Modern Philosophy Commits Intellectual Suicide
It is only if naturalism is false at
its foundation that any philosophical
worldview can be objectively true
Suicide of the Philosopher(s)
by John D. Wise
in 1897, responding to speculations by Americans while he was in England, Mark Twain wrote to a reporter in New York:
“the report of my death was an exaggeration.”
I would suggest that similar speculations are in evidence in this article:
Is Philosophy Dead? (Psychology Today, 17 September 2026). Author Walter Veit, Ph.D., is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Reading. Veit’s essay takes as its starting point Stephen Hawking’s infamous decree in The Grand Design:
How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? … Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. [emphasis added]
One might expect a professional philosopher like Veit to point out the irony of Hawking’s claim. It is itself philosophical, not scientific. I cannot help but be reminded of a similar claim that captured my young mind in the 1980’s, this time by science popularizer Carl Sagan, “the Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be,” spoken with all the swaggering authority of a modern-day Druid.
Instead, Veit rolls over, agreeing in essence with Hawking:
Philosophy today is marked by an uneasy peace between two entirely different ways of doing philosophy— namely, scientific philosophy and unscientific philosophy.
Can you guess which one Veit aligns with?
The scientific philosopher sees philosophy as a field sitting between the department buildings of the other sciences. It is part of the sciences. The unscientific philosopher claims privileged access to unique philosophical methods and a stark demarcation between science and philosophy and is at home in the humanities. For they reject the view that philosophy is science. [emphasis mine]
Calling logical empiricist Hans Reichenbach to the witness stand, Veit agrees that traditional philosophy[1] is nothing but a tired museum of outdated historical relics. His philosophical apologia in this article is little more than a groveling unconditional surrender. Philosophy must subjugate itself to greater authority and become “scientific philosophy” – a junior clerk running errands between the laboratory buildings of natural science.
Veit commits the fatal error we’ve been tracking at CEH, the error which has hollowed out the modern mind: substituting the part for the Whole. He points to Daniel Dennett’s famous maxim that “there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.” But Dennett’s defense of philosophy, like the early nineteenth-century church’s responses to Darwinism, was practically a progressive retreat, a compromise, not a defense at all. Dennett did not defend philosophy as the pursuit of transcendent first principles; he reduced it to “baggage,” luggage to be unpacked, inspected, and streamlined by naturalism, a metaphysical stance masquerading as an empirical discovery. Veit simply follows the logic of Dennett’s fatal concession: if empirical science sets the agenda, why bother with the baggage at all? Why not burn the bags, dissolve the department, and become junior lab technicians?
The irony is that modern “science” was never an autonomous master of reality. It was, and remains, a branch of philosophy.
Click to read biography of William Whewell
Consider the very origin of the word. In 1833, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, steeped in German philosophy, stood up and rebuked the attendees. He demanded that they stop dignifying themselves with the venerable title of “philosophers,” because their work had become so narrowly empirical, technical, and specialized that it had lost sight of the universal Whole with which true philosophy concerned itself. In response to this charge of narrowness, William Whewell coined the term “scientist.” The word was minted precisely to designate a specialized investigator of physical particulars, distinguishing him from the seeker of universal wisdom.
The baptism of the “scientist” was an explicit confession of its status as a narrow sub-discipline. Yet two centuries later, Veit rushes forward to announce that this narrow sub-discipline has become the Whole, and the parent must serve the child, or the Master his emissary, to put it in the terms of Iain McGilchrist.
To understand the sheer magnitude of Veit’s capitulation, we can measure it against four historical and theological witnesses:
- The Archetype of Rebellion
The part’s demand for independence from the Whole is the oldest temptation in the cosmos.[2]
In Paradise Lost, Satan’s rebellion is rooted in the refusal to remain a derivative and dependent creature situated within the divine order. Satan cannot bear to reflect an external glory; he demands self-origination, proclaiming that it is “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
When Veit urges philosophers to abandon metaphysics and baptizes naturalism as the only path to truth, he is reenacting this archetype. Materialism demands that reality consists of only that which the finite creature can touch, weigh, and manipulate. The Infinite must be judged by the finite. This is the book of Job. It is CS Lewis’s “God in the Dock.” Like a branch “freeing itself” with a saw while boasting that it has outgrown its trunk, the materialist prefers to reign in the cold, meaningless embrace of death than to admit dependence on Life.
- Socrates vs the Great Capitulation
When Socrates faced the Athenian court, he was offered an easy out. Stop practicing philosophy as you do and all will be well. He could have compromised, adopted the pragmatic relativism of the Sophists, agreed to stay in his lane, and ceased asking questions about Virtue, Justice, Truth and Being. Instead, he drank the hemlock, famously declaring that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
He did this because he understood that philosophy is the humble steward of a higher order, playing its limited role in service to the Whole, to Truth itself. To gut philosophy of its search for transcendent truth was, to Socrates, a betrayal of his divine calling. He refused to compromise the soul of his discipline. Contrast Socrates with Walter Veit and Daniel Dennett. Veit does not stand firm before the cultural tribunal; he betrays the profession. He betrays his own humanity and the transcendent order to purchase institutional survival. Veit says,
Science dealt a death blow to a vision of philosophy that is dominant among the public and common among philosophers: a philosophy that is separate from the sciences. Unscientific philosophy, for the radical naturalist, must appear as pseudo-philosophy. It no longer meets scholarly standards for the pursuit of objective truth. [emphasis mine]
But it is the very scientism to which Veit here genuflects that has presided over the ‘death of objective truth,’ and it is the duty of the true philosopher – now and always – to be the annoying and unpopular gadfly, not a collaborator in the murder. Veit’s cowardice mirrors the catastrophic collapse of the nineteenth-century Western Church. When the twin batteries of Darwinism and German higher criticism (the JEDP hypothesis) opened fire on the authority of Scripture, the ecclesiastical establishment did not stand on the bedrock of God’s word. It compromised biblical authority away, dressing its surrender as a necessary concession to “the assured results of modern scholarship.”[3]
They chose death rather than Life (Deuteronomy 30:19).
It is the familiar posture adopted today by theistic evolutionists, BioLogos, and accommodationist apologists like William Lane Craig. Terrified of being locked out of the secular academic consensus, they concede the naturalist premise, demote Genesis to myth, and spend their careers negotiating the terms of their own execution. Veit is simply enacting that theological apostasy within the philosophy faculty.
- Blind Guides and the Pharisaic Curse
Veit’s article is an active campaign of proselytization. He chides traditional philosophers, whom he brands “unscientific philosophers,” who hold out for metaphysics, warning that if they do not adopt “scientific philosophy,” their discipline will be confiscated by biology and neuroscience.
This brings to mind the stinging indictment of Matthew 23:15: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.”
A laboratory technician who pursues empirical research with a naive, unreflective pragmatism may be excused for his lack of philosophical training. But what shall we say of the professional philosopher who actively recruits his students into metaphysical blindness? Veit crosses the Academy to convert thoughtful initiates into “scientific philosophers,” teaching them to celebrate their own epistemic castration. It is the tragedy of Isaiah 5:20 enacted in peer-reviewed prose: a guild of blind guides who deliberately put darkness for light, and light for darkness, congratulating their fellow cave-dwellers on how well they can see in the dark.
- The Hegel Trap and Marx’s False Sun
Veit assumes that subjecting philosophy to radical naturalism represents intellectual progress. He fails to see that he is trapping himself inside the burning wreckage of a nineteenth-century philosophical system.
G. W. F. Hegel sought to save philosophy by making it Wissenschaft (systematic science). Decades before Whewell coined the English word “scientist,” Fichte and Hegel used Wissenschaft not to mean test tubes or physical reductionism, but a unified, all-encompassing rational architecture of knowledge. Yet Hegel committed the fatal error of the West: demoting the transcendent God to nothing more than creation itself. In Hegel’s system, Absolute Spirit realizes itself through the dialectical unfolding of time and struggle. The Western mind thus surrendered transcendence, making God into an inhabitant of the cosmic terrarium, with nothing and no one on the outside. This is the true source of scientism’s methodological naturalism, and its implicit metaphysic is becoming ever more explicit in the literature as naturalism fails.
Marx, Darwin and Freud read from the same script written by Hegel. (ChatGPT)
Karl Marx did not break from Hegel; he followed him on an even more direct path into the abyss. Marx kept the closed, immanent dialectic and declared that man must finally cast off transcendent religion so that he may revolve around himself as his own true sun.[4] Veit’s “scientific philosophy” is simply the academic exhaust of that Hegelian-Marxian pipeline. By shutting out the transcendent Whole and making empirical science the sole engine of truth, modern naturalism forces humanity to revolve around its finite, fallen mythmaking.
Yet notice the fatal paradox: if scientism is correct, Reichenbach’s museum must eventually contain the philosophical worldview that is scientism itself! If evolutionary naturalism is true, human cognition is merely an accidental, pragmatic adaptation, and no worldview possesses timeless validity. Scientism is just another passing relic destined for the display case. It is only if naturalism is false at its foundation that any philosophical worldview can be objectively true.
The Return of the Repressed: Science Reinvents Plato and Hegel
While Walter Veit is busy begging for a janitorial job in the laboratory, an astonishing development is taking place behind his back: today’s scientists themselves are rebuilding, brick by brick, the very metaphysical edifice Veit believes science has abandoned.
Having pushed reductionist materialism to its absolute limits, frontline researchers are hitting a hard metaphysical wall. In developmental biology, Michael Levin at Tufts University is openly appealing to Plato and Platonic forms to explain how bioelectric networks hold anatomical memories that direct cellular morphogenesis. In theoretical physics, Carlo Rovelli champions a “relational quantum mechanics” that reads like a modern mathematical translation of Hegel’s dialectical holism. Philosophers of science like Philip Goff are fleeing physicalism to embrace panpsychism, while geochemists like Robert Hazen map mineral evolution through the lens of emergent, holistic complexity.
Scientists have followed the yellow brick road of reductionism only to discover that matter alone cannot explain form, agency, information, or consciousness. Just as the naturalists are being dragged kicking and screaming through the back door into Platonic forms and teleology, Veit is crawling out the front door, shouting that metaphysics is dead.
The Matchstick and the Sun
This entire debacle turns upon the ruling reality of Light. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the Sun is not one more object among the shadows; it is the ultimate, transcendent Source that makes everything visible. As David Coppedge recently reminded us, C. S. Lewis captured this truth with characteristic brilliance: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Light is not simply an object to be verified under a lens. It is the necessary pre-condition for seeing, for believing, for knowing anything at all.
Carl Sagan famously tried to cast empirical science as a heroic “candle in the dark,” an embattled human flame flickering against an infinite, hostile cosmic night. But Sagan had the picture completely inverted, and Veit has swallowed the inversion whole, becoming one of its many false prophets. The materialist is not a brave and embattled lonely seeker holding a candle in a dark abyss. He is a man standing under the blazing, high-noon glory of a rational, Logos-ordered creation, squeezing his eyes shut, striking a match, and boasting that because his match doesn’t illuminate the sun, it cannot exist. Veit’s “scientific philosophy” is not an illumination. It is an eclipse, an artificial and voluntary dimming of the faculties of the rational soul made in God’s image.
As the Apostle Paul warned the philosophers on Mars Hill, the God who made the world does not dwell in temples made with hands, “for in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Empirical science thrives because it operates inside an intelligible creation upheld by the divine Word. It borrows the capital of God’s ordered universe at every turn while refusing to pay its intellectual debt. When the Church or the academy attempts to compromise with this totalizing naturalism, it explicitly chooses death. It is becoming increasingly clear that the only coherent answer is to refuse the closed just-so story, reject the fatal concession, and heed the ancient prophetic summons: Return to Me, and I will return to you.
The Divine Hierarchy of What Is
Science arose in the Western world precisely because early investigators understood the divine hierarchy of Being:
- Theology is the rational faith in Being Himself, the transcendent and self-sufficient Source of all things. Credo ut intelligam: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible … all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” (Colossians 1:16-17)
- Philosophy is the overarching human quest for Truth: our systematic endeavor to align our finite reason with the transcendent Logos, thinking God’s thoughts after Him with the tools of logic and first principles. Its origins are in the wisdom literature of God’s word.
- Science is simply natural philosophy: a sub-discipline of the larger quest, restricting its gaze to the physical creation in order to trace the wisdom, order, and faithfulness of the Creator through the things He has made.
The boundaries and the order of priority matter, because the created-hierarchy cannot be inverted without inviting chaos. When philosophy is superseded by divine revelation, man’s intellect is elevated into worship, recognizing its creaturely status before the Infinite. But when philosophy is dissolved into scientistic empiricism, empiricism is elevated into Being, the species attempts to devour the genus, the part claims sovereignty over the Whole. This is not enlightenment. It is intellectual and spiritual suicide.
Walter Veit may believe he is heralding the future of philosophy, but he is only measuring the self-imposed walls of ‘the Cave.’ Science never outgrew philosophy, and it can never replace it. It merely chose to gouge out its eyes and mistake the resulting blindness for the death of the Light.
Veit’s report of philosophy’s death is greatly exaggerated.
Footnotes
[1] This battle was in full force while I was doing my PhD work at the U of CA, Irvine in the late 90’s, and the philosophy department was deeply divided. I was, and remain, a Continental philosopher, not an analytical philosopher, much more “at home” in the humanites. Why? Because science, for all its vaunted authority, remains a human discipline. It is the sciences, not philosophy that is the sub-discipline.
[2] Isaiah 14:13-14: “And thou saidst in thy heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; and I will sit upon the mount of congregation, in the uttermost parts of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.”
[3] I use this phrase here as CS Lewis did in “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” available here.
[4] The phrase comes from Marx’s “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” available here. The quote in question is this:
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself. [emphasis mine]
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.