Apologetics from the greeks

https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/bible_books/?view=book_chapter&chapter=3842

When you read something like this, to me it stirs remembrance of Francis Schaeffer where he explains the intricacies of Pythagoras.

What does this have to do with you and I?

From this kind of philosophy is born the current ideologies we resist as Christians.

Can you name any?

Sometimes I like to think of some things in the abstract in order to make more substantial connections with current events. These tidbits help me to understand what I face.

"crickets"

I get that I am a nerd.

This kind of philosophy formed the impetus for the enlightenment. Their division of material and ethereal, tangible and intangible.
This later formed the idea that our human reasoning, our 5 senses trump all intangible assertions. So, science steps up and declares to us about 200 years ago, what can be known scientifically can be truly known. What is religious, myth, intangible, abstract or spiritual cannot be known because it cannot be proven by the 5 senses, it cannot be reproduced, it cannot be analyzed in a closed system.

As a result you have books written how the Christian religion disdains scientific discovery, they are backward and reticent toward the rational and scientific mind.
This later created a chasm between the material and the spiritual, where what is material must be true because it can be quantified and analyzed. What is spiritual or upper level was all relegated to the same platform; that platform was myth, religion, superstition, ecstatic experience, visions, dreams, prophecies, ghosts, spirits and God himself were in fact unqualified to be considered fact.

The Egyptians and later the Greeks had in seed form the poisonous plant we know as secular humanism. For them, they were immersed in superstition and myth, their cultures were wholly dependent upon worship and service to their gods.
Humanism could not be birthed from pagan religious worship. But it was not need then. It would not be needed until Christianity revealed the utter folly of mythological gods and the worship of bugs, animals and reptiles. When the educated world realized they were to sophisticated for paganism and they were too rational for Christianity, they did what any good rationalist does...he contrives reasons to remove any outside voices that question the rationality of the day.
God in his wisdom was setting free Christianity from the entrance of superstitions and false teaching; yet, the German enlightenment and later the French denounced the scandalous clergy and resisted the backward thinking Church. For the most part the then modern world said "away with the Church". During this time ( as with out time) the Church had come into disfavor because of it entrenchment in greed, scandal, political intrigue.

To this day the remnants of enlightenment refusal of the Church and the duality of Spirit/matter allowed the reasonable and educated man a reason to consider the bible and the metaphysical as 'man in his former thinking'.
Hippolytus helped us even then in a very prophetic sense to be warned of the errors of the Greeks...even in something that seems so innocuous as Pythagoras' Duality of substances.

In reading one of the infamous atheists of our day Daniel Dennett, his book "Darwin's dangerous Idea" highlights the very things I have shared here, that Darwin's' corrosive truth of evolution crushes man's superstitions which cannot resolve the scientific evidences pointing away from the metaphysical and existential. Instead he re-labels them mere constructs in the human mind as coping mechanisms.

But, there is more to be said and the story is not over yet.

FYI Hippolytus was a 3nd century bible answer man, his books on heresies are expansive, his knowledge of the intricacies of these false doctrines and the ability to exposed their error show him to be a man with a powerful mind.

From the introduction

We can scarcely over-estimate the value of The Refutation, on account of the propinquity of its author to the apostolic age. Hippolytus was a disciple of St. Irenæus, St. Irenæus of St. Polycarp, St. Polycarp of St. John. Indeed, one fact of grave importance connected with the writings of St. John, is elicited from Hippolytus' Refutation. The passage given out of Basilides' work, containing a quotation by the heretic from St. John i.9, settles the period of the composition of the fourth Gospel, as of greater antiquity by at least thirty years than is allowed to it by the Tübingen school. It is therefore obvious that Basilides formed his system out of the prologue of St. John's Gospel; thus for ever setting at rest the allegation of these critics, that St. John's Gospel was written at a later date, and assigned an apostolic author, in order to silence the Basilidian Gnostics. In the case of Irenæus, too, The Refutation has restored the Greek text of much of his book Against Heresies, hitherto only known to us in a Latin version. Nor is the value of Hippolytus' work seriously impaired, even on the supposition of the authorship not being proved, -- a concession, however, in no wise justified by the evidence. Whoever the writer of The Refutation be, he belonged to the early portion of the third century, formed his compilations from primitive sources, made conscientious preparation for his undertaking, delivered statements confirmed by early writers of note, and lastly, in the execution of his task, furnished indubitable marks of information and research, and of having thoroughly mastered the relations and affinities, each to other, of the various heresies of the first two and a quarter centuries. These heresies, whether deducible from attempts to Christianize the philosophy of Paganism, or to interpret the Doctrines and Life of our Lord by the tenets of Gnosticism and Oriental speculation generally, or to create a compromise with the pretensions of Judaism, -- these heresies, amid all their complexity and diversity, St. Hippolytus reduces to one common ground of censure -- antagonism to Holy Scripture. Heresy, thus branded, he leaves to wither under the condemnatory sentence of the Church