The Bastion of the Secular Mindset

Ever since I read Martin Luther's "Bondage of the Will" (having picked this out of a bunch of titles he authored merely out of curiosity) I have been thoroughly amazed at the response of people to any challenge focused on human autonomy. It's like "Whoa take off your shoes you're standing on holy ground". 


The following is a sad testament to the influence of the worlds most influential philosopher- Immanual Kant. My sincere apologies to the original author as I foolishly did not keep a record of where this came from, but am reasonably sure its source is one of two authors, John Frame or Greg Bahnsen. My apologies- perhaps some kind reader will correct me. Kant's influence in the Western world is huge, and is no less apparent in Evangelical circles as it is in any secular sphere.

Although Kant professed a kind of theism and an admiration for Jesus, he was clearly far from orthodox Christianity. Indeed, his major book on religion, “Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone,” has as its chief theme the thesis that the human mind can never and must never subject itself to any authority beyond itself. In other words, to Kant, the human mind must be autonomous, subject only to its own law. Kant radically rejected the idea of authoritative revelation from God (either in nature or in Scripture) and asserted, perhaps more clearly than ever before (although this had always been the view of secular philosophers), the autonomy of the human mind. The human mind, that means, is to be its own supreme authority, its own criterion of truth and right.

"Kant’s philosophy explicitly presupposes human autonomy. It adopts human autonomy as the root idea to which every other idea must conform."

            In his other works, Kant argued that what makes our experience intelligible is largely, perhaps entirely, the work of our own minds. We do not know what the world is really like, we know only how it appears to us, and how it appears to us is largely what we make to be. Thus, the mind of man not only is its own ultimate authority, but also replaces God as the intelligent planner and creator of the experienced universe. And, to Kant the human mind is also the author of its own moral standards. Kant saw, of course, that none of this could be proved in the usual sense of proof. He adopted what he called the ”transcendental method,” which seeks to determine the necessary preconditions or presuppositions of rationality. He reached his conclusions concerning human autonomy not by proving them by the usual philosophical methods, but by showing our need to presuppose them. Kant’s philosophy, therefore, does not merely assert or assume human autonomy, as did many previous philosophers; it explicitly presupposes human autonomy. It adopts human autonomy as the root idea to which every other idea must conform. That is what makes Kant unique and vastly important: he taught secular man where his epistemology must begin, his inescapable starting point for all possible reflection. So Kant is widely regarded as the most important philosopher of the modern period. He showed “modern man,” secular, would –be autonomous man, what he would have to presuppose about knowl­edge and the world in order to be consistent with his presumed autonomy. In other words, Kant made the modern sectarian “epistemologically self-conscious.” If modern man is not to bow to God, he must bow before himself; to that extent at least, he must be a Kantian.

"we can at last define the essential philo­sophical differences between the Christian and the non-Christian worldviews"

    If Kant taught the world of secular belief the essentials of its own (until then, subconscious) theory of knowledge (“epistemology”), Van Til did the same for the Christian. As Kant said that we must avoid any trace of the attitude of bowing before an external authority, so Van Til taught that the only way to find truth at all is to bow before God’s authoritative Scripture. As Kant presented his view transcen­dentally, as the inescapable ultimate presupposition of human thought, so Van Til made and defended transcendentally the same claim for the revelation of God: that God’s Word is the only presupposition that does not destroy the intelligibility of human thought.Because of Van Til, we can at last define the essential philo­sophical differences between the Christian and the non-Christian worldviews. If Kant’s achievement makes him the most important secular philosopher of modern times, should we not say that Van Til’s achievement makes him the most important Christian thinker of modern times?