In the Bible the person of faith is warned not to be led astray by the “wisdom of this world.” Yet, on the other hand, writers such as Paul make it plain that our Creator has made certain truths about His own existence and nature accessible to all men, even to those who choose to deny or suppress those truths.
The history of our civilization is fascinating partly because it contains a parade of brilliant thinkers whose ideas about the nature of creation have steered the course of our culture down through the centuries. With or without the availability of the Scriptures, men have sought to reason out systems of thought that best explain reality as they judged it to be. As Christians, it is helpful to have a basic familiarity with these various ideas, so that we might better understand the changes of culture that have faced the church throughout its history, as well as the background behind the secular thinking of our own era.
In the 6th century B.C. a Greek scientist named Thales (THAY-leez) correctly predicted a solar eclipse, establishing him as a first-rate thinker, engineer and mathematician. He was also engaged in the first recorded work in what could be called philosophy--not, as the word suggests, a mere “love of wisdom,” but the search for ultimate truth about the universe. A kind of scientific paradigm that would explain reality with the fewest possible anomalies or “loose ends.”
The first Greek philosophers concerned themselves with locating a substance that would give a kind of unity to all the particular things they saw around them. They looked at their world and saw a dizzying array of living and non-living things, and they wondered if there was an underlying “stuff” out of which all things were made--a substance that would explain the diversity of things.
Some of them, like Thales, believed the ultimate substance was a singular, physical material such as water. Others were convinced that there were several different materials that were equally ultimate, like earth, air, fire and water. Still others looked beyond the physical world, believing the ultimate essence of things was a boundless energy that could not be seen or touched by our senses.
Later on, two intellectual giants came along who gave convincing arguments for seemingly contradictory theories. Parmenides claimed that all things that truly exist, must have a kind of permanent being that cannot undergo change. If something appears to undergo change, that change must be an illusion. To conceive of a being going through change, it must be what it is and at the same time be what it is not, which is absurd. To Parmenides, “Only that which IS...is.” Everything else, he insisted, is only an illusion.
“Nonsense!” said the other mental titan, Heraclitus. To him, the only permanent fact about our universe is that everything is undergoing change all the time! All of reality is like a flowing river. You can never step into the same river twice, because from the time your right foot is in the water to the moment your left one gets wet, the river has moved on and changed. Even while you are reading this sentence, the very cells of your body have changed and gotten another few seconds older. Nothing has absolute being, because everything is in the process of becoming.
Parmenides and Heraclitus were both so convincing, their hearers pretty much gave up the hunt for absolute answers for a while. If two such brilliant teachers couldn’t agree on a single theory about reality, what hope was there? Philosophy got “stuck in neutral” and began concentrating on things like rhetoric and political theory. Rather than arguing about ultimate truth, focus instead on using debate to persuade the most people to side with your way of thinking--your partisan position. Forget about discovering ideal truths; what matters is the nitty gritty of life in the here and now.
Fortunately, a man named Socrates appeared on the scene in ancient Athens. Born in 470 B.C., Socrates fought against the cynical sophistry of his time by insisting that there must be ultimate answers out there for things like justice and certainty of knowledge. He was convinced that, through a process of provocative questioning, discussion, and careful reasoning, truth, knowledge and, ultimately, wisdom, were attainable. He insisted that right reasoning could lead to virtue, that is, right living.
What can the Christian learn from the history of philosophy up to this point? Well, clearly, the pre-Socratic thinkers like Thales were engaged in a methodical examination of their natural world. They were not put off by the old superstitions that discouraged human thinkers from examining the scientific realm because evil spirits lurked in every rock and tree! They could tell by observation that there is a definite pattern of intelligent design and regularity to our universe, a pattern that may be discovered and followed and mapped out with the aid of reason. God has made mankind with the capacity of curiosity about his own nature as well as the order of things around him. It is a gift we ought to be thankful for and use to our advantage as we seek to communicate the gospel to others.
And what of Socrates? Many historians credit him with saving western civilization by standing up for the ideals of rational thought and scientific inquiry, without which the Greek culture may have devolved into barbarianism and chaos. Instead of weakening and collapsing, Greek civilization became a kind of protective cradle for the proclamation of the gospel of Christ in the first century A.D.
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