| Author | Francis A. Schaeffer |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
Publication date | 1970 |
Pollution and the Death of Man is an ecological and philosophical work by the American presuppositionalist theologian Francis A. Schaeffer, published in 1970. [1]
"...the hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture and the church should have been fighting it too... More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture - modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class - is poor in its sensitivity to nature... As a Utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man's concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side". -Chapter 2
"If God treats the tree like a tree, the machine like a machine, the man like a man, shouldn't I as a fellow-creature, do the same - treating each thing in integrity in its own order? And for the highest reason: because I love God - I love the One who has made it! Loving the Lover who has made it, I have respect for the thing He has made". -Chapter 4
"The man who believes things are there only by chance cannot give things a real intrinsic value. But for the Christian, there is an intrinsic value. The value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it. It deserves this respect as something which was created by God, as man himself has been created by God". -Chapter 4
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The Problem of Pain is a 1940 book on the problem of evil by C. S. Lewis, in which Lewis argues that human pain, animal pain, and hell are not sufficient reasons to reject belief in a good and powerful God.
Value theory is the interdisciplinary study of values. Also called axiology, it examines the nature, sources, and types of values. Primarily a branch of philosophy, it is an interdisciplinary field closely associated with social sciences like economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology.
Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. Epistemic relativism holds that there are no absolute principles regarding normative belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. Alethic relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture, while linguistic relativism asserts that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions. Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism. Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the word truthfulness of views within a given framework.
Francis August Schaeffer was an American evangelical theologian, philosopher, and Presbyterian pastor. He co-founded the L'Abri community in Switzerland with his wife Edith Schaeffer, née Seville, a prolific author in her own right. Opposed to theological modernism, Schaeffer promoted what he claimed was a more historic Protestant faith and a presuppositional approach to Christian apologetics, which he believed would answer the questions of the age.
Dignity is the right of a person to be valued and respected for their own sake, and to be treated ethically. In this context, it is of significance in morality, ethics, law and politics as an extension of the Enlightenment-era concepts of inherent, inalienable rights. The term may also be used to describe personal conduct, as in "behaving with dignity".
Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated, often called simply the Meditations, is a philosophical treatise by René Descartes first published in Latin in 1641. The French translation was published in 1647 as Méditations Métaphysiques. The title may contain a misreading by the printer, mistaking animae immortalitas for animae immaterialitas, as suspected by A. Baillet.
Thomism is the philosophical and theological school which arose as a legacy of the work and thought of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Dominican philosopher, theologian, and Doctor of the Church.
In moral philosophy, instrumental and intrinsic value are the distinction between what is a means to an end and what is as an end in itself. Things are deemed to have instrumental value if they help one achieve a particular end; intrinsic values, by contrast, are understood to be desirable in and of themselves. A tool or appliance, such as a hammer or washing machine, has instrumental value because it helps one pound in a nail or clean clothes, respectively. Happiness and pleasure are typically considered to have intrinsic value insofar as asking why someone would want them makes little sense: they are desirable for their own sake irrespective of their possible instrumental value. The classic names instrumental and intrinsic were coined by sociologist Max Weber, who spent years studying good meanings people assigned to their actions and beliefs.
The tzimtzum or tsimtsum is a term used in Lurianic Kabbalah to explain Isaac Luria's doctrine that God began the process of creation by limiting the Ohr Ein Sof of the Godhead in order to allow for a conceptual space in which the Four Worlds, or finite realms, could exist. This primordial initial contraction, forming a "vacant space" into which new creative light could beam, is denoted by general reference to the tzimtzum. In Kabbalistic interpretation, tzimtzum gives rise to the paradox of simultaneous divine presence and absence within the vacuum and resultant Creation. Various approaches exist as to how the paradox may be resolved, and as to the nature of tzimtzum itself.
How Should We Then Live: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture is a Christian cultural and historical documentary film series and book. The book was written by presuppositionalist theologian Francis A. Schaeffer and first published in 1976. The book served as the basis for a series of ten films. Schaeffer narrated and appeared throughout the film series, which was produced by his son Frank Schaeffer and directed by John Gonser. In the film series, Schaeffer attacked the influences of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Charles Darwin. The films were credited with inspiring a number of leaders of the American conservative evangelical movement, including Jerry Falwell. The complete list of materials that the Schaeffers produced under the title "How Should We Then Live?" include the initial book, a study guide for the book, the ten-episode film series, and study aids for the films.
Secular ethics is a branch of moral philosophy in which ethics is based solely on human faculties such as logic, empathy, reason or moral intuition, and not derived from belief in supernatural revelation or guidance—a source of ethics in many religions. Secular ethics refers to any ethical system that does not draw on the supernatural, and includes humanism, secularism and freethinking. A classical example of literature on secular ethics is the Kural text, authored by the ancient Indian philosopher Valluvar.
Nous, from Greek: νοῦς, is a concept from classical philosophy, sometimes equated to intellect or intelligence, for the faculty of the human mind necessary for understanding what is true or real.
Allegorical interpretations of Genesis are readings of the biblical Book of Genesis that treat elements of the narrative as symbols or types, rather than viewing them literally as recording historical events. Either way, Judaism and most sects of Christianity treat Genesis as canonical scripture, and believers generally regard it as having spiritual significance.
De doctrina Christiana is a theological text written by Augustine of Hippo. It consists of four books that describe how to interpret and teach the Scriptures. The first three of these books were published in 397 and the fourth added in 426. By writing this text, Augustine set three tasks for Christian teachers and preachers: to discover the truth in the contents of the Scriptures, to teach the truth from the Scriptures, and to defend scriptural truth when it was attacked.
Human nature comprises the fundamental dispositions and characteristics—including ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—that humans are said to have naturally. The term is often used to denote the essence of humankind, or what it 'means' to be human. This usage has proven to be controversial in that there is dispute as to whether or not such an essence actually exists.
Mark of the Christian is a work by Francis Schaeffer concerning the spiritual life of the Bible.
The Personal Heresy is a series of articles, three each by C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard, first published on 27 April 1939 by Oxford University Press and later reprinted, also by Oxford University Press, in 1965. The book has been reprinted in 2008 by Concordia University Press with an Introduction by Lewis scholar Bruce L. Edwards and a new Preface by the editor, Joel D. Heck. The central issue of the essays is whether a piece of imaginative writing, particularly poetry, is primarily a reflection of the author's personality or is about something external to the author. The two positions may be summarized briefly as the subjective position (Tillyard) and the objective position (Lewis). In general, Lewis attempts to keep poetry within the reach of the common person, while Tillyard thinks of the poet as a person who is "a cut above the common person."
In philosophy, religion, and psychology, "good and evil" is a common dichotomy. In religions with Manichaean and Abrahamic influence, evil is perceived as the dualistic antagonistic opposite of good, in which good should prevail and evil should be defeated.
The values that a person holds may be personal or political depending on whether they are considered in relation to the individual or to society. Apart from moral virtue, examples of personal values include friendship, knowledge, beauty etc. and examples of political values, justice, equality and liberty. This article will outline some current ideas relating to the first group – personal values. It will begin by looking at the kinds of thing that have value and finish with a look at some of the theories that attempt to describe what value is. In this article reference will solely be made to Western sources although it is recognised that many, if not all, of the values discussed may be universal.
Importance is a property of entities that matter or make a difference. For example, World War II was an important event and Albert Einstein was an important person because of how they affected the world. There are disagreements in the academic literature about what type of difference is required. According to the causal impact view, something is important if it has a big causal impact on the world. This view is rejected by various theorists, who insist that an additional aspect is required: that the impact in question makes a value difference. This is often understood in terms of how the important thing affects the well-being of people. So in this view, World War II was important, not just because it brought about many wide-ranging changes but because these changes had severe negative impacts on the well-being of the people involved. The difference in question is usually understood counterfactually as the contrast between how the world is and how the world would have been without the existence of the important entity. It is often argued that importance claims are context- or domain-dependent. This means that they either explicitly or implicitly assume a certain domain in relation to which something matters. For example, studying for an exam is important in the context of academic success but not in the context of world history. Importance comes in degrees: to be important usually means to matter more within the domain in question than most of the other entities within this domain.