Ancient Greece’s Contribution

Important Note: The things here written do not necessarily reflect the opinions, teachings, philosophies, and/ or views of the Ron Paul Curriculum and its faculty.

Today’s Western Civilization is greatly founded upon ancient Greece’s way of thought. The education, science, government, arts, etc. of the present, contain their mayor influence in the ancient Greek philosophy and culture. The problem is, though, that we have become so accustomed to living in this manner that we have never stopped to analyze the yielded result in today’s society of syncretizing a Christian philosophy with a Greek philosophy (which revolves around reason) to create the foundations for our Western Civilization.

While some of each’s arguments might be of mutual support, there comes a point in which they contradict. Ultimately, this creates an unstable foundation which can be easily destroyed along with all it sustains. Therefore, because they can enter in conflict, either we are for the one or the other. Here is why.

Christianity says that God existed before anything else and He created all things. This means that God created reason, God is above reason, and created all things with much more than reason. Even so, Greek philosophy says that you can come to comprehend this world fully through reason. But if God created everything with something much more than reason, this signifies that you need that “something”, besides reason, to completely understand this world and all created things. Human reason is limited and bounded to the structures, preconceived ideas, and acquired knowledge of man, thus it can never understand the unreasonable, unlimited, eternal, or invisible. For that matter, reason is also subjective not objective.

Greeks basically concluded that reason is the only thing that differentiates human beings from animals. On the other hand, Christianity says that the essential thing that separates man from animals is the reality of having been created at the image and likeness of their Creator. (See essay on The Light, the Life and Eternity). If these two conclusions were to be mixed, it would end up meaning that the essential characteristic of God that makes him God is reason. And that doesn’t sound quite right.

Human beings have an imagination, something animals do not have. With this imagination we can think of irrational things. For example, I can imagine myself as obtaining eagle’s wings and flying up into the heavens. Reason would tell me that this is impossible, crazy, or just plain stupid. Nevertheless, the invisible, eternal, boundless, and spiritual realm of God tells me that this is possible. For example, Jesus said something in John 3:12-14 that may sound very unreasonable to the human way of thought, “If I told you earthly things and you don’t believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended out of heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven.” As a matter of fact, Jesus’s whole chat with Nicodemus (found in the beginnings of John 3) demonstrates perfectly the rivalry between the spiritual ways of thought of God against the rational ways of thought of man.

Reason has taken humanity to seek natural, rational, and visible explanations for every single thing that exists and takes place. As some Pre-Socratic philosophers would also seek reasonable explanations for everything, before attributing them to the gods. What has this committed? Well, we have a society that has little by little been separating God from humanity to the point in which reasonable explanations have intended to wipe out His existence.

Why? The answer is because the spiritual realm of God is many times incomprehensible, along with the things He does. Reason has made us numb to the fact that God’s and the devil’s reality (spiritual realm) is constantly active among the natural one. As I exposed it in The Light, The Life, and Eternity, it is the spiritual realm that determines everything in the natural one. Therefore, to understand natural things, we must first understand spiritual ones and I am not talking about religion. That is why I like what Greek philosopher Socrates said; that the more he knew about things, he realized the nothing he knew. Admitting we know nothing requires great meekness and humbleness, but reason increments the pride mankind has in their own knowledge. This pride blinds us and hinders us to not understand we know nothing. That is why every time there is a scientific “discovery” the only thing we uncover is more questions.

That is why people today do not understand the bible either, because they use reason to understand a spiritual book. God is spirit (John 4: 24). His Spirit, upon men and women, wrote the bible. He spoke of spiritual and invisible things that cannot be comprehended with human reasoning, but with the mind of the Spirit. Remember, the spiritual realm is many times irrational. Reason only departs God from humanity little by little, until it finally “eliminates” His existence. If we knew God, we would know that it is He who grants us our freedom or liberty in every single area of society, not the vain reasoning and efforts of man.

If we knew the spiritual realm, we would know that ancient Greece’s foundations for our society are spiritual and not intellectual, thus they affect us greater than we have ever come to understand. Hence, it is important we understand in what way they have influenced our civilization and be capable to detect those things in which we have been erroneous to adopt and eliminate them, first spiritually, second intellectually, and finally naturally.

Important Note: The things here written do not necessarily reflect the opinions, teachings, philosophies, and/ or views of the Ron Paul Curriculum and its faculty.