“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1
Before we can look at some of the men that have been instrumental with their ideas and philosophies that have had an impact upon Western Civilization over the past few centuries – there are some other aspects we need to consider first.
Every philosophy or ideology has to answer the same fundamental questions:
1. CREATION: How did it all begin? Where did we come from?
2. FALL: What went wrong? What is the source of evil and suffering?
3. REDEMPTION: What can we do about it? How can the world be set right again?
Nancy Pearcy said: “Every worldview starts with an account of Creation, which shapes its concepts of the Fall and Redemption. Whoever has the authority to shape a culture’s Creation myth is its de facto “priesthood,” with the power to determine what the dominant worldview will be. To break the power of today’s secular “priesthood,” Christians need to have a basic grasp of the origins controversy, with its wide-ranging impact on American thought.”
The Christian message does not begin with “accept Christ as your Savior;” it begins with: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Bible teaches that God is the sole source of the entire created order. Thus His word, laws and creation ordinances give the world its order and structure.
One way to examine every philosophy that comes our way is to see how they frame the same grid of Creation, Fall and Redemption.
Francis Schaeffer said that if we want to understand the Bible we need to have a grasp of the first ten chapters of Genesis and the Book of Romans. In both we see the biblical worldview being laid out.
CREATION: When we think in terms of creation we have to think of origins. Every worldview has to have a start of origins. Where did it all come from? Also, who are we and how did we get here? Did it just happen? Was there a first cause?
We are told from John 1:1 that God spoke the entire universe into being with His Word, called the Logos. The Greek word “Logos” not only means “Word” but also “reason” or “rationality.” The ancient Stoics used it to mean “the rational structure of the universe.”
This is why the Psalmist (under the influence of the Holy Spirit) said that the “heavens declare the glory of God.” In other words, the entire universe reflects the mind of the Creator. What does this mean to us practically? It means that we are to look at every aspect of creation or any subject area of study in the light of its relationship to God.
Jonathan Edwards explained that God communicates not only “by his voice in the Scriptures to us but also in creation and in historical events.” This is important because human reasoning is not a repository of infallible truths. We will look later at some of the men whose philosophies have had a derogatory effect upon the West. Especially in our universities and higher education we see that any human reasoning must have a premise. So the question with human reasoning is: What is the premise? What do they base their reasoning on? Whatever premise we accept forms or shapes everything else that follows.
So, if you take any idea or philosophy and go back far enough you come to some starting point; something that is self-existent, and is their source of everything else.
Nancy Pearcy went on to say: “For the materialist, the ultimate reality is matter, and everything is reduced to material constituents. For the pantheist, the ultimate reality is a spiritual force or substratum, and the goal of meditation is to reconnect with that spiritual oneness. For the doctrinaire Darwinist, biology is ultimate, and everything, even religion and morality, is reduced to a product of Darwinian processes. For the empiricist, all knowledge is traceable ultimately to sense data, and anything not known by sensation is unreal.”
Every system of thought begins with some ultimate principle and if it is not God then it is some dimension of creation such as material, biological, etc. So when examining these different ideas the question is: Which is true and which is false? This is why we as believers cannot just abandon the so-called ‘secular subjects’ to the non-believer, but with godlywisdom and love we must examine the intellectual idols that have been set up and to be able to construct biblically based alternatives.
Later we will be looking at some of these intellectual idols that have been set up especially here in the West and have brought us to the place we are today. Like I said before, it did not happen overnight but over several centuries, precept upon precept, until we have the strongholds we have today.