Lecture
Science the New Source of Truth
#3Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject:
Genre: Speech
Track: 05
Dictation Name: RR325C5
Location/Venue: ________
Year: _______
God, we thank thee that thou hast called us into thy service, and that thy commission unto us is not one of defeat nor of stagnation, but to be more than conquerors. Give us zeal, give us courage, give us knowledge of thy word that we may apply it to every area of life and thought and bring all things into captivity for Jesus Christ our Lord. Bless us to this purpose we beseech thee, in Jesus name, Amen.
We have on previous meetings considered science. We shall do so again at our first hour and again at a subsequent meetings. The reason for giving this very heavy emphasis to science is that science provides to many modern men their religion. A very large number of moderns feel that their criteria of truth is to be derived from science and from the scientific method. We shall deal with the scientific method in our next meeting. But modern science provides the basis, the forum, and the basic thinking for modern revolutionary thought. It is the fact of modern science and the ideas derived from it that provided the rationale for the hippies, for the (beat-necks?) before them; for the young revolutionary of the last century and for the drug culture people.
Vantil calls attention to this in a book which I strongly commend to you. His essays on Christian education. He says, and I quote this from page five, “In particular the goal of modern culture is the cultivation of self sufficient free human personality. It is assumed by those who hold this ideal that the world of state and time is controlled by impersonal law and that human freedom must be attained by setting it negatively over against the impersonal laws of space and time. The world of space and time is not thought of as embodying the laws of the Creator. Therefore, the idea of freedom is freedom that is set over against mechanism - not freedom that is found in obedience to God.
So the goal of freedom is one of pure negation; or if it is one of affirmation then it is that of an ideal cast up into the limitless sky of the unknown. Here too, it is the first duty of Christians to call men to repentance lest they and their culture lose all meaning and men remain under the wrath of God.” Unquote.
In our last meeting we saw that because modern science gives an impersonal view of reality we have a picture of the universe and of reality that is essentially an impersonal one. Essentially a material one. As a result, as men look at the “real world” they see it as one of necessity. An impersonal realm of necessity. This is why Karl Marx spoke of the need for man to go from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom; this was to be accomplished the proletarian revolution and finally through a long and essentially mythical concept of deliverance from the physical realm by a total emersion in it. We’ll return to this to a degree in a moment.
But nature being the realm of necessity, the only area of freedom therefore for man was in the mind. The mind was seen by science as constituting freedom. Modern thought has been from the Greeks to the present dialectical. The essence of modernity is dialectical thought. In Greek philosophy the dialectic was between matter and ideas. In the medieval period the dialectic was between nature and grace. In the modern era the dialectic is between nature, the entire physical universe, and freedom. But freedom has only one area: in the mind of man. It has no place in the physical universe. As a result, how can you in terms of this modern suspective which informs modern philosophy and modern science, how can you express this freedom that is in your mind? That cannot function in the physical world? There is only one way: by sheer negation.
And freedom therefore becomes the negation of the world of necessity. Hence, you revolt against the world! Your revolution has faith it will accomplish freedom, no positive action is required. The ironic fact is that when the Marxist and the soviet union in 1917 when the revolution began the {?} Marxist had no program except to continue the old minus the emperor. Forethought. When Lenin took over, again, he had no program except total negation. He would not even tolerate the (duma?) or constitutional assembly, it had to be the total negation of all things. Destroy - destroy the family, destroy the social order; destroy this, destroy that,... destroy everything.
And then they were left with the fact that, what shall we replace it with? The idea of the soviets had no plot in the Marxist system. An American Marxist, Daniel De Leon was the man who developed the idea of the soviet and he was regarded as a kind of socialist heretic. However without acknowledging De Leon’s thinking to this day Lenin and his professors borrowed it and applied it, and they have been inconsistent to their faith since. Because for them the antithesis to the world of necessity is negation, negation brings in paradise. This was the philosophy of the ‘60s. Gruff up, negation...that’s freedom! And that idea is still apart of our culture today. It is basic to the sexual revolution of the ‘70s. Negation: that’s freedom.
Now all of this is the modern world and its teaching coming into fruition. The scientific perspective has consistently reinforced this dialectical thought and therefore, as I said when I began, it is important to understand this influence of science as the source that proves in our day how the earth religion of our time, because this is what provides the basis of this philosophy of negation which marks our modern world. We cannot understand the intellectual of our time, unless we see him as negation.
I read, not too long ago, of the irritation of a French radical journalist who was rather favorable to the United States and thought the United States was treated unfavorably. He came over here and he was treated with tremendous respect in Washington, DC. After all, he was a far out liberal {?}.
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On his return to France this journalist found it necessary to criticize the United States savagely in a series of articles. One, because he felt that his personal integrity required negation. And especially since the Americans had treated him so well in Washington, DC, it was especially necessary for him to assert his intellectual integrity by being totally negative.
That represented freedom. This is why the world of the intellectuals is dedicated to negation. They must negate religion. They must negate the United States. They must negate everything that is affirmed because only so can they affirm this doctrine of freedom which is basic to the modern world. Now, educationally this is extremely important for you to grasp because, first of all, all of us pick up this attitude. This was behind the phenomenon of adolescence, and adolescent rebellion. The sense that freedom means negation! We also feel that our independence is asserted not by productivity, not by works, not by character, but by negation.
Until we find everywhere we turn this spirit of negation. Men on the job feel that they are serving their freedom by an attitude of negation. Women (and of course this is your womens league movements) feel that negation means freedom, and therefore they must carry that spirit of negation into their relationship with man. I think you begin to understand why a healthy perspective on science is necessary, because it is it’s scientific perspective with regard to reality, the physical universe as the realm of necessity - of blind impersonal necessity which is created at the other end of the dialectic, freedom as belonging to the mind and constituting pure negation.
This too explains something virtually unheard of before in all of civilization, the senseless...the causeless crime. The crime committed just to commit a crime, as a means of asserting one’s freedom. One’s sense of negation. So that, today one of the problems that confronts male inspectors as they deal with male theft and police on every level is the fact that, once, it was possible to look for a motive. Now, the motive is no longer a governing factor in the rising proportion of crimes. They are senseless. They represent negation.
Of course this was first of all expressed in the arts. In the last century in France the Avant Garde artist, especially in the era 1885 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 emphasized this idea. Apollinaire was the man who was the leader of this. Apollinaire declared that it is the {?} act that which is an expression of freedom. It meant for him unmotivated evil. If the evil you do has a motive in the ground it is a polluted act. Thus, if someone has done you wrong and you want to take vengeance in your hands and do them wrong that constitutes for these people a polluted evil act, because there’s a cause for it. The pure act of evil is directed against someone who has no relationship to you or may even, if they have a relationship to you, be in a relationship that is a very favorable and a good one. But you direct your unmotivated evil against them in order to manifest your spirit of negation - your spirit of freedom.
This means therefore that freedom means lawlessness. Freedom means lawlessness. And the lawlessness of our time will not abate, it is going to increase as it has year after year until there is a change in the thinking of people. Until there is a theological change. This is why the Christian school is so important. This is why it must teach science properly - otherwise it will lead to a false concept of freedom. It may teach survival, it may have been believing it from cover to cover, but if you have a wrong concept derived from the science of our time then there’s always lurking in the background of their mind the idea of freedom as negation.
This is why I stressed so heavily last time that our science cannot be our god as abstracted from the physical universe, we cannot think of reality as impersonal. We do not, nor do we believe in an impersonal nature. For us nature is personal, because behind every facet of nature stands a very personal God, closely intimate to it. For us freedom is in obedience to God. I think we need to get back to the view of nature as it is given to us in Nahum, the 1st chapter, verses 2 and 8.
Nahum writes, “God is jealous and the Lord revenges. The Lord revengeth, and is furious. The Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries on his adversaries and he reserveth wrath for his enemies. The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked. The Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet
4 He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the rivers: Bashan languisheth, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon languisheth.
5 The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein.
6 Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of his anger? his fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by him.
7 The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.
8 But with an overrunning flood he will make an utter end of the place thereof, and darkness shall pursue his enemies.”
What does this mean? That God is operative in the world around us, that nature responds to the will and the purpose of God. And that God judges us in and through national events; he is the captain of the whirlwind and the storm. That when nature languishes we can read the hand of God in it. I think the question today is, will men read the hand of God in what is going on all over the world today? The fearfully cold winters in many areas and the draught over most of the world. The unbelievable (cold?) where in Turkey it hit a hundred and sixty-two degrees a few weeks ago and people were dropping dead.
When in one state in the South almost all the corn was lost...totally lost. In many many areas the devastation was infinite. Will man see it? That it is the judgement of God? They can talk about their cycles, but it’s never been this bad before. Only when we have a faith in the personal God can we preserve science and society. Because, then we give science its proper perspective, and instead of an impersonal realm of necessity it is the realm where we exercise dominion under God, because God has created the natural realm as that realm wherein we function, wherein we exercise dominion.
The modern scientific naturalism renders nature meaningless and it makes freedom negation. Moreover, it leads to a reductionism - everything is reduced to physical matter, impersonal matter, and blind necessity. When this is the case, when you have this reductionism as modern science gives it, the physical reality... it destroys the real world.
I recall when I was at the university we were taught that mind was not real. They didn’t speak of the soul - that kind of word was a dirty word. Mind was an epic phenomenon; something that appeared to be there but is not real... They were only reflexes, and consciousness was an illusion. Now what happens when you reduce man who is a physical being to reflexes and experiences? And you deny a vital center, the heart of man as God has created it?
Why then, for man, reality becomes an experience. A physical experience. This became apparent as far back as the early ‘20s, shortly after World War I.
A study at that time was made of adultery among women. A couple of researchers made quite an extensive study, and one of the thing that came up as the tremendously clearcut factor in their research was this: The women who had committed adultery did not particularly enjoy it, it was often an unpleasant experience. Why did they do it? Was it love for some man? No. They did it in the overwhelming majority of cases because they felt that if they didn’t experience the sexual act with someone other than their husbands they would be missing out on an important experience of life. Missing out on experience.
You see the implications of that? With the reductionism that modern science has given, life becomes experiences. We find this in common expressions all the time. You haven’t really lived if you haven’t traveled, or if you haven’t gone to Europe, or if you haven’t gone to Hong Kong, or if you haven’t gone to wherever the person who's talking has just been. You haven’t really lived. Why? Because living, for them, is experience. Paul said, for me to live is Christ. Modern man says, for me to live is experience. And so, modern man is an experience monger. He is on a continuous quest for experience. He goes searching for it.
This is the increasing focus of the modern films, especially the horror films. Each one boasts that it’s further out, it’ll scare you more than anything that has ever done. I’ve seen ads that say, you won’t sleep well for nights after you see this! And this is what draws people, because it’s an experience. And so there is the quest for experience.
And by experience it is meant, lawless experience. It has to be negation. That constitutes freedom. To live is experience, and the experience that is a living one is the experience that involves the maximum amount of negation. And this is why we find increasingly that there is a growing appetite for more and more further out pornography, further out perversion. Why? Because the other gets old hat, and there has to be more and more negation. And it isn’t accepted by them who need something further out.
I was told recently, I don’t know whether it’s true, though I know the measure was before the Swedish parliament - I was told that the measure legalizing incest had actually passed. If that is true what that means is that very soon there will be a demand for even further out violations of God’s law, further out negations. And so there will be even more outrageous things demanded, and it will not stop.
Religion too, then becomes negation. And increasingly in Neo-evangelical churches and in liberal and modernist churches the spirit is essentially one of negation. They are more against the rest of us than they are for anything, they are more against, say, the capitalists or the slum lords or imperialism or colonialism or what have you! But it’s negation! And this is the life of politics. The free man in politics is the one who voices the most negations, and this gives him popularity with the election. He’s the independent, the free man. Why, look at all the things he’s against! He’s negating everything.
And this counts, to the people. Because they have been schooled in a philosophy of education, in a philosophy of science, in a philosophy of reality that is shot through with this dialectic. Because the natural world is a kingdom with necessity and the human life can only express freedom by negation.
Someone years ago said that of Immanuel (Kant?) that he was so methodical he never left (Huntingburg?) and people could set their watches by the time he passed their house on his daily walks. A more humdrum, dryly intellectual, and abstract person would be hard to imagine. But revolutions began as a result of Kant's thinking. What I’ve been talking about is Kantianism. Out of such thinkings comes the revolutionary tempers of our time.
The students, whether in the grade schools or in the colleges, and the voters in our country don’t get the abstract perspective that I’ve been talking about here on the dialectics of necessity and freedom - but they’re living it. They’re living it every day, they’re voting in terms of it, they’re acting in terms of it, their sexual life is dominated in terms of it. [audio ends abruptly]