsche admitted the existence of God, then
professed his vehement opposition to him while forming an alliance with the
Evil One himself. Any logically
consistent philosopher will either turn to God or turn insane: Nietzsche chose
the latter. He rejected any ultimate
source of truth, reality, or ethics, thus rendering everything pointless and
the human brain worthless matter, then tried to use human reason to create
truth, reality, and ethics. He was
completely insane for the last eleven years of his life; and yet, the world
embraced his ideas.
John Dewey, 1859-1952
Dewey brought the humanism of Rousseau, Descartes, and
Darwin to America through the public schools.
Until 1900, the McGuffey Readers used in American schools retained
references to Scripture, the Ten Commandments, and some sense of the fear of
God. By 1950, almost all textbooks had
been purged of references to God, Jesus, the Christian church, and the natural,
moral law of God. We can thank Dewey,
Swanson says, for this national apostasy.
Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, set out to “replace home education
with social.” Likewise, Dewey wrote that
“the school is primarily a social institution.
[Education] is the regulation of the process of coming to share in the
social consciousness.” Everything else—academic
rigor, character training, the fear of God, work in a free enterprise system,
etc.—takes a back seat. I took a closer
look at this issue in my April 21 post, American
Education, Then and Now. Dewey’s
focus was on centralizing education – removing the responsibility for the
younger generation from the family and placing it in the hands of a strong
federal government.
Interestingly, Dewey was raised by devout Christian parents,
and was well on his way to being an important Christian figure as a teacher at
Michigan State University… but his faith faltered. In his first publication, Dewey argued that
logic proved God a necessity; criticism of that book caused him to
reevaluate. His humanist agenda was
godless, egalitarian, Marxist, and stridently man-centered. He readily conceded that there can be no
certain knowledge within his philosophy that is built on human reason – so why
would we listen to anything he said? He
admitted that he stood on quicksand, but insists that it is a good place to
stand! He was a pragmatist, in the
truest sense of the word: the ends justify the means… even though the ends have
no justification themselves! The
government chooses the ends, and will do whatever is necessary to accomplish
those ends.
Jean-Paul Satre
1905-1980
The spirit of teenage rebellion was strong in the 1900s, and
Satre led the charge. His life was one
continuous, 50-year celebration of debauchery.
He was an alcoholic, drug addict, and serial fornicator – a pioneer of
the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Expanding on the ideas of Rousseau, Darwin, and Marx, Satre was an outright
advocate of terrorism. He failed to
identify man’s basic problem as sin against God, and so his “solution” to man’s
problems turned out to be more vicious and deadly than the problem itself.
Like all humanists, Satre placed man in the position of God
to determine reality and ethics. When a
man seeks godhood, he cannot stand the idea of a God who limits his freedom and
forces him to deal with his sin. In the
end, Satre had to reject all relationships and isolate himself completely,
because he didn’t want a relationship with his Creator. That, Swanson contends, ruined our world:
today, nine times more people live alone as in 1900. 94% of Americans still say they consider the
family an important value, but less than half of American households consist of
nuclear families. Satre played a key
role in the unraveling of Christian culture and the entire social fabric of our
nation.
From Aquinas to Satre, we can see the significance of one bold, intentional step away from the truth. The moral repugnance evident in the personal lives of Descartes, Rousseau, Bentham, and Satre, logical impossibilities and ethical inconsistencies inherent to the arguments of Nietzsche and Dewey, and the horrific worldwide impacts of the advocacies of Rousseau, Darwin, and Marx ought to be red flags, prominent warnings of the dangers of humanism. Swanson’s argument makes sense: without the prior work of Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, and Emerson, the world would have dismissed Nietszche’s ferocious “God is dead” as the ravings of a madman. Apostasy is a progression – a slippery, downhill road that our nation is still travelling. We must reverse course while we can. I’ll share my thoughts on how best to do that in the final section of this series.
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