Positivism: Christian Worldview with R.C. Sproul — Transcript

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1. 0:06SPROUL: In the last several sessions we’ve looked at the different strands of philosophy
2. 0:12that have informed and shaped the culture in which we live.
3. 0:15And you remember our opening session we considered the analogy of missionaries—that when a
4. 0:22missionary goes out to a foreign environment he… we don’t send a missionary there until
5. 0:26they first study the culture to which they’re going.
6. 0:29And that’s what we’re trying to do now is to understand our own culture, the culture
7. 0:33in which God has placed us as participants in the mission of the kingdom of God.
8. 0:40And we’ve looked at humanism and existentialism and secularism and all of these isms, I think,
9. 0:47are words that at least most people are vaguely familiar with.
10. 0:53But today we’re going to consider positivism—positivism as a philosophical system, a life and worldview.
11. 1:06Now how many of you have never heard of the concept positivism?
12. 1:15How many have never heard of logical positivism?
13. 1:19And I … ok, most of you have never heard of logical positivism but the majority have
14. 1:26heard of positivism?
15. 1:27I doubt it.
16. 1:29I doubt it.
17. 1:32I’m not thinking of the opposite of negativism, positivism in the sense of accentuating the
18. 1:38positive and eliminating the negative, and watching out for Mr. in between, you know.
19. 1:43I’m talking about a philosophical movement called positivism.
20. 1:47How many have never heard of that?
21. 1:49Now we’re getting more of the hands up.
22. 1:51Now … that I was convinced that a majority of people would not have heard of it because
23. 1:55it’s not a word that is tossed around regularly in our culture.
24. 2:02But it is a movement that has its roots in the 19th Century in Europe that has had an
25. 2:08enormous impact in the shaping of the culture in which we live today.
26. 2:15Now the name that is usually associated with the founding of positivism as a philosophy
27. 2:23is the name Auguste Comte.
28. 2:29Now how many of you have never heard of him?
29. 2:31Huh?
30. 2:32Ok.
31. 2:33I didn’t … and he was not as famous as Freud and Marx and Kierkegaard and some of
32. 2:38the others that we’ve considered here.
33. 2:41But Auguste Comte was working in the realm of science and philosophy in the 19th Century
34. 2:50and this man had a vision for the complete reformation of human society.
35. 2:59He saw himself as a reformer.
36. 3:02And what he wanted to do was to implement changes is his modern world that would reflect
37. 3:10the enormous steps of progress, as he considered it, that Western civilization had moved through
38. 3:18the period of the enlightenment and into the scientific and industrial revolution of the
39. 3:2319th Century.
40. 3:24He wanted to see all of society transformed by a new kind of philosophy that would be
41. 3:32brought about by what Comte called the dominance of scientific knowledge.
42. 3:40He wanted to see a culture and a society established scientifically rather than philosophically
43. 3:51or theologically, but to apply the newer advances that the scientific revolution had brought
44. 4:01about for Western man.
45. 4:04Now I’m going to erase his name now and go back to the principal problem that ties
46. 4:13all of these philosophical systems together that we’re considering now.
47. 4:18Do you recall when we lectured on secularism that I talked about the difference between
48. 4:24the eternal realm and the temporal realm?
49. 4:28The fact that the key point of secularism is that man must live his life in the now,
50. 4:37that we have no access, no point of entry to the eternal transcendent realm.
51. 4:45Now I’m going…
52. 4:46I draw this double line across the board to indicate the barrier that exists between the
53. 4:53eternal up here or the transcendent realm, the realm where we put God, and down here
54. 5:02is the realm of time and space.
55. 5:05Well we can look at this a little bit further.
56. 5:10We mentioned that the ancient problem of philosophy that thinkers have wrestled with throughout
57. 5:17history is how do we make sense out of all the particulars that we encounter in our life.
58. 5:27We see dogs; we see trees; we see kangaroos.
59. 5:30We see rivers; we see rats.
60. 5:31We see … . You know, we see people.
61. 5:35And you have all of these particular entities that appear before us in this world of space
62. 5:44and time.
63. 5:45And what we call those things are phenomena.
64. 5:51Phenomena.
65. 5:53A phenomena is a data bit, a unit of experience that we perceive, that we observe.
66. 6:07The word for phenomenon that the plural phenomena has to do with things that we can basically
67. 6:15see.
68. 6:16Ok?
69. 6:17That appear to our senses.
70. 6:20And so in this world down here you have all these little bits of diversity—animal, vegetable,
71. 6:26mineral, and all the rest—all the little diversity that makes up this world.
72. 6:32Now the question of ancient philosophy was what?
73. 6:36How does this all fit together?
74. 6:39Is there anything that unifies the individual particular bits or the phenomena of the world
75. 6:49that we experience?
76. 6:50And now what am I going to do in front of this television camera with my, the phenomenon
77. 6:51of chalk that everybody can see is under the phenomenon of the chair, and so we will illustrate
78. 6:52my point while I retrieve my chalk.
79. 6:53Ok.
80. 6:54Now historically we sought to harmonize or unify all of these data bits by pointing to
81. 7:05some kind of transcendent point of unity or unification.
82. 7:12And for the Christian what is that one being that makes sense and integrates and coalesces
83. 7:23all of the different pieces of phenomena.
84. 7:28STUDENT: God is …
85. 7:30SPROUL: God.
86. 7:31Ok.
87. 7:32So that the theological answer to sense and coherence is established by the doctrine of
88. 7:39the existence of God.
89. 7:41Philosophy tried to establish some point of reference.
90. 7:47That is if you weren’t theologically inclined, philosophy could seek it in some kind of abstract
91. 7:52principle like reason or mind or whatever, and the quest for ultimate truth above this
92. 8:08line we called in philosophy the science of what?
93. 8:12Do you remember?
94. 8:15This is the physical realm, the realm that we can measure, the realm that we can see
95. 8:20and taste and touch and…
96. 8:22Aha.
97. 8:23So that that realm which goes beyond and above the physical realm we call what?
98. 8:31Metaphysical.
99. 8:32So that metaphysics was a philosophical attempt to bring sense and coherence out of all of
100. 8:42the disparate pieces of this world.
101. 8:46All right?
102. 8:48Now this is just so far a review of what we’ve basically been talking about.
103. 8:54And we’re going to see once again in our next session when we consider pluralism as
104. 8:58an ism in our society.
105. 9:01But now Comte, what he is saying is that there is a natural law, not only that governs planetary
106. 9:11motions or gravity or how seeds germinate in the earth but there’s also a natural
107. 9:20law of society.
108. 9:23And just as in the evolution in the biological sciences is a movement from the simple to
109. 9:33the complex—a movement from the simplistic to the mature—so there are laws that work
110. 9:42in the development of society, and that man is going through stages in his own societal
111. 9:51progress.
112. 9:53And that man goes through infancy and then through adolescence and then he reaches his
113. 10:00adult phase of maturity.
114. 10:03And that’s not only true of individuals, says Comte, but it’s also true of cultures
115. 10:08and society.
116. 10:10And his sweeping panoramic view of Western history is that mankind has gone through these
117. 10:17three stages of development.
118. 10:22The first stage, or the infantile stage, is where people seek a theological or religious
119. 10:32answer to the meaning of life, so that in the early development of Western civilization
120. 10:39religion dominates the shaping of culture, because man superstitiously attributes the
121. 10:47unifying force to his world to the person of God.
122. 10:53But then as man begins to grow up and passes through this earlier stage of infancy and
123. 11:00moves into adolescence and becomes a little bit more sophisticated then he moves away
124. 11:05from religion and theology and moves into the state of philosophy, into the metaphysical
125. 11:15stage, where now he has a more complex, more abstract system of reason or whatever that
126. 11:24is above the line.
127. 11:28But he only reaches adulthood when he recognizes with maturity that the world is to be understood
128. 11:39not by religion or by philosophy but by science.
129. 11:46And so need a new society established on the basis of science rather than religion or philosophy.
130. 11:56Now he shared the skepticism of some other thinkers earlier than he that this whole realm
131. 12:04up here above the line is unknowable.
132. 12:10You can’t get over this wall or around it so that man, as in the rest of secularist
133. 12:21philosophies, is left to understand himself and his world on this side of the barrier—in
134. 12:30the world of the phenomena, the world of the particularist, the world of diversity.
135. 12:40There is no uni to the universe.
136. 12:44Remember the word universe?
137. 12:48Combination of unity and what?
138. 12:51STUDENT: Diversity.
139. 12:52SPROUL: Diversity.
140. 12:54And so that the classical model was that all of the diversity of this world is unified
141. 13:00ultimately in God or in some abstract principle.
142. 13:03Not for Comte.
143. 13:04There is only diversity, no unity.
144. 13:11Science busies itself and considers simply the particulars of this world.
145. 13:19As he said, incidentally, that there is only one absolute principle, the … no universals,
146. 13:29this is the universal realm, no universals save one.
147. 13:34There’s no absolutes save one.
148. 13:41The only absolute, he said, was that everything is relative.
149. 13:50Everything is relative.
150. 13:53So he’s absolutely saying that there’s … are absolutely no absolutes, except the
151. 14:00absolute that there are absolutely no absolutes.
152. 14:03Everything is relative.
153. 14:06Ok.
154. 14:07Now, this man tried to translate this into a workable religion as such.
155. 14:14He tried to establish what he called the religion as humanity and in London, in Chapel gate,
156. 14:22for example, in the middle of the 19th Century the positivists who rallied around Comte built
157. 14:31what was called the positivist temple.
158. 14:34Thomas Huxley who was involved in some of this responded to Comte’s philosophy by
159. 14:42saying what he has given Western civilization was simply catholicism minus Christianity.
160. 14:52That was a sort of a summary dismissal of Comte’s new religion by Thomas Huxley, call
161. 15:01it catholicism minus Christianity, religion without God, see.
162. 15:07It is a religion based upon science and the scientific control of our environment with
163. 15:14man at the center.
164. 15:16Well, I said at the beginning most of us had not even heard of Auguste Comte.
165. 15:23He tends to be obscure to the general population although he must be studied if somebody’s
166. 15:31a technical scholar in the field of the history of philosophy.
167. 15:34As I mentioned his impact went way beyond his own personal version of what positivism
168. 15:45should look like.
169. 15:46In fact, one of the dominant forces early on in the 20th Century in the realm of philosophy
170. 15:53is another school of thought that builds upon the 19th Century foundation of positivism
171. 16:00only gets a little more sophisticated, and it is called logical positivism, which incidentally
172. 16:11is one of the most important and one of the most dominant philosophical movements of the
173. 16:1720th Century.
174. 16:19How many of you have heard of logical positivism?
175. 16:22How many haven’t?
176. 16:23Ok.
177. 16:24It’s all right.
178. 16:26Let me just back up a second and say that the two, in my opinion the two, most influential
179. 16:3320th Century schools of philosophy in our culture have been existentialism, which we’ve
180. 16:38already considered in brief, and analytical philosophy.
181. 16:42Do you … if your son or daughter wanted to go and study philosophy in the university
182. 16:47today.
183. 16:49The chances are that if he entered into … picked the school or graduate school of philosophy
184. 16:54in any major university the chances would be about 80% that the dominant motif in that
185. 17:00school of philosophy would be what we call analytical philosophy.
186. 17:07So analytical philosophy has been a dominant force.
187. 17:10Now analytical philosophy is not the same thing as logical positivism, but it is the
188. 17:16outgrowth of logical positivism.
189. 17:18It stands in a direct historical line to logical positivism, which in turn goes back to the
190. 17:25positivism of the 19th Century.
191. 17:28Logical positivism emerged as a philosophical force in this world largely in the ‘30s
192. 17:37and ‘40s, but had its roots in a group of thinkers who bandied together in Vienna in
193. 17:48the 1920s, and this group was simply called the Vienna Circle.
194. 17:55The Vienna Circle, and it’s an incredible thing in the history of philosophy how new
195. 18:01schools of thought very closely knit groups can have an unbelievable impact.
196. 18:10That’s… we looked at pragmatism.
197. 18:11I talked about the metaphysical club at Harvard that included Pierce, and James, and Oliver
198. 18:17Wendell Holmes… couple of guys, and they changed the shape of modern society.
199. 18:22You go back to Athens and think of the relationship between four men that were very closely interconnected—Socrates,
200. 18:33whose disciple was Plato whose disciple was Aristotle whose chief disciple, and most famous
201. 18:42was Alexander the Great.
202. 18:46Those four men.
203. 18:47In any case it’s interesting to see in this philosophy… how little groups like this
204. 18:53can expand and just have enormous impact on civilization.
205. 18:59Whether the inner circle was a group of mathematicians and scientists who held as a goal the elimination
206. 19:11of metaphysics and theology from any influence on culture, they were after both theology
207. 19:19and philosophy.
208. 19:21They wanted to free science altogether from any dependency on philosophical systems and
209. 19:32let science reign supreme.
210. 19:36They were convinced that the issue of the existence of God looked at from a scientific
211. 19:45perspective was a waste of time.
212. 19:49In other words, you had debates between theists and atheists, people who thought they could
213. 19:55prove the existence of God and people who thought they could disprove the existence
214. 19:58of God.
215. 19:59There’s the sense in which the positivists, the logical positivists of Vienna tried to
216. 20:03cut the Gordian knot and simply say all conversation about God whether He exists or doesn’t exist
217. 20:12is meaningless, because the very word God is a meaningless word.
218. 20:21Now what if somebody came to you and said the word God is meaningless, … meaningless.
219. 20:30Is that true for you?
220. 20:32Does the word God mean anything to you?
221. 20:34Huh?
222. 20:35Does it mean a lot to you?
223. 20:37There have been people who have died for the sake of the name of God, the sanctity of the
224. 20:43name of God.
225. 20:44Here comes, these men come and say the word God itself is meaningless.
226. 20:48When you say it’s meaningful and they say it’s meaningless it might be because you’re
227. 20:54working on different criteria on what constitutes meaning and how we determine meaningfulness.
228. 21:03And this is what the logical positivists were trying to do, were trying to come and tell
229. 21:10us and establish the rules of meaning, how we decide whether something is meaningful
230. 21:21or not.
231. 21:22And they sought to bring about scientific methods to do this.
232. 21:30Now so the great contribution or innovation of logical positivism was the establishment
233. 21:38of what was called the verification principle.
234. 21:41The verification principle.
235. 21:42Now again, how many of you have never heard of the logical positivists’ verification
236. 21:46principle?
237. 21:47Let me see your hands.
238. 21:48Great.
239. 21:49You know what that tells me?
240. 21:50That means that today, yes today, you’re going to learn something that you didn’t
241. 21:51know before.
242. 21:52The verification principle, simply stated, is this: that no assertion, no statement is
243. 21:57meaningful unless it is either analytical or synthetic.
244. 22:06Now that’s simple, isn’t it?
245. 22:09Or to state it another way, no statement is meaningful unless it can be verified empirically.
246. 22:16Now, I’m going to explain what that means.
247. 22:20So don’t be frightened.
248. 22:22Ok?
249. 22:23What does it mean to verify something?
250. 22:26To show that it is true.
251. 22:28Something claims to be true, and that truth can be examined, or that claim can be examined
252. 22:33and we can either falsify it or verify it, or not not … … would be paralyzed so we
253. 22:39don’t know.
254. 22:40But if we try to either falsify or verify it.
255. 22:44Now how do we say or verify the truth of the statement that a triangle has three angles,
256. 22:52or this truth of the statement a husband is a married man?
257. 23:01How do you verify the statement that a triangle has three sides?
258. 23:06What?
259. 23:07STUDENT: By sight.
260. 23:10SPROUL: By sight?
261. 23:11Do you need to see a triangle to know that it has three sides?
262. 23:15Do you need to view a husband to know that he’s married?
263. 23:20The word by definition means what we’ve just said.
264. 23:25A husband by definition is a married man.
265. 23:28A triangle by definition has how many angles?
266. 23:31Three angles.
267. 23:32I don’t have to see one.
268. 23:33I never have to put one in a laboratory.
269. 23:35That’s what we call an analytical statement, a statement that is true by definition.
270. 23:42In order to add knowledge, we need to synthesize.
271. 23:45We need to make, we need to find out that that triangle is not only has three angles,
272. 23:53but that it’s either gold or silver, that it’s big or small.
273. 23:59The idea of bigness or smallness is not found in the word triangle, is it?
274. 24:04Triangle can be big or it can be small.
275. 24:05And if I said to you, there’s a big triangle out there in the field, if I’m going to
276. 24:11prove that or verify that, what am I going to have to do?
277. 24:15I’m going to have to go out there and take a look and see whether or not there was a
278. 24:20big triangle out there.
279. 24:23So that science, according to these men verifies principally by, I said, the empirical method,
280. 24:32by sight, sound, hearing, touching, by seeing.
281. 24:38Empirical means had to do with the senses.
282. 24:41Now the bottom line is that statements that cannot be verified empirically are meaningless.
283. 24:53All statements that cannot be verified empirically are meaningless.
284. 24:59Now has anybody in this room ever seen God?
285. 25:02Hum?
286. 25:05Has anybody in this room ever tasted God?
287. 25:09… taste buds of your tongue?
288. 25:11Has anybody … … subject God to observation or measurement or experimentation in a scientific
289. 25:17laboratory?
290. 25:19No.
291. 25:20So the point is that the word God itself cannot be verified.
292. 25:26And since it cannot be verified, it’s meaningless.
293. 25:32So that religious statements are at the bottom line unverifiable and meaningless.
294. 25:40Now that created a crisis for whether or not all of our discussions about God have any
295. 25:48meaning whatsoever.
296. 25:52What was the Achilles’ heel of the principle of verification?
297. 25:56Principle of verification has been pretty much discarded by analytical philosophers.
298. 26:03Why?
299. 26:04What’s wrong with the principle of verification?
300. 26:06Let me tell you the principle of verification.
301. 26:09The only meaningful truth is a truth which can be verified either analytically or empirically.
302. 26:17Hum?
303. 26:19It’s very easy, so obvious it bites you if it were a snake.
304. 26:25There is a principle that the original founders missed completely at the beginning.
305. 26:32Their whole philosophy rests on what principle?…
306. 26:37The truth of the verification of principle.
307. 26:41Can the verification of principle be verified empirically?
308. 26:46Is the verification of principle analytically true?
309. 26:50If a guy stands up and says the only thing that is true is that which can be verified
310. 26:55empirically, can he now verify his statement that the only thing that is true is that which
311. 27:00can be verified empirically?
312. 27:02No, he can’t verify that empirically.
313. 27:05It’s an utterly gratuitous rule.
314. 27:07Remember they’re trying to rewrite the rules of meaning.
315. 27:11And if you apply their own rules of meaning to the new rules of meaning that they have
316. 27:15foisted upon the public, that rule of meaning collapses, and later philosophers saw that.
317. 27:20But, dear friend, don’t make any mistake that the impact of that kind of thinking has
318. 27:27been enormous to our culture.
319. 27:31So that we’ve seen a whole generation of theologians going through the terrible crisis
320. 27:36of whether or not any statements about God are meaningful or whether or not they’re
321. 27:41just simply emotive, that is saying something about you and your emotional makeup rather
322. 27:47than that which is scientific.
323. 27:51What positivism does is that it divorces science from the whole realm of truth.
324. 28:03And trying to make it an independent thing that cuts science itself from its very foundation
325. 28:12and its very roots.
326. 28:13Ok.
327. 28:14You want to have a universe without union.
328. 28:18Ok.
329. 28:19Well you’re left in a sea of diversity with no possible foundation for meaning.
330. 28:29It cuts you off from meaning.
331. 28:33That’s an awfully heavy price to pay to grow up.
332. 28:40And I’ll stop there.
333. 28:43And in our next session we’ll consider further ramifications of this in pluralism.