My daughter and granddaughter are visiting this weekend, so I have taken a hiatus from cottage building and book writing to be with them, but now they are napping. So, I will make a gallant effort to finish this series… maybe not in this one setting.

Here is my dilemma. As I’ve said many times, we are facing a crisis in our culture and within Christianity specifically. No, I am not being a Chicken Little announcing the end of existence. Our culture has had many near extinctions and has bounced back or evolved to continue. The Christian church, however, has only faced one such crisis at this level, and that was the efforts by the Roman Empire to exterminate Christianity during the ante pacem (the period before Christianity was legalized).

The Christian faith is shrinking much faster than the polls indicate, as many of the people who are still going to church no longer believe the simple essentials that have historically defined Christianity. The conservative churches are now buried up to their eyeballs in political conspiracy theories, and the progressive church is now buried in late-postmodernist philosophy, whose central tenet is that there is no factual truth.

So, these two ends of the church, as well as the culture at large, have one thing in common: the loss of the aspiration to find and believe factual truths. Donald Trump is the poster child for this loss of curiosity and the pursuit of truth. I have found only a remnant of fact-seekers, and they mostly lie in the scientific fields. This makes sense because the charter of the scientific revolution was the pursuit of factual truth. But now the Trumpians and Christians are doing their best to undermine science, research, and education.

The other dilemma I face is what I have described as the “Catch-22” situation: people under the influence of late-postmodernism are not interested in the cause of this situation, because the very nature of postmodernism is not to think, or at least to overthink. And on the Christian side, everything about God must be irrational… no interest in rational things that pertain to God. This is a profound change in the historical course of the Christian church. Therefore, I cannot address this situation as comprehensively as I would like, because it is like trying to hold an iced drink on a record-hot day. It quickly melts. In other words, attention spans are very short. I’ve noticed a large drop-off in readership of this particular series, so I must come to a conclusion quickly, or there will soon be no readers.

To be clear once again, I’m not a religious person. This means I don’t necessarily make this a moral problem. In other words, I know many wonderful people who are caught up in this way of thinking, and that doesn’t mean they are dumb or immoral. Many are better and smarter than me, but they follow the wrong philosophy because it has taken our culture by storm… just like bellbottom jeans did in my high school.

Where I Left Off

I last left the historical record with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Then came Romanticism, the Age of Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and then Modernity. Those latter movements, in my opinion, were simply the maturing of the Scientific Revolution, its offspring. The Scientific Revolution laid the foundation for those subsequent movements, up until postmodernism. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, having learned from the newly discovered writings of Aristotle, made the Scientific Revolution and its offspring (the movements up to postmodernism) possible by establishing two main ideas: the material world, or nature, was created by God and seen as good (which also contradicts Eastern religions) and that human reason is a gift from God as the best tool for finding truth. These two ideas profoundly changed the world.

The Scientific Revolution and its children profoundly improved the world. Romanticism (not the historical period, but thinking romantically) and historical revisionism in postmodernism argue that the improvements were not all good… but mostly bad. That is not true. As measured by life expectancy, it went from 28 years to 80. Life was much, much easier and happier. To me, this speaks to the factualness of these movements, because they resonated with reality, and therefore we lived better.

The Rub

Direct Conflict with the Church and Faith. The Scientific Revolution, because it was seeking factual truth, conflicted with the church, both Catholic and Protestant, because they believed some things that were not true. Galileo’s heliocentric model of the solar system is one example, but I could give you hundreds. Before the Scientific Revolution, people explained all events in nature as supernatural. A comet was a sign from God. Diseases weren’t caused by bacteria, viruses, or genetic mutations (as in cancer) but by demons or an act of God. They believed in alchemy, that straw or lead could be turned into gold. They also believed in specific miracles that scientists later disproved, such as the “Weeping” Virgin Mary of Sicily. In 1995, a scientist studied the statue and found a plausible reason for the drops of water forming beneath its eyes. The plaster statue absorbed moisture from the air, which plaster is famous for, and then the front of the statue had been glazed, thus waterproof, except for scratches through the glaze beneath the eyes, where the moisture could escape. This is not to mention James Hutton’s proof that the Earth was very old (millions if not billions of years old) in the eighteenth century and Darwin’s theory of evolution in the nineteenth century.

Disillusionment with the hope of science. The scientific revolution was fantastic, but could not solve all the problems of men and women. For one, it could not solve the moral problem. A scientist may invent a farming technique, thinking of the hungry, but an immoral industrialist would use it to enslave people and give himself wealth. The most notable example was scientists like Einstein and Oppenheimer; driven by curiosity and intelligence, they discovered nuclear energy. It was the politicians and religious leaders who wanted it turned into an inhumane bomb.

The last holdout for optimism, in my opinion, was B.F. Skinner in his belief that you could use his mechanical system of stimulus and response to end all crime, all wars, and all mental illnesses… but he failed.

Because of these things, modernity was rejected, and postmodernism rose.

Søren Kierkegaard (born 1813) is often called the father of postmodernism. As a Christian theologian, he was appalled by the scientific revolution’s effects on Christian faith. He had read Voltaire (born 1694), who used the Enlightenment and scientific method to deconstruct Christianity, and especially the Catholic Church.

The final blow for Kierkegaard was reading Hegel (born 1770). Unlike Voltaire, Hegel was a Christian seminary graduate and considered himself a devout Lutheran. But by applying the scientific mind to Christianity, Kierkegaard believed that Hegel had dehumanized Christianity (this is a gross summary). For one example, Hegel did not believe in literal miracles.

Kierkegaard, deeply distressed over the state of Christianity under the influence of the Enlightenment, moved in the opposite direction, with an irrational faith as the center of Christianity.

In my closing articles in this series, I want to examine Kierkegaard’s concept of faith and truth and how it has led to the present situation.

One great hope of mine is that philosophers and culture watchers agree that we are leaving postmodernism and entering a new period they call metamodern. My beef is with late-postmodernism. Early postmodernism had some benefits, such as deconstructing cultural beliefs like racism and chauvinism.

Mike