Welcome to Christian philosophy, the very unusual course let me say, in the  whole history of Christianity, almost no major Christian thinker has thought that a Christian philosophy was even a possibility. It was possible for Christians to do  philosophy they held, of course, they can do philosophy. And over here they had their Christian faith, and they would try to make sure that their philosophy  harmonized with their Christian faith. But they didn't see any ways to construct a distinctively Christian take on philosophy. In fact, I'm going to read for you what  one of them said. This is Father Copleston a distinguished historian philosopher  sais, “if philosophy is a legitimate and Autonomous Province of humans study  and knowledge, it would appear that it is not and cannot be Christian. It would  sound absurd to speak of a Christian biology or a Christian mathematics. A  biologist or mathematician can be a Christian, but not his biology or his  mathematics. Similarly, it might be said a philosopher can be a Christian, but not his philosophy, his philosophy, his philosophy may be true and compatible with  Christianity. But one does not call a scientific statement Christian, simply  because it's true and compatible with Christianity. The most of the phrase  Christian philosophy can legitimately mean is a philosophy compatible with  Christianity. If it means more than that, what is speaking of a philosophy which is not simply philosophy, but which is partly at least theology.” All due respect to  Father Copleston. I think that's exactly wrong. And well, I can show that it is. But  in order to do that, I have to do two things. First, I have to explain what  philosophy is. And to do that, I'm also going to explain what a theory is, because the philosophy is a kind of theory. And then we have to know what religious  belief is, we have to have a good working definition of religious belief. And once  we get those two, settled and clear, then I think it will become apparent that  philosophical theories, as well as biology, mathematics, and any other kinds of  theory, all presuppose some divinity, belief or other. The contents of a theory  turned out to be very different, depending on what divinity beliefs they  presuppose, including, distinctively different if they presuppose God, the God  that Christianity proclaims Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who came incarnate in  the world in Jesus Christ to redeem the world. So let's start with what's  philosophy. And let me put it to you as as a poser. a question for you to think  about. Over on the side of the board, I've written a number of areas domains of  study, that have arisen that some of them are called sciences, some are just  domains of study or fields of inquiry or theory making, but they've been around  for a long time. And I'm not going to quarrel with the list. This is just what people  have presented studies in, starting with the fact that the reality as we experience it, exhibits the fact that it has quantity, it can be counted, it can be calculated, it  exhibits the fact that is spatial, things have spatial shape and location and size.  It's kinetic, there is motion through space. Some people have included that  under the physical they put it as part of physics. But at least Galileo and Einstein thought it was distinct. physical, sensory, sensory, we perceive things they have 

color, they're smooth, or rough, or hot, or cold sounds are loud or soft. We also  see that the world around us conforms to logical laws. And logic is a special  study. It's a procedure now to check arguments to make sure that they're valid  when they're given that if the premises are true, the conclusion must also be  true. Formative or historical. That is this has to do with making artifacts, taking a  natural material and turning it in making it into something new. And that I think, is the key to history as well. History isn't everything that happened in the past.  When we study, say the Battle of Waterloo, we were not concerned with what  the farmers did try to get their crops in out of the way of the battle they saw  coming, that doesn't count as part of the battle is not anything that somebody  thinks is historically important. But what is important is the way people form a  culture and pass it on and who holds the power to do that? That all has to do  with what I call formative or historical. There's also the field of linguistics,  sociology, economics, jurisprudence, there's aesthetics. And there's an ethical  dimension to human experience, people experience things to be right and  wrong, morally. And finally, I called the last one fiduciary Professor Dooyeweerd  whose theories are going to be the example, Christian philosophy that I'm going  to be explaining in this course, called that last one Pistic. It's an odd term, but in  in Greek, it means trust or faith. And fiduciary has to do with the trustworthiness  of things. Often that's calculated by probability, but it's certainly a dimension of  human experience. So if all of these are already studied, and people have  distinguished them, and written about them in formulating theories to explain  different phenomena in them, what's left for philosophy is it after all, just a ruse  to keep us out of the unemployment office? Some people might suspect that but  it's not true, actually, when I pose this to my students, usually their a little  puzzled at first but somebody eventually says, is philosophy about how all of  them hang together, how they all relate. And I say, you get the gold star. Exactly. That's exactly what it's about. And there are two kinds of theories that do that,  that deal with the whole of theses that go after the what's true of reality,  generally, rather than specifically, let's think of each of these as a specific  dimension or side to reality as we experience it. But then there's, there are two  theories that go after the entirety of the characterization of the whole of reality.  The first is called ontology. That's its proper name, it's probably a word you  never heard. But you may have known it by its nickname, metaphysics is a term  that sounds somewhat esoteric to many people. But it's actually a very ordinary  one. What happened was that after Aristotle died, his nephew started to edit his  work, edit his work, and publish, publish it. And they finished his book on  physics. And then they came to the next book, which was on theory of reality,  and it didn't have a title, and they didn't know what to call it. So they called it the  book that comes after the physics. That's what meta means. Meta is the Greek  word for after. So they didn't actually give it a title and over the years, calling it  that became the name of what Aristotle did in that work, in other words, 

ontology. And so it's, it's an Alternative term for it. Let me see if I can make this  clear with an analogy of what it is, philosophical theory does here. It looks at all  these different sides to reality. And it asks, but what is the most basic  characterization of the rest of the reality of which these are all different sides?  The metaphor I sometimes use is that of a necklace. If these are the beads on  the necklace, ontology wants to know, what is the string? What is it that hangs  them all together? has them merge and meld and qualify different things that we  experienced in such a way as the we have to pick these dimensions out in order to study them, but reality doesn't find one here and another there these kinds of  properties or approval of all things. So that's what ontology is about. Now some  of you might right away be saying to yourself? No, don't tell me. I have a tough  enough time study in one of these. Or if somebody raises the question, how  does one relate to another? That's bad enough. But now you want a theory, you  want to talk about theories that relate to all let's say, all they all hang together?  That's what philosophy is about. Right? So I know that for some people, that's  going to be off putting it's going to be seem daunting. Let me take you by the  hand and walk you through it and you'll find it isn't. It isn't as daunting as you  think. For other people. They will have a different reaction. I know. You're gonna  say whoa, this is the kind of thing I've always wanted to do. So you're gonna get  the chance. What's the string? If these are the beads. What is the string? As  philosophy first arose, it was done by pagans who didn't know God. Very bright  group of them, however, what they always did, all of them did was pick some  one, or at most two of what I'm calling the beads on the necklace, and made the  claim these aren't just beads, these are the string. It's this one that generates all  the rest. And that's how they're all hooked together. This is the cause of all the  rest. So that's the kind of thing that you're kind of expecting, we'll be looking at,  as done by non Christians, and then as done by Christians will ask How Should  Christians do it? And what that answer will be such theories do depend on  regarding something or other as a divine, and that's going to be the true and  living God, or some part of creation that's deified instead of him. That will  become clear after the next installment of this course in the next lecture, which  will be about what is religious beliefs. And once I make clear what the  philosophical theory is, and what religious belief is, I think that will become  apparent why I had to talk to disagree with Father Copleston here and say,  Christian philosophy can and ought to be a legitimate enterprise for Christians.  Let's, here's another way to characterize what ontology is about. And this was  said by a famous philosopher of science, from the last century, Wilfred Sellars.  Philosophy is about how all things he said, In the widest sense of things hang  together, in the widest sense of hanging together. That's also a very good way to put it, got it right on the nose. But a second kind of theory that deals with all of  these. And that has to do not with the nature of reality, but the nature of  knowledge. And that field is called epistemology. These terms all come from 

Greek because it was the Greeks that first did philosophy. So epistemology has  to do with knowledge. And these are all different kinds of knowledge, as well as  different kinds of characteristics. We see the world around us exhibit. There's  quantitative knowledge in mathematics, there's knowledge in physics and  psychology, in logic and history, sociology, aesthetics, and ethics, there are  different kinds of knowledge as well. So how do you characterize knowledge  itself, in its most basic nature, in order to understand how all these different  kinds of it hang together and relate to what's most basic. And once again, these  are the different disciplines that have been distinguished over the last few 1000  years by different people I'm not going to, right now argue whether this is this list is correct, or it needs to be changed or amended. I'm just going on the fact that  this is what great many people have written about. So I hope that much is clear.  If it is, I want to now explain, in little more detail, what a theory is, since I've been saying, theories are made within these different aspects of reality. And theories  are made about how they all hang together give you the big picture. But what do we mean by a theory? Fair enough. Theories replaced myths as a way to  explain things. Until theories were invented. People tried to explain the world  around them as best they could, mostly by likening it to human relations inter  relations. The the heavens and the seas were at war, and they hated each other. And when they fought, then this occurred that came into being and that kind of  thing Robin struck, and hate were in strife with one another, and so on. If you've  run into some myths like that, you know what I mean? The first person we know  of to offer to theory to explain anything instead of a myth was an ancient Greek,  Thales, who was born somewhere about 600 years before Christ was Thales  wanted to explain things in terms of characteristics the things themselves had,  and the laws they seem to be subject to. And so he came up with theory making  instead of myth making. Essentially, what happens is this, we observe a number  of things that are true about the world around us. I'm going to use a super  simple example. Let's say, we can observe that if we take red paint, and blue  paint and pour it into a larger container and stir it up it turns purple. Suppose we  want to know why it turns purple. Sticking your head in the paint is not going to  tell you. You can observe as closely as you wish, but it's never going to tell you  why. Paint turns purple rather than green or orange or something else. Or why  doesn't state just stay a mix of red and blue and not producing new color, blue  with red polka dots or something? Suppose we want to know that. And now,  somebody puts forward the theory that goes roughly like this. paints are actually  made of tiny particles so small we can't see them. And the way the particles  arranged themselves is the reason we see the paint as red or blue or purple. In  other words, clusters of molecules of one type, reflect to our vision, the purple,  the blue wavelength of light. In the other paint, it reflects the red wavelengths of  light. And we pour the two together, the molecules clump up in another way,  such that it reflects the purple wavelength of light. And so that's what we see. 

Here's an explanation put in the middle of a puzzle. We know we have red paint, we know we have blue paint, we know that if we mix them the paint turns purple. The question is, what other explainers are we going to stick into this? So we  have blue paint? Red paint. We set this up like a logical argument. Then we  have 3, 4, 5. We know the paint turns purple. But what goes in here? What is it  that we have to add to? We have blue paint red paint? We mix them? What else  is true? Such that it always turns out the paint paint turns purple. What do we  stick in here? And what what the guesses that we put in there? We call  hypotheses. It's a it's a fancy word for an educated guess. Here are our  hypotheses which would add into these three statements will logically yield that  statement, then we get a theory. There are other things we could put in here.  Suppose I propose the theory that there are invisible paint pixies and paint  pixies are annoyed with one another Red ones hate the blue ones and blue  ones hate the red ones. And when you mix them together, they spit purple at  each other. And that's why the paint turns purple. That would not be a very good  theory. But it's another possibility. It's our invention here our guess as to what's  going on. And of course, the guess about molecules is a lot better than the one  about pink pixies in philosophy of science class, ask its class, when we get into  the course, always in to write a little essay on why just why is it that the  molecular theory is better than the paint pixies theory. And that can be daunting.  It's a challenge. There are good reasons. I'm not saying the paint pixies is as  good a guess. But it's difficult sometimes for students to state what the  differences are, why one is much better than the other. I hope that this has given you some introduction to what's going to happen here, we're going to be looking  for an ontology. We're going to look at all the different sciences or fields of study  fields in which theories are made. And we're going to ask but how does the  whole the big picture how's it all hangs together? And we're going to want to  hypothesis as to how they all hang together, what the beads are all what's the  string, all the beads are hanging on? That's the way philosophy philosophical  theories were first set up. And by the way, when we come to do Christian  theories, one of the first things I hope to show you is that regarding these as  beads on the necklace, necklace, and then picking one of them to actually be  the string is precisely what I'm going to say no Christian should. So I'm going to  disagree with that way of doing it, even though that's how philosophy started out when it was first cooked up 600 years before Christ. And we're going to still  make hypotheses and we're going to make theories but it's going to be very  different because they're going to be guided and led and limited by belief in God