Foundations

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• Foundationalism v. Fallibilism
• “The classical contrast between skepticism and dogmatism can be interpreted as one
between fallibilism and foundationalism. For the fallibilist, the body of knowledge-claims
is like a ship kept afloat by constantly replacing old parts; for the foundationalist, the
body of knowledge-claims is like a building that needs a secure foundation.”
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• The Foundation of Western Civilization
• Judeo-Christian faith
• Human reason
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• Major Themes of Western Civilization
• Capacity for self-criticism
• Development of political freedom
• Shifting relations among religion, society, and the state
• Science and technology
• Religious and intellectual currents
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• Raphael’s School of Athens (1511)
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• Design in Nature
• A major battle in the culture wars
• Teleology
– The unmoved mover or first cause
• Historiography as a secular project
• Benjamin D. Wiker,
– The Mystery of the Periodic Table
• The war against Christianity
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• Religion and Civilization
• Hebrews 11:3 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of
God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
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• Religion and Civilization
• All cultures have their foundational myths, but they can be reasonable or unreasonable,
rational or irrational.
– “Poetry precedes science.”
• Judeo-Christianity, Western philosophy, Taoism, Confucianism, and Hinduism all search
for “the way.”
• This is not to adopt “the shallow and absurd view that all religions ‘teach essentially the
same thing.’”
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• Religion and Civilization
• “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such
that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it

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 —believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or
disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.”
– C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1944.
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• Religion and Civilization
• “It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and
others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”
• Socrates knew, as Heraclitus did before him, that there are the wise few who listen to the
Logos, and the foolish many who do not
• “And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or
responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with
reason…or out of harmony with reason.”
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• Religion and Civilization
• The search for truth.
• Objective reality.
• Dualism* of good and evil.
– *Not a dualism of equals.
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• Religion and Civilization
• Greek logos: “Greek term meaning word, utterance, rationale, argument, structure. In
Heraclitus, the ordering principle of the world; in the Gospel of John, that according to
which all things were made and which became incarnate in Jesus.”
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• Religion and Civilization
• Foundation on reasonable as opposed to unreasonable sentiment.
• It is on the basis of a reasonable sentiment in the reality of existence that we are
“impelled from behind by the life-affirming sentiment and drawn forward by some
conception of” our higher purpose.
– Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.
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• Religion and Civilization
• “As myth gives way to philosophy…the tendency to see a principle of divinity in
language endures. Thus we learn that in the late ancient world the Hebrew memra and the
Greek logos merged, and in the Gospel of John we find an explicit identification:
– In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God.
• Speech begins to appear the principle of intelligibility…knowledge of the prime reality
comes to man through the word; the word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world
of appearances.
• The central teaching of the New Testament is that those who accept the word acquire
wisdom and at the same time some identification with the eternal, usually figured as
everlasting life.”
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• Religion and Civilization
• A transcendent God as opposed to pantheism.

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 – Order out of chaos.
– Truth over falsehood.
– Good over evil.
• “That which is highest in man is derived from that which is higher than man.”
• Judeo-Christianity:
– Recognition of our dependence on God, the author of our being.
– We are all born equal in the sight of God.
– Individual salvation: faith and good works.
– There is order and a natural hierarchy of goods.
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• Religion and Civilization
• “The ‘self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable’ crippled reason by
confusing faith with fideism and confining reason to the realm of technological or
instrumental rationality.” Pope Benedict
• Quoted in Daniel J. Mahoney, The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity
Subverts Christianity
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• Religion and Civilization
• Judeo-Christianity facilitated a much greater sphere of human trust, allowing for the
growth of one of the world’s greatest civilizations.
– Based on faith and reason.
– Based on the rule of law rather than arbitrary tyranny.
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• Religion and Civilization
• What is evil?
– Denial of God.
– Falsification of the Good.
• Satanic, “rightly defined, means the desire to tear down a longstanding, even elemental,
order and replace it with…nothing.”
• “When you can manipulate the language and convince an otherwise sane world that your
mad version of events is the truth, you have a formidable, satanic weapon.”
– Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the
Subversion of the West
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• Religion and Civilization
• “The man who no longer believes in God does not believe in nothing; rather, he will
believe in anything.” G.K. Chesterton
• God’s message is one of forgiveness and redemption.
• Satan’s goal is revenge.
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• Great Chain of Being
• The Great Chain of Being is a classical conception of the metaphysical order of the
universe in which all beings from the most basic up to the very highest and most perfect
being are hierarchically linked.
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• The Challenge of Modernity

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• Modernity:
– Modern nation-states
– Renaissance
– Protestant Reformation
– Agricultural Revolution
– Scientific Revolution
– Enlightenment
– The Industrial Revolution
• Two paths…
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• The Challenge of Modernity
• Value relativism erodes the traditional foundation based on the certainties of God and
reason.
• Secular multiculturalism is not at all what a Christian multiculturalism would look like or
one based on Greek reasoning.
• Nietzsche understood that value relativism destroys everything.
• He thought this was good; he believed it would lead to the creation of a new world order
based on new gods and a new type of man.
• The divinization of the state.
• The rise of the Übermensch.