Can we trust anything? You've been living in a dream world, Neo. It's an age-old fear that the world you think you know is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Whether it's Neo in The Matrix or Truman from The Truman Show, a lot of strange things have been happening. There's the lingering doubt that nothing is what it seems. You were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. And in the modern West, we can trace these doubts back to one man, Rene Descartes, and his famous I think, therefore I am.
SPEAKER_01If you look at Descartes' thought experiment that led to him saying, I think, therefore I am, it's kind of crafted as a certitude of one's own existence over against even one's own body. Me in here, world out there. So there's a fundamental loneliness to the modern outlook.
SPEAKER_00The reason why we feel estranged in the world, the reason why we have a meaning crisis, the reason why we are atomized as these individuals with a profound sense of alienation is that we have tended to take the path that Descartes took in the 17th century. It is the most famous line in philosophy, and it has ruined everything. I'm talking about René Descartes' I think, therefore I am, and I'm only exaggerating a tiny little bit. Rene Descartes was born in 1596. He was a French mathematician and philosopher. He was also a gentleman soldier in the religious wars that were tearing Europe apart, and I think that is very significant. In his career, he was actually on both the Protestant side to begin with and then the Catholic side. But what he is most famous for is retreating from that conflict to try to find certainty. Imagine a teenager where mom and dad are fighting. Catholics and Protestants are in conflict. And what does this new member of the household do? They usually go into their room, slam the door, and they say, Shut up, Mum and Dad, I wish I was never born. I'm gonna do things my way from now on. And that is what Rene Descartes did philosophically. On one winter's day in 1619, he retreated into a warm room, a stove, really. He shut the door and he wanted to doubt everything he possibly could in order to get to certainty. Later on, he tells us his thinking. In Discourse on Method, he said his first precept was never to accept anything for true, which I did not clearly know to be such. Mum and dad are fighting, the Protestants and the Catholics are fighting. The people with the holy books say they know things, but they conflict with one another. So what is actually true? I need to stop listening to the holy books and the holy men, and I'm to retreat into myself if I am ever to find a sure footing in this world. Now he didn't want to stay a skeptic, he wanted to build up knowledge again from that core. So he said his goal was to conduct my thoughts in such order that by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, doubt everything, get back to the core, which for him was the thinking individual, and from there, little by little build up a vision of the world, but only if the world could be ascertained by my method of doubt. For about a thousand years prior to Descartes, the European idea of truth was to receive truth from outside yourself and to trust ultimate reality, that ultimate reality is good, is true, and that I can have confidence in that ultimate reality. The word confidence in Latin is confide, with faith. And confidence was a faith-filled enterprise for faithful Europeans until Descartes. But perhaps we shouldn't blame Descartes. After all, mum and dad were fighting the Catholics and the Protestants. Luther, you'll remember, is wanting to refound our confidence on faith in Christ. And the Roman Church, he thought, had undermined faith in God and put other barriers in your way to the confidence that we ought to have. And so the Protestants and the Catholics fight it out, and you can understand why the teenage son of Mum and Dad, when they're fighting, slams the door, shuts himself in his room, says, I wish I was never born, and tries to start again on his own two feet. But this was a profound mistake. The reason why we feel estranged in the world, estranged from any notion of God or purpose or freedom or goodness or beauty or truth or love, the reason why we have a meaning crisis, the reason why we are atomized as these individuals with a profound sense of alienation in this world, is that we have tended to take the path that Descartes took in the 17th century. Here's what he did. He started with himself. For a thousand years earlier in Europe, they had started with God. Descartes says, no, I'm going to start with me. And there's a world out there, but I'm just not sure about that world. My world is tearing apart. The religious wars of the 17th century were incredibly bloody. So, of course, one of the first things he's going to doubt is the holy books. He said, I entirely abandoned the study of letters, resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself, or else in the great book of the world. I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it. He's a young guy in his twenties, he's doing what young guys in their twenties do. He's going out for experience. But then he notices that you can doubt experiences. You can even doubt your sense perceptions. Have you ever put a stick into a river and seen the way that the stick seems to bend? You take the stick back out of the river and it's not bending. It's an optical illusion. Your senses can lie to you. So experience is not a sure source of confidence either. You can doubt religion, you can doubt your senses. You can also shrink your world further. You can even doubt reason. And you think, how could you doubt reason? Two plus three always equals five. But says Descartes, what if there's an evil demon continually making you go wrong and making you think two plus three equals four? If we're going to doubt, then let's be thoroughgoing doubters. And Descartes says, you can doubt even your own reason because maybe an evil genie is messing with you. And of course, this idea comes up again and again in philosophy. Maybe you're just a brain in a vat being prodded by a mad scientist. Maybe you are neo plugged into the matrix. Maybe you're a simulation. Maybe you're just a prompt in an AI world. If you're going to start on this method of doubt, it's pretty hard to put the brakes on. It's like trying to slide down the slippery dip only halfway. And Descartes was determined to go right to the bottom. He doubts religion, doubts his senses, doubts reason, and he shrinks things down and down, even doubting his body. You could doubt that you have four limbs, couldn't you? But it's your mind that's doubting the fact that you have four limbs. Your body is much less certain than your mind, according to Descartes. I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking. Here is a profound mind and body dualism, a divorce, really. And so what are we left with? We're not even just left with the individual Descartes. We're left with just a mind. The individual, doubting, thinking self is the beginning of all confidence, says Rene Descartes. Now, Descartes was the father of modern philosophy, and modernism is profoundly solipsistic. Do you know what solipsism is? It's the belief that perhaps I am the only thing in existence. A solipsist doubts the external world. They doubt that whatever is presented to their senses is real. Because if it's real, it's got to first present itself to my doubting mind. What is more real than the world is my doubting mind. And so the world is doubtful, but I am certain. The solipsist can also doubt all history. Bertrand Russell called this the five-minute hypothesis. You could hypothesize that all of reality came into existence five minutes ago. It's just that you were given memories of a universe that had existed before five minutes ago. You can actually doubt history. And if you begin with this solipsism, no one can ever argue you out of it. Because whatever evidence they bring to you, they bring it to your doubting mind. And your doubting mind is always more certain than the doubtful evidence that is brought to you. So you can doubt the world, you can doubt history, you can doubt other minds, obviously. How do I know that you're really a thinking thing, you might be a prompt? How do I know that you really have consciousness? I can doubt the world, I can doubt history, I can doubt other minds, I can doubt all of reality. That's what a solipsist does, and don't you notice that is what the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes, did. All of modernism is profoundly solipsistic. And so modernism gave rise to a mind-body split with the privileging in modernism of the mind. There is a knowledge versus belief split, with the modernist favoring knowledge. I know. You might believe things, but I know. There's also a split between science and faith. You have your faith, but I have science, and the modernist trusts in science. And there's a fact value divide. I have facts. You might have values, that's nice, that's sweet, that's quaint, but facts really win in this tug of war between fact and value. So the modernist privileges everything on the left hand side. Mind, knowledge, science, fact. The postmodernist might rebel against that, but they don't rebel enough. They just privilege the right hand side. Body, belief, faith, value. They take up either side of this tug of war, but the tug of war is a non-starter from the beginning. Rene Descartes set us on a fool's errand. And now modernity is entirely solipsistic. So we start with skeptical individuals who, through the success of the modern scientific method, we are now at least assured of the facts of science. So we believe in equations and reasons and doing good experimental science. But everything beyond that becomes dubious. And if anything wants to convince us of its reality, it must convince the doubting individual scientist. So is there such a thing as God? Well, God might exist if he plays by the rules of this solipsistic, individualist, scientific doubter. And so God becomes doubtful. But it's not just God. Beauty becomes doubtful, goodness becomes doubtful. Truth itself becomes doubtful. What place does freedom have on such a model? What place does consciousness have on such a model? These are the big questions we've been wrestling with since Descartes. He himself believed in God. The very next thing he did after proving that I think, therefore I am, was to try to prove God's existence through the ontological argument. But the doubting individual comes first, and then God must play by that game. But it's not just God who must jump through the hoops of scientism. Beauty must do so and is found wanting. Goodness must do so and is found wanting. Truth must do so and is found wanting. Freedom must do so and is found wanting. Consciousness must do so and is found wanting, which means that the whole enterprise has undermined itself. Now there's not even a mind within that circle of doubt. Because what is a mind on scientism? And so here we are. I don't think we're solipsists so much anymore. We're solidists, okay? Only what is solid, only what is scientifically testable is really real, and everything else is doubtful unless it plays by the game of materialism. It's not solipsism, it's solidism. And it inoculates the modern Westerner not only from belief in God, but also belief in beauty, goodness, truth, love, freedom, consciousness, everything. We had on the channel Professor Esther Lightcap Meek, and she is a merry philosopher, an epistemologist, a profound thinker who, from the age of 13, really wrestled with the question, not only can I believe in God, but can I believe in the external world at all? She was profoundly solipsistic, and she utterly blames Descartes.
SPEAKER_01If you look at Descartes' um thought experiment that led to him saying, I think, therefore I am, it it's kind of crafted as a solipsism, which is, you know, a certitude of one's own inexistence uh as over against even one's own body. So you know, there's a a fundamental loneliness to the modern to the modern outlook and a fundamental um rejection of external reality. And I actually um in recent years have found uh some kind of a response to that, and um I'm writing it in my next book, which is um developing an idea I've gotten from other philosophers about the philosophical formation that we all receive in the welcoming smile of mothers when we're infants, and obviously family also and friends. So um that book is gonna be called maybe being seen. So uh what the baby walks you know, drops into is the rapturous gaze of the loving mother and and um is formed philosophically in the most fundamental way in that, which means then that the fundamental paradigm, and this is a philosophical matter, but the like the fundamental existential experience is not me in here world out there, but me in communion with a in a welcome that was looking for me, and it's encounter, it's face to face, it's intimate, it's raptured, rapturous, and and uh it's epiphanic, meaning it's an epiphany. You know, reality shows up and says, Here you are, I've been looking for you. And then what happens also in that is I see myself being seen. And and there's a um a philosophical magic about that. I and I think that friends um continue this philosophical formation through your life. So so uh a kind of noticing regard um is essential to my sense of my being here. So we are made for communion with the real and we're born into it, and that should be the philosophical paradigm. That should be the philosophical paradigm. Why should it be Descartes? Why should it be knowledge as power? Actually, you know, if you exalt knowledge as power, the knowledge goes away and it becomes all about power, which is what we've got.
SPEAKER_00Isn't that so helpful from Esther Lightcap Meek? I highly recommend her books perhaps begin with longing to know. But she describes the problem with post-Christian modernity as a problem of utter loneliness, of atomization, and of solipsism. And it's inhuman. We are estranged from the natural world, we're even estranged from our own bodies, we are just these thinking individuals, proceeding by doubt and not faith. And yet, how do we come into the world? We did not come into the world as rational individuals. We came into this world as pre-rational, dependent, communal, needy persons in relationship who must receive life from the outside. And we only come to know ourselves in the rapturous gaze of the loving mother, as Esther Lightcap Meek puts it. The fundamental experience is not me in here and the world out there. The fundamental experience for all persons is communion with the real. We are not fundamentally Rodan's thinker like that. We are not fundamentally Vitruvian man. We are not fundamentally individual thinkers and doubters. We are weak, dependent, reliant trusters who are in communion with others, and that's how we have confidence in the world. Confide, with faith, we trust in others in order to know who we are, who they are, and what the world is. And of course, Esther Lightkapmeek is a Christian, and she believes that that communion with others goes all the way down. That behind and before this universe, there are persons in communion, that God comes first, that faith comes first, and that the second person of the Trinity became one of us in Christ and earthed that life of love and trust into our humanity, and we are called to be with Christ and in Christ, trusting in a source of life that has that positive regard for us. Just as the rapturous gaze of the mother greets the child, so the rapturous love of the Father in heaven is the context in which we are truly to be seen and to see, to be loved and to love, and in that communion we can finally know. In that communion we can finally trust and have confidence. It is not a coincidence that a pre-Christian view of the world sees reality as quite shadowy. Think of Plato's cave, unsure of whether he can really trust in his senses. It is not a coincidence that non-Christian philosophies, like in Buddhism, there is a veil of illusion. And our confidence in knowing reality as it really is is questionable. It is no coincidence that pre-Christian understandings of reality lack confidence, that many non-Christian views of reality lack confidence, and that post-Christian views of reality, like Descartes, also lack confidence. And these ideas keep coming back. Like Neo in The Matrix, like simulation theory, like prompt theory. It seems like before and apart from Christ, we are simply going to lack confidence. Because it's in Christ that we can truly trust that the reality that is out there has indeed anchored itself to our kind of life. The incarnation of Christ is the answer to our confidence crisis. And it doesn't just restore confidence in God, it restores confidence in beauty, truth, goodness, love, freedom, consciousness, restores confidence in ourselves, it restores confidence in the way forward in life, that it is not a method of doubt, but that it is a method of communion with others in interdependence and mutual trust. It's Jesus who really is the answer to the problems that Descartes throws up. So, did Descartes' I think, therefore I am ruin everything? Well, that might be an overstatement, but it is emblematic of everything that has gone wrong with modernity. In life, we do not begin with the doubting individual. We do begin with the trusting person in relationship. So it is with the child, so it should be in our philosophy. Turns out that beginning with self means you lose yourself. It turns out that beginning with this God, the God who pours out his life for humanity, in him, you find yourself again. All those theologians that Descartes was trying to overthrow, they had it right. It is far better to begin with faith. That is how we actually tick, and that's the method that actually accords with what God is like. You can totally found your life on trust in Jesus. That turns out to be the rock solid foundation. All other ground is sinking sand. If you want to explore more, go to 321course.com. It's all about how God is a father in communion with his son in the joy of the Holy Spirit. It's all about how Jesus is the second Adam who takes our humanity to himself and in incarnation anchors reality to you, and how you can be one with him and be anchored to the one who loves you. That might not make sense now. That's okay. You can go and do the course, and please do subscribe so we can catch you on the next one. God bless.