My work on Philosophy after Christ proceeds; today’s post expresses part of what I mean by philosophy, not only chronologically after Christ’s earthly ministry, but also “according to Christ” (κατὰΧριστόν, kata Christon) (Colossians 2:8).
We all take many things for granted. If, however, we would honor our mental obligations, we ought not to take things for granted, but rather examine their grounds. That is, whoever aspires to pursue wisdom or “philosophize” (which pursuit the linguistic analysis called “philosophical” ought to subserve) should not take taking-for-granted for granted. We ought to ground that habit.
We can do that by examining our worldview to see whether it can bear the weight we put on it. The German for “worldview” is Weltanschauung, a calque of the Greek kosmotheoria. A worldview is a network of first truths that constitute our pretheoretical propensity to see (theoria) the world (kosmos), which includes God, mankind, and nature.[1]
Our worldview-forming capacity is innate. It is a heuristic for making sense of the world, including our sense-making. The Christian claims that the kosmotheoria on display in the Bible alone fills that schema concretely and successfully. It’s our birthright, which except by God’s grace we incline to trade for a pot of message. The history of philosophy is the story of the attempt to put something else in place of God’s Word, the chronicle of the many ways human beings can devalue their inheritance.
The renown linguist and cognitive scientist, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) provides a glaring example of this devaluation. He matter-of-factly consigns science, his intellectual milieu for seven decades, to a meaningless void:
[A] partial congruence [Chomsky writes] between the truth about the world and what the human science-forming capacity produces at a given moment yields science. Notice that it is just blind luck if the human science-forming capacity, a particular component of the human biological endowment, happens to yield a result that conforms more or less to the truth about the world.[2]
He rejects Darwinian natural selection as plausible explanans for the scientific enterprise:
It is possible to imagine that chimpanzees have an innate fear of snakes because those who lacked this genetically determined property did not survive to reproduce, but one can hardly argue that humans have the capacity to discover quantum physics for similar reasons. The experience that shaped the course of evolution offers no hint of the problems to be faced in the sciences, and ability to solve these problems could hardly been a factor in evolution. We cannot appeal to this deux ex machina to explain the convergence of our ideas and the truth about the world. Rather, it is largely a lucky accident that there is such a (partial) convergence, so it seems.[3]
Chomsky then moves on with his scientific enterprise, not realizing that he’s just pulled out the rug from under it. (And, for that matter, from under his political musings.) But that’s the fate his non-Biblical worldview commits him to. He roots human language in biology, but biology is a “lucky accident,” an issue of “blind luck.” As there’s no evidence for abiogenesis, no imaginable evidence for it, there is no intelligible matrix for biology and therefore for our “science-forming capacity.” On this view human knowledge-seeking itself is a surd, and so is any imagined “fit” between the kosmos and knowledge of thereof we claim. Perhaps one continues to read Language and the Problems of Knowledge out of curiosity, or as an intellectual pastime, or because one likes (or detests) his political choices[4], but not to gain understanding of either language or knowledge.
If, however, human beings are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-28), endowed with light (John 1:9), and commanded to seek understanding above all else (Proverbs 4:7), using understanding to subdue and cultivate the rest of creation under God (Genesis 2:15), then hope of making sense of our sense-making is not fatuous.
As we will demonstrate, any proposed alternative to God’s wisdom is rank foolishness. Chomsky’s dodge is but one of countless examples that can be adduced. They all fare no better than, say, Stalinist “philosopher” Maurice Cornforth‘s Dialectical Materialism. 
But apart from God’s gracious wake-up call, sinners will embrace any species of foolishness rather than acknowledge that, if they know anything, they are only thinking God’s thoughts after Him.
Notes
[1] θεωρέω theóreó, to look at, gaze, spectate, form a picture. The roots of “theory,” theoria, lie in the noun for “spectacle” and in the verb “to behold” θεάομαι from which we get “theater.” A theoros is a spectator. “When all the people who had gathered to witness this spectacle (θεωρίαν) saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away” (Luke 23:48). “He [Jesus] beholds (θεωρεῖ) a commotion with people crying and wailing loudly” (Mark 5:38).
[2] Noam Chomsky, Language and the Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures, MIT Press, 1988, 157-158.
[3] Ibid., 158.
[4] The subtitle of Language and the Problems of Knowledge is “The Managua Lectures,” Managua being the capital of Nicaragua, which Chomsky visited in 1985 during the reign of the Marxist-inspired Sandinistas.
Posts related to my Philosophy after Christ project
- Bill Vallicella on Cornelius Van Til: an open mind and heart.
- Philosophy: its descent from loving wisdom to studying problems.
- Brand Blanshard: rationalism’s “working hypothesis” and the Van Tilian verdict.
- Christ, our philosophical GPS.
- The Godless Delusion: my truth-in-advertising concern.
- “Your word is truth,” the Word said.
- God has spoken. “So what?,” you might ask.
- Do atheists have an excuse?
- “Life from non-life”? Without a prayer.
- Did the Apostle Paul argue for God’s existence?
- Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them.
- Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them. Part 2
- The Problem OF Philosophy
- “Why did you not give me better evidence?,” the atheist would ask God, as though his demand for evidence were not itself evidence.