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How Critical Race Theory Operates And How To Defeat It

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Today we continue our conversation with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In the three previous essays we defined CRT, discussed its twelve central beliefs, and documented its immediate sources. My intention at the beginning of this series was to devote an essay to each chapter of the book and end the series with a Christian assessment of CRT. However, as I grappled with the fourth chapter [“The Deep Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory” (pp. 159-220)], I realized that I could not summarize this chapter in a way that would benefit my target audience. It deals with the thought of Karl Marx (1818-83), G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), and J.J. Rousseau (1712-78)—some of the most obscure thinkers and difficult concepts in the history of thought. Compounding the chapter’s difficulty, Lindsay leaves many of these difficult concepts underdeveloped.

Also, Lindsay’s goal and mine differ. He wishes to demonstrate that CRT is Marxist to its core. This goal is important to him because advocates of CRT are subversive and slippery; they will deny that they are really Marxists. He wants to make their denials completely implausible. My goals for the series are (1) to get clear on what CRT is, what it believes, how it operates, and how to respond to it, and (2) subject it to a theological critique. I think my first three essays go a long way toward accomplishing the first goal. I believe I can skip reference to chapter four without detriment to the series. In this essay we will examine CRT’s agenda for taking over institutions and develop strategies for defeating it.

How Critical Race Theory Operates

What does CRT do? According to Lindsay, it does only one thing: it cranks out more Critical Race Theorists (p. 224). In classrooms, government agencies, boardrooms, media, and in churches, it carries on its own form of evangelism. It prefers soft persuasion but is not above using coercion and extortion. It assumes that once enough Critical Race Theorists hold positions of power, a new era of “racial justice” will dawn.

Lindsay describes several CRT strategies:

(1) “Divide, Scoop Up and Conquer.” An entity—a university, academic department, or government agency—will in good faith or in hopes of warding off charges of racism, invite a CRT activist to join the team. Some supposedly “racist” event will occur. The CRT activist will generalize the event as a sign of “systemic racism.” Those who do not immediately jump on the CRT bandwagon will be labeled racists and silenced. The organization has been effectively commandeered by CRT. Its original purpose—education, profit, witness to the gospel—will be replaced by its new purpose: creating more Critical Race Theorists.

(2) CRT focuses almost entirely on “systems” of power. When they cannot point to a specific incident of injustice or abuse attributable to racism, they point to group disparities and cry systemic racism. Such systems are vague and diffuse. It is impossible to understand how they work to produce a particular incident of injustice. If ordinary people don’t get it, Critical Race Theorists “accuse them of not understanding systemic thought, or, more simply of being stupid and intellectually unsophisticated” (p. 233). Lindsay replies that “when a Critical Race Theory calls something “systemic,” what it really means is that it has an all-encompassing Marxian conspiracy theory about that thing” (p. 233).

(3) “The Critical Inversion of Language.” Critical Race Theories adopt “highly specialized and contextual definitions of otherwise familiar words. In fact, it inverts the meaning of everyday words” (pp. 240-41). Such words as racism, justice, antiracism, democracy, belonging, diversity, inclusion, and many others are used to mean the opposite of what they mean in ordinary usage. Once these words have been enshrined in policy by naive policy makers, CRT activists begin to exploit their specialized meanings to “gain institutional and personal power” (p. 245). Anyone who objects is accused of racism.

(4) Theory trumps fact. One of CRT’s twelve beliefs declares that “Racism is the ordinary and permanent state of society.” Whatever word, state of affairs, characteristic, or practice that Critical Race Theorists think hinders their quest for power arises from and embodies racism. Defending yourself against a charge of racism is racist. Asking for evidence of racism to support CRT’s assertions is racist. CRT wisdom in a nutshell: “Of course you would claim to be innocent. That is what guilty people do.” Or, as Ibram X Kendi observes, “Denial is the heartbeat of racism” (How to Be an Antiracist, p. 9; quoted in Lindsay, p. 247). In interactions with CRT, it’s always a “lose-lose” proposition (p. 250).

How to Defeat CRT

In his last chapter Lindsay lays out a strategy for defeating the cynical and manipulative Critical Race Theorists (“What Can We Do About Critical Race Theory,” pp.253-86).

(1) Stop assuming that CRT has good intentions. It does not. “It has only one intention: seize as much institutional authority as possible to raise enough “racial consciousness” to establish a Dictatorship of the Antiracists that will enforce Critical Race Theory on everybody” (p. 254). Lindsay advises, “Do not attempt to compromise with Critical Race Theorists. Just tell them no” (p. 254). If you try to meet their demands halfway or admit any truth to their Theory, you will “lose every single time” (p. 255).

(2) Do not play CRT’s language games. Make them define their terms. And don’t get into a fine-grained debate about the meaning of words. Instead, call their definitions “absurd,” “Orwellian,” or “conspiratorial,” because that is what they are. Don’t set foot in their linguistic world where nothing is as it seems. It’s a word game only insiders can play. Each distortion supports and is supported by all the other distortions. Your only options are to submit to the “superior” gnosis of the CRT specialist or to exit the game into the real world. Let them know you are not playing their game.

(3) “Stop being afraid of the consequences of speaking up and pushing back” (p. 255). There are only two alternatives: total surrender or total resistance. Until they gain total control, their power rests in their threat to label you a racist, which makes sense only in their made-up world.

(4) At an institutional level, Critical Race Theorists must not be promoted to positions of power and influence and must be fired from those positions if they occupy them. Lindsay makes this point clearly:

“They must be fired, forced to resign, voted out of office, sued, defunded, and limited in their ability to abuse power for Critical means by both law and institutional policy…The thing about people who abuse their power is they abuse their power and don’t tend to care too much what anyone thinks of that so long as it doesn’t impact their ability to keep abusing their power” (pp. 258-59).

(5) At the cultural level, we must energetically assert common sense, beauty, objective truth, unambiguous facts, and our common humanity against group-based, identity politics. Most people will reject divisive and race conscious identity politics as soon as they understand what it is. For most Americans, the liberal order of individual freedom, work, individual competence, individual rights, and equality under law, still seems superior to socialist theories of utopia. Assert these truths without compromise.

Next time: Is CRT compatible with Christian faith?

The Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory

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Today we continue our review and dialogue with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In the two previous essays we defined and set forth CRT’s twelve central beliefs. In this essay, we will turn to the story of its origins. In Chapter Three, Lindsay uncovers “The Proximate Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory” (pp. 87-158). The sheer number of authors, books, papers, and different movements covered in this long chapter is overwhelming. I will do my best to summarize it concisely, accurately and fairly. But I cannot help but oversimplify. There is another complicating factor I must mention. Attempting to discover and describe the origins of any historical phenomenon is fraught with many dangers. Among the most obvious are (1) the past is too complicated to describe completely and (2) historians, despite their best efforts, harbor their own prejudices.

The Two Main Sources

According to Lindsay, “Critical Social Justice Theories, including Critical Race Theory, arise from a deliberate fusion of Critical Theory (neo-Marxism) with postmodern Theory” (p. 89; emphasis original). This fusion was accomplished in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in academia. At a minimum we need to understand the essential features of three things: Critical Theory, postmodernism, and the process of their fusion.

Critical Theory, Or Neo-Marxism

Karl Marx (1818-83) claimed to have discovered the true science of history. History began with the communism of tribal society and passed through two other forms of society until it arrived at capitalism. The capitalist system will inevitably reach a crisis point wherein the exploited workers will revolt and take over the means of production to institute socialism. Socialism will naturally transform itself into communism similar in form to tribal communism but now worldwide. That was the theory.

But by the 1910s and 1920s it had become apparent that something was wrong with Marx’s theory. Capitalism had raised the standard of living in Europe to the point that workers no longer felt themselves miserable and exploited. The workers had adopted what Hungarian Marxist György Lukács (1885-1971) called a “false consciousness,” that is, they thought they were free and happy when in truth they were enslaved and miserable. The neo-Marxists realized that the socialist revolution was not inevitable. They held on to the Marxist belief that capitalism was unstable, but experience had taught them its advance toward socialism was but one possibility. It could also slide into fascism. Hence, the neo-Marxists developed an agenda of “consciousness raising;” that is, a program to convinced people who are relatively satisfied with their condition that they were oppressed in ways of which they were not conscious.  Marxist theorist Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) named this new approach to revolution “Critical Theory” in his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.”

For the process of consciousness raising to succeed, the “cultural hegemony” of capitalist society must be challenged. Marxists must pay attention to the places in culture where identity, consciousness, and values are formed. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) named five cultural institutions that Marxists need to infiltrate to cultivate a “counter-hegemony,” that is, an alternative narrative favorable to Marxist revolution: religion, family, education, media, and law. Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), in the 1950s and 1960s, despaired of awakening the satisfied American middle class to revolutionary consciousness. He looked instead to urban blacks, the unemployed, and university students to form the vanguard of a revolutionary coalition. In his books, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Counterrevolution and Revolt, An Essay on Liberation, and One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse outlines an ideological strategy for completing the Gramscian project of creating a Marxian consciousness as a challenge to the dominant culture. Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire (1921-97), in his highly influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, packages Critical Theory in a form designed to liberate students from their “false consciousness” and create in them a revolutionary consciousness.

Critical Social Justice theories, including CRT, incorporated neo-Marxism’s critique of capitalism and liberalism, its theory of false consciousness, its strategies of institutional infiltration and consciousness raising, and its ideal of communism—all while re-centering its social critique on race.

Postmodern Theory

Whereas Marxism and neo-Marxism critique the values and knowledge claims of liberal capitalist society in view of their own truth-claims about a truly just society (Communism), postmodernism debunks all truth claims and grand narratives—including Marxist—as expressions of power. They are in effect post-Marxist as well as postmodern. The most famous postmodern thinker Michel Foucault (1926-84) underlined the ideological nature of all knowledge claims by using the term “knowledge-power” whenever speaking about assertions of truth (p. 127).

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) considered language a prison from which we cannot escape into truth. Words refer only to other words and can never take us to real things. For postmodern thought, linguistic expressions, culture, social order, and law are “constructions” created consciously or unconsciously to acquire or retain power. To the unknowing, these constructions have the appearance of truth, fact, and reality. Hence the task of postmodern criticism is to unmask, to “deconstruct,” these deceptive structures. All of them! Those trained to think in postmodern terms see a power play, a conspiracy, in every assertion of truth, value, or fact. In Lindsay’s words, “It isn’t clear that postmodernists had much interest in doing anything further than taking things apart and playing in the wreckage, however” (p. 132).

At this point we are left asking how CRT can benefit by incorporating postmodernism. For in postmodernism, CRT’s central concepts—“race,” “systemic racism,” “Blackness,” “Whiteness,” “justice,” “equity” “diversity,” “inclusion,” etc.—are just as much power constructions as are rights, free markets, merit, and other liberal values, facts, and truth claims. They too must be deconstructed to reveal cynical masks for power, which would empty CRT’s rhetoric of its moral force.

Fusing Neo-Marxism and Postmodernism

Lindsay takes Kemberlé Crenshaw’s 1991 paper “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” to be a pivotal text in the creation of CRT. As Crenshaw sees it, postmodernism’s assertion that all group identities, values, and cultures are socially constructed—a view called antiessentialism or constructivism—can be useful to critical social justice movements such as CRT. Incorporating postmodernism into CRT enables it to expose and deconstruct hidden systemic racism. But Crenshaw also sees the need for marginalized groups to maintain a strong sense of group identity. She says, “At this point in history, a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate and destroy it” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 139).

The dominant group (white people) intends the categories “black,” “woman,” “queer,” etc. to be negative and disempowering. Crenshaw welcomes the postmodern insight that these labels are pure power constructs with no basis in the essence of the people to whom they are attached. Nevertheless, these categories possess a sort of reality that must be acknowledged. Crenshaw observes, “But to say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance in the world” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 137). Identity categories “are imposed, thus made meaningful and real, by systemic power and those who hold and wield it” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, pp. 139-40; emphasis original).

In this way, Crenshaw can embrace postmodern constructivism as useful in critiquing the dominant group’s justifications for maintaining its privileges without giving up the reality of marginalized group identities useful in the quest for liberation. There is a huge difference, says Crenshaw, between saying “I am a person who happens to be black” and saying “I am Black.” To say “I am Black” accepts the imposed identity but transforms it into “an anchor of subjectivity…a positive discourse of self-identification’ (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 138). Think of the way certain gay people have embraced the insult “queer” and turned it into “Queer,” a proud assertion of identity. For Critical Race Theory, Black identity is a “matter of lived experience no one has standing to challenge” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 137).

According to Lindsay, Crenshaw’s contribution to CRT was to figure out a way to incorporate the advantages of postmodern constructivism while making the category of race-identity immune from deconstruction. The assertion “I am Black” is irrefutable. Thanks to Crenshaw and others, CRT is Critical and Constructivist, that is, neo-Marxist and postmodern. It can exempt itself from the critique it makes of others. Liberal accusations of racism in CRT or postmodern attempts to deconstruct it will be interpreted as manifestations of systemic racism and white supremacy.

What Do Critical Race Theorists Believe?

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Today we continue our review and dialogue with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In Chapter Two, Lindsay lays out CRT’s core beliefs under twelve headings. The precise wording is not as important as the picture they paint of the CRT worldview and agenda.

The Twelve-Part CRT Creed

Racism is the ordinary and permanent state of society. The whole system of society has been constructed to benefit white people and disadvantage people of color. In examining any situation “The question [under CRT] is not ‘did racism take place”? but ‘how did racism manifest in that situation” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, p. 7; quoted on p. 32). Racism is so woven into the system that it cannot be rooted out apart from a complete transformation of society.

White people do not act to benefit people of color unless it is in their interest. This thesis was popularized by Dereck Bell in 1970 and is known as the “Interest-Convergence Thesis.” Under this thesis, school desegregation (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954) and other civil rights “advances” were enacted primarily to serve the purposes of whites. The system cannot act otherwise than to benefit those in charge of the system. The effect of this thesis is to cast a pall of suspicion over every interaction between whites and non-whites no matter how innocent it appears to those not sensitized.

Material conditions determine one’s character, values, and choices. The problems that beset minoritized communities today—crime, poverty, illiteracy, etc.— are the legacy of past racism. They are not the result of character flaws.

Race is socially constructed—not biologically given—and imposed by white people to maintain white dominance. Though CRT denies “race essentialism,” it nevertheless affirms that imposed race categories create a “structurally real” racial identity in a way that determines the lived reality and identity of minoritized groups.

Social structures—law, customs, policies, values—determine the positions of different groups within the power dynamics of a society. Lindsay explains, “While there is nothing [biologically] essential to being black or white, there is something structurally essential to being black or white in a white-dominant system” (p. 47; emphasis added). That is to say, “Whiteness” and “Blackness,” though features of an artificially constructed social order, determine the feelings, place, and identity of every black or white individual within this order as unavoidably as if they were written into the biology of each. As Lindsay points out, this belief grounds the logic of identity politics.

People of color—the oppressed, the minoritized—possess privileged access to knowledge white people do not have. One’s oppressed position within the power structure of society “brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism” not possessed by whites (Delgado and Stefancic, p. 9; quoted in Lindsay, p. 49). This positionality within the system gives minorities a “unique voice of color” that “is deemed to be authoritative and beyond contradiction” (p. 49). It is impossible for a white person to disagree with CRT, because CRT claims to be the authoritative source for the authentic “voice of color.”

CRT privileges storytelling, narrative-weaving, and counterstorytelling above rational argument and fact-based reasoning. CRT uses fictional stories, allegories, and parables to create narrative realities that “challenge prevailing narratives, stereotypes, and expectations…about race” (p. 52). Though such a storytelling approach can be persuasive to a receptive audience, it can be abused. Lindsay observes, “As a result of leaning upon storytelling…Critical Race Theory often presents claims of racism in situations where the evidence doesn’t support it and then considers requests for evidence to be evidence of further racism” (p. 56).

Standard narratives of American history are written from the perspective of the dominant group and must be subverted and revised to favor minority perspectives. Quoting Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: “Revisionist history examines America’s historical record, replacing comforting majoritarian interpretations of events with ones that square more accurately with minorities’ experiences. It also offers evidence, sometimes suppressed, in that very record, to support those interpretations” (Delgado and Stefancic, p. 20; Lindsay, p. 57). This belief is clearly a subcategory of the one above. CRT constructs revised historical narratives that subvert the legitimating narratives of the dominant (white) order whether they are plausible by the standard methods developed by professional historians or not.

Such liberal principles as color blindness, individual rights, equality under law, economic freedom, freedom of speech, reinforce and perpetuate the status quo of white supremacy. In their critique of liberalism, Sensoy and DiAngelo assert that “The logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism…[keeps] the marginalized in their place by obscuring the larger structural systems of inequality. In other words, it fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow” (Is Every one Really Free? p 5; quoted in Lindsay, p. 60). Liberalism provides excuses for white people to benefit from the racist system with a clear conscience and constructs convenient explanations for why inequality among racial groups persists. As long as the liberal order remains, white people will never freely give up their privileges to create racial equity. Hence CRT favors socialism above liberalism.

In CRT, whiteness is a kind of property—equivalent to “private property” in Marxism—which must be abolished if true equality is to be achieved. Whiteness—a rather diffuse concept—is the sum total of the exclusive privileges white people give to themselves along with their justifications and the mechanisms for their preservation. Whiteness is held as a kind of property justified in law by a right of exclusive use. Whiteness must be abolished. According to Lindsay,

“Critical Race Theory regards ‘whiteness as a property’ because it enables them to transition the Communist Revolution out of the economic sphere and into the racial-cultural sphere—with race made the central construct for understanding inequality. To become ‘less white’ and to ‘disrupt whiteness’ is to attempt to fulfill Marx’s Communist vision of the abolition of bourgeois private property in a new domain to which the American culture is more sensitive” (p. 67).

Intersectionality: people within oppressed groups must not be identified primarily as unique individuals but as members of intersecting groups. A person may be black and female or black, male, and gay, etc. and be oppressed from more than one angle. The point of intersectionality is to open the eyes of all oppressed groups—so different in many respects—to their common identity as oppressed and generate a common front against systemic oppression.

Antiracism is the practical strategy for implementing CRT. The first thing to get clear is that “antiracism” does not mean color blindness or race neutrality. It means replacing policies that promote inequality with policies that institute equity among groups. Ibram X Kendi proposes enacting a constitutional amendment establishing a Department of Antiracism. He describes its work as being:

…preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure that they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas (Interview with Politico Magazine, 2019).

The Department of Antiracism would be independent of Executive, Judicial, and Legislative oversight and would be staffed by “formally trained experts on racism” (Interview with Politico Magazine, 2019).

Kendi says elsewhere,

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination (How to Be an Antiracist, p. 19; quoted in Lindsay, p. 75).

Two-Sentence Summary

CRT’s belief system can be summarized in three words:

White America stinks!

Summarizing its agenda takes thirteen words:

Burn it to the ground and build a Socialist order ruled by Antiracists.

What Is “Critical Race Theory”?

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Today I will begin a series of essays in review and dialogue with James Lindsay’s book Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis (Orlando, FL: New Discourses, 2022). This book addresses matters of great importance to the church, Christian higher education, and American society. As readers of this blog know, I try to stay away from partisan political issues. My central aim has always been to help Christian believers, individually and corporately, to think clearly about their faith and remain true to the original, biblical faith in confusing times. In so far as I touch on politically controversial issues, I do so only in service to this central aim.

My Political Philosophy

You would not believe me if I claimed to have no political philosophy. So, let me tell you where I am coming from. I believe that the American constitutional order, along with the original Bill of Rights (and most of the later Amendments) set up in 1787/90, has been a great blessing to the church and the world. I believe the liberal order thus instituted—limited government, separation of powers, the rule of law, representative democracy, individual rights, personal, religious and economic freedom, equality before the law, etc.—is the best system of government ever devised. I am instinctively suspicious of any movement toward state control of private spaces in the name of public good. I reject all dreams of humanly constructed utopias—anarchist, communist or theocratic.

Overview

As is obvious from his book’s title, Lindsay argues that Critical Race Theory (CRT) should be understood as “race Marxism;” that is, CRT is a Marxist program that makes race instead of economic class “the central construct for understanding inequality” (p. 5) in society. We cannot grasp CRT’s convoluted vocabulary, methods and aims, asserts Lindsay, unless we first understand it as a Marxist program. Lindsay supports this charge with quotes from the original writings of the movement and a thorough examination of its historical antecedents. The book contains six chapters and 297 pages:

  • 1. Defining Critical Race Theory
  • 2. What Critical Race Theory Believes
  • 3. The Proximate Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory
  • 4. The Deep Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory
  • 5. Critical Race Praxis—How Critical Race Theory Operates
  • 6. What Can We Do About Critical Race Theory

Defining Critical Race Theory

CRT is a belief system and an activist program, originally centered in the nation’s elite law schools (in the 1970s and 1980s) but now present in almost every college and university in America. It asserts the belief that American society is, and always has been, constructed on a foundation of white supremacy. America is racist to the core. CRT insists that the system of government that I praised above—the American constitutional order, limited government, separation of powers, the rule of law, representative democracy, individual rights, personal, religious and economic freedom, equality before the law—puts people of color at a disadvantage and was designed from the beginning with this end in mind. It cannot be fixed from within but must be replaced with a new socialist order empowered to commandeer and reallocate economic and social goods to create equity among racial groups.

Lindsay quotes CRT insiders Richard Delgado and Jean Stefrancic (p. 26):

What is Critical Race Theory? The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power…Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” (From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, NYU Press, 2001).

Lindsay provides his outsider definition of CRT:

Critical Race Theory is a revolutionary and broadly neo-Marxist mode of activism based upon the belief that the fundamental organizing principle of society is “systemic racism,” which it asserts was created and is maintained by white people in order to preserve a social structure that provides a multitude of unjust advantages over people of color, especially blacks (p. 16, bold and italics original).

Academic Interest Only?

I hope you will stick with me as I take you through Lindsay’s argument. He argues that CRT is not just another kooky academic theory. It is of a piece with the Marxist utopian visions that can be implemented only by totalitarian regimes, which have murdered hundreds of millions only to fail time and again. CRT must not be mistaken for liberalism or progressivism. It is intolerant and regressive. It is not compatible with Christianity or belief in God. It is a replacement for God and Christ. It is not truly antiracist but racist. Indeed, Lindsay finds the “Iron Law of Woke Projection” to be true every time: Of whatever crime or sin CRT accuses its opponents, you can be sure that it is guilty of the same.

Galileo, What Hast Thou Wrought?

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Today we continue our study of how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of intelligent people. The previous essay explained why no one before 1500 could have comprehended the modern dichotomy between the external appearances of such things as the male and female bodies and their internal reality. At the conclusion of that essay, I promised that in the next part “we will see how the architects of the scientific revolution—Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, et al.—destroyed confidence in the reality of forms and souls and replaced them with atoms, space, and machines. The appearances no longer reveal the reality of things. Creation is emptied of spiritual reality, meaning, purpose, moral law, and beauty, all of which are transferred to the inner subjective world of the human mind.” We begin that saga with Galileo Galilei.

Galileo Versus Aristotle

Students of nature before Galileo assumed that the way things appear to us reveals something about their inner reality and that the inner reality of things manifests itself truly in their external appearances. The meaning, purpose, beauty, moral law, and value we experience in our minds also exists in nature. The goal of Aristotelian science was understanding how all these qualities are embedded in the natures of the things themselves. However, by the time Galileo (1564-1642) came to maturity in the early seventeenth century, such thinkers as Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) were already complaining that the doctrine of forms contributed nothing to our empirical understanding of things. Mysterious forms, whether they are real or not, cannot be clearly thought and have no value for making predictions, discovering laws, and creating technology. And for reasons I do not understand, achieving these goals had become the driving force of the emerging scientific revolution.

Galileo and the Mathematization of Nature

Galileo believed that applying mathematics to nature was the only way to achieve his practical goals. Numbers and mathematical operations are clear and simple, and when we see the value of a mathematical expression or equation, we become certain of its truth. To understand nature, argued Galileo, we should set aside questions about its mysterious inner nature, the ways it appears to us, and the way it makes us feel; these are irrelevant to achieving the goals of the new science. We will then be free to work out the mathematical laws of nature’s movements and transformations. At last, we can understand nature as clearly as we understand mathematics!

Unforeseen and Unintended Consequences

To modern ears, Galileo’s philosophy of science and his revisions to the scientific method sound familiar and innocent. Whatever Galileo’s intentions, however, his innovations produced a profound moral and religious revolution. For by limiting science to knowledge that can be expressed in mathematics, Galileo, Descartes, et al, broke decisively (1) with the traditional belief that things reveal their inner reality in their outward appearances, and (2) with the corresponding belief that the inner worlds of things in nature are intelligible and mindlike in a way similar to the inner world of the human mind.

The Distinction Between Primary and Secondary Qualities

Perhaps Galileo and other pioneers of the scientific revolution could have narrowed science to what can be understood in mathematical terms without postulating an alternative to Aristotle’s intelligible forms as the cause of the way things appear to us. But they did not exercise such restraint. Instead, they replaced Aristotle’s inner forms and souls with imperceptible material atoms or corpuscles, which possess only mathematically measurable properties: shape, movement, mass, velocity, etc. In ways Galileo and Descartes cannot explain, these material particles cause us to experience the world in a human way. By distinguishing primary qualities (material, mechanical, and mathematical) from secondary qualities (psychological, organic, and qualitative), they drove a wedge between the way human beings experience the world and the world as it is apart from human perception. The only bridge between the two is mathematics. Listen to Galileo, Descartes, and Locke drive this point home:

“To excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow or rapid movements. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds. The latter, I believe, are nothing more than names when separated from living beings, just as tickling and titillation are nothing but names in the absence of such things as noses and armpits” (The Assayer, 1623).

“The properties in external objects to which we apply terms light, color, smell, taste, sound, heat and cold—as well as other tactile qualities…are so far as we can see, simply various dispositions in the shapes, sizes, positions, and movements of their parts which make them able to set up various kinds of motions in our nerves which are required to produce all the various sensations in the soul” (Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy, 1644; Quoted in Cottingham, A Descartes Dictionary, p. 149).

“These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colors, sounds, tastes, etc. These I call secondary qualities”(John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1698, II. 8)

Oh Galileo! What Hast Thou Wrought?

Galileo convinced the world that the variety and obscurity of the natural order could be reduced to the clarity and certainty of simple mathematical equations. Modern advances in understanding the mathematical laws of nature and the explosion of technological innovation rely on this supposition. But at what cost?  God’s glorious creation has fallen silent, emptied of spiritual reality, meaning, depth, mystery, purpose, moral law, and beauty, all of which have been transferred to the inner subjective world of the human mind. But how can we continue believing in the reality of meaning, depth, mystery, purpose, moral law, and beauty, if we think of them as existing only in the human psyche? They seem to be hanging in midair with no confirmation in common experience or foundation in an enduring reality.

Aristotle and all the ancients believed in the likeness and harmony between the human world and the natural world. This belief seemed reasonable, obvious even, because humans are part of the natural world. Galileo, Descartes and others split them apart, dividing the qualities we experience into the objective (real) and subjective (psychological) spheres. Human beings became islands of mind in a sea of mindless matter. It was inevitable that this division would become intolerable…that the human mind and soul would be reunited to nature by reducing them to something simpler. Sooner or later some thinker would do to the human soul what Galileo had done to the solar system.

And that “someone” was John Locke.

Who Are You My God? Is There A Way to Know?

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How do you decide between Christianity and some other form of theism? In the first sixteen instilments of this study we’ve limited ourselves to reasoning from what is given always and everywhere to reason. We reasoned from the appearances of the natural world given through the senses and from the mind’s knowledge of itself gained by internal reflection to the ultimate explanation for the existence and operations of these things. Using these sources, we confronted three decision points where we had to make a choice between two explanations for our experience: (1) matter or mind, (2) an impersonal or a personal God, and (3) God as a part of nature or God as wholly transcending nature. The cumulative argument of the series so far amounts to this: believing in a personal God that wholly transcends nature can be based on a reasonable judgment and a responsible decision. I do not claim to have proved this conclusion beyond all doubt. I have not presented every argument for God’s existence or attempted to refute every argument against it. But I have presented what I believe to be the reasoning mind’s own drive toward God as the only explanation that does it justice. At this point, I must let the evidence speak for itself and move on.

The Fourth Decision Point

What is the first step one must take to transition from mere theism to Christian faith? As I admitted in previous posts, I don’t think there is only one path from unbelief to Christian faith. Different people make the transition differently. The order I wish to propose here makes sense to me because it addresses some concerns of our age and considers the questions our culture asks of Christians. If you can think of a better one, by all means follow it.

How does the Christian message enter the sphere of our reason so that we can assess its meaning and make a judgment about its truth? Clearly it is not given everywhere and always with nature. Nor is Christianity built into the structure of our minds. Hence Christianity is not merely a metaphysical explanation of the workings of nature or our minds. Nor can its coherence and truth can be judged only by its conformity with these perennially present structures. From where then does the information on which we can base a rational judgment and a responsible decision about Christianity come? Is there another source for truth relevant to the question of God and the appropriate human relationship to God? Or must our knowledge of God be derived solely from structures perennially available to us in nature or mind? (Deism insists on this limit.)

Two other options come to mind: (1) divine illumination or inspiration of every individual or (2) a unique event in history, a record of which is passed on in language to those not present at the event. I do not wish to deny the possibility or even the actual event of illumination or inspiration of individuals. After all, Saul of Tarsus (Paul the Apostle) claims to have experienced the resurrected Jesus Christ in a unique vision or revelation. And others since his time right up until today have made similar claims and experienced similar conversions. But I don’t think this is the norm. Today and for centuries past, most people meet the events on which Christianity is based in the form of language, that is, reports of the founding events that claim to derive from those who actually witnessed them.

Before we look at those reports, I want us to think about history as a source of information. By “history” I do not mean history in its proper sense. The “history” of historians is a reconstructed narrative of events based on a critical assessment of the sources that claim to have access to that event. For the historian, neither events themselves nor reports of events are “history” in the technical sense. But at this point I want to use the word history loosely to mean the entire fabric of past events. Natural scientists assume that past natural events and processes—though unique in their particular time and place and order— operated by the same physical laws as natural events and processes operate today. The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 was a unique natural event, but we assume that it can be explained by same physical laws that operate everywhere and at all times in the universe. In a sense, each natural event is new and unique; it cannot be repeated exactly. But these new and unique natural events do not reveal new natural laws. Only when natural events are brought into relationship with human and divine actions do they acquire the potential to reveal anything beyond natural law. (I will show how this works later.)

For the rest of this essay, I will use the term “history” to designate the complex flow of human actions and passions and interactions through time. In human history we see something we do not see in natural history, genuine novelty fueled by human freedom. I recognize that human beings’ free decisions are set in the context of certain stable features of human biology, psychology, and sociology and in relation to natural history. But I deny that human history can be explained wholly by such deterministic factors.  Writing, art, architecture, cities, poetry, and philosophy are in part products of human freedom and not merely determinations of the laws of nature. Because of the activity of human freedom, history is the realm of the new and unique. And the most significant of those new and unique things is the unique personhood of each individual human being. There never was and there never will be another Julius Caesar, Paul the Apostle, Abraham Lincoln, or you.

Why are other people are fascinating to us? Even though each person possesses a unique identity we cannot share, we can see in their stories realizations of possibilities, free actions, and sufferings which could be ours. Each person’s life history is a revelation of something humanity could be, of what you and I could be. Hence history may embody and the study of history may reveal something the study of nature and of the mind cannot get at: the possibilities of the human spirit both to create and become something that transcends the possibilities of the ordinary course of nature. Only in human history is such a revelation possible. It cannot be known abstractly because it is the product of freedom. It can be known only in its actual realization, and since the actual realization of personal identity happens in human individuals, we can come to know it only through personal revelation expressed in their acts, creations, and language. To know persons from the past we must rely on their stories recorded and passed down.

What if one individual realized the possibilities of human nature and freedom so completely and dramatically that this person’s life became the definitive revelation of human destiny and of divine identity? This is exactly what Christianity claims for Jesus Christ.

Next week we will begin our examination of the reports through which we get in contact with the story of Jesus Christ.