Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

• Genesis 1:27

Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am in distress;
    my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
    my soul and body with grief.

• Psalm 31:9

Your hands made me and formed me;
    give me understanding to learn your commands.

• Psalm 119:73

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

• Matthew 10:28

“Friedrich Schelling started out as a theologian but, inspired by the ideas of Immanuel Kant, he turned to philosophy. Born in southern Germany, he studied with Georg Hegel at Tubingen and taught at the universities of Jena, Munich, and Berlin. Schelling coined the term ‘absolute idealism’ for his view of nature as an ongoing, evolutionary process driven by Geist, or spirit. He argued that all of nature, both mind and matter, is involved in one continuous organic process, and that purely mechanistic accounts of reality are inadequate. Human consciousness is nature become conscious, so that in the form of man, nature has arrived at a state of self-awareness.”

• Sam Atkinson (senior editor), The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) was a German philosopher.  While some call him one of the three founders of German Idealism, the last being his former college roommate, Georg Hegel, others claim that he changed majors and his mind so often that they felt he could not be a founder of anything.  Besides, his empirical claims are considered to be indefensible today.

That last statement is a slippery slope and a grave error within philosophy.  What empirical evidence is now indefensible?  This comment came from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  If a liberal, progressive worldview finds facts, observed by someone 200 years ago, to be inconvenient to their present worldview, can you truly dismiss those empirical observations as being indefensible?

This seems to border on relativism, but since the “empirical claims” are not defined in detail, you cannot decide whether this is academic one-upmanship or clear empirical proof that the claim has been proven in error.  Making a broad statement of this type then is not proof at all, but it brainwashes the reader into thinking there is proof.

The quote attributes Schelling using the term “evolution” in one of his theories.  Note that Schelling passed away 5 years before Origin of the Species was published.  Schelling was using the word in its true meaning rather than lumping his idea with Evolutionism.

But what I caught of this snippet about Schelling’s philosophy is that humankind cannot be defined strictly as a machine. His key point was that we are not only sentient beings, we are sentient of our consciousness.

The Scriptures speak of body and soul.  We were created in God’s image.  We are not simply machines.

For people do dismiss the evidence that is common sense because the concept introduces a God that they do not believe in is typical, but poor philosophy.  The world has too much hatred, stating this or that is not true due to the fact that they have no alternative argument that meets the observed facts.  Please, do not tear down with no idea of building up on a firm foundation.  Just state that you do not have a rebuttal to the philosopher’s claim.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.