One of the key areas in the A2 Development of Christian Thought is the question of Christianity’s contribution to society’s culture and values. Not only to what extent it has contributed but also to what extent it should contribute. These are two different questions. Many secularists would agree that it has contributed significantly to society’s culture and values in the past but disagree that it should continue to do so in the future.

Christopher Dawson whose theories I examine below said “a culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying culture, however prosperous it may appear externally” – he called this the ‘central conviction’ of all his work, and he argues most forcefully for it in The Crisis of Western Education. Joseph Ratzinger also points to the religious connotations of the word ‘culture’, which has its roots in the word ‘cultus’ meaning cultivation or worship. He argues that the West is undergoing an attempt to divorce culture from cultus which leads to dangerous forms of rationality which devalue the human person.

To what extent is Christianity a significant contributor to society’s culture and values? To what extent should it be?

“The great world cultures, like China and India and Islam, are classical examples of a moral order. Each of them possesses or possessed a sacred law and system of values on which its social life was founded.

The Western world today no longer possesses this principle of moral order. It has become so deeply secularised that it no longer recognises any common system of spiritual values, while its philosophers have tended to isolate the moral concept from its cultural context and have attempted to create an abstract subjective system of pure ethics. If this were all, we should be forced to conclude that modern Western society does not possess a civilisation, but only a technological order resting on a moral vacuum.

But Western society inherits the tradition of one of the greatest of the civilisations in the world, and in so far as one recognises this bond we are still civilised and it is still possible to restore moral order by a return to the spiritual principles on which our Christian civilisation was based. “

Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education

Earlier in this work, Dawson defines civilisation as a super culture – and argues that it is inherent within such super cultures to have their organising principles in sacred laws and values.

Here he argues that if we follow secularising forces where they inevitably lead, we will not have a civilisation at all, as we will lack an organising system of values, and we will have or already do have, a technological order resting on a moral vacuum.

Such an order will rapidly either destroy itself or die out. Such an order is unsustainable. ‘Instrumental reason’ as Charles Taylor calls it, is the method of dominant reasoning in such a secular age, and such reasoning can be easily hijacked by the merely powerful in pursuit of their own ends.

Interestingly, Dawkins himself, scourge of believers, seems almost sympathetic to such a viewpoint in many of his writings. He talks of the comfort he feels on entering an old church and he seems to be aware of the magnitude of what was lost. However, he wants to keep such musings at a purely aesthetic level, for his world view cannot allow Christian culture to have any intellectual punch. For him, it is a lot of stories you tell to children to comfort them when they are scared or sad. He invests in the simplistic view that religion is something to be outgrown, left behind like the childhood toys of the human race, and here he follows to a degree, Freud and Marx.

So today’s philosophy AS exam was interesting…

The questions were in the three general areas that I indicated:

Ancient Greek Philosophy

Religious Experience

Ontological Argument

Of course, I did not completely nail the titles. But a question on Aristotle’s view of reality, a question on conversion experiences and a question on Kant’s view of the ontological argument was close enough.

In fact, Plato’s view of reality would have made a good contrast to Aristotle’s in the first question, and an understanding of psychological explanations of religious experience would have helped to critique conversion experience.

Ethics is next, and I hope to post some more exam tips and revision chunks on this soon.

Earlier I shared a video I tried to make with advice for tomorrow’s AS exam. I say tried to make because my 4 year old daughter tried to steal the show…

Exam Advice

Anyway, My key advice was from the examiner’s report last year –

1. In the AO1 don’t just write everything you know/all the scholars you know on the general topic – knowledge must relate to the question
2. In the AO2 don’t do sweeping generalisation or resort to assertions without justification – use arguments
3. Perhaps be ready for questions on the topics that didn’t come up last year, so that would mean:

• Ancient Greek Philosophical influences (Plato and Aristotle)
• Religious Experience
• Ontological Argument
• Teleological Argument

I then had a stab at three possible questions along these lines:

1. ‘Plato’s rationalism is stronger than Aristotle’s empiricism’ Discuss.
2. Critically evaluate physiological and psychological challenges to religious experience
3. To what extent does Anselm’s ontological argument survive the criticisms of Gaunilo?

I have no idea if these will come up but they are as good a guess as any. That first one is quite hard though, perhaps too hard.

Some thoughts: Rationalism clearly has the strength of being capable of producing logically valid arguments which are true by virtue of their own inherent logic rather than relying on possibly flawed sense-data. On the other hand, there are many areas where we rely on empirical data for knowledge, for instance whenever we make predictions about the natural world such as weather forecasts. The fact that such forecasts may be unreliable does not mean people cease to use them.

Physiological and psychological challenges: Dennett, Dawkins et al argue that these are the best explanations for religious experience. Don’t forget that there are many flaws in reductive materialism, the worldview that is usually behind such challenges. For instance, it is self-defeating, as it if it is true, people are not actually free to hold any beliefs whatever, as they are just complex lumps of meat. In that case, on materialism’s own account, there is no reason why I should take the materialists views as any more valid than anyone else’s!

Anselm I will leave to you to have a think about…

Good luck tomorrow!

Now we understand why God desires that death, why the Father gives His Only-Begotten Son to it. He desires the salvation of man, i.e., that the destruction of death shall not be an act of His power (“Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He shall presently give Me more than twelve legions of angels?” Matthew 26:53), not a violence, be it even a saving one, but an act of that love, freedom and free dedication to God for which He created man. For any other salvation would have been in opposition to the nature of man, and, therefore, not a real salvation. Hence the necessity of the Incarnation and the necessity of that Divine death. In Christ, man restores obedience and love. In Him, man overcomes sin and evil. It was essential that death be not only destroyed by God, but overcome and trampled down in human nature itself, by man and through man. “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.” (I Corinthians 15:21)

Update 17/03/17: I wrote this post last year before the EU referendum in response to a post in which someone tried to frame the choice as egoism on one side (Brexit) and selflessness on the Remain side. I thought this rather shallow.

At his site Peter Baron has interestingly looked at the politics of Brexit through the lens of moral egoism.

I thought it would be interesting to take a virtue ethics view of the EU question. Virtue ethics makes eudaimonia, roughly translated as flourishing, a key element of moral decision-making. Equally it emphasises character over duty or consequences. It is not surprising that most of the arguments for Remain or Leave are framed in terms of utility or consequence; basically what are the economic losses or gains if we stay or go, because utilitarianism is the default public discourse mode of moral decision making. And this is so probably because of the materialism and relativism of secular modernity.

It is my view that virtue ethics can do much to augment and invigorate such deracinated modes of moral reasoning. And taking a virtue ethics approach to the EU referendum seems refreshing. Where are the great narratives on both sides? Rabbi Sacks argues here that they are missing from this debate:

“The debate has been great and vigorous but what is it turning on? How much money will this cost us; will it make it easier or harder to control immigration.

“These matters … are important but in the long run the fact is that we have historical narratives that should have been spoken about and haven’t.

“One is the historical narrative of England, that extraordinary history that runs all the way through from Shakespeare to Elgar to Blake. The second is the other narrative, of Europe in the 20th Century, two world wars, tens of millions of deaths and the original vision … the people who really passionately believed and believe in Europe were people who came through the Second World War and vowed let us create a Europe where this can never happen again.

“There are two very powerful historical narratives, one for leaving, one for staying, but nobody has tried to do that and it tells you that it is very difficult to speak in these memory terms and narrative terms at all.”

If we try to speak in these narrative terms we will be attempting a telos-orientated interpretation of events. We will be rejecting Utilitarian modes of thought, but more than that, we will be rejecting the simplistic liberal reactions to Brexit that frame it in terms of egoism on the Leave side and superior moral insight on the Remain side. Here is the smug arrogance of the liberal elites at its worst.