HOW DID THE POPULAR VIEW OF REALITY ARISE, AND WHAT ARE ITS PROPERTIES?

     Needless to say, Christianity of all kinds had a far more powerful grassroots influence in the Nineteenth Century than it does today.  But at the crucial time when the carpet got yanked in the universities, Christian leaders, for the most part, were not looking.  Few even among the greatest teachers and evangelists were thinking about ideas at the foundation of their world view.  It might be argued that they were too busy winning souls -- and God bless them, men like Finney, Moody and Spurgeon were!  Such men fulfilled their callings and then some.  Yet there are needed callings in the Christian community -- callings in business, the arts and sciences, not to mention apologetics.  Apologetics is the science of defending the faith.  Until that time, classical apologetics, where everybody basically had the same definitions for the same words, had sufficed.  But beginning in the Nineteenth Century that situation changed, as we shall see.  Unfortunately the study of Christian apologetics did not keep up with the pace -- men of God often failed to examine the thought foundations of their humanist philosophical opponents, who were gaining prominence in both the higher education community and the churches themselves because of it.
      Please keep in mind that our purpose here is not to blame our present day problems on past generations, much less cast aspersions on the godly men and women of that time period who have passed on to us faith’s torch.  But churches, both then and now, consist of human beings with human weaknesses and oversights.  We are at war spiritually and must realistically expect the enemy to exploit these oversights.  In order to prevent the same mistakes of former battles we must study our past weakness patterns also -- humbly, recognizing that we’re probably making a whole bunch of different mistakes of our own.
      Most Christian thinkers in the Nineteenth Century focused on what we have called the political, religious and ethical “superstructures,” rather than spiritual, intellectual and philosophical “foundations.”  Winston Churchill, reared in the late Nineteenth Century, is anecdotally quoted as saying, “Even if God does not exist, men should behave as if he does.”  This captures much of the Christian mentality of the time, whether Churchill really said this or not.  But it also raises the basic question of why?  For pragmatic reasons?  Because society works better that way?  What if a society were to arise where such beliefs would not be practical?  It seemed as if many of our spiritual forebears were trying to figure out how they would keep people motivated to live according to Christian moral values if the secularists turned out to be correct about the realms of geological, biological and sociological science, and in the other intellectual disciplines which many Christian thinkers had so thoughtlessly abandoned to them.³  This abandonment happened in a sudden fear of "worldliness" often encouraged by the popular Pietist Movements in the grassroots churches of that time -- science, art and fictional literature were frequently portrayed as having no spiritual value.  Had Bible oriented Christian thinkers thought more about foundations, they would have discovered that a good deal of what they feared was coming -- what we are now experiencing today -- had its genesis not in scientific or historic evidence, but in their own near systematic abandonment of the intellectual disciplines, and in the failure of Christian clergymen, monarchs, and statesmen to operate their lives and governmental responsibilities in a manner consistent with biblical teaching.  On top of all this, the various institutions of the Church had fallen into the nasty habit of seeking political and military solutions for spiritual and intellectual problems.  The reason most educated Christian leaders were not looking when the cultural rug got pulled could be summed up simply by saying that many of them had become "so earthly minded that they were no heavenly good."⁴  This, of course could not be said of the great missionaries and evangelists, who were of great "heavenly good."  But even these rarely placed much emphasis on the trans-cultural penetration aspect of what Jesus meant when he called us to be "the salt of the earth" (Matthew 5) -- that well-prepared disciples should actually penetrate into and influence culture through callings in business, government, art, literature and science.  This weakness often showed up on the missionary field of that day as a tendency to confuse the propagation of Christianity with the westernization of non-Western peoples.  Many didn’t realize how this same methodology helped put to death a lot of good Western culture as well.  Up until the Nineteenth Century much of the best in art, literature and science had come from a Bible-based world view.  What happened?
      Dark conditions had pervaded church leadership in Roman, Eastern and Reformed Christianity for a long time.  The worst case -- the lynch-pin for all that has followed -- was the deteriorated situation that existed between the Lutherans, the Catholics and the Calvinists during the Seventeenth Century, which led to what history has called "the Thirty Year War."  This war on some levels can be thought of as being like Christendom’s equivalent of the American Civil War, in which Central Europe was decimated for two generations.  So many men were killed in Germany that the Catholic Church even considered allowing its priests once again to marry because there simply were not enough people left to keep the land from going wild.  Whole villages were left unoccupied -- not ruined -- merely deserted for lack of people.  Germany alone went from a population of 16 million down to only 6 million, with industry, agriculture and essentially all that was needed for cultural survival, trampled under the feet of plundering armies.⁵  Needless to say, the bitter emotional backlash against the Catholic Church and against the Northern European state Reformed Churches was huge, particularly in France, which had suffered its own "Confessional Strifes" not long before.  Moral outrage against this war, instigated and then prolonged as it had been by princes and church leaders of nearly every creed, became a chief emotional driving force behind a philosophical movement arrogantly called "the Enlightenment."
      Voltaire (1694-1778), who is often named as the "Father of the Enlightenment,"⁶ grew up in a Europe that was still reeling in the century-long aftermath of the Thirty Year War.⁷  One can understand why he saw Christianity as the wellspring of all ignorance and prejudice in the world.  In the Enlightenment, reason was deified, but only when it was used to support Enlightenment ideals.  Man became the measure of all things.  All supernatural beliefs about God were summarily rejected.  This was an act of faith that there could be nothing beyond the physical existence of this life.  It is important to point out that the majority of scientific thinkers at that time, following in the stream of Sir Isaac Newton, rejected Enlightenment philosophy on the basis that it lacked an explanation for the ordered universe we observe around us.  There was nothing in the measurable, repeatable realm of science to mandate it.⁸  But the Enlightenment, with its promise of "intellectual liberty" and freedom from the moral restraints of oppressive and spiritually decadent church systems, captured the jaded hearts and imaginations of young minds at the universities.  How familiar it all sounds to me, as one who grew up in the late sixties and seventies.
      Voltaire’s student, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), depressed by the dehumanization of Man into a mere machine of the Industrial Revolution -- a thing he correctly foresaw as the inevitable outcome of his mentor's rationalism -- parted with the deification of reason in favor of romanticism.  Romanticism was a totally feelings-based view of reality that idealized an absolute freedom for the individual without the Bible-based idea that with such freedom comes responsibility and limits within certain absolute moral bounds.  Rousseau proclaimed that Man was by nature good.  He believed that society could rest on a "social contract" in which individual freedom would coalesce somehow into a mass "general will" of the people.  If one opposed the "general will," that person would then theoretically be "forced to be free."⁹  The unreality of his position led to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, where the refinement of the "general will" was carried out by the guillotines of Robespierre.
      Rousseau's views also had a great influence in the Bohemian ideal, a free sex life-style which sought to shed the restraints of civilization and return to nature.  The hippie movements of the 1960s were very much influenced by Rousseau, as were many post-Impressionist artists, most notable of whom was the painter, Paul Gaugin, who attempted to live the life of Rousseau's idealized "noble savage" and ended in deep depression after a failed suicide attempt.¹⁰  When "return to nature" ethics were carried to their logical conclusion by the Marquis De Sade, who based his morals on the fact that in nature, the strong prey on the weak, we got Sadism -- the brutalization of women or of other, weaker men as sex objects.  Yet the concept of "Naturalistic Law" is clung to irrationally by some idealists even today as a viable basis for law and morals.¹¹
      It seems to me that two major flows of thought emerged from the Enlightenment:  The first was Rousseau's emotion-based romanticism, which laid the logical foundation for the founding fathers of modern Western Man's fractured view of reality.  These “founding fathers” include the religious existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard, the synthesis thinking of Georg W.F. Hegel (that there is no absolute “right and wrong,” only opposing view points with the truth ALWAYS being in between), and later the secular Twentieth Century existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus.  The latter has been unwittingly absorbed as “reality” under varying terminologies by the average person in many cultural media forms, even though it has died as a philosophical movement in the classical sense.  The second flow to spring from the Enlightenment in the Nineteenth Century remained for those not willing to part with their reason totally -- the continuation of Voltaire’s materialistic rationalism.   This is not to be understood as a commitment to being rational, but rather the ARBITRARY ASSUMPTION that only materialistically based ideas can be rational.  These two streams, though seemingly opposed to each other, in effect maintained a symbiotic relationship.  Working together in the universities like the poisoned sea anemone and the attractive clown fish, the romantic flow explored a variety of forbidden pleasures and Eastern style pseudo-spiritual experiences, while the rational flow hammered out an intellectual foundation to justify a need for such journeys.  This philosophic foundation summarily pronounced Christianity to be spiritually and intellectually dead without bothering to take a pulse.  It reacted to the distorted images of decadent church systems and not to the substance of biblical teaching.  The holders of this new philosophy did not recognize that the pervading corruption of Eastern, Roman and Reformed Christian institutions existed not because these systems had followed biblical teaching consistently in their policies, but because they had consistently failed to do so -- in some cases for many centuries at length.
      An irrational and often unspoken starting assumption began to penetrate into the disciplines of knowledge at the universities of Europe and America during the early Nineteenth Century -- the pulling of the carpet, so to speak.  This was the idea that any thought of an intelligent Creator-designer was irrelevant to the serious study of origins in a cause and effect universe, even though this universe clearly demonstrates design and function.  They did not usually go so far as to say such a Creator did not exist -- only that he was irrelevant, and had never spoken.  Yet this assumed lack of speech rested on nothing more than a desire for there to be no divine revelation to deal with.  Thus such irrelevance amounted to functional non-existence for the God of the Bible.  All things needed to be explained in terms of an impersonal, time plus chance operation in order for the world view proposed by the Enlightenment to work.  By and by, the radical students of the late Eighteenth Century grew to be tenured professors.  Studies in the realms of science, theology and law came to be interpreted through the guidelines of the new popular "insider" philosophy as if by intellectual osmosis.  It should have come as no surprise to anyone that a generation later, men like Hutton and Lyell would be re-interpreting the fossil strata to fit the new view, and that two generations would see Darwin, or somebody just like him, spouting evolutionary theories on origins, with a book that would be the marching banner of a philosophical revolution that was already a fait accompli!
      But we must understand the flow, and note that none of these historic streams of thought were independent of one another.  The rise of materialism was joined at the hip to the Bohemian Ideal, and these, together with the other faith-held ideologies incubating in Europe's universities in the early Nineteenth Century (Marxism, etc.), salted a tormenting thirst for some scientifically believable explanation of origins apart from the intelligent Creator-God of the Bible.  Put simply; angry emotion spawned a philosophy which was accepted by faith (though people hated to call it that).  This philosophy, in order to validate itself, then penetrated the intellectual disciplines like the sciences, theology and law.  These disciplines then, to varying degrees, came to be viewed through the eye glasses of the new philosophy, affecting the kinds of questions asked and the kinds of conclusions drawn in certain areas of study, usually the ones least open to experimental verification -- like the interpretation of events in the distant past.  Enter the cornerstone of today's popular view of reality.
      What a person accepts to be true in the realm of what he cannot verify will drastically affect his methods and conclusions in the realm of what he can -- no matter what he believes in.  The unprovable starting assumptions of Enlightenment thought came to guide legal, scientific and theological interpretations both in the church and at large more and more throughout the Nineteenth and into the Twentieth Centuries.  They eventually became chic and popular among many of the intelligentsia.  They also came to be accepted virtually without criticism within higher education circles.  This produced sociological law, evolutionary science, and liberal theology.  The late Dr. Francis Schaeffer, in his book "HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE -- THE RISE AND DECLINE OF WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE" made this observation about materialistic evolutionary science:

It arose not because of that which could be demonstrated by science, but because  scientists who took this new view HAD ACCEPTED A DIFFERENT PHILOSOPHIC  BASE.  The findings of science, as such, did not bring them to accept this view; rather,  their world view brought them to this place.  They became naturalistic or materialistic in  their presuppositions.     (Schaeffer's emphasis)