Relativism

Has everyone gotten these handouts? There's two pages of handouts. And then for the upcoming weeks, there's evidence for the resurrection and how we got the Bible will be upcoming classes. And my dad's going to take over. For some reason, he's under the impression that having a new baby in the house is going to distract me a little bit. We've got actually more vocabulary words than we've had in the past couple of weeks. But we're going to be addressing two things that I probably have spent the most amount of time studying in school.

I kind of took a shortcut on the first vocabulary word, modernism. Last week we talked about modernism. If you weren't here, I definitely recommend getting the tape or the CD or the MP3. Modernism generally is defined, and a lot deeper definition could be here, but is generally defined as secular humanism. We discussed that last week. Humanism is, yay, I'm a human, and yay, I can do it. So we're going to build on that with post-modernism, but I wanted to make sure that by using the term modernism, you had at least some context for that.

The second term here is nihilism, which is a form of skepticism, holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. I was going to do the house chart like last week. We had the charts with the houses for nihilism, but it was empty. I just said nihilism. It was a waste, it was a lot of trees to cut down for nothing. So we didn't do a handout chart for nihilism. And postmodernism was so hard to explain in a simple house format, so there's no charts this week.

So nihilism, any questions about nihilism in case? I mean, that's a brief, overly simplified description of nothing. But that's nihilism. What is an example of a group today that would be like that or a particular group you'd associate with that? One of the problems is it's really hard to gather around nothing. Yeah. It's really tough. I'm sorry, I can't hear you, Tom. What? Anarchists? Yeah, maybe.

I think anarchists still believe too much in the person, the individual. The thing is, it's really a weird view. In fact, one of the things when I was looking at nihilism is in psychiatry, they consider somebody who's a nihilist to have a mental disorder, for whatever that's worth. I'm not trying to say anybody who believes in nihilism is mentally screwed up in the sense of insanity, but it is pretty crazy.

Steve. Trent Reznor or Nine Inch Nails? I don't know. Oh, Marilyn Manson. Yeah, he kind of runs in the same circles. Yeah, the goth scene, but most of you are probably not familiar with the goth scene. Anybody familiar with goth, if I say goth? You see the young people dressed in all black and black makeup and black... Yeah, that's right, the Columbine shooting.

There we go. There's an unfortunately close reference for us here. So nihilism is really strange because it's negative, okay? Because when I say negative, we're going to talk about the positive version of nihilism next, which is postmodernism. This is a long definition. I'll go ahead and read it. I'm sure there will be a question or seven about it.

Postmodern philosophy is generally characterized by a skepticism toward the simple binary oppositions predominant in Western metaphysics and humanism, such as the expectation that the philosopher may cleanly isolate knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, or presence from absence.

This is anti-foundationalism. Remember last week we talked about humanism and existentialism and their foundations were despair and the self and nature that we can do it. Well this says there is no foundation. You can't know that you have a foundation.

To some critics this skepticism appears similar to relativism or even nihilism. Defenders of postmodernism would argue that there is a distinct difference, however. While relativism and nihilism are generally viewed as an abandonment of meaning and authority, postmodern philosophy is generally viewed as an openness to meaning and authority from unexpected places, and that the ultimate source of authority is the play of the discourse itself. In addition, many view postmodern philosophy not as a purely abstract or logical argument, but as a historical occurrence.

Okay, lay on the questions. That's kind of tough and it covers a lot of stuff. We're going to go over, if you'll look I believe at page two on your handout, we're going to go over postmodernism in more detail. So, since none of you had any immediate questions, we'll hold off and look at this more clearly and then maybe you'll have a better perspective or better understanding of it.

Deconstructionism is the next term here. The postmodern view that one person cannot clearly and absolutely communicate what he or she means to another person due to the personal nature of truth and the fact that words mean different things to different people. The text must be deconstructed into other possible alternative texts.

An example of this would be me saying I love you to Jessica, my wife, and her not really knowing what I mean by I love you. The reason they deconstruct here, what they would do is they would take I, and they'd evaluate I into various meanings of I. And then they would take love and evaluate love into various meanings of love. What are all the contexts that we use love? And then you, you is evaluated into various meanings of you, and at no point in time is any of these meanings applied with any certainty to the whole, and all possible interpretations of I love you are equally valid.

Jessica had a particularly postmodern English teacher in college who, they read the word, the name, Jesus Christ in some English assignment, and the guy said, well, what if instead of Jesus Christ meaning the reference to Christ, it meant some profanity?

And so he shouted out some profanities, which I won't do for obvious reasons, and that was He was like, oh, well, we'll just take what this could mean and then open that and expand it. And all of those views, whether or not Jesus was the Son of God, some religious teacher, or a nice guy, were equally valid to profanities.

So deconstructionism is obviously freaky, and it's most often applied in literary situations. But last week I mentioned ex-president William Jefferson Clinton being on trial for possibly engaging in things with an intern, and he asked the question, what is, is? And basically he tried to, if we, I define sexuality differently than you do, therefore you can't really accuse me of anything sexual because I've defined sexuality differently.

So if you redefine things, because there's multiple possible interpretations and definitions, you've wormed your way out of any actual ramifications or real known truth or knowledge So that's deconstructionism. Obviously you can see that that could be really harmful when you get into scripture. How do I know what God's word says if I don't know with any certainty what the words mean? You can't tell me that I'm wrong with my theological views because you are using certain definitions and I'm using other ones and they're equally valid. So that's deconstructionism.

Relativism is the next one. Relativism is the idea that ethics and morals are not absolute and are subjective. An attempt to state moral relativism is something like, there is no absolute moral truth. Of course, this statement is self-refuting, so it becomes futile to actually attempt to clarify this position on a logical basis. If I say there is no absolute truth, I am saying that the absolute truth that exists is that there is no absolute truth, which is self-cancelling. Does everybody follow that? Self-refuting.

Last word here is amoral, not admitting of moral distinctions or judgements, neither moral nor immoral, lacking moral sensibility, not caring about right and wrong. Any questions on amoral, real quick? It's pretty clear in the definition, but just because I get it doesn't mean that it's obvious. Last week we talked about worldviews. I want to talk about the first worldview, This week is postmodernism, and I've got a list on the second page there of basic tenets of moral or postmodernism.

The first one here is reality is in the mind of the beholder. The second one is people are not able to think independently because they are defined or moulded by their culture. The third one is you cannot understand other cultures. We cannot judge others because we cannot understand them. We are not moving towards progress, but arrogantly dominating nature and threatening our future. Well, not really. Nothing is ever proven by science or history or any other discipline. Intuition is most important. Feelings tell us more about reality than reason.

You have to view technological advances, and I'm not saying like the switch from Intel Pentium 1 to Pentium 2, but various technological things that are involving developments outside of just a simple chip upgrade necessarily. They view technological advances and law with cynicism, fear, and distrust. They're interested in spirituality because logic and reason are bankrupt, but they reject any faith that is exclusive, like Christianity, because it is not open and claims a universal truth that all can understand. Alright, so those are the basic tenets, but let's go back over those and let's think about the logical conclusions of those things.

First one, reality is in the mind of the beholder. Does anybody see anything wild and crazy about that? off the top of your head. Okay, everybody's reality would be different because it's your own personal reality. People are not able to think independently because they are defined or molded by their culture. How about that one? That one kind of, initially on the surface you can go, okay, I can see how that could be presented. What does this mean as far as Somebody's a murderer. Not a big deal. The culture molded them into that.

Well, that is self-contradictory, but you're using logic, and logic is already bankrupt. Sweep that away. Stop thinking that way. You'll never make a good postmodernist. Steve, you raised your hand and I think Tommy. You will find these things to be self-contradictory from their communication of these ideas. You gave the example of Jessica, a postmodern instructor. Yeah, the instructor was able to distinguish these things. This is where it gets really difficult because you're like, wait a minute, you're employing different logic outside of your system to develop your system. And it just seems inconsistent.

Imagine that. People are not able to think independently because they're defined or molded by their culture. You're a victim of society, in essence. Third point there, you cannot understand other cultures. Now, this one has some very serious social ramifications. I'm going to ask, you'll see there's some questions below this. But, you cannot understand other cultures. That means that I, as a middle class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant married to a woman with two daughters, I'm trying to think of other subclasses with one car that's a Honda that's green, you know, various, you know, narrowing it down, could never understand a Latino woman with two boys driving a white Suburban.

It just, we would never be able to mesh because her culture and who she is and mine are so radically different that if she tried to sit down and describe to me what her life was like, I would just be confused. And if I thought that I understand, I'm deceiving myself. Because her culture and who she is are so radically different from mine. So, what is a logical conclusion of our cultures cannot understand one another?

Tom? Yeah, we're deceiving ourselves. Steve? Yeah, all that's left is vying for political power. Art? On the other hand, don't we, in our investigation of the scripture itself, try to understand the culture of the time that the scripture and the situation that we're reading about, Yeah, and Art's saying, you know, in Scripture, don't we have to know what the culture and history is about to understand it?

And the answer to that is often yes. Last night I was looking at Romans Chapter 2. Well, Romans Chapter 2, if you're divorcing that from the New Testament timeline of the Jews being a prominent part of the Church and their history and culture being law-based, then Romans Chapter 2 doesn't make any sense because you don't understand why he keeps saying Jews, Gentiles, and no law. You have to know the history and the context.

The question I asked, though that nobody answered, is you cannot understand other cultures, therefore, what does that mean socially? What major ramification is there? And the answer is that totally justifies racism. Racism is completely legitimate because your race and my race can never understand one another because we've got different cultures.

Cultural and tribalism segmentation You know, all of this movement for integration of different cultures and societies that the government has instituted laws to try to facilitate this are contrary to post-modernistic ideas. There's actually some ACLU members back from the 70s that actually presented some ideas suggesting that white people could never understand black people. And it's kind of a sub-movement within post-modern And I'm just thinking, that's horrible. In Texas, I went to church with people of various ethnicities, and there were some really sharp people that were not white.

And I was like, that's okay, because you're my brother in Christ, and we're going to learn God's truth together. So this is really problematic that cultures become irrelevant or un-understandable. The other thought that I had on that is that I have been in my personal situation and I know of other people who have moved comfortably from one culture to another. People who can live in one culture and live in another and understand the language well and move quickly between them. Sure. And know them both and step easily into them. And that by itself denies the tenet. Sure.

Yeah, there's there's people that that that work outside of that rule. Another clear example of that is missionaries have to know about the culture. When they go to translate things, when they go to work with a group of people, they need to know how the people operate. They need to understand the culture so that they can share the gospel in that culture. So that's one of the issues.

The next tenet here is we cannot judge others because we cannot understand them. This is absolutely critical. And before we look at that any further, I want to actually read for you some news from this week, earlier this week. I'm just going to read some snippets from it because I want to present a biased view. No, I'm going to read some snippets from it because I think it's the high points. October 14, 2005. This is from the LA Times.

USC student Holly Ashcroft, described by the manager of her apartment building, is a sweet young woman from Montana. was charged with murder and child abuse in Los Angeles courtroom. Thursday, as questions continued to surround her alleged abandonment of her newborn in a trash bin, police said the full-term boy was born alive before he was put in a cardboard box and placed in the trash bin near a popular USC hangout and Ashcroft's off-campus apartment late Sunday. Boy, that was a strange run-on sentence. A homeless man searching the bin for recyclables discovered the child and called police, authorities said. Okay, so morally, this woman has been charged in the state of California, in the United States, with attempted murder and abandonment.

We all can agree with that. You hear that and you go, okay, that's logical, that's wrong, that's nasty. As the father soon to be of a new baby girl, that just breaks my heart. Now I'm going to read to you, they talked about the apartment manager's opinion in that first little segment I read, and now I'm going to read some quotes from her. And let's see about judging here.

Ann Doerr, who owns the building and a number of other rental properties near the campus, said the young woman paid her rent on time and was generally viewed by other tenants as agreeable and not a partier. Doerr said police told her that Ashcroft had been linked to the case after she sought medical treatment at an area hospital.

Now the building owner said, I feel like you need to protect her. I'm not justifying what she's done, but I don't like her to be judged. I think she was just plain scared. So we shouldn't judge her for these things because she's a good person. She pays her rent on time and she's not a partier. Hello? Isn't that justify things? So I have the article. You're welcome to read the whole thing if you would like to after the I don't know about the class, but here's a great example of, we shouldn't judge one another. Let's not judge. You have to make moral judgments or else you're going to be in trouble.

How many of you have worked at an office where somebody has stolen something? Wow, only one of you. Maybe you just don't know somebody stole something. Or maybe, you know, see I work in my industry, intellectual property without walking out of the building. So somebody looks at my source code that I work on for programming, they could walk out of the building and copy that down somewhere else and make their own program and steal our work.

That's an issue. Well, if I was an employer doing an interview, I would want to know that I'm hiring a moral person so that I can trust them to not steal me blind, you know, or rob me blind. So we have to make moral judgments. You have to. I'm sure that that gal wanted to be paid and or wanted to be paid her rent. She probably would have been upset and said it was wrong for somebody to sign a contract saying that they'd pay rent and then not pay rent. But for her, the morality of the rent, being paid the rent, justified the person as a whole. And so the judgment for abandoning a baby in a dumpster was apparently not a big deal, which is just freaky.

But anyways, you can see that there's some serious issues with not judging people for moral standards The next one here, we are not moving towards progress, but arrogantly dominating nature and threatening our future. Okay, this is a big one. If you're familiar with environmentalism, I was in an environmental class in college and they fed me a bunch of basically what I would consider propaganda. And part of it was based on this idea that we're not moving towards progress, we're dominating nature and threatening our future. Okay, and I'm not saying that everything that goes on by corporate factories is all hunky-dory and we're not screwing up parts of the planet. But I also would not agree with the statement that we're not moving towards progress. There is progress being made in all kinds of areas. Yes? You also said that part of God's command to Adam was to subdue the earth. Yeah, God commanded Adam to subdue the earth.

That's contrary to this. God obviously didn't understand the postmodern tenants. I don't know, sometimes God just really confuses me with how dumb he was with these things, right? You know, it's amazing to me, these views, and God contradicts them, but they don't believe in God, so it's not crazy. And there again, God has answered all of these things long before mankind ever came up with the idea of God. Yeah, God answered them and put things in place.

So not moving towards progress, that's pretty crazy. This next one is really, really dangerous if you think about it. Nothing is ever proven by science or history or any other discipline. We can do without schools. Well, here's the real critical question. I actually ran into this with a relative. How many of you were there during the Holocaust? Nobody raised their hand. John said he was. You're 14, dude. Helmet was, okay. The thing is, here's the deal. There are postmodernists that say you cannot prove the Holocaust happened. You cannot prove it happened. Five to six million Jews are estimated to have been killed during that time period, not to mention other ethnicities. You can't prove it.

We have all watched various movies where they use computer animation various other effects to modify documents and modify film and modify things. How do you know those people really suffered? You don't know. They could have doctored the documents. It could be a big farce.

That's insane, if you ask me, and that's insulting to a lot of people. But the view is, again, hey, you can't prove it. That is also fostering racism. Yeah, it does foster racism. You can't prove it. Basically, it ends up that all of these things, we'll ask some questions in the end here with this section, you end up proving a lot of immoral behavior as being valid.

Let's talk about the last point because my time is running out so I have to be selective here. Interested in spirituality because logic and reason are bankrupt, but they reject any faith that is exclusive, like Christianity, because it is not open and claims a universal truth that all can understand. This is probably the biggest thing that you're going to run into when you deal with somebody who's generally espousing postmodern ideas. They'll say, that's great for you to be a Christian, that's nice that you like it, but I also want everybody who's sincere in their faith to be able to go to their own heaven and do what they want to do because everything's okay.

And the question I often ask when I'm in that scenario is, what do you do with a fundamentalist Islamic guy who's been told to go out and kill people? He is sincerely acting out what he's been told to do and what he believes by going up with a bomb and strapping it to him and blowing himself up with everybody else. He's sincere.

Is that not immoral to kill people? I would say, yeah, that's an immoral act, Tom. Oh, I wouldn't have gone about it that way. Or they'll say, well, he doesn't represent the accurate faith. But you just told me that sincerity is what was the priority. So suddenly, sincerity is not the priority. It's sincerity as long as it doesn't affect other people. Well, then you make moral judgments again.

The authors of this book, we didn't get this for everybody in the class. Some of the classes get books, but we didn't buy this because we're only doing this for one week, but it's called Relativism, Feet Firmly Planted in Midair by Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Kuchel. Very, very strongly recommended for those of you interested in dealing with postmodern culture and relativism in general. I strongly recommend that you find a copy or borrow a copy or do something to get a hold of it because it goes through a lot of these different things in detail. The question I have on your handout here is roughly, let me read it off the handout, I didn't put it in my master file here.

Given the above tenets that we just talked about, why does postmodernism produce ambiguity, non-absolute truth, racism, sexism, and general discord? We kind of answered some of those questions within there, but one of the things we didn't talk about is sexism so much.

You know, one of the statements that I've heard for most of my life is that ignorance breeds fear. And if we say that we cannot understand another culture, We are ignorant of that other culture when we fear that other culture which creates isolism, racism, sexism.

Men and women would never get married because we don't understand each other so well already. Some creation would never occur. You wouldn't be a dad. Fear is probably one of the major drivers in this scenario with postmodernism because they don't know anything. They're afraid of what they don't know. will lead them to falsehood, so they assume that everything is personal or false, rather than everything can be determined to be true or false.

But sexism, here's a scenario, and Steve talked about this last night, it's a man thing, or last night, last week, it's a man thing, or it's a woman thing, or it's a whatever thing that it is that's your thing, but that is really severe. You're going to run into a lot of situations where That's a problem.

Steve? Yeah. So power becomes the ultimate authority. I put a quote in your handout. It's actually at the bottom of Relativism. So we're going to hold out. I'm sorry. Ha ha ha. I faked you out there. Let's talk about Relativism here. I'm going to take a copy of the handout since I'm using my master notes and they're not as effective here. There are three types of Relativism.

Cultural Relativism, Prescriptive or Normative Ethical Relativism, and Personal Relativism. I'm going to give these easy names that are in this book. feet firmly planted in mid-air, which is society does relativism or cultural relativism, society says prescriptive, normative or ethical relativism, and then personal relativism is personal relativism.

But it's easier to understand that cultural relativism is what we're doing. This is just observing what is being done in the cultures. I've got the different definitions highlighted, or my dad bolded them. Cultural relativism observes society and cultures and reports what is going on. Because it sees differences, it concludes that morals are relative to culture.

So this first type of relativism says, You do it your way in your culture, I do it my way in our culture, therefore there's no absolute truth or absolute morals because it's obvious to see that different people do it different ways and we're okay. The second type is prescriptive or normative ethical relativism. I call that the society says relativism.

It says that people ought to act in accordance with their society's code. While there may be differences, they should comply with the collective norm of morals. This sounds like a nice moral viewpoint, but it says that if you don't comply with your culture's moral standards, you are actually a social dissident and immoral. You should be restrained and stopped. Examples of people who would be rebels in a society says culture is Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus Christ. Those are all people that generally have been looked at as revolutionaries, that we're moving for progress. But in a society says version of relativism, whatever the culture says goes. And if you rebel against that, you're immoral. You are a rebel. Well, that's a pretty serious issue. Those are all people that...

So they would say that the cultural norm for morals would be a dynamic absolute... Yeah, as the culture shifts moderately and minorly, That's okay, but anybody who is pushing for major reform or major changes is immoral. You're a rebel and you should be stopped, which is really crazy, but it's still not absolute. There is no absolute moral. It's just what your society says or does. Personal relativism here is the idea that individual ideas and opinion give guidance for moral behavior.

You do what you want to do, I'll do what I want to do. How many of you have heard that before, where people say, well, that's your truth, or that's what you want to do, I believe what I want to believe. It's all personal. That was the argument when I talked about, you believe what you want to believe and you're sincere about it, then you'll go to your own heaven.

That's good for you. The problem always with these things comes when you try to step outside into the big picture. The big picture is, OK, but we live in a society where it's wrong for me to murder or kill, isn't it? Oh, OK, there's an absolute moral law. How do you handle that? You can't define that. My morality doesn't say that I can't kill. That's ridiculous.

One of the authors in this book gave a fantastic example. And he said he was having some medical work done. And he said, I'm reading a book on relativism, because he was reading one, not working on this one. And he asked the nurse, do you believe there are moral standards that are absolute?

And she kind of wishy-washed around and really didn't give him a solid answer on yes or no. That's all he's looking for is a yes or no. And he said, well, OK, I'll help clarify it. And he goes, do you think it's wrong for people to have fun torturing young children? And she said, well, I wouldn't want somebody to torture my children. But she wouldn't commit to saying that there is right or wrong.

Personal relativism or cultural relativism is still problematic because at that point in time, you've got one situation that's problematic. How many of you have shared the gospel with somebody and they said, well, I can't believe that God would forgive Hitler if he asked Jesus to be his saviour before he died? I've run into that multiple times where somebody has proposed that. One of the problems here with this, though, is they have just said that morals are relative and personal. If somebody tells you that morals are relative and personal, then they cannot say that Hitler was wrong.

He was working out his morals in a personal way. They affected other people. That's just the consequences of him making some poor choices, maybe. But you can't call him wrong absolutely, because everything is subjective. So you run into some very serious issues with that. Now, we can talk about the quote.

It says, when any human court is the highest authority, then morality is reduced to mere power, either power of the government or power of the majority. If courts and laws define what is moral, then neither laws nor government can be immoral, even in principle." Okay, that's part of the prescriptive or normative ethical relativism. Our culture says that this is okay, we've legislated it, therefore this is valid. this is what it is, this is the moral, this is our standard.

Well, how many of you keep track of politics? And I actually think that a pretty decent number of the people in the congregation have indicated at times that they keep track of political things. Who cares what judge is on the Supreme Court? Oh, that person has to determine what's legal or not. They're going to keep the legislative branch in check, they're going to keep the presidential branch in check, they're going to make judgments on major court cases. We care about them, and we hope that they don't think they're the highest authority, that they have morals that are outside and above that, at least from a Christian perspective we do.

The problem is that you get people in the court at various levels who don't think that there's an authority above them, and the culture has defined what is right, you end up having people that are suddenly very powerful. And the problem I've run into more recently in dealing with, talking with people who are more liberal politically and usually also spiritually, they will talk about, well, you know, people need to go out there and they need to vote.

If we all vote, then everybody will exercise their moral judgment and then everything will be okay because everybody will vote liberally, or conservatively, or whatever it is that they'll vote, and then morality will have been defined to represent all the people. The problem is, are the people moral? If you remember from the second week we talked about, and the third week, we talked about Romans Chapter 1, and the people are not moral. They're not going to make judgments that are moral, and if you ask a group of people to vote morally, you're going to get a bunch of immorality into the law books. It's a problem. Now, I want to ask some questions. I have worldviews part two as the header here. One of the suggestions in evaluating a worldview is what sort of heroes does that worldview produce?

What does the perfect or heroic humanist look like? What does the perfect or heroic existentialist look like? What does the perfect heroic Christian look like? We're running out of time, so without asking questions about some other things, what does a Christian hero look like?

Can anybody give us an example? Please use somebody from scripture rather than, say, Billy Graham. Jesus is the ultimate hero, and what did Jesus do? He laid down his life for us. The ultimate hero in Christianity is one that's humble and serves and who lays down their life. That's pretty awesome. What sort of hero does a post-modernist person look to? Last week we briefly mentioned Michael Foucault.

He's a French philosopher, contracted HIV, and because there are no moral absolutes and because no one could understand him as a gay French philosopher male, It was not wrong for him to spread HIV to other people as often and as well as he could. I don't know if you would call him a hero, but he certainly embodied... Typhoid Gary?

Unfortunately, I don't know. That's a reference I don't understand or know about. was a carrier who wasn't suffering symptoms of the disease of typhoid fever. And she was preparing food. She was in a restaurant. Oh, typhoid Mary. I thought you said Gary. Now I know what you're talking about.

I was going, wow, that sounds familiar, but I don't know. Yeah, so carrying didn't know the symptoms were there and carrying it and just spreading it all over instead. So post-modernism, if you take all of those tenets, you get somebody who's sexist, racist, they don't trust technology, they don't trust truth, they don't trust all those things, and what you get is a very paranoid human being who's very isolated. A relativist, and yes, Yeah, I can't produce a universal hero.

Yeah. You end up having some kind of segmentation. You have localized heroes, maybe. Well, wait a minute, you're your own hero. I am the most heroic being that can be because I'm the only one that can understand me. So maybe that's, you get self-idolization or something there. What sort of hero does relativism produce?

One of the, I thought it was a powerful quote from this book over here, is a sociopath. It's a homicide detective's worst nightmare, is somebody who's amoral. Because a relativist basically says there is no absolute morality, which in general is amorality. There are no morals, there are no standards. Well, somebody who's amoral has no problem with murder, rape, We can make a long list of things where you could just read Romans 1, where Paul already goes and outlines what those things are. God-hater, all those things. That's what it looks like.

So that is a brief and edited version of postmodernism and relativism. Are there any questions before we close the class? Because that's a lot of material to cover and it's just the very tip of the iceberg. You know, one of the things that strikes me is, as you're presenting all these philosophies, a couple of things seem to jump out.

One is that all of them base knowledge and truth on the human being as the measure. Whether they take it optimistically or pessimistically, the human being is the measure. And the other is that they make absolute statements in each case. They make an absolute statement about the ambiguity. Yeah, they have to try to define something that is saying that there is no definition.

Or if it's based on the self, you end up having to contradict yourself because you cannot speak with authority on some level in each one of the secular pagan views. You can't make some absolute statement with any authority, but you must try to define the view. One of the things I find most self-contradictory in postmodernism is that they say you cannot communicate ideas to other people because it's personal. You have defined the word personally. You have made things up in your mind personally and you cannot communicate those to somebody else.

But to communicate the idea of postmodernism requires that they are able to communicate at least the general concept with enough clarity for you to go, oh yeah, I do realize that I can't realize something. And so it just becomes really problematic. But the thing is, it's being taught more and more in our schools and higher level education and in seminars, in places where people are going and they're being indoctrinated with this stuff, with the idea that it's going to produce a tolerant more efficient person in society or something that's productive. And what you end up getting is a bunch of radical, crazy people who can't work together because no one can understand one another if they really embrace these ideas.

And what scares me the most as a 28-year-old male is that possibly in 40 years or 30 years or 20 years or 2 minutes or 2 hours I may find myself in a medical situation with somebody who's a postmodern relativist holding some kind of medical device and having the authority, or at least mentally making the decision, is this person worth saving? Is this person worth treating medically? And my life has no inherent value. They may figure this white guy doesn't understand me. because I'm Hispanic or I'm black or I'm Hawaiian or I'm Chinese or I'm an Alaskan Eskimo or I'm a whatever and he doesn't understand me and that scares the crud out of me.

The social ramifications of these views that are being taught right now in American schools, that scares me because my life may be on the line someday and that person may be able to make a choice and have no moral qualms or ethical qualms with doing something that's really questionable. in business classes, in medical schools, things like that, they frequently are having ethics courses.

Yeah, ethics courses. Those are classic. The classes that they offer are asking, you know, they want people to be equipped with ethics and morals, but then the teacher's clearly following the logic of a selfish and human-based system. cannot say that they're absolute. Because if they say that they're absolute with morals, then suddenly there's a lot of other things that could be absolute. And that's a real problem. So instead of equipping people with something that might turn out a moral human being, you equip somebody with something that makes them possibly more dangerous socially. And it's required. It's a required class. It's absolutely required. So it's pretty dangerous, as you can see, the possible ramifications.

However, there's hope because we have Christ. That's the thing that I keep coming back to, is it's like, okay, God's got a plan. He's doing something. And, you know, knowing the end, knowing Revelation, we see that, yeah, the world's going to get funky. It's going to get much worse than it already is, possibly, unless the Lord returns tomorrow. And then God's going to take care of things.

So when I look at philosophy, I end up feeling rather despair, or despaired, or discouraged, despairing. Don't define those words wrong. But don't judge my grammar. The thing is, you come away, when man is the source of truth, morals, or standards, it's discouraging. There's not hope. really useful stuff that you walk away with because you see how corrupt we are.

However, I look at the hope of Christ and I look at the opportunities, Ephesians 2.10, God's got good works planned for us. Those good works are going to probably involve being lights and sharing the gospel with people. So, anyways, this actually concludes this segment of philosophical things for the apologetics class.

There's lots of opportunity for you to ask questions or say, can we explore certain territory more or deeper future classes. So if you want to cover anything that more philosophical, something that we didn't talk about at all during this last three weeks, or something in more depth that we have covered in the last three weeks, please ask myself or my dad or write a note or an email.

My email is Randy at RandyPeterman.com. You can send one to my dad. He's got several email addresses as well. Can I share your email address with mine? You can use the vern at randypeterman.com or you can use vernpeterman at msn.com. Send us requests.

We'll talk about more philosophical things or in more depth about these things. Yes. We've got six slots, time slots. Six weeks of space. At the end of this elective so that people can bring questions forward and if we end up with something that really looks significant, we can address those in that time.

For the record, we're going to try to take denominational or cult or religious topics. We're going to hold that over until the next class, which will be two semesters, or when these two semesters are over with apologetics. We're going to approach those things. So if you say, oh, I really want to talk about Catholicism, we'll say, great. You're going to have to wait for a while. But we will get to those.

But if there's things that are dealing with the science or the philosophy or Bibliology or you know, where do we get what what we have in Scripture then we can address those more With that in mind, let's close in prayer. Brian has rung the bell twice and so I'm running behind Heavenly Father we come before you and we're thankful for truth and morals Authority that we can come to who who loves us and whom we can know and whom knows us We ask that you would allow us to be able to discern where relativism and postmodernism and humanism and existentialism and all kinds of other fleshly things are being pushed on us or being used and employed around us. Give us discernment and allow us to walk in your spirit moment by moment. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.