Ideas can be powerful. If they are good, we all benefit; but bad ideas can have disastrous effects when they are widely accepted. In this series, Vision takes a look at six dominant ideas of our time which came from men who popularized their own musings until they became the concepts that animate our thinking and the language we all use. These include Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and its associated mechanism of natural selection; Karl Marx’s theory and practice of dialectical materialism; Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the human mind; positivism, the philosophy underlying the scientific method; and relativism, the idea that there are no absolutes. These influential ideas and their proponents have several things in common: science and scientists as the ultimate arbiters of true knowledge, the rejection of the metaphysical, and the end of God’s role in human life.
Six Dominant Ideas, Part 1: Origin of a Specious Theory
In the first article in a series examining the foundations of modern Western thought, Vision looks at two ideas within a theory that removed God from His role as Creator.
Six Dominant Ideas, Part 2: A Dark Fellow From Trier
Karl Marx may have influenced modern history more than any other intellectual, but what influenced his theories?
Six Dominant Ideas, Part 3: A Dream Gone Wrong
Sigmund Freud's theories have helped to shape the mental framework of just about everyone, whether they have read his works or not.
Six Dominant Ideas, Part 4: Positively No Absolutes?
A look at two philosophies that gained prominence largely as a result of 20th-century developments in science.
Six Dominant Ideas, Part 5: Turning the Intellectual Tide
An analysis of the important ideas that have shaped the modern world suggests that, contrary to the message conveyed by the proponents of those ideas, faith and reason are not mutually exclusive.
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