Author: Greg Howlett

I was exposed to Ayn Rand decades ago by a fellow employee who chastised me when I mentioned an altruistic endeavor in which I was involved. Never before had I considered the possibility that giving to others might be immoral, and I was intrigued enough to read a few of Rand’s books, including her most famous, Atlas Shrugged. While I am not a Rand zealot (or even a fan), I have been interested ever since.

Rand is not considered a great philosopher, and most current philosophers do not hold her philosophy (objectivism) in high regard. Nevertheless, while Rand died three decades ago, her influence has probably never been greater, especially in the areas of economics and politics, and particularly with various stripes of libertarians and conservatives.

I often wonder if those currently jumping on the Ayn Rand bandwagon really know what she believed. For sure, the admiration would not be mutual in most cases. Rand would absolutely despise much of what her current followers believe. For example, while many Christians have embraced her economic teaching, she had no patience for Christianity.

The reasons for this uneasy alliance are interesting to me, so I want to take some time to discuss Rand over a few posts. To start, let’s give Rand some credit. While many today tend to focus on her political/economic ideas, Rand was somewhat unique in that she actually had a holistic philosophy that drove those ideas. By that, I mean that she spent the time developing a system of metaphysics (theory of reality) and epistemology (theory of knowledge) that led her to her beliefs about politics and economics.

Most of us simply do not have that kind of cerebral investment behind our beliefs, and by most, I mean 99.999% of us including me. The talking heads you see on cable news have not made that investment. Nor have the politicians you see on those same programs. Compared to Rand, these people are lightweights.

To be sure, the greatest economic minds in history such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx have always had a philosophy originating in epistemology and metaphysics that drove their conclusions. Marx for example had a materialist perspective that naturally led to his economic ideas. To what extent Rand deserves to be named on the same level as Marx is debatable, but she was certainly in a very small club of political/economic thinkers in that she had a solid philosophical foundation.

For that matter, very few thinkers of any kind through history have really developed a comprehensive systematic philosophy. I am not saying that Rand’s system is on the level of Hegel’s, but at least, she made a valiant effort and came up with a somewhat unique comprehensive philosophy that we now refer to as objectivism.

Understanding objectivism helps us understand Rand, and perhaps more importantly, helps us understand why people to this day gravitate toward Rand even when she would hold nothing but contempt for them in return. So, let’s talk about what Rand offered that was so attractive.

Rand was at war with a philosophy known as idealism which had been prevalent in western thought for the past few centuries. Idealism is the belief that the human mind creates/controls reality. While there are many different variations of idealism, some idealists actually believe that no reality exists outside of the brain at all.

Now, most of us mock the concept of idealism outright. It sounds strange to our ears and leads to all kinds of apparently absurd conclusions. For example, if a doctor tells me I have cancer, can I be healed simply by convincing myself I am healed? Almost all of us would emphatically deny that possibility.

However, while the idea of idealism is universally rejected by moderns, I am quite sure that the practice of idealism has infiltrated almost all of us. You see it everywhere, from self-help techniques to the current disturbing rise of conspiracy theories. People often do operate as though reality is relative to one’s state of mind and in fact, can be controlled by one’s mind. Today’s postmodernist that talks about his own “version of truth” sounds like an idealist to me.

Now, Rand saw idealism far more broadly than just a two-century phenomenon. She contrasted idealism with her own view of reality which I will summarize in this way:

What exists exists, and it exists whether a human wants to acknowledge its existence or not.

Reality simply is the sum of what exists.

The human senses are a reliable way to learn about reality, especially when combined with rational judgments about the data provided by those senses.

Humans that want to be successful do not try to add to or modify reality. They understand that success means conforming to reality and playing by its rules.

Reality self-controls. No other entity such as a deity or the human mind controls reality.

In other words, Rand was a common-sense philosopher. While modern philosophers were debating such questions as to whether a table is really a table and whether the physical senses are at all reliable, Rand took an opposite tack that discarded those thorny questions as absurd. In general, what appeared to be reality could be accepted as reality though she readily admitted that cognitive processes were needed to interpret the data provided by the senses.

To Rand, when a tree falls in the forest, it obviously does make a sound regardless of whether any humans are around.

Or, to take another old philosophical problem, while an ax handle stuck in a pool of water may suddenly appear bent, that does not mean that our senses are unreliable. It simply means that our cognition of what our senses tell us is flawed/incomplete. Humans that want to understand reality need to improve their cognition so that they better understand the rules of reality.

To put it mildly, Rand was the anti-idealist.

Now as I said, Rand painted with a broad brush when she was labeling people as idealists. For example, in Rand’s view, religion is anti-reality because religion represents a set of mind-based rules that add to reality. A religious person is trying to change reality through the mind by adding concepts that only exist in the mind, which to her, constituted a form of idealism.

Therefore, because premodernists were religious and believed in a God that controlled reality, Rand believed that they were idealists. St. Augustine was an idealist in her view.

In fact, Rand saw all 2,500 years of western thought as driven by idealism though she divided it into three sections. The pre-modernists were idealists because they believed in a God-controlled reality, the modernists were idealists because they believed in a culture-controlled reality, and today’s postmodernists are idealists because they believe that reality is unique to the individual and controlled by the individual.

In other words, she did not really approve of any major philosophical systems from the past or present. For her, humanity is always trying to control reality from outside reality, when in fact, reality cannot be controlled. Reality just is, independent of our minds.

A natural extension of this belief was that Rand strongly believed in absolutes, and she did so in a time where absolutes were under attack. To her, every argument against absolutes was fallacious. For example, a person could not argue that a statement was relative because to do so implied an absolute definition of the term “relative.”

Aside: Rand’s argument here is easy to counter, but you hear similar rhetoric from absolutists to this day. For example, if a relativist proclaims that one cannot know anything for sure, an absolutist will ask how that can be known for sure.

So was Rand’s philosophy unique? She would have said yes, but then, she clearly had a generous amount of hubris. In actuality, she was not the only common-sense philosopher, and much of her metaphysics and epistemology is reminiscent of Aristotle (the only philosopher she could bring herself to credit).

However, Rand was definitely countercultural at least during her time, and unique from Artistotle in one particular regard: while Aristotle believed in a chief designer of reality (creator/deity), Rand saw that as a fallacy. For Rand, what exists exists and only that exists. There was no room for a creator because only religion gives us the concept of a creator, and as already stated, religion exists only in the mind.

Overall, I think I would say that Rand’s objectivism was at least modestly unique in history and certainly a substantial counterweight to the postmodernism with which she was at war.

As mentioned, most modern philosophers find a lot of Rand’s philosophy to be nonsensical. But, weak or not, in an age where postmodernism must have been driving much of society crazy, Rand’s philosophy had to have seemed like a breath of fresh air. It is easy to see why she had followers and for that matter, still has followers.

In the next post, I want to talk about how her foundation of philosophy drove her contributions to how many view economics and politics. It would be a mistake to underestimate her influence. For example, Alan Greenspan was an early Rand disciple and many attribute much of Trump’s economic policy to Rand. And on a far bigger scale, many millions have read Atlas Shrugged and adopted her beliefs.

A few years ago, I was reading Plato’s Phaedo and I came to a passage that goes like this:

For whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? For wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body. (Translation of Benjamin Jowett)

I was immediately struck by a parallel passage written some 400 years later in James 4 from the Bible.

From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? (KJV)

Now granted, both of these passages are English translations of two different versions of Greek. However, I very much doubt that this similarity is a coincidence. The phrasing is similar and the context is similar. My guess is that James was quoting Plato. I may be wrong, but I do not think so.

Whether James was flagrantly plagiarizing Plato is debatable and not my point. To give him the benefit of the doubt, it is quite possible he was quoting some text that he knew his readers would recognize as Plato and therefore felt no need to credit Plato. It would be like me repeating Patrick Henry’s famous quote “Give me liberty or give me death.” I would not necessarily credit Henry because everyone would already know I am quoting Henry.

Regardless of James’ intentions, I am merely pointing out how Greek philosophy started influencing Christianity very early and managed to make its way into the Bible itself (this is not the only example). That influence would continue to strongly shape Christian theology for as long as there has been Christianity.

Let me talk about two very critical intersections between these two pillars of western civilization. The first was the theology of St. Augustine in the early 5th century. Augustine was a convert to Christianity from Neoplatonism, a system of philosophy based on Platonism. There were many other Christian theologians who were also influenced by Neoplatonism during those early centuries (Origen is a famous example), but Augustine was the giant among them.

I recently read Augustine’s The City of God, an astounding book written in the sunset of the Roman empire. From a historical, philosophical, and theological perspective, it is a gold mine. If you are a Protestant and wade through the book, you will be surprised at how much of his theology you recognize. Even some of his phrasing (or at least the interpretation of his phrasing) of theological concepts has largely survived the last 1500 years effortlessly.

At some point, I will try to write an entire post about The City of God, but one of the most striking things about the book is Augustine’s obsession with Plato. He briefly mentions a few theologians of the day (Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, and a few others), but much of the book is both a refutation and appreciation for Plato. He clearly respected Plato as a worthwhile opponent, and he readily admitted the many similarities between Platonism and Christianity.

In fact, in one entertaining spot in the book, Augustine is trying to explain how the Christian/Judaism account of creation matches up so well with Plato’s creation account (the Timaeus). He actually proposes a somewhat ridiculous theory that Plato may have met the Jewish prophet Jeremiah on a trip and gotten the Jewish creation story from him.

So what is Platonic in Augustine’s view of Christianity? There are several things, but here are just a few more notable ones:

• a focus on beauty and ideals (reminiscent of Plato’s forms)
• an emphasis on personal relationships/communion with God
• an emphasis on heaven (as an eternal, perfect place)
• predestination (yes, the subject of predestination vs free will is a philosophical question that far predates Christianity)

I would have to write a long time about Plato’s view on these topics, and there are more qualified people than me that would do a better job. However, Augustine seemed to be heavily influenced by Plato in his positions on these theological questions.

Furthermore, it is important to understand that while Protestants take Augustine’s teaching for granted today, Christianity has often struggled with most of these doctrines. It took centuries after Jesus lived for this kind of theology to fully develop, and a lot of it really does seem to originate with Augustine. Again, when you read Augustine, you will note that he does not quote other theologians to bolster his theology.

While Augustine was influential during his era, western civilization was about to enter the Dark Ages and his theology would hibernate for centuries and then get replaced entirely by a very different approach.

Before I get to that big change in direction, let me talk briefly about the Dark Ages, a period in western civilization where among other things, Christianity took a back seat. During that time, Islam was far more dominant in culture and arts, science, and other disciplines. Very interestingly, it was Islam that preserved Greek philosophy through those years. In fact, Greek philosophy was almost forgotten in the Christian-dominant side of western civilization during that time.

After the Dark Ages ended, there was a second major intersection of Christianity and Greek philosophy. The Christian swing from Plato to Aristotle actually started with Scholasticism in around 1100 AD. It is very ironic that this was at least partly due to some Islam-preserved texts of Greek philosophy making their way back to Catholicism.

While Thomas Aquinas was hardly the first in the movement, he represented the pinnacle of Scholasticism. Aquinas revered Aristotle to the point where he simply referred to him as the philosopher.

Scholasticism was a logical approach to theology, using elaborate logical rules and proofs that originated with Aristotle. That should not be a surprise; to this day, rules of formal and informal logic trace back to Aristotle. In fact, the theologians of that time tried to answer theological questions in a similar way that a geometry student might try to prove a theorem.

As you can imagine, such a rigorous, cerebral approach to theology ruled out all but elite scholars from being capable of obtaining knowledge of God. It is no surprise that Catholicism moved away from the more Augustinian idea that a common person could know enough to have a personal relationship with God. This ill-fated change would of course become a major impetus to the spark of the Reformation.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Scholastic approach to theology is still the dominant approach in Catholic seminaries today. However, on the Protestant side of things, at the start of the Reformation, suddenly, a Platonic-tinged Christianity was in vogue again. Martin Luther loved Augustine. And to this day, Protestants love Augustinian teaching, even if they do not take the time to read Augustine himself.

If you are looking for it, you can see Platonism in many places in Protestantism. For example, when I read C. S. Lewis, I am struck by the not-subtle Platonic ideas. The picture of heaven in The Last Battle where there are worlds stacked in each other, each bigger and better than the last is very similar to Platonic metaphysics. It is an interesting example of how Platonism and the Bible itself sometimes get combined/confused in the teaching of Christianity.

What to make of all this overlap is a subject for another post. But for myself, while I am not quite sure about theological ramifications, I have a strong suspicion that they are enormous, especially in the realm of the sufficiency of the Bible. In other words, if the Bible is sufficient in itself for faith and practice, why has Christianity always been so tightly woven with and influenced by Greek philosophy?

These are the kinds of questions that I like to ask theologians. For the most part, I get politely rebuffed. But in my opinion, at a minimum, Christianity needs to meet these kinds of challenges head-on rather than ignoring them.

How is it that when I wake up in the morning, I know who I am?

With that question, I am getting at a particularly unknowable philosophical problem: the question of personal identity. How indeed do I come to identify myself not just as a human but as a particular human described by the name Greg Howlett?

Are modernist philosophers correct when they assert that personal identity is a mental container of sorts that holds and categorizes experiences? Or is identity connected to (maybe equal to) the soul concept found in most religions? Perhaps it is material in nature and related to DNA? Is identity found in the energy in the brain of which thoughts are composed?

Here is an associated line of thought: is my personal identity connected to this particular body? Could my identity be associated with another human body perhaps born in a different time and place to different parents? For that matter, could I have the same identity if I were born to the same parents but with slightly different DNA? If I were a female, could I still have the same personal identity (albeit with a different name)?

While I am not dogmatic, I tend to believe that personal identity is indeed connected to a particular body with a specific material/non-material makeup. In other words, you and I had exactly one shot each to exist. The stars had to align exactly right.

If I am right, it is a remarkable thing that you and I even exist. What if your parents had attended different schools and never met? What if they had just fallen asleep in front of the TV on the night you were conceived? What if your mother’s parents had not happened to live in the same town? What if distant relatives had never immigrated to America?

If you open that can of worms, my existence is tied to a miraculous chain of events that go back through history. For example, would I exist if Pope Clement had granted Henry VIII his annulment and England had stayed Catholic? Not a chance. That event affected innumerable events after it that led to the founding of the USA and the particular circumstances of my parents meeting each other.

Some events in history are even more mammoth in scale, affecting not just billions of personal identities but entire civilizations. I want to discuss one of those events today: consider what would have happened if things had gone differently when the Spartans fought the Persians at Thermopylae about 2,500 years ago.

Here is the story. Around 480 BC, Persia under King Xerxes was preparing to invade Greece.

Greece, as we all know, was a democracy, with flaws and warts similar to the ones we see in our democracy today. It was a loose coalition of cities similar to the states in the US, and sometimes there was little loyalty between them.

Persia’s general strategy was to buy these city-states off and they did it very successfully. By the time this event took place, very few Greek states were holding out against Persia.

One of those remaining states was Sparta.

Sparta was unquestionably a remarkable place by any standard or time period. The obsession of Sparta was war. Children were the property of the State from birth. Males were taken away from their parents and lived in dormitories, rigorously (and brutally) trained in the art of fighting, both psychologically and physically. Those that didn’t make the cut were ostracized if not eliminated. Those that survived the training became long-haired super-warriors; they were efficient and brutal killing machines that were fearless in battle and would not hesitate to lay down their lives for their city. Likewise, women were trained to be breeding machines and used to breed more warriors.

For these reasons and many more, Sparta was probably the earliest significant example of a communist state in history. In fact, the communistic aspects of Spartan life would influence Plato’s communist beliefs that he laid out in The Republic a century later. Plato’s communist views in turn helped lay a framework for Marx and modern communism.

Suffice it to say that most of us would find Spartan (and Platonic) communism quite abhorrent with its breeding programs and such. I am not focusing on this communism to defend it, but rather because it is an interesting part of the story.

When Persia came calling in 480 BC, they brought anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million soldiers with them. From the start, the Greek armies were far outnumbered, and even more so as its cities defected to the other side.

The Greeks found themselves in a desperate position and started looking for a place to make a stand. The place they chose to make this stand was a small mountain pass called Thermopylae.

The Greek navy was powerful, and they believed that if they could hold their own on water, they would force Persia to have to move through this tight pass on land if it wanted to invade the main part of Greece. They also knew that the pass could be somewhat defended with just a few soldiers.

When the Persians arrived at Thermopylae, they found it defended by three hundred elite Spartan warriors. Those Spartans knew they would never leave that mountain alive. In fact, following Spartan custom, they were chosen for that battle because they all were already fathers and their bloodlines would not end on that battlefield.

The Persians initially engaged with their normal strategy: they tried to buy the Spartans off. When that failed, they sent word to the king of Sparta (Leonidas) and demanded that he surrender his weapons.

His response? Molon Labe (come and take them).

Over the next three days, all three hundred Spartans died one by one. But as they did, they managed to kill 20,000 Persians. It is one of the most remarkable feats of battle in any period of history.

And while the Persians won that battle, the Greeks rallied at the bravery of the Spartans, and though hopelessly outmanned, drove Persia out of Greece for good within a few years.

I really like that story partly because I see those three hundred Spartans as defending more than a mountain pass or even Greece. No, they were actually defending the start of western civilization.

They did not know it, but they were defending Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, all of whom would soon be born and would function as pillars for western thought. Make no mistake about it; if Greece had lost the war, western civilization would be very different today (if it would even exist at all).

Of course, that is just the start of the impact of that battle. Those Spartans were also indirectly defending America because almost certainly, America would not exist, at least in the way we know it. American political philosophy traces back to those Greeks too.

And to take things further, if my theory of personal identity is true, you and I would not exist either.

In other words, those brave, communist Spartans were indirectly defending you and me.

That is an interesting thought.

What is the origin of morality, and what right does anyone have to make moral judgments?

Until fairly recently (a few centuries ago), the answers to these questions were generally settled in western civilization. From Aristotle to Cicero to Aquinas and to even modernist atheists like David Hume, most believed that moral law is universal, originating from a place outside of any person or experience. In other words, they believed in a version of natural law.

This by the way is quite shocking. It is not surprising that Aquinas believed in natural law. But Hume? Hume was a radical empiricist who believed that there was virtually nothing that could be known outside of experience. He would be radical even by postmodern standards. And yet, he believed in instinctive morality. That Hume was sort of a natural law guy is an indication of just how dominant the natural law theory has been for the past 2,500 years.

By the way, if you believe in natural law, you have an argument for a deity. If natural law exists, arguably, it has to come from somewhere. Or, to put it another way, someone or something had to create it. And if someone had to create it, that someone is God, because only a deity has the power to create a universal. This argument from morality is still widely used in debates between religious apologists and atheists today.

So what changed a few centuries ago? In short, natural law went out of fashion and new theories of morality were introduced. Here are perhaps the three most prevalent:

1. Moral code can be developed by reason alone. Kant was the major influence in this area, and his work was undeniably impressive. He, for example, developed a somewhat complicated form of the Golden Rule using just reason. I am not going to spend any time talking about this here, but it is worth studying. On the surface, living by the Kantian moral code would be admirable, but unfortunately, few can really understand it. (Put me in the group that really does not understand it, and I have spent a great deal of time trying.)
2. Moral code is based on a utilitarian formula. John Stuart Mill was probably the biggest influence in utilitarianism, a theory in which people should make moral judgments based on the predicted outcomes. In other words, the action that creates the best result for the most people is the most moral. Modern political libertarians in particular are heavily influenced by this kind of thought.
3. Morality is relative and developed through experience. This approach is postmodern and is based on the idea that a culture will develop its own moral rules based on whatever works. For example, a culture may decide that murder is wrong because a culture where people murder each other just does not work very well. So, in the end, moral rules are a result of the conditioning of a culture and applicable only to that culture.

So why does the dominant theory of natural law, once a settled idea, now have this kind of competition? Are there weaknesses in the idea of natural law? To me, clearly, the answer is yes. I believe in natural law myself, but here are two nagging problems that I see.

Problem 1: At best, natural law is non-specific and leads to relativistic applications.

If you take the position that a deity puts the capacity for making moral decisions inside humans at birth, you are forced to try to answer the question of why that real-life decision-making is far from easy and the right answers are often elusive (if even obtainable in the first place). What good is a natural law that is useless except in the most obvious situations?

By way of example, proponents of natural law say that murder is clearly wrong, but they cannot agree on what constitutes murder. How about killing in a war situation? Or turning off life support for a patient in a vegetative state? How about thorny self-defense situations? What about abortion when the mother’s life is at stake? You simply cannot answer these questions with natural law alone.

Of course, I could also bring up similar situations regarding lying or stealing. A big problem with natural law is that it just is not specific enough to provide help for a great deal of what constitutes real life.

Even worse, two different people with two different life experiences can come to two very different moral judgments about the exact same situation. In other words, while natural law may be universal, the application of natural law cannot escape relativism.

The common pragmatic solution to these kinds of problems is civic law (government and a court system). This solution is nothing new; Cicero was one of the first to discuss the distinction between civic and moral law. However, civic law is an admission that natural law is insufficient in itself.

Problem 2: Natural law changes over time. There are clear changes in the perception (at least) of natural law over time and across cultures.

Proponents of natural law have to deal with the reality that moral ideas have changed over time, sometimes for the worse, but very often for the better.

For example, it would be hard to argue that we have not progressed in a positive way in regard to the value of human life. The barbarism of the Bible’s Old Testament or Homer is distasteful to our modern sensibilities because we now know better.

Or, of course, we could point to slavery. Western civilization widely accepted slavery through the late 1600s until the Quakers began to mobilize against it. The Greeks loved slavery as did the Romans. The Bible condones slavery, even if it did attempt to make the practice a bit less barbaric. The early church fathers such as Augustine had their chance to speak against it but failed to do so.

I am not here to bash on the past or all the people that were wrong about slavery. But they were indeed wrong. Every religion including Christianity was wrong.

And that begs a question: was natural law itself wrong? Or, do we have a different version of natural law today?

It is easy to see why moral relativists like the example of slavery…

These are real and significant problems. However, I am not saying that the alternative theories about the origins of morality do not have problems; they all have them too.

It is interesting to me that natural law is making a sort of comeback. You are starting to hear more about it, especially within the realm of Christianity. I have a theory about that, but first want to talk about how Christianity deals with natural law.

First, I want to dispose of the Judeo-Christian term you often hear in regards to this topic. I intentionally do not use that term because it is just a political invention of the last century as the United States grappled with the atrocities that Jews suffered in WWII. Today, it has become a sort of trump card that represents a so-called superior moral ethic resulting from a combination of Jewish and Christian ethics. It is a loaded term and useless.

Original Judaism and Christianity moral laws may have heavily overlapped but do not really go together. Any objective observer has to come to the conclusion that the morality of the Bible’s OT and NT are quite different. As I have written before, the teaching of Jesus was radical in its scope in areas such as love, charity, and forgiveness, and that kind of teaching made a huge impact on ethics. So, what I am about to speak about is specific to Christianity and the NT, not Judaism and the OT.

Essentially, the Christian twist on natural law is sometimes referred to as common grace, which Christians believe is an inherited knowledge of morality that every human possesses. Obviously, in real life, both Christians and non-Christians have moral failures, and Christians believe this is due to the fact that we all have a sin nature which prevents us from doing what we know we should do.

When Christians talk about the influence of Christian ethics, things get complicated. In general, they are referring to natural law/common grace given to everyone, but in addition to that, the teachings of the Bible (particularly the NT). The latter is an additional moral code specific to Christianity, and in many cases, only possible for Christians to really understand and practice.

To me, it is fairly obvious that Christian ethics have improved civilization. That Christianity had moral blindspots both in teaching and practice from the very beginning is undeniable, but it is also hard to deny that early Christian ethics was at worst a significant improvement when compared to other cultures of that time. So, while I am not going to sweep the problems under the rug, I am not going to bash Christianity either.

However, Christianity is not exempt from the two problems of natural law I mentioned above. So, let’s touch on that a bit.

How do Christians deal with my first problem with natural law regarding its vagueness and relativistic application? For starters, they take the same pragmatic approach as everyone else: government and courts. In addition, they establish church authority to help individuals make difficult decisions and also believe in the concept of an indwelling Holy Spirit that guides Christians through everyday moral dilemmas.

As people say, the proof is in the pudding. Whether this approach has actually worked throughout history is debatable.

As far as the second problem goes (my assertion that natural law seems to change over time), Christianity really struggles in that it is forced to either defend the indefensible or try to explain why a natural law from an unchanging God is changing. That is true even if you ignore the enormous inconsistency between the ethics of the OT and NT.

For example, it is very hard to explain today how almost an entire religion could be wrong about slavery for 1,500 years, and especially hard to explain why the Bible itself condones slavery. The same can be said for the various brutalities that Christians have inflicted on each other and other religions throughout history. I certainly know and understand the Christian explanations for these kinds of things, but find them unconvincing. There is certainly a lot about Christianity that I have no interest in defending.

In closing, let me say that problems withstanding, I think the concept of natural law is beneficial. It is especially useful because it creates a common ground between people even of different religions. For example, I believe abortion is a moral judgment, or more specifically, I believe that at least some of the time, abortion is an immoral choice. It is quite easy to discuss the issue from a natural law rather than Christian perspective, and in fact, make more productive arguments from that perspective.

I mentioned that natural law is making a comeback, even in Christianity. In my opinion, the current Christianity morality crisis is driving Christians to fall back to the concept of natural law from the lofty ideal of a superior Christian ethic.

Perhaps it is sad that this retreat is necessary. On the other hand, perhaps this renewed focus on natural law is not a bad thing. Natural law has always been a common ground that crosses all religions and cultures. We could use more common ground these days.

Pardon me as I meader from one unfinished discussion to another. I know I have loose ends lying around that I need to tie up eventually.

Today is the start of a new series, and this will be a lengthy discussion too. The intersection of philosophy and Christianity is one of my little passions.

To kick this off, western civilization has essentially been built on three gigantic pillars:

• Greek culture from roughly 800 BCE (starting with Homer) and ending when the empire fell around 31 BCE.
• Judaism and its two more powerful stepchildren (Islam and Christianity).
• Science and related disciplines.

I included science on this list because it really does belong there, but it is important to recognize that it is a newcomer. While science certainly was important all the way back to ancient Greece, it did not become a powerful force in culture until just a few centuries ago with the arrival of modernism. For that reason, I want to put it aside for a while and focus on the other older two pillars.

It is really hard to put in words just how vast the influence of ancient Greece has been on the arc of humanity over the past 2,500 years. No other similar civilization over a similar time period has even come close to achieving what the Greeks achieved in fields such as mathematics, geometry, philosophy, theater, literature, music, science, and medicine.

Yes, the Greeks had some strange ideas. But it is jaw-dropping just how much they discovered that still is considered useful today. For example, Democritus somehow came up with the concept of atoms in the 5th century BCE. During the same time, Pythagoras used ratios to discover the modern western musical scale and the famous geometry formula that bears his name.

And without the use of the sophisticated tools we have today, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth to within just a few miles. Forget about the myth that all the world believed the earth to be flat until Galileo. The Greeks knew better than that 2,000 years before Galileo.

Indeed we could talk about Greek accomplishments for a long, long time.

The greatest contribution of the Greeks was in the realm of how to think, a discipline we call philosophy. But don’t get the idea that the Greeks were unified on philosophy. Greek philosophers cycled through an immense variety of ideas that have been debated ever since. Eventually, the culmination of Greek philosophy occurred between 300-500 BCE with Plato/Socrates and Aristotle, but those men did not agree among themselves as much as you would think either.

If you are like me, you probably know something of those three names from your high school or college education, but may need a refresher. It is important to understand a bit about these men if you want to follow where I am going, so let me give a bit of background.

First, you might wonder why I lump Plato and Socrates together. The simple reason is that it is virtually impossible to separate their teaching. Socrates was an older friend/mentor to Plato. He wrote nothing on his own, and in fact, almost everything we know of him was recorded by Plato. Supposedly, Socrates had long conversations (dialogues) with other influential philosophers and pupils, and Plato recorded them word for word at some point later on in what we now know as the Socratic dialogues.

In reality, of course, it is not possible to remember any conversation word for word even a week later, and that is doubly true for these kinds of complex and technical conversations. For that reason, it is sort of taken for granted that Plato was at least sometimes using these Socratic dialogues as a literary device to speak for himself. In fact, I rather doubt that some of those dialogues ever really happened at all. And while Plato probably initially largely agreed with Socrates, as he aged, his views diverged more and more.

Socrates was an interesting guy. He lived a fairly humble life, was generally respected in the community, and usually hung out with a small circle of pupils and philosophers. Over time, the leaders of Athens began to see him as a threat, and eventually, he was executed by hemlock. Plato presents him as a gentle soul, patient to a fault, humble, and unflinchingly moral. By the way, Socrates was also excruciatingly funny. To this day, you can read some of these dialogues and laugh hysterically. (I recommend Euthydemus in particular if you want to laugh.)

Plato and Socrates generally believed in a god of some sort and strove to live up to that god’s idealistic standards. To them, this present world is a poor mirage of a better world, an ideal world, and a more real world. Plato and Socrates largely focused on improving the inner person, a priori knowledge (knowledge of universals existing outside experience), and a somewhat mystical, supernatural world of ideals (which are often referred to as “forms” in Platonic philosophy).

Aristotle lived after Plato, and in many respects, saw the world quite differently. When you think of iron-clad logical/rational thinking (the kind of thinking that advances science and medicine), you probably have in mind many of the methods and tools that Aristotle gave us. Aristotle was not focused on some idealistic world; he was rather squarely focused on the world in which we live. He was more empirical in his epistemology, meaning that he valued the knowledge that comes from real experience.

While Aristotle was influential in science and medicine, he actually wrote extensively on ethics and morality. His writing on ethics for example is arguably more extensive and systemized than the ethics of the Bible. He also believed in a god; specifically, he believed that the world in which we live is full of things that are clearly designed, and a designed world requires a designer. To this day, Christian apologists regularly use Aristotle’s thinking in this area (often called the teleological argument) in debates with atheists.

A main point that I want you to take away from this discussion so far is that Plato/Socrates and Aristotle essentially staked out a battleground for philosophical debate that has never ended. Today’s debates such as rationalism vs empiricism, materialism vs idealism, and nominalism vs realism trace back to Plato and Aristotle. The tenets of virtually every philosopher since then can be traced back to one or the other. Their shadows are just immense.

And, as we shall see, this battleground over the same issues has existed within Christianity as well.

Now, let’s talk briefly about the origin of Christianity.

Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, which was a culture and religion that existed during the same period as ancient Greece. It is actually very easy to view the Old Testament Judaism of the Bible as a parallel culture to Greece, especially if you have spent time reading Greek literature. For example, the animal sacrifices you find in Leviticus are eerily similar to those Homer detailed in the Illiad.

The same is true for the wars and the recorded deeds of warriors. II Samuel 23, for example, contains an interesting discussion of warriors that is very reminiscent of Homer. There is, without doubt, a difference in style. Whoever he actually was, Homer was a master of style and far more talented than the OT authors. His writing was more dramatic and colorful, but the general content is quite similar in many ways.

In general, while Greeks were busy setting a stage for Western civilization to flourish, early Jewish culture contributed little in the arena of art, literature, science, and other such disciplines. It was a much smaller culture and population that in its best days controlled an empire a tiny fraction of the size of the Greeks.

However, the Jewish contribution would be in the area of religion, and it is hard to overstate just how significant that contribution would be. Judaism may have been small-time compared to the Greeks, but Jewish religion has had a remarkable run and has been extremely influential all the way through modern history. More significantly, it was the precursor of Christianity and Islam, two powerful forces that would eventually overshadow it and dominate western history every since.

I think we have now done enough setup to actually start talking about the intersections of Christianity and Greek philosophy.

To give you an idea of the ground we need to cover, I could start by saying that there are secularists who see Jesus as a copycat of Socrates, used by Greek-influenced Jews as a way to export Jewish culture to the world. In fact, there are many similarities between the two men. Both had a relatively humble station in life and both lived a modest life, surrounded by a small group of disciples. Neither wrote their wisdom down and what we know about their lives is limited to what their disciples recorded of them. Both used the dialectic method as a teaching tool. Both got into trouble with powerful politicians and both were unjustly executed. Both had the power to escape execution but willingly chose to submit to death. Both had an enormous influence that only grew exponentially after their time on earth.

I do not put much stock in this copycat claim because of a general lack of proof. Similarities do not prove much of anything, and furthermore, the general similarities shared by Socrates and Jesus probably were shared by many other religious leaders of that time. The Buddha for example lived a similar life.

But as we shall see, the Socrates/Jesus similarity is only the beginning of a broader question. It is worth examining what Greek philosophy made its way into what would become Christian theology and even into the Bible itself. Those are questions for next time.