In this post and the next few to come I'd like to share a few thoughts on Christian Philosophy.
Let me begin with this caveat- I was not a stellar student. For one, I came into the Philosophy department having spent the first two years of my college experience as a History major, and so I didn't have as deep or wide a foundation as a student would have who had taken philosophy courses from the word go. For another, I was working full time, and often neglected my studies in favor of my career. Finally, I was an angry young man, and the chip on my shoulder was so large as to sometimes obstruct my view of the page I was reading. Let me also say that, as a mere undergraduate, one ought to read what I'm writing with a grain of salt, at least until I get a few more impressive letters after my name.
At any rate, I studied Philosophy at UNCG, where I think it's safe to say that there was a majority of professors who were not Christian believers. I didn't get a lot of hostility toward the gospel, aside from the normal antipathy toward the Jerry Falwell/moral majority types that liberal intellectuals love to hate, but I did get a lot of indifference. Where it was discussed in detail, it was recalled as something one struggled with while one was being raised in a Christian home, and which one finally heaved off one's shoulders as he ascended the airy heights of intellectual endeavor.
Professors being educated in the 1950's, 60's, and 70's have two things going against them in terms of Christian belief, in my opinion: the intellectual climate, and the Christian alternative.
The first is the prevailing intellectual wind at the time, being saturated with the behaviorism of Skinner and Watson on the psychological front and the verificationism (and resulting scientism) of contemporary epistemology and the sciences.
Behaviorism is the theory that people learn by being conditioned. The most famous instance of this principle comes from Pavlov's experiments on his dogs. Every time he fed them, he would ring a bell. He did this for a length of time and then, one day, rang the bell without feeding them. The dogs had so closely associated the bell with lunch that their mouths began to water without there even being food present. It was taken from this that the brain forms associations between two things, and that what cements that association is pleasure and pain. The result is something called "Conditioning."
Everyone accepts this, but some people thought that it accounted for EVERYTHING we learn. These people were called Behaviorists. "Give me a child", Skinner famously boasted, "and I'll turn him into a doctor, a lawyer, or whatever you want." One merely had to carefully control the input- after all, garbage in, garbage out.
This view caught on because we had just beaten the Nazi's, who thought that people's value came from their lineage. The intellectuals of the 50's and 60's were still reeling from the horrors of the Holocaust, and the theory that people could be in charge of their own development was a welcome alternative- and so the pendulum swung from nature to nurture (There was a lot of Marxist dialectical materialism in there too, but let's not go there for now).
Verificationism is the belief that it only makes sense to believe something if you can prove it beyond doubt, and the only way to prove something beyond doubt is to prove it by science- that is, using the five senses to do experiments which produce predictable and reproducible results. Since religious claims can't be submitted to scientific testing, people thought that not only were they wrong, but meaningless.
Just as the parable of the sower illustrates, it would be difficult to believe in the gospel surrounded by such thick brambles as these. But now consider the Christian alternative.
During the 60's, 70's, and 80's, evangelical Christianity was largely confined to fundamentalist circles. An anti-intellectual strain has always existed in the Church and has been combated since the early fathers, but as the academy became not only increasingly secularized, which had been happening since the enlightenment and especially since Darwin, but also more and more hostile to theistic belief, the American community of believers became increasingly reactionary, aiming to produce "Christian versions" of the sciences and largely withdrawing from the Philosophical community. Intellectual rigor is often lacking in these separate versions, and many fail to pass what good old Dr. Terrence McConnell called "the straight face test."
The mid-20th century intellectual, therefore, looked at a Christianity which emphatically insisted that to be a good Christian meant puppy-like devotion to things like six literal, twenty-four hour days and a young Earth, and found it profoundly intellectually dissatisfying.
Consider this exchange between Christian philosopher Dr. William Lane Craig and a questioner. It's a bit long, so bear with me:
The question:
"I really can't see how God would punish me, if I lead a good, honest, a compassionate life but just feel that [naturalism] is the only position that makes sense of the world around me and what I understand about it. This does not seem to me to be worthy of condemnation when I compare my attitude to standards of evidence and investigation to those of some Christians, especially those who hold extremely unreasonably dogmatic positions. If I accept the findings of science, will God punish me but reward those people who reject all scientific evidence and adhere only to scientifically insupportable positions, such as a literal interpretation of Genesis whereby the entire universe was created between 6 and 10 thousand years ago?
I would add to this by saying that many of the advocates of this position, so called Young Earth Creationists, disseminate outright falsehoods and misinformation and everything from astronomy, to geology and biology, any field of science which disagrees with their reading of what they regard as divinely inspired scripture."
To which Dr. Craig responds:
"...at the heart of the Christian doctrine of salvation is God's unmerited grace.
This teaching is obscured today by a sort of cultural Christianity which has shaped American culture. Cultural Christianity teaches that if your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds, then God will forgive your bad deeds and reward you with eternal life in heaven. (How Jesus Christ fits into this picture is unclear—maybe as a living illustration to us of what God is like.) By contrast biblical Christianity teaches that no one is good enough to merit heaven. To be judged on the basis of our deeds would be the worst possible thing that could happen to us, for none of us measures up to God's moral law (perfection)...
So forget about the Young Earth
Creationists! Why let them stand between you and God? Why not receive God's transforming grace yourself and
then be better than the Young Earthers? You know that I don't hold their views
about the age of the universe. Neither do most evangelical Christians, despite
the high profile of their movement in churches. So why not become a Christian
and then be a better thinker than they are? (In fact, you just might find that
God will do a transforming work in your own heart, replacing what seems to be
hatred and resentment toward these folks with a genuine compassion for them.)"
For the masochists among you who actually want to read further about the subjects I've mentioned, find here some useful links:
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on the subjects:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/
The exchange between Dr. Craig and the skeptic in its entirety:
Will God's Judgement be more Tolerable for Atheists than for Young Earth Creationists?
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