I have barely scratched the surface of the history of how we got to the subjective culture we live in now. However, people get easily bored with history without knowing the point of the study; just ask a high schooler. So, I will come up for air and refocus on the point before I resume the fascinating story, starting with Constantine the Great.

We are living in a time of wholesale loss of truth. The Christian community is the worst of this movement. When knowledge was decoupled from evidence, it started us on a path to a cultural disaster. Notice I am not writing in religious terms; I’m not saying the people are evil or going to hell, but culture will cease to function. This is also the point of Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Yes, the age of AI will make this even worse if we are not prepared. I’m not worried about people believing AI fakes but not believing factual truths and equating the two.

My favorite twentieth-century theologian/philosopher was Francis Schaeffer. He was the first to open my eyes to this deviation from reason and factual truth with his book, Escape from Reason. However, in his book, he was concerned about the loss of truth in the secular world and hoped that Christianity would temper that decline by focusing on objective truths. Instead, it turned out that Christianity has led this decline… leaving Dr. Schaeffer to roll in his grave. I will explain how that happened in my history story.

Presently, the conservative Christians in America, at least, are those most likely to believe false information, such as that the Earth is only six thousand years old, vaccines do more harm than good, the 2020 election was stolen, evidence-based medicine is not trustworthy, climate change is a hoax, landing on the moon was a hoax, and the absurd; a plethora of conspiracy theories, such as Bill Gates created vaccines to cause abortions.

Now, the progressive church, while more highly educated, is not off the hook. They have now fallen in line with a deep devotion to such postmodernist gurus as Richard Rohr. Postmodernism, at least the late version we are in now, holds that there are no factual truths; each person creates their own truth subjectively. Rohr speaks and writes in poetic prose that, I admit, is very attractive. However, when you really listen to him, as I did in a small group that focused on him, for two years (I was the only dissenting voice in that group), you will hear some remarkable and disturbing things.

For example, Rohr says that questions are okay as part of a spiritual exercise, but looking for answers is wrong: “an exercise in ego.” He must say this as a postmodernist, because to them, there are no answers. Rohr went on to falsely claim that the historical Jesus used questions as a spiritual practice but was not interested in answers. After hearing that, I went back and read every single question that the Bible records Jesus as asking, and each one demanded a particular answer, often implied via a rhetorical question.

But here’s the rub (my new favorite term from Shakespeare). I will ask some questions and now pretend the answer doesn’t matter, only the experience of asking the question.

My dear wife… do you love me?

Is racism wrong?

Is pedophilia really wrong?

Is murder wrong?

Does God want us to hate gay people?

Should we bomb these children?

Should we starve these people?

So, the answers to those questions really don’t matter?

I could go on and on, but only to make the point that a world built on subjective truth will always end in disaster. And one last point, because we are finite and imperfect, while the goal is to find truth the best we can, we can never reach factual truth with total certainty, only with a high probability, but that is a hell of a lot better than making it up.

When I went from subjective Christianity, where we pretended things, to objective Christianity, where evidence was important for faith, it was like going from a make-believe (AI) girlfriend… to a real one. Profoundly richer and more mysterious than “truths” generated inside my own head.

Respectfully,

Mike