The Truth War
I’m adding one more series to my plate here on this site. As you know I’ve taken a nose dive into the Cedarville conspiracy issue. I’ll give a brief history if for a wrap up. Cedarville has been in the midst of some philosophical controversy over the past 5-6 years, and as a result some Bible professors have been let go, for what has been cited as “violations of the faculty handbook”. These professors are some of the more “Conservative” professors at Cedarville. They stand for conservative hermeneutics. Because these conservative professors have been let go, and because certain other “Liberal” professors have not been let go, there has arisen a group of students, as personified in the Facebook group “Students who want the truth about the faculty exodus away from Cedarville,” who have jumped to the conclusion that Cedarville is intentionally trying to oust its conservative faculty to replace them with liberal faculty so that they can move away from such things as “Conservative Hermeneutics… Biblical Truth… Scriptural Authority… Her Baptist Roots…” Now there are a plethora of issues that surround this. I’ve tackled the logical error that is the assumption of what is going on – the conspiracy theory that has arisen. But now I’m going to get into some other areas of this.
3 Examples of Nominalism
I guess I can’t always talk about Calvinism, seeing as how it’s not the only thing I think about. Today I’m thinking about Nominalism.
Nominalism:
the doctrine that general or abstract words do not stand for objectively existing entities and that universals are no more than names assigned to them1
In short this is in contrast to a metaphysical epistemology which says that reality is bound to form and our knowledge of anything is an internalization of its form. In short, nominalism says ‘It is what I call it’ while metaphysics says, ‘I call it what it is’. Anyone who has traveled or lived overseas should be able to identify with the metaphysical position. When you get in your car in London and drive through the chunnel and come out on the other side to find you’re driving a voiture, are you suddenly no longer in a car? Of course not! The concept of car is tied to its form and matter, not the word assigned to refer to it. The same is true if you were to drive west instead of south and upon crossing the mountains you find you’re driving a cerbyd. Again, what you’re driving hasn’t changed, because the word has no bearing on it’s metaphysical reality.
You might ask if this is the same thing, because ultimately if we call it what it is, then it is what we call it, right? Not necessarily, because according to my Thomist friend, nominalists assert that it is the naming of the thing that creates its essence. Thus by saying something is something, you make it that way.
But let’s get out of the abstract. Let’s get to the concrete. My friend decries nominalism as one of the worst things to plague philosophy and Christianity. I don’t know enough about it to know whether that is true, but I do know three cases in which I have seen nominalism at work and in each case it is dreadfully wrong.