I am determined to finish this series, come hell or high water. It is very important, and I think at least some of my 600 readers per week (small for a blog, I know) are interested. But I’m facing a dilemma. I am in the busiest time of my life. I have five adult children and five grandchildren, and I want to spend time with them. I am working hard on finishing my stone cottage, with the truth hanging over me that my cancer will likely come back someday, and when it does, I will be very sick, once again fighting to stay alive. If I don’t get this cottage done before then, I’m afraid it will sit and rot, as there is no one else to finish it.

Lastly, my other writing needs my attention. I have one book at a publisher, Agony of a Woman, which may never see the light of day, but the publisher wanted all kinds of reports about the book done (such as how I used AI, if at all). I am also working earnestly on my latest book, How Cancer Taught Me to Swear. I neglected it for two months, but I must focus again.

The last reason for my delay is my own studies. I’ve said before that I’m an amateur when it comes to philosophy. I love it, but I’m not an expert. Since I assume that many readers have no background in philosophy (and a few far more than me), I have to make this story very simple. But you can make something so simple that it is wrong.

I am now reading Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Søren Kierkegaard, and listening to lectures. But I need to have a better understanding of these fellows before I wrap up this discussion. I’m almost there. Dr. Peter Kreeft, an American philosopher, professor of philosophy at Boston College, and a convert to Catholicism has been helpful to my studies. I think he said something like this: Socrates was, of course, the father of Western philosophy. His student, Plato, was the father of dualism. Plato’s student, Aristotle, was the father of rational thought. Aquinas and the Catholic scholastics brought Western culture back from the brink. According to Kreeft, Hegel was the last modern philosopher, and Kierkegaard was the first postmodern philosopher. I want to write about this transition next, when I return to this journey.

Why Take This Journey

Our culture is in a crisis, both politically and with the demise of the church and many other institutions. You can understand how we got here when you understand the history of philosophy. When you see how we got here, you can change the future… for the better. Naivety, while it feels blissful, is not helpful. Underthinking is the problem, not overthinking.

I will oversimplify the problem by blaming it on a metaphysical problem of dualism. This is where reality is divided between the material and the unseen (you can use the word “spiritual” if you like). In this model, the unseen sits at the apex; the material at the bottom. Christian culture has mistakenly made the material so low that it becomes dirty. Bodily functions such as sex are dirty, and reason is dirty, in comparison to the unseen. When Aquinas elevated the material (nature) back to the proper place God put it (in Genesis, saying it was good and very good) , in the thirteenth century, Western culture changed profoundly, succeeded, and dominated the world (I will get to the downside).

We have now entered a postmodern world where truth is again relegated to the subjective. Lies fill our government and shape how people think. Some experts now think the greatest challenge to human existence is believing false information, and it’s getting worse in the age of AI.

I want to define two terms again: dualism and truth.

Truth

While studying the philosophers above, I realize how careful I must be with the word “truth.” I define truth as what is consistent with reality. But I want to take it further in contrast to what Hegel and Kierkegaard have said. So, I see two kinds of truth: truth as I have defined it, and existential truth as Kierkegaard defines it.

Imagine there is a village at the bottom of a steep mountain. An old man has climbed the mountain once a week since he was seven. When asked how far it is to the top, he says, “At least twelve miles.”

A company wants to put a TV tower at the top of the mountain, so they come in and measure the path, using very precise GPS data, down to the millimeter. They find that the true length of the path is just 5.65 miles.

The old man is angry because he’s walked  6 miles in other places, but the mountain feels much longer.

What I call truth, that which is consistent with reality, is the 5.65 miles. Kierkegaard would say truth is subjective and based on experience (existence), so the man is right: it is twelve miles long. But I say it is much better to stick to objective truth: the path is 5.65 miles, yet feels like 12 because it has a 4,000-foot gain in elevation. Why does it matter? Because the TV tower company must buy expensive cable to run to the top, buying 5.65 miles of cable would cost only half as much as buying 12 miles.

Practically speaking, we are at war with Iran right now because Donald Trump, who is quite incurious, never studies, isn’t interested in advice, and “felt” that it was the right thing to do. It is his existential truth that bombing Iran was the right move. But it is a quagmire, and almost every expert (the curious ones) on Middle Eastern affairs knew how this would turn out.

Both the conservative and the progressive arms of the church now depend on existential truth. The spirit speaking to me directly trumps reason. The rub is, according to both the Bible and modern behavioral research, our intuition, even if we think it is the voice of God, is highly unreliable.

Another example of this. I had a patient once who was a devout Christian. She told me that her husband was struggling with depression and suicidal ideation. He came home from work one Friday very upset. He grabbed his pistol and a bottle of vodka and said he was heading to his hunting cabin and might blow his head off. She said she heard the voice of God speak to her, “He’s in God’s hands… let it go. Don’t be anxious.”

Well, he drank himself into the courage of putting the gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. She now assumes that this was God’s plan because of the voice.

While we cannot stop someone from self-harm, the rational approach on that Friday was to call the police and report him as someone in danger of self-harm, or go after him yourself. I’ve had many “talking out of suicide” sessions with patients and once with a family member who had a gun and was ready to do it. I sat in his van with him for hours until he backed down. Sitting at home and believing you heard God say, “let him go, it’s okay,” is the easier way to handle this. But was this really God’s voice?

What Dualism Looks Like

I remember the year, circa 1986. I was a devout evangelical, preparing to go to Cyprus, to work with Lebanese refugees from its civil war as a missionary. I heard about a senior missionary of the Presbyterian Church USA (my present church’s denomination) who had just retired from a fifty-year term in Lebanon. I remember driving to the church in Detroit where he was speaking. When I entered the large church, I bumped into a friend of mine; I will call him Mitch, someone I knew in evangelical circles. Mitch and I thought alike (evangelical groupthink), yet he was much more vocal than I was, a true extrovert.

During the program, the eighty-year-old seasoned missionary shared stories about how he and his team started a hospital in a poor area of Beirut; it grew to over two hundred beds, offered services found nowhere else in Lebanon, and was free to the poor. They shared how they had started early childhood vaccination, food, and education programs in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley of Eastern Lebanon. They had started a farmer assistance program to help new farmers provide for their children. He shared how they had built homes for the homeless and set up Christian education programs throughout Beirut. He shared how they had worked with the Lebanese government and the many factions- Maronite Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze, etc.- to help them reach a peace plan to end the civil war. They created a large prenatal and maternity program for pregnant women who had no access to care. And the list went on and on.

After the hour-long presentation, with slides, he welcomed questions from the audience of a couple hundred. During the talk and Q&A, I noticed Mitch growing restless in his seat. Finally, he stood and shouted at the dear man, “I’ve wasted an hour of my time listening to you go on and on about all the useless humanistic projects, but not a single word about Jesus and saving souls… no, sir, you were not a missionary.”

The dear man stumbled through his words, trying to answer Mitch’s attack. I remember him saying, “Everything we did was about Jesus, and loving the Lebanese people.”

Mitch laughed out loud.

This was an excellent example of dualistic thinking: things of this material world are insignificant; only things of the unseen (saving souls) realm matter.

Respectfully, Mike

If you are interested in listen to a real philosopher talk about this difference tween Kierkegaard and Hegel, the video below might be helpful.