Welcome to Episode 81 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about one of the most bizarre concepts the world has ever known. Namely, the future.

OK, I know, I lost you right here, at the very beginning. The future is a bizarre concept??? How come? What do you mean, Bo? The future sounds to me as one of the most natural concepts a man can have. We are born thinking of the future, dreaming about the future, imagining what we are going to be in the future, planning for the future. No person has ever found difficult to think of the future and eagerly expect the future. Why would it be “bizarre,” if everyone is so familiar and so comfortable with the concept of the future? What are you talking about?

Not so quick. Let’s start thinking here. I suggest that we have always accepted the concept of a the future as natural and normal without thinking why it should be natural and normal. Most of us never even thought what the future is, as a concept. When we dig into that concept, and into the way it is produced and perceived by our minds and hearts, we may discover that it is not as natural and normal as we may have first thought. May be it’s not even not normal, it may be a severe aberration, a mental monstrosity, if the “naturalness” of our minds is to be our standard for “normalcy.” Perhaps we need to stop and consider the possibility that “future” is simply an illusion which we have been poisoned with from an early age. Perhaps it is even a propaganda device meant to manipulate us and control us for certain purposes? Who knows what we can discover if we start thinking about the concept of the future instead of just accepting it on faith. Then again, we may discover that it is just a normal and natural concept, as we have always thought, right? But whatever we discover, it is still worth to start thinking about that concept of the future. It may help us learn things about ourselves and about how our minds operate. And if we learn things about ourselves, we may learn things about our Christian faith. And, as John Calvin said in the first book of his Institutes, once we learn more about ourselves, we end up learning about God.

So, what is future? Specifically, what is it as a concept of thought, of philosophy, of psychology, of practical ideology? How do we define it, and where does it comes from? Is it part of our nature to think of the future as a separate category; do all people instinctively adopt it as part of their thought models? Or is it something that we learn from our parents because they learned it from others before them; and therefore, if we had parents from a different culture that didn’t have the concept of future, we wouldn’t even think about it as a valid reality?

Reformed Christians, and especially presuppositionalists among my listeners may be fascinated to learn that despite the prevalence of that concept in our every day lives, and in our formal philosophical and ideological systems and endeavors, the concept of the future has been amazingly under-represented in philosophical and psychological studies. Not that there aren’t any studies on it, but the existing ones are way too few for such a common concept, and they are usually limited in scope. Even if you go to Wikipedia and read the article on “Future,” you will see that that article is quite short, with a few sketchy paragraphs on each of the disciplines of physics, philosophy, and religion, and half of the article devoted to side issues like art styles, and music and literary genres that have adopted the concept as foundational (like futurism and science fiction). It even lacks serious references for additional reading: no books, only a few references to marginal encyclopedias and newspaper articles. To compare, the article on “Mysticism,” for example, is about 8 times longer, very detailed and comprehensive, and has about 150 references, all to serious academic studies. And yet, how often is mysticism present as a topic in serious discussions as opposed to the future? The discrepancy is not only in Wikipedia; it is everywhere. Philosophers discuss a whole lot of other subjects, but they somehow always evade discussing the future as a philosophical concept, even though the future is one of the most common concepts the modern man deals with, every day.

There were attempts, of course, few and far between. Roger Evered, a British engineer and educator who immigrated to the US in the 1960s, worked as aerospace engineer at McDonnell Douglas, and later taught at several universities and at the Postgraduate Naval College, did try to tackle future as a philosophical concept. His doctoral dissertation with the University of California in Los Angeles in 1973 was titled, “Conceptualizing the ‘Future’: Implications for Strategic Management in a Turbulent Environment.” He later went on to teach Strategic Management, and had to tackle the concept again. Most of his treatment of the concept of the future, however, remained limited to the area of strategic management. Not that there is any problem in such specific application of the concept; but it certainly tends to limit the scope, and Evered ended taking more things for granted than he analyzed and explained. After him, no one really tried to explain the concept from a philosophical perspective. The deepest studies ever tackled the concept in the context of consumer behavior; the 1980s and the 1990s were the culmination of studies on consumer behavior, and expectations of the future were central to any understanding of how the consumers would react to new products or commercials. Still, no scholar dared touch the concept from a more general, philosophical starting point. In that period, the term “philosophy of time” became popular. But despite its popularity, no one really sat down to even give a definition of the concept of the future, let alone study it as a concept. The philosophy of time studies focused mainly either on realism – the metaphysical relation between past, present, and future – or on nominalism – human perception of time and the theory of time preferences (the last one especially important for the study of political economy and entrepreneurship and investment). Again, nothing wrong with these studies, in fact, they are important both practically and theoretically, but . . . a definition of “future” was still not given, and neither was a study of the concept itself presented. The concept of the future was taken for granted, as if it has already been defined and studied, and only its relationship with other concepts was examined. Unique, huh? There is really no other such concept in philosophy that has been treated in such a lousy way. In fact, if anything, secular philosophers have often criticized Christians for not being able to define God (not that God is definable in human terms in the Christian worldview in the first place); and yet, here they are taking for granted a concept that they have never even tried to define.

Now, there is a good reason why modern philosophy – especially modern secular philosophy – is incapable of even beginning to define the concept of the future. That reason is that modern philosophy has fallen victim to its foundational premise: that whatever definition or logical rule we use, it cannot refer us us back to anything supernatural, or to any other and higher reason or mind outside and above the human mind and human experience. Everything man uses to define himself and the world around himself must be based on “natural” assumptions, meaning naturalistic assumptions. All the foundations for our definitions must be grounded in man’s direct sensory experience. You know the regular atheist excuse for an argument: “If I can’t see your God, then He is either non-existent or irrelevant.” Philosophers know that such excuse is rather primitive and low-brow, and they seldom use it directly, it is still, as a philosophical presupposition, embedded deeply into the modern secular thought. So when it comes to definitions of things that require some open display of non-sensory faith, philosophers are rather timid to take up the challenge.

And indeed, think about it. How can we define the future based on the modern secular thought that requires sensory experience before there is a definition? Why should we be even mindful about the future? Has anyone experienced it? Has anyone seen it? I used that argument with atheists many times: Do you believe there is future? Have you seen it? Can you describe it? Can you define it? The answers were always quite lame, logically. The complaints secularists raise about the Christian God apply to the concept of the future as well: it is only a figment of our imagination, only a conjecture, an extrapolation from misinterpreted evidence (and all of that evidence comes from another imaginary, the concept of the past, but I won’t go there in this episode), no one has seen it or experienced it, really. There is no natural reason for us to even believe there is future, or that it has any relevant significance to anything we do or say or think. The only possible answer to this is that even if we haven’t experienced the future so far, we will surely experience it tomorrow, when it comes . . . but so what? When it comes, it won’t be future anymore, it will be present. To base our definitions on mental expectations, not sensory experience, would be to resort to faith – and why would a secularist philosopher want to base his philosophy on faith? I mean, once you resort to faith for one thing, who knows in how many more definitions you will let faith dictate your perceptions and definitions, and then . . . what is the defense against Christianity and its faith-based philosophy? So, no wonder secularist philosophers avoid defining the future as a concept. They may talk about it, they may take it for ...