Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Body

Don’t heed Worldly Philosophies which are vain deceit

The Power of an Idea

For me it started with Isaiah Berlin.

Granted, Alexander Herzen, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Hayek and others – Tolstoy, Mill, Camus, Orwell to name a few – all contributed to varying degrees.

But it was definitely Berlin who first captivated me with the at once powerful, transformative, compelling, and sometimes destructive, power of ideas.

In his seminal essay 1958 Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin reminded us of the German poet Heinrich Heine’s 1834 warning that the power of ideas is not to be underestimated: “philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization”.

Heine was principally alluding to the 40 years of bloodshed and murder in the name of progress that had followed France’s 1789 revolution, but it is a warning the 21st century would do well to heed.

Ideas are everywhere.

They underpin social, economic and political acts.

They provide inspiration for art, literature and films, which, for future generations, become a lens through which they can observe their ancestors, discovering what they thought, felt, liked, disliked; how they lived.

In the context of a human condition characterised by heterogeneity, the proliferation of ideas can contribute towards celebrating those individual differences, while at the same time offering means of co-operation: shared traditions, cultures and nationalities all arise from shared ideas.

And yet ideas have also been the direct cause of horrible human crimes for millennia.

Or rather, one idea in particular: the notion that all answers to the central questions of human life – individual, spiritual, political or cultural – can be reduced to one single answer, an irrefutable and universal standard.

It is this very idea which underpins the extremist ideology of the Islamic State – that pretends to know what is right for every single individual – and which presently offers such a visible and direct challenge to the Western liberal paradigm.

Edward Andrews, The Power of Ideas, www.theresa.org

What people think; what they believe about reality, about how we know what we know, about how we should live our lives, becomes, not just important, but absolutely paramount.

Three areas of Philosophy

Metaphysics - Our ideas about reality.

Is reality knowable?

What is included in reality?

Epistemology - How do we know what we know.

What does it mean to know something?

How are we sure we do indeed know it?

Ethics - How we should live our lives.

One idea in particular has caused a multitude of problems for us: The idea of Secular Humanism.

Or, if you prefer, Methodological Naturalism, Materialism, the idea that ONLY what we can see, taste, touch, and feel is real.

The apologetic used to defend this worldview is called Evolution, and it was pushed to the forefront by two individuals.

Charles Lyell

A Scottish geologist who introduced the idea of Uniformitarianism, or the idea that natural processes in earth’s history happened at a uniform rate.

“The present is the key to the past.”

He presented this idea in his book, Principles of Geology.

Before this most scientists subscribed to the idea of Catastrophism, or the Biblical idea that there was a flood in our recent past that rearranged the geology of the Earth’s surface in one catastrophic event.

Lyell saw himself as “the spiritual saviour of geology, freeing the science from the old dispensation of Moses.”

Charles Darwin

An English Naturalist, geologist, and biologist, popularized the idea of Evolutionary Biology, the idea that all of life arose ultimately from inanimate material.

He presented his ideas in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.

Interestingly, this was a rather old idea, but Darwin popularized it due to the respectable, scientific slant he put on it.

Originally he attended Cambridge university to become an Anglican clergyman

In this period of his life he did not doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible.

On board the HMS Beagle Darwin would quote the Bible as an authority on morality, and saw in nature evidences of creation

By his return, Darwin was critical of of the Bible as history, and wondered why all religions should not be equally valid

He was introduced to Charles Lyell’s book Principles of Geology on board and had read it during the voyage

He began to question the account of scripture based on the “scientific evidences” that, when interpreted by Lyell, contradicted the historical creation account presented to us in the Bible

Five years after his book was published, he was awarded Britain’s highest scientific honor, and by 1870 most scientist believed that evolution occurred.

Every belief system leads us to inevitable conclusions about the nature of reality, how we know what we know, and how we should live our lives.

Let’s see where this belief system would inevitably lead.

The Logical Conclusions of Materialism

Metaphysics

There are no supernatural events or entities at all.

Only material, natural objects are thought to exist

Reality is self-creating, self-guiding, and self-evolving, leading to everything getting bigger, better, stronger, faster.

Everything is gradually improving

There is no intelligent design built into existence and no direction to evolution, and so no purpose to life can be assumed.

No more value can be placed on a human life as it can a fern, or a bacteria.

Epistemology

There are no supernatural elements to existence, and no non-material elements either

This means information, and ideas would have no place here

Natural laws, numbers, laws of logic, would have no place in our universe

So if no laws, then we have chaos.

But that’s not what we observe

Because we sprang into existence by a cosmic accident, a rapid expansion of space-time, why can we trust in the overall stability and reliability of our observations of it?

In other words, just because I observe gravity acting a certain way today, how do I know it’s going to do that tomorrow?

How do I know gravity operates the same way on earth as it does a billion light years away?

How can I trust my own thought processes?

My brain is simply molecules-in-motion, How can I consistently rely on a something that was thrown together at random?

How am I able to prove inconclusively that my memories are recollections of actual events.

Brains are able to manufacture them?

Brains can alter them substantially.

Ethics

Where do we get the idea of morality from?

How do we determine right and wrong?

Why “ought” I do certain things, and why “ought I not” do other things?

Why should I place such a premium on human life?

We’re a bag of chemicals mixing together in water.

What’s that worth?

And who cares anyway?

We’re born into a purposeless and meaningless reality, we live out our purposeless and meaningless lives, and we die.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . .

Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains.

Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ozymandias, by Percy B. Shelley

Even if we accomplish great things in our lifetimes, so what?

They’ll eventually be forgotten by everyone

If I help people and improve their lives, what meaning does that provide me or them?

If I hurt people and take advantage of people, so what?