Pragmatism

The pragmatist is very much worried about being practical, but so is the Christian. The Christian is also concerned about practice and about being practical, but being practical does not mean that you must embrace pragmatism as a philosophy of life. In fact, where the tension comes, where that point of conflict is, is that Christianity says that ultimately pragmatism as a philosophy is the most impractical thing that a person could ever embrace. Is it practical?

Does it work? Have we solved today's problem? These are not bad questions in and of themselves, but they are questions at the heart of the worldview that we'll be exploring today, pragmatism. This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind as we continue a week-long study of the worldviews, the isms that have influenced and are present in modern society. RC Sproul recorded this series to help you understand the world we live in, to help you engage thoughtfully with those around you, and to help you be faithful in a fallen world. You'll only hear five messages from this series this week, so I would encourage you to request digital access to all 12 messages and the study guide by giving a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. We'll also send you his book on impacting culture and society as a Christian.

You can find a convenient link to request these resources in the podcast show notes. So let's hear Dr. Sproul on pragmatism, a worldview born and bred in the United States. As we continue our study now of the culture in which we seek to live out our Christian lives, I want to turn our attention in this session to another strand of philosophy that heavily influences our culture and, if you will recall, is one of those subdivisions of the broad generic perspective that we call secularism. And that philosophy that I'm going to be concerned about today is called pragmatism. How many of you have never heard of the word pragmatism before?

Well, that's good. You know, people are somewhat frightened by words like existentialism and logical positivism, but everybody's heard the term pragmatism. I suspect that there's a reason for that because pragmatism as a formal philosophy was developed and expanded in the United States. Most of the philosophical movements that affect our culture are transported from Europe, come across the sea, and then they make their impact felt here in this nation.

But pragmatism was born and raised in the United States and reflects something of the genius of the American culture itself. Now, I have made references in the past to a little book that was published in the 60s that was very surprising in the impact that it had within the church and in the intellectual world because it was more or less a semi-popular work of philosophy and religion, and it was written by Harvey Cox. How many of you have heard of Harvey Cox, the Harvard professor?

Okay. Cox's book that made him famous was entitled The Secular City. And what Dr. Cox was trying to do in that little book was to write a contemporary book that would be somewhat similar to St. Augustine's classic work, The City of God. And the very title calls attention to the change in Western civilization from a society and a culture that looked to God for its values, that looked heavenward for its goal and its destination, to modern culture which, as we've seen with secularism and humanism, has more or less abandoned the eternal as the reference point for its own definition and its own formation and shaping.

We now live not in the city of God but in the secular city. And what Cox was trying to do was to apply to the American culture a yardstick of evaluation that used both theological categories of evaluation and sociological and anthropological categories. And I would have to say I think Cox was a better sociologist than he was a theologian. But he makes some interesting observations about our society. He talks about the shape of America, and he talks about the style of America.

And when he comes to an evaluation of the style of America, he points immediately to pragmatism as being the dominant influence in producing the style of American life. And he uses as the symbol that embodied pragmatism – remember this book was written in the 60s – he used John Fitzgerald Kennedy as the supreme example of American pragmatists. He says – and I won't read a Atlantic passage here but just in passing – he says, urban secular man is pragmatic. He devotes himself to tackling specific problems and is interested in what will work to get something done. He has little interest in what has been termed borderline questions of metaphysical considerations.

He wastes little time thinking about ultimate or religious questions. And as he goes on to explain here, the spirit of pragmatism is the spirit of problem solving. The pragmatist is basically either skeptical or agnostic about man's ability to discover ultimate truth. And so what the pragmatist says, I don't have time in my life to figure out all the mysteries that are clouded in the universe about ultimate reality and ultimate purpose and all of that sort of thing that religion and philosophy has been traditionally concerned about. I have to be busy with living, and my life involves encountering a myriad of problems.

And so I've got to find a solution to those problems. And so that hard core realist is a man who's asking this basic question, what works? Not what is fancy and pleasing to the intellect in terms of theory, but what is it that brings results?

That's what the pragmatist is interested in. But again, as a formal philosophy, it proceeds from a prior skepticism of metaphysics or of theology. Now what do we mean by metaphysics?

There's a word that is an everyday word for the philosopher, but it's not a word that we find in the soap operas every day in America. Metaphysics, what does that mean? That means alongside or with.

That's exactly right. Okay. And you know what physics is. We have the science of physics that studies the order and the behavioral forces and all of that of nature.

It's a natural science. Metaphysics, we could say, is not the study of physics or the study of nature, but it is the study of that which is alongside or above and beyond that which is supra or supernatural. Metaphysics looks beyond what can be seen and observed in the sphere of natural science to ask the ultimate questions, what is ultimate reality? Is there a God?

Is there not a God? That's a metaphysical question. And so, men for centuries have sought to unravel the mysteries of metaphysics. But a period of skepticism came in after the Enlightenment, particularly in the 19th century. And at the same time, enormous advances were being made in man's ability to cope with his world, with the Industrial Revolution, the breakthrough in science and medicine and so on. And there was a sense in which the hostile forces of nature were being tamed with light bulb, you know, modern medicine and so on. And so, modern man is saying, hey, I don't have time. I'm so involved in working out my life, and we're getting the answers to our problems.

We look to the scientific community to solve the problem of cancer and so on. Who has time to be fooling around with metaphysical consideration? And so, a whole philosophy emerged that looked at life from this side, from a perspective of naturalism, of natural science, and tried to frame a whole philosophy of living on the basis of that. And we call that pragmatism. Now, there is an easy point of confusion here between Christianity and pragmatism, because in our vocabulary, in the common language of our day, we often use the term pragmatic as a synonym for what other word? Practical. We want to be practical, and I get that all the time when I'm teaching theology and everything. People say, well, I'm tired of studying theology, R.C. You know, we want to be practical. Because doesn't God, in the final analysis, really care more about our practice than anything else?

He does. The Bible is always talking, by their fruits you shall know them. You know, by their practice, by what you do, really reveals what you think and what you believe. And God, from the beginning on, has been very, very much concerned about how we live out our faith in practice. So, the pragmatist is very much worried about being practical.

But so is the Christian. The Christian is also concerned about practice and about being practical. But being practical does not mean that you must embrace pragmatism as a philosophy of life. In fact, where the tension comes, where the collision occurs between Christianity and pragmatism, which I'll try to explain more in just a minute, where that point of conflict is, is that Christianity says that ultimately pragmatism as a philosophy is the most impractical thing that a person could ever embrace. So, I hope that this group of you will be careful about distinguishing between being practical and being pragmatic. Now, what's the point of distinction? Let me back up just a second. Just yesterday I was lecturing on Romans 1 and the conclusion of Romans 1 where Paul is explaining that God's judgment is being manifested to the world and that God's judgment is poured out.

Why? Because God reveals Himself to man, and the bottom line is that man does not see fit to take seriously the knowledge of God. In other words, he does not approve the idea of spending much time thinking about or learning about the character of God. Therefore, God gives man over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not proper. And then that catalog of vices that he concludes with in Romans 1, murder, strife, covetousness, gossip, okay, haters of God, disobedient to parents, malicious, malignant, and so on.

He gives this dreadful list of human vices. But the point that the Apostle is making is that there is a causal relationship, a natural consequence when man will not have God in his thoughts that immediately is reflected in what man does. And if you think that God is not worthy of your mental consideration, that will have a massive impact on your life and on the style of your life.

How could it not? I mean, there's a sense in which not everybody is theoretically oriented, but everybody is involved in practice. Philosophers have to live, and non-philosophers have to live.

We're all involved in the practice of living. But whether it's a sophisticated, formally developed concept or not, how we behave is the clearest expression of what our theories really are. Nobody operates without a theory. You may not be able to articulate it.

You may not be able to write an essay about it, and it may be filled with contradictions. But you have a value system. You have a theory. You have an understanding of the meaning of life and what is good and what isn't good, what is valuable and what isn't valuable, and you act according, and so do I. Now the conflict between pragmatism and being practical and the conflict between pragmatism and Christianity is at this level, that pragmatism is a theory of truth. Practicality is a test for truth. You look at that and you say, what is that, a distinction without a difference?

Grab a hold of this distinction. We have our theories, and then we must test our theories to see whether or not they are validated or falsified. Now what the pragmatist theory of truth is, truth is that which works.

The good is that which works. But built into that is the skepticism with respect to ever really coming to an understanding of transcendent norms. Remember I said metaphysical agnosticism. One of the great ironies of American history is that at Harvard University in the 19th century, the philosophy students at Harvard started a club, and that club was named the metaphysical club. That is to say that they defined their purpose and their goal of the club as to be students of philosophy who specialized in concerns of a metaphysical nature. And at the same time, there were three men who were members of that club who were classmates, William James, Charles Pierce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who along with John Dewey became the leading spokesman for the philosophy of pragmatism in the American culture.

In other words, pragmatism grew out historically of a group of fellows in a little fraternity in Harvard who were committed to the precepts of metaphysics. But out of that growing spirit of skepticism with respect to understanding transcendent norms, these fellows began to look for an alternative approach to things. They said, okay, we can't know ultimate truth. We can't know ultimate values. We can't go to the other side.

We're stuck by living here. So how do we know what's right? Well, by experimentation. And William James, how did he approach religion? He's written a classic called The Varieties of Religious Experience, where he analyzes your experience.

You say you're a Christian. You would go into Dr. James' study, and he would say, okay, tell me about your Christian experience. And you would begin to explain to him that you grew up in such and such a home and then you had a crisis experience when you were 21, and you were converted to Christianity. And he would begin to probe and see how your attitudes changed, how your behavioral patterns changed, how your inner feelings change.

And he would say, okay, has this been a positive experience for you or a negative experience for you? And you say, well, it's been a positive experience for me. So for you, religion works. Religion works. It helps you cope.

It helps you make it in this world. And so for you, religion is good, and religion is true. What does that say about whether or not there's a God at that point to this point?

Nothing. Now, the earlier pragmatists, incidentally, believed that there was a God, but you couldn't know very much about it. But they thought that the corporate experience of mankind tended to validate the idea that there was a God. Later, pragmatists moved away from that into a more atheistic bent. But the bottom line concern, again, was not whether there is such a thing as ultimate truth because you can't know it.

But what works? And I've had people come to me. I mean, it embraces a kind of relativism with respect to truth and relativism with respect to goodness. I've talked before about the person that came to me and said, R.C., do you believe in God? I say, yes. Are you glad that you believe in it?

Yes. Does it make a difference in your life? Yes, it makes a difference in my life.

It helps me through all kinds of things. And I say, well, I don't feel the need for God. But for you, God is true. For me, there is no God.

I don't need God. Now, what's going on here? We've redefined truth. Truth classically corresponds to what is objective, what is real. Now, truth is determined by what works for me or for you or even for the group. The problem comes in when it works for you, but it doesn't work for you. Which is true?

Well, they're both true. See, when I say that it's one thing to have practicality as a test for truth, yes, practicality is. I mean, what good is faith if it doesn't work? But then you have to ask the obvious question, work to what end? Work for what? If the truth is that which works, I have to add the question, truth is that which works what? What good is it producing?

You have to have some standard, some norm to determine whether the results are good results or not good results other than pure preference, an arbitrary thing. A college student is having trouble in college. He set out to get an education because he had a long-range goal. He wanted to become a doctor. But he's having struggle, and he's disappointed now in college, and so he decides to go out and get stoned on drugs. Now, as soon as he uses the drugs, he's gotten rid of the pain of his depression, and he's no longer upset about his future, and he's sort of floating around in space, and you say to him, well, do you think this is good?

He says, yes, it solved my problem. And that's been the other chief criticism of pragmatism, that pragmatism tends to focus, and we've mentioned this throughout this course, short-term consequences. Harvey Cox said that Kennedy's philosophy was this. I don't know how accurate his evaluation of Kennedy is, and I'm not here to criticize John Kennedy. I'm here to illustrate a style of pragmatism that is pervasive in our culture.

The nation is bogged down in problems as it was at the beginning of the sixties, and the plan of FDR was consciously embraced by Kennedy, and that is the style of problem solving. We call this the American way of life, or we call it Yankee ingenuity. When I lived in Europe, when I moved out of the American culture, I experienced real cultural shock. You don't realize how strong certain attitudes are in given societies until you leave those societies, but it's in our bloodstream, and if you don't believe it, move.

Go to South America when everything happens mañana. Drive you nuts, okay? Our goal is the difficult we do immediately.

The impossible just takes a little longer. That's part of our national heritage that comes out of this result orientation. But the problem, we run into problems like this, that pragmatism lives, again as I said humanism does, on borrowed capital.

That's not my evaluation. That's pragmatists' own evaluation. I'm thinking here of William James who says that truth is the cash value of an idea, so that the values you select along the way, you don't know whether they're true or not. The principle is the point where you don't know whether they're true, we can't know whether they're true or not, but we borrow it, and then we try to cash it in.

And when it works, that's the cash value. But the problem is, in this whirlwind of problem solving, and John Kennedy realized it and embraced it anyway, he said you have a problem, solve it. Now the solution tends to do what? Give you another problem.

In fact, it may give you two problems. We have a problem with people reaching retirement age, and they haven't saved up enough money to care for themselves in their old age. So what do we do? We create an enforced retirement savings plan. And then people begin to think that that enforced retirement savings plan will cover their needs, not considering inflation. So inflation comes, and the people retire, and they find out they don't have the social security they thought they had, so the government now begins to supplement it.

Okay? And pretty soon it becomes the elephant that's about to sink the ship. But it doesn't happen in six weeks.

It happens in 30 years or 40 years or 50 years. The long-range consequences begin to make themselves full. But the short-range solution, it creates a problem or it creates two problems. That's okay, the pragmatist says, we'll handle them as they come. We'll solve those problems.

But if you're thinking short-term, what happens? Now you've got four problems. You solve those, now you've got eight.

You solve those, now you've got 16. And by exponential growth, the problems of the culture escalate and explode and bring the house crashing down. This is the point where the Bible is saying, yes, truth is that which works, but that which works must be measured by the eternal norms of God. The real conflict between Christianity and pragmatism is the conflict between what is right and what is expedient. As Josiah Royce stated it, and with this I'll close because I'm running out of time, he said, if you want to see how pragmatism degenerates at the ethical level, think of the oath that a person is called upon to give on the witness stand in a law court and change it to pragmatist categories. Do you swear to tell the expedient, the whole expedient and nothing but the expedient, so help you expediency? There you see the conflict between a man who lives for eternal God with eternal norms and eternal truth and those who exchange that, their birth light, for short-term consequences of expedience.

It can be easy to live with a short-term mindset and not live with eternity in mind, or as R.C. Sproul so often reminded us, the need for us to live all of life quorum Deo, before the face of God. To learn more about what that means, click the link in the podcast show notes of today's episode.

Today you heard a message from R.C. Sproul's series Christian Worldview. You can request lifetime digital access to this series and the study guide with its message outlines and discussion questions when you call us at 800 435 4343 and make a donation of any amount. You can also give your donation at renewingyourmind.org. To further help you in this study and for those who prefer to read, we'll send you a copy of Dr. Sproul's book Making a Difference, Impacting Culture and Society as a Christian. Simply give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you click the offer link in the podcast show notes. Thank you for fueling the growth of Renewing Your Mind. It's common today to hear people refer to your truth and my truth, but where did that idea come from and what does it mean? That's what we'll consider tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.