The enthronement of naturalistic science began during the Enlightenment era (1650-1800) when Niccolo Machiavelli argued that we must stop seeking wisdom from the ancients and come to recognize that they were wrong. We should forget about what life ought to be about and concentrate on how it is. Instead of exhorting men to virtue, we should emancipate them within their vulgarity. Philosophy should collaborate with men in creating a regime that assuages the primal passions rather than one that excites high hopes, a state that acknowledges and appeals to a person's natural fear of violence and death and which cooperatively creates a society of safety rather than a paradise of purity.

This thought was further codified in Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In their thought, the state of nature in which all men were isolated and at war with one another would be sublimated if a regime could emerge within which the primal passions of self-preservation and self-interest could be guaranteed through social contract. This assumed that men could be guided by their reason such that they would desire such a state of affairs. However, this optimism in universal political truth apprehended by reason was vigorously opposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau challenged the Enlightenment confidence in reason by asserting that freedom, not reason, is fundamental to man as man. In Rousseau, the man of feeling surpasses the man of thought, and his freedom in creativity is what defines him. Hence what matters is not the dull democratic regime in which men are accommodated within their lowest state, but culture, which is man’s highest expression. Hence, there could be many cultures that are rich and viable in contrast to one “everyman” regime.

This rift between the rational and the expressive troubled Immanuel Kant, who saw the loss of the knowledge of those things that made men human, like the good and the beautiful. He attempted a great synthesis, assigning knowledge acquired by sensory experience (as in natural science) to a Phenomenal Realm and knowledge directly apprehended (such as moral truths and aesthetic truths) to a Noumenal Realm in the hope of affirming the rationality of both. 

Over time, however, within a world that was governed only by nature, naturalistic science emerged the victor in the rationality war, and assumed the throne such that even rulers were obliged to bow in its presence. In addition, more doubts began to emerge regarding the rational grounding for moral and aesthetic claims. If what we can know comes to us only through our natural senses, how then do empirically unverifiable moral or religious claims even qualify as knowledge? Furthermore, in a world where liberal democracy based on nature alone is the best that men can do politically, pragmatism demands a naturalistic academic discipline to sustain the project. The danger, of course, is that such a science is intrinsically amoral, and, therefore, just as useful to oppressive regimes. 

Finally, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe delivered a death blow to rationality altogether in his Faust, where the protagonist comes to realize that neither knowing nor feeling is sufficient, but only "dark action" compelled by "fatal impulse“ and that "action has primacy over contemplation, deed over speech…. The act of the [human] creator, not preceded and controlled by thought, is the first thing” (Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 303). In Goethe, the divide is complete, and man must behave irrationally and existentially if he is to affirm his distinctiveness from other animals, because his soul and, hence, his inherent worth have been effectively extinguished by science. We now live in the world of thoughts and values fashioned by this naturalistic science.

Theistic realism, on the other hand, directly challenges naturalistic science in both its philosophical presuppositions and its methodology. It asserts that God is real, that his involvement in nature must be taken seriously, and that public caricatures of creationists attack a straw man. It points out that a democratic environment of free inquiry must allow the open discussion of alternative viewpoints on scientific issues. It challenges the notion that religious views of origins threaten good science and that considerations of the supernatural are irrational. Theistic realism insists that theology is a source of knowledge and moral truth and calls out the naturalist to defend the position that scientists must follow the rules of naturalism. The Theistic realist stands on John 1:1-3 and Romans 1:20-23 as the key verses that make accommodation with naturalism impossible. Theistic realism does not seek compromise or accommodation with naturalism, but truth.

According to Phillip E. Johnson, the most important thing a Christian can do is “to divert attention away from questions of power and toward questions of truth.” Christians should “want whatever is true, good and beautiful” as opposed to the naturalist who holds that “such a unifying vision is fantasy and that the real business of life is to find the knowledge that can supply whatever it is that we happen to want.” Our agenda should be “to advance truth rather than social usefulness as the first item on the intellectual agenda and to define terms so as to open up truth questions to intellectual inquiry rather than settle them by verbal manipulation.” The kind of truth we seek consists in “a common sense of rationality that permits the inevitable differences of outlook to be understood, debated and respected.” This is the path toward finding unity within diversity. Our times call for “not a strategy to preserve a dying Christianity as long as possible, but a dedication to discover the first principles and premises that will help us base our lives, worldviews, and communities on truth and not error.”

May God grant the Church a holy audacity as we bring this message boldly into the public square. May a western culture within which true freedom and human dignity based on the reality of the human soul and the recognition of the image of God in men and women flourish once again.

Blessings,