The Revolution in Philosophy

For some years now there has been a quiet revolution occurring in university philosophy departments throughout the West. Whereas for the better part of the 20th century to be a university philosophy professor was to perforce be a philosophical materialist or naturalist, today a significant minority of philosophers are Christians and the number is growing.

Philosopher William Lane Craig discusses this phenomenon in an article posted on his website. He writes:

“The contemporary Western intellectual world,” declares the noted philosopher Alvin Plantinga, “is a battleground or arena in which rages a battle for men’s souls.” Three schools of thought struggle against each other in the competition to win the minds of thinking men and women: Enlightenment naturalism, post-modern anti-realism, and theism, typically Christian theism.

It is in the field of philosophy that the decisive battles are taking place, and the outcome of these contests will reverberate throughout the university and ultimately Western culture.

Craig then presents a summary of twentieth century philosophy with its heavy emphasis on the positivism of the early century which gave rise to the Verificationism of A. J. Ayer.

In order to understand where we are today, we need first of all to understand something of where we’ve been. In a recent retrospective, the eminent Princeton philosopher Paul Benacerraf describes what it was like in philosophy at Princeton during the 1950s and ‘60s. The overwhelmingly dominant mode of thinking was scientific naturalism.

Physical science was taken to be the final, and really only, arbiter of truth. Metaphysics—that traditional branch of philosophy which deals with questions about reality which are beyond science—metaphysics had been vanquished, expelled from philosophy like an unclean leper. “The philosophy of science,” says Benacerraf, “was the queen of all the branches” of philosophy, since “it had the tools. . . to address all the problems.”

Any problem that could not be addressed by science was simply dismissed as a pseudo-problem. If a question didn’t have a scientific answer, then it wasn’t a real question—just a pseudo-question masquerading as a real question. Indeed, part of the task of philosophy was to clean up the discipline from the mess that earlier generations had made of it by endlessly struggling with such pseudo-questions.

There was thus a certain self-conscious, crusading zeal with which philosophers carried out their task. The reformers, says, Benacerraf, “trumpeted the militant affirmation of the new faith. . . , in which the fumbling confusions of our forerunners were to be replaced by the emerging science of philosophy.

This new enlightenment would put the old metaphysical views and attitudes to rest and replace them with the new mode of doing philosophy.”

The book Language, Truth, and Logic by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer served as a sort of manifesto for this movement. As Benacerraf puts it, it was “not a great book,” but it was “a wonderful exponent of the spirit of the time.”

The principal weapon employed by Ayer in his campaign against metaphysics was the vaunted Verification Principle of Meaning. According to that Principle, which went through a number of revisions, a sentence in order to be meaningful must be capable in principle of being empirically verified.

Since metaphysical statements were beyond the reach of empirical science, they could not be verified and were therefore dismissed as meaningless combinations of words.

Ayer was very explicit about the theological implications of this Verificationism. Since God is a metaphysical object, Ayer says, the possibility of religious knowledge is “ruled out by our treatment of metaphysics.” Thus, there can be no knowledge of God.

This was the ruling philosophical paradigm in many universities throughout much of the latter part of the 20th century. Consequently, most philosophers dismissed any metaphysical claims, including the claims of Christianity, as meaningless.

I hope you grasp the significance of this view. On this perspective statements about God do not even have the dignity of being false. They’re just meaningless words or sounds uttered in the air.

If you say to someone, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” you’ve said nothing more meaningful than if you had proclaimed, “T’was brillig; and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”

Today that movement has all but disappeared. What happened? Well, what happened is a remarkable story.

It is indeed and you can read about how it all changed at the link. Suffice to say that Christian philosophers, though still a minority, are having a profound impact in philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, ethics and epistemology. They're also influencing the field of philosophy of mind.

In any case, the landscape of academic philosophy looks much different than it did just fifty years ago, so much so that atheistic philosophers are taking notice.

An example of this notice is a piece that atheist philosopher Quentin Smith wrote some twenty years ago which Craig quotes in his article.

Give it a read.