Video Transcript: How the Ancient Greek Philosophers Influenced

Henry Reyenga - Hi, I'm Henry Reyenga and with me is Dr. Roy Clouser. And  now we're going to launch into the Greeks. So is it true that Greeks invented  philosophy?  

Dr. Clouser - far as we know, yes. In fact, as far as we know, they invented  theory making as a way of explaining something the man who's credited with  that is a man named Thales of Miletus. Thales is the first that we know of, to try  to give an explanation of things in terms of properties, the things have the forces that we know impinge on it, and so on, rather than making a myth about love  and hate and strife, cosmic forces all personified that kind of thing. fact he made he was quite a celebrity in his time he traveled to Egypt. And when the people  there told him how important it was Nile overflow, its banks. And that's how they  irrigated their fields. They complain that they never knew when that was going to happen. So he took a look at things and said, Well, I can tell you why. When the  wind shifts around to the north, and it comes against the Delta, the Nile Delta,  that slows the river up and the water backs up. Well, they thought he was just  the greatest genius that ever lived. They gave him awards and dinners and all  kinds of things. So he had quite a reputation. Aristotle tells a funny story about  him, too. He says, Thales got tired of people saying, If you're so smart, how  come you're not wealthy. So he had been keeping records of weather patterns.  And according to that, the next year, there should be a bumper crop of olives.  So he borrowed all the money he could and bought up all the olive presses. And sure enough, next year, there was a bumper crop. And he made a million  dollars. And Aristotle adds the comment, This is from a guy who inherited as  well. Yeah, this just shows that philosophers could all be rich if they wanted to  be, but they're not interested in that sort of thing. They're just interested in  philosophy. That's easy for him to say,  

Henry Reyenga - Now I know that philosophy is important to study. You're  studying the enterprise here, to be able to do well. So you do can support your  own ministry. I understand that there's some report on the University of  Michigan, talking about how people say philosophy, philosophy majors, end up  actually becoming blessed materially, is that true? It's a sidetrack here, but I  want to go there real quick.  

Dr. Clouser - That happened. A number of years back. One of my colleagues at  the college, at the college where I taught, told me about a report he had read the University of Michigan Business School. And they did a survey among all their  alumni. Who had made it to Vice President or above in their careers. Okay. And  it turns out that 51% were philosophy majors, that's astounding. Because  usually, in any university, about 5% of the graduates are philosophy majors. 5%.  But when you're when you're trained to look at examine theories, and you're 

trained to examine them minutely, right? But that's logically you're looking at the  arguments. And then you're looking at the big picture. That's the other thing that  philosophy always does, it looks at the overview, right? That's great training for  business, as it is for law as it is for the military as it is for so many things.  

Henry Reyenga - Well, I took philosophy then went into ministry and I credit my  philosophy training as allowing me to study scriptures better, but also run  Church, the church is a little business. Now house church have not but the point  is, it does take those things. Now the Greeks, do they do minutia and do they do the whole? 

Dr. Clouser - Yes, they have theories that are aimed at explaining the whole  character of reality, or knowledge. Reality came first, the theories of reality came first. There the famous elements, Greeks proposed Thales himself invented  theories proposed the theory that the most basic thing in the universe was  Water, water. Now, that doesn't sound convincing, you know, Bertrand Russell  once made the comment that if you start with philosophy class, you lose the  respect of the class for the rest of the semester. You'll never recover. But it's not  so bad as you think. He's trying to find out what it is that everything's made of.  Alright. Now, you know, we know that water can evaporate, he stood there and  watched it evaporate from the sea, and his theory was clouds are the  evaporated water, okay. He watched the water come down the rivers and  deposit earth, silt right So he thought maybe just as the waters, water could be  evaporated and make clouds may be clumped up and made the earth. You  know, when water gets cold, it does become solid. Right? So he just noticed the  Yes. So he's saying, maybe this is the stuff that everybody's made of because  it's the most versatile, right? So the theory is wrong. But it's brilliant.  

Henry Reyenga - Yeah. But so what do you think the Greeks were so interested  in philosophy theory making? Was it a combination of certain things occurred at  that time that really created that or what happened there?  

Dr. Clouser – I think the invention of theories on the one hand, okay. The  development of mathematics, Pythagoreans.  

Henry Reyenga - Okay, that were the Pythagoreans first, the numbers? 

Dr. Clouser - They're usually they are usually dated around 550 BC. That's a  earlier. Thales is usually a little earlier also Thales comes first. Then comes the  mathematics. So theories of the math and then comes Plato in. That's later.  Okay, there's Socrates 400. In the three hundreds, Aristotle, I think Aristotle died in 330. Something. And, and of course, there's, there's a succession there. 

They're taught by one another. Plato says that he learned from his uncle  Socrates, and then Plato. Aristotle went to Plato's Academy for 20 years,a  student of Plato. So these things are passed down. 

Henry Reyenga - So how has Greek philosophy influenced Bible times  influenced philosophy influenced the world? So as we studied Greek, what are  some of the things that we credit to Greek philosophy that is still in philosophy?  Or maybe even in Christianity today?  

Dr. Clouser - Well, there's good and bad. Okay. My opinion. For one thing, they  developed logic, okay, we mentioned, Aristotle comes up with a syllogism way to check on whether premises really yield the conclusions are supposed to yield.  That's logical entailment, you get theory making brought to a quite a height, in  Plato and Aristotle. And the the danger, though, is that, as I see it, that those  people were painted thinkers, right, so we don't expect them to have insight into  the transcendent creator who reveals himself in the Bible and comes incarnate  in Christ. But what these people did instead was take some facet, some aspect  of the world around us and make that the divine part of reality. The self existant  part that generates all the rest. 

Henry Reyenga - so how did Plato do that?  

Dr. Clouser - Well, for Plato, the forms. It's what he called, forms. It's  perfections. For Plato, there's another realm of reality, besides the one that we  live in and see, okay, and in this other realm, are perfect circles, perfect squares, lines that are exactly Okay, all the things that are imperfect in this world, but we  treat it as though they're perfect. That's because there are these perfections  things in this world, imperfectly copy, okay. But then he went further, why not  make that explanation of everything. So, in this other realm, there's the perfect  horse, and the perfect tree, and the perfect color blue. And all the things that are horses, or trees, or blue, are copies of the perfections in the other world.  Aristotle thought that theory was wacko and he modified greatly, but he still  keeps the idea of perfections impacting matter, so as to form things. So there's  still such a thing as what it is to be a horse that combines with matter to make  horses,  

Henry Reyenga - okay. And that's the way now in Christianity, if you just take  that philosophy, and we call it syncretism, where you just take take this, and  then you superimpose it. On Christian thinking in the Bible. What's happened is,  is throughout the history of the world, there's been Playtonic Christianity, Neo  Platonism Christianity and view so So later on in the history of the church and  Christianity. Some of this connects Yes. 

Dr. Clouser - Again, in my view this to be regretted, but it did happen. In other  words, these pagan thinkers are taking parts of some aspect of the universe and making that the divine part that generates all the rest. All right, when Christians  come and they look at that they say themselves, Well, no part of the universe is  self existent, divine and generates all the rest. That's God. That part they got  right now and I'm grateful for that. But then they thought about it. And they said,  but there's no reason to reject this method of explaining the world around us.  Because maybe, although what it is in the world that generates everything else  in the world, isn't divine, because it depends on God, maybe there still is  something that does that. There's some aspects of the world that generate all  the rest. And they in turn, depend on God. If we keep that scheme of things,  then we can go right on trying to see whether it's Plato that matches up best with our Christianity, or it's Aristotle, or Plato, or it's the neoplatonist, or the  nominalist, or Cartesian Dualism, or conference Hathor or existentialism, we get  this long parade, things hooked up with Christianity, to try to make sense of the  world around us. And I think that was a fateful an awful decision to make.  Because Colossians I tells us that God has created everything visible or  invisible, right. And that means God's created the laws that govern the world too. It's not the case that mathematics and logic are in some other divine realm.  There in this realm. They're creatures. They're created by God. And we don't  have to take any anything in the universe to be that, which all the rest depends  on. And for the very reason that Colossians 1 gives us. Colossians 1 says, that  God has created and sustains in existence all things through Jesus Christ. And it doesn't say that in a way that leaves it open, what maybe Jesus plus better, or  Jesus plus the mathematical laws or the logical laws, it's just Jesus Christ. And  everything about creation is creaturely. And everything is depends on Christ. In  Christ, all things hang together, says verse 17. And that's what this strategy for  theorizing has missed. And if you reject it, then you start with God as the  Creator. The Christ is the only mediator of God's power is creation and  sustaining to the world. And then you have a very different program for  explaining you don't take anything within the world is what generates all the rest. Instead, you look at how things look empirically and how things are in fact,  related. You trace up causal pathways as they exist, without a pre commitment  to reduce everything to just to this one or that one. So overestimate this and  underestimate the rest. And it's a distinctive program for an ontology and  epistemology.  

Henry Reyenga - So one last question about the Greeks. Why studying? Why is  studying the Greeks so important? 

Dr. Clouser - There's an old saying that philosophers are more often  remembered for the questions, they raise them for the answers they gave to  them. Okay, the answers seem to come and go, people will reject the answers to the questions, stick in people's minds. And they still some sometimes the  questions aren't properly posed. That's part of the problem. But the questions  tend to endure. So, for example, Immanuel Kant, philosopher who died in  1901,1801. Kant raised the question. How much of our experience is our own  contribution? What are we contributing to our own experience? A Christian  philosopher, like Dooyeweerd is going to say, we bring to the table our religious  commitment, what we regard as divine, even if it's an unconscious commit, right, right. What do we think is the self existent reality that generates everything else? It's either God or a god substitute by God, or it's, it's an idol. Right? And that  guides, it pushes the way we think it's delimits, theories that are going to look up fix up. And so he answers that in one way, Kant thought it was way more than  that we read in space and time and logic and numbers, he made the human  mind the law giver to creations that have died, right? But a Christian is going to  come at that very different way. Answer that question differently. It's not an  improper question, though. Right?  

Henry Reyenga - So how Dooyeweerd analyze the Greek question, how would  he say that? What did the Greeks bring out of their own presuppositions?  

Dr, Clouser - Okay, he's he thinks that overall, you take the stand back and see  what's going on and all the theories, they have a commitment to that there is  some kind of stuff and they call it matter, okay, it means material Yeah. And then  there's some source of order to the stuff. And he takes, and the Greeks took  each of those to be self existent, they just okay. All right. And then the cosmos in which we live, is the result of the combination of the principles of order, whether  that's mathematics or Plato's forms or Aristotle's secondary substances, how  they impress the matter and make material things into, into definite entities. Like  okay, trees, right? Horses, people, nice clouds. Okay. So there's a play to call  the principles of order form. So Dooyeweerd says, seeing reality as form and  matter. Those two things have the place of divinity in their thoughts. They also  believed in Gods and Goddesses. They thought that divine power wasn't  exhausted in forming the, it's leftover divine, and it collects in these beings. But  what's crucial to the Greek outlook was, the gods weren't crucial to the popular  religion. So when you have Protagoras writing, he writes the classic call on the  gods. I still remember translating the first sentence reads, concerning the gods,  it is not possible to say whether they are or are not, right. But in their mind it is  possible to say form and matter. Oh, absolutely. That's, that's the way they see  reality, a source of order and sometimes stuff that gets ordered, and both of  them are independent reality. 

Henry Reyenga - So as you read through the Greeks, notice the form and  matter. Notice, maybe you can see some of those presuppositions some of their  faith commitments. And as you get foundational, Greek philosophy thinking,  you'll notice this form matter. They call it a dualism, yes. That that goes through  much of philosophy. So even if you go to Kant, later on, you mentioned the  name way in the in the 19th century dies for 1801. But you'll notice that some of  these questions and themes happened then so to study the Greeks is an  important, first piece, as you explore the world of philosophy,  

Dr. Clouser - There's an interesting way in which form of matter impacts even  the practice of medicine. Right. When the Greeks undertook to treat someone,  they would do it only if the person could be restored to normalcy. To perfect,  perfect design, if there's no possibility of that they wouldn't treat them. The  Jewish and Christian way of treating patients is to relieve pain, right? But the  Greeks have an ideal. If you can't meet the ideal, you're a goner.  

Henry Reyenga - There you go. Engage in your study of the Greeks.