3.2—Ockham & Descartes (13 min video)

Transcript

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Welcome back. In this lecture we’re going to take a look at two very early philosophers. Now I should give a quick disclaimer on the philosophers. Since we’re looking at the Enlightenment, we’re looking at how ideas change from the philosophers, we’re going to be starting to focus on some of the more negative aspects of them. The deal with these philosophers, especially the two we’re looking at today, William of Ockham and René Descartes, is that they both have incredible and genius things to say that are worth looking at.

And I’ll try to point out some of those along the way, but that’s just not really the point of our focus. In fact, anyone can look at these philosophers, even the ones we’re looking at later, like Immanuel Kant, for example, and you can find brilliant problems that they wrestled with and came up with workable solutions for.

But we’re taking a look at some of the big issues that changed the manner of thinking. That’s kind of what we’re looking at. We’re trying to trace this whole trajectory of thought in the Enlightenment. Another quick thing I’ll say before we unpack these two characters is the fact that philosophy, which literally means the love of wisdom in Greek, was often seen in Christendom as being the handmaiden to theology.

So you began with scriptures, you began with the study of who God was and is and always will be, and then you also looked at philosophy, kind of this unpacking of human reason in the world based upon Revelation.

So Thomas Aquinas, for example, would be a great example of someone who was able to synthesize the theology of the scriptures with what is observable in the natural world.

Did a brilliant job on it and his massive work, the Summa Theologica, which by the way actually went unfinished. Well we’re gonna start out with actually a near contemporary, somebody came a little bit after Aquinas. It came from that time period, it’s William of Ockham, and we’re really beginning to look at a medieval character here because his dates are 1285 to 1349. Comes long, long before any of the other thinkers we’re gonna look at. He was an English friar of the Franciscan order and William of Ockham is most often associated with the ideas of nominalism and this is really what I want to point out to you about William of Ockham at least for in terms of understanding the Enlightenment.

Nominalism began with the idea that God is absolutely free meaning that God is absolutely not dependent or we might say contingent upon anyone else.

He can do do whatever he wants to do because he’s God. He’s transcendent. He’s above and beyond his creation because he made it. He’s above and beyond all space. He’s above and beyond all time. He made and created those things. So prior to Genesis 1 and 1 where it says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” there was only God. There wasn’t a space that God was at. There wasn’t a time that God was in. Well, that’s again just for a moment. So far, so good. That part of nominalism is fine. That’s in agreement with the rest of Christianity. But the interesting thing about nominalism and interesting that William of Ockham actually talked about was he said that because God is so free, we must emphasize his freedom or perhaps even his divine will above all of his other attributes.

What that means is that God is more free than he is holy. God is more free than he is good. God is more free than he is even immutable, which means he cannot change. So at least on a philosophical level, that implies that God could actually change because he’s free to change. He could suddenly not be good anymore. He could suddenly not be holy anymore. He could suddenly not be the God of love anymore. That’s a big deal. We actually would argue that God’s character, his entire character of being holy, of being good, of being loving, of being the truth itself, that those things are just a part of who he is.

Those things do not change. He’s infinite in all of those things and infinity cannot be changed. Anyway, what this did was it meant that for William of Ockham, there really were no universal or absolute truths. There was only God’s freedom, there was only God’s will. That’s why, for example, William of Ockham kind of caused a bit of a fight in the church when he suggested that perhaps God could have incarnated himself as a donkey or as some other kind of animal.

He didn’t really have to be a man. But of course when we look at the gospel message we would say, “No, in order for him to represent all of mankind and because man is made in God’s image to begin with, it makes sense that he was actually a man. So William of Ockham trying to do a good thing, trying to emphasize God’s will, ends up in a strange way limiting God. Because suddenly we can no longer entirely depend upon God being truly good or upon God being truly holy or actually being able to fulfill his actual promises.

What this does in terms of mankind, in terms of the Enlightenment is it provides a very simple basis for focusing on the will of man.

Because after all, if man is made in God’s image and if his chief attribute is the will, his freedom to do what he wants to do, then man’s going to be able to recognize that in some way. And this also goes with William Whatcom’s idea that there really are no universal ideas. There’s really only our experiences. This is where we really get into the Enlightenment especially. The The second character that I want to take a look at is René Descartes. Descartes was a famous Frenchman. His dates are 1596 to 1650. He came from the noble, wealthy class of France. He was a genius. He was a childhood prodigy. He was so advanced in languages and in mathematics and in his understanding of the written word that he went off to college at the age of eight.

Initially it was a Jesuit college, eventually went on to the University of Poitiers where he earned a degree in law. But probably one of his greatest passions was mathematics. In fact, it was Descartes who is seen as the inventor of coordinate geometry, the whole X, Y axis. I mean, you’ve probably studied in your mathematics classes or especially in algebra. In fact, his work in coordinate geometry really advanced not only geometry, but also algebra as well. It was Descartes also who toyed around with the idea of trying to find mathematical formulae, kind of these mathematical constructs or ideas that could explain everything in the universe.

As a result, he tended to kind of move away from some of the medieval ideas and had kind of the enlightenment type of thinking that would come after him of let’s look to the future, let’s see what we can discover based solely upon reason. Now Descartes, like William of Ockham, you have to understand this, they were both believers. As far as I can tell, they both actually probably had a saving faith. They both actually accepted the scriptures as true. William of Ockham tended to make some crazy statements about things, we already looked at that. Descartes himself emphasized reason in the human mind, often above revelation, but he still had an incredible respect for the scriptures and actually accepted them as truth.

What his intent was, or what his passion was, was to use just human logic, just human reason, to try to demonstrate that God actually exists.

He He said this about the mind and about our own thoughts. He said, “Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.” In other words, it’s the mind and thinking where we really come into contact with truth, with the divine. This is a common concept or idea that we’re going to see in the Enlightenment thinkers. He also argued that because of this, you have to discover truth through experience and through investigation. And so he was a great champion of the scientific method, which was a great thing. His most famous work is called The Discourse on Method. He published it in the year 1637. And it really began with the idea of doubt. He kind of wondered, how is it that we can actually know that we exist? What if this is all just some kind of dream? What if this all is just existing in my head, that is, this world and all the people that I know and all the people that I talk to and what I ate for breakfast and what I watched last night?

What if that all just exists in my head? Or maybe even in somebody else’s head? Maybe I’m not actually a person. Maybe I’m not actually real. And so he realized that everything that he could experience, everything he could sense, he realized it could actually be doubted. And then he kind of struck upon something brilliant. He recognized that even though he could doubt everything around himself, he could not doubt his ability to doubt. He said that because I actually am doubting, if I even exist or if what’s around me is actually real, that proves that I’m actually thinking, which proves that I actually exist. His famous line is “Ka jyuto ergo sum,” I think therefore I am. He then argued from there that if he thinks, then someone must have made him to think, and someone must have created thoughts themselves, and that someone must actually be God.

Now his argument for that is much more complex than what I just told you in a few seconds. I encourage you when you’re of the appropriate age that you read the Discourse on Method, you might want to dive into it even now, but it is rather dense, difficult stuff.

Anyway, what’s curious about this is he’s proving the existence of God based solely upon reason. It’s fascinating and there’s actually a whole field of apologetics that looks at this and it does have its value. But my point is, is that he’s moving away from Revelation. That is a change in the history of the church. Besides elevating the mind and so forth, he recognized that all ideas should ultimately be kind of reduced to different formula, especially if that could actually be possible.

He believed if it was ever found, it would be found through the mathematics as I mentioned to you earlier and he believed that all of these things would actually lead to the truth.

But of course, as I mentioned to you earlier as well, he said that this thing was often based upon doubt. I’ll leave you with this quote. Actually, I’ll give you two quotes of his because they’re both worthwhile. One of his most famous mottos besides the one I already gave you, “Cogito ergo sum,” is “Dubium sapientiae initiam,” which means that doubt is the beginning of wisdom. I just let that sink in, maybe compare that to the Proverbs where it says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, which implies a belief in God first of all, and a belief that he’s holy and we’re not. That’s why there would be a fear there. That’s the beginning of wisdom. But Descartes says something very different. He says doubt, the ability to question things, that’s the origin of wisdom. He said, “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it’s necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” In other words, kind of empty yourself and then discover truth through reason and the fact that you can think. It’s very different than what Chesterton had to say about these ideas in which he said that the one thing that we were always really meant to doubt was ourselves.

Not our existence, but our own motives. Not whether or not God is actually at work within us, but whether or not we’re actually doing things for the right reasons because of sin. So think about those things. And that’s something to really wrestle with as we begin to unpack more of these Enlightenment era thinkers.