The Seven Deadly Spins--Nominalism

Trying to understand our culture today is a lot like showing up late to a movie—important things happened before you arrived, but since you’re not aware of them, you’re struggling to understand what’s unfolding before you right now. So it is in our present time. Many people are looking at the ideas being embraced in our culture and are asking, “How can my neighbor (or friend or family member) believe THAT!?”

Spiritually, we know that the root of all problems and false ideas in our society is sin. The human race is in rebellion against God; we don’t want to accept things the way He created them. Sin is the problem causing trouble in all societies and yet, societies manifest this struggle with sin in different ways. Differences in the intellectual soil of societies produce different false ideas and thus different problems.

In my next few articles, I’d like to dig down into the intellectual soil of our society to uncover the factors producing false ideas around us today. I hope this project won’t seem out of place—my colleagues who also write in this column do a good job of taking us to the Scriptures, so I’m confident that contribution will continue. Perhaps my short project will simply provide some helpful context for understanding our society today and how to navigate through it in a faithfully Christian manner. I’m calling my little project “The Seven Deadly Spins” in order to refer to spins—or distortions—of what is true.

The idea I’ll mention today is called nominalism. It is the claim that an idea like “human nature” or “humanity” does not come into our minds from the world around us; rather, that idea is just a title or category that we assign to a group of similar but ultimately separate things. For example, when you go downtown to the café, you don’t shake hands with “human nature”—you shake hands with Bob, Steve, Debbie, and Sue. Yet from ancient times, philosophers argued that there was something real that connected Bob, Steve, Debbie, and Sue—something they all shared in common that we could call human nature. These philosophers argued further that this shared thing was not just an invention of our minds, it was something our minds discovered about the real world, and this shared thing was just as real as anything we can see, touch, taste, smell, or hear. Beginning in the Middle Ages however, it started to become more fashionable among philosophers to deny that something like “human nature” existed as anything more than just an idea that our minds created to categorize things around us.

That far-too-brief description is surely still a bit confusing to you, but the significance of nominalism is this—if an idea like human nature is just the product of human minds, then human minds control it. We would get to decide what the boundaries of human nature are and who fits inside those boundaries. Perhaps you can see where this could lead. Combined with another idea or two, nominalism becomes the root of racism—the claim that we can declare other people to be “sub-human” simply because of where we choose to draw the boundaries of humanity. In a similar way, nominalism becomes the root of denying personhood to a baby in the womb—because again, if nominalism is true, human minds become the arbiter of who does and who does not count as a person.

In contrast to nominalism, Christians ought to affirm that a thing like human nature is a real, true, objective feature of the universe. It’s not something we made up and thus it’s not something we control. My shared humanity with another person is a fact imposed upon both of us—I don’t get to decide if humanity applies to him any more than I get to decide if the laws of physics apply to him! And what could make reality be this way? Only our Creator God who conceived of humanity in His mind in the first place.