Losing Touch With Reality

Recently, I listen to this Breakpoint podcast, where John Stonestreet was talking about how Christians were the first ones to make the case against foot binding in China back in the late 1800s. The earliest opponents of foot binding didn't just make a Christian argument, but rather that they were able to make arguments based on the fact that binding is bad for the whole culture regardless of their beliefs. Christians can make such an argument because their beliefs are based in reality and that is why Christians can point others to the real world.

This reminded me of the fact that much of the modern age and scientific discovery came about because a Christian worldview began to dominate the western world. In the pre-Christian world there wasn't  a basis for believing that nature made sense, but the Christian understanding of the world was that God created and His creation makes sense, so we can discover truths about it using observation and logic. One early Christian scientist put it this way, "I'm thinking God's thoughts after him. "

Over the last couple of century, secular philosophers and scientists have been trying to jettison the idea of God, while at the same time trying to maintain a philosophy that the universe still makes sense. Unfortunately this is like trying to maintain a skyscraper while digging up its foundation. As time goes by the whole structure begins to crumble, and we are seeing the fruit of this godless philosophy in the postmodern age.

Here is how this works and why secular modernism cannot sustain the idea of a rational world. They start with the foundation that all evidence must be empirical or observable evidence that can be experienced and tested (This claim by the way cannot be tested empirically!) Second, because they cannot find that type of empirical evidence for God or anything supernatural (because their first test for evidence excludes evidence that might point to the supernatural by definition!) Then they claim that there's no rational reason to believe that God exists because there is no evidence for God. In other words, it is a circular argument that excludes the possibility of evidence of the supernatural, and then claims they cannot find any evidence or arguments for God.

The logical consequence of this is that there is no objective or larger reason for anything to exist or anything to happen because the physical world is all that could exist. In a purely physical world, every event is ultimately either random or determined by prior physical conditions. Things like meaning, purpose, morality, and destiny are not physical and are therefore ultimately not actually part of reality.

Now on this last point, many modernists are not actually very honest in public, although a few of them, such as Sam Harris in this podcast, admit the consequences of their belief system. Previous generations of atheistic philosophers, such as Nietzsche and Russell, have admitted the consequences of this view of the reality mean that there are no metanarratives that explain and give meaning to the universe.

If things like purpose, meaning, morality, and rationality itself are all ultimately random or determined, then how can we trust one idea to be "better than" any other idea. Thus modernism logically led to postmodernism, which makes the claim that all meaning is ultimately subjective coming from either individuals or groups. Ironically, this actually places a postmodern society back in the position of premodern societies, where truth was determined only by your group and most often by the authorities of your group such as the ruler or the priest. Meaning determined by which ever group or individual can hold power long enough to impose their definition on others.

Now we've gotten to the place where we can see how these ideas have practical effects on our culture. Here are three examples of the postmodern/relativistic view of truth in action. 

First, when someone makes a claim that they are transgender or a different gender than the physical body, they are making a claim that the physical reality of their body (chromosomes and physical characteristics) does not determine their gender. Instead, they claim that their internal experience can determine their gender. This works in the current culture because truth is not determined by physical realities, but by the individuals or groups. In the past, facts that were obvious to everyone's senses would have informed us that the physical reality is what should be believed rather than someone's experience, but now someone's internal experience is supposed to define not just their reality, but the reality of those who interact with them.

Another example is how we view race and any group that is deemed to be a minority or oppressed group. In critical theories, there is no meta narrative or overarching truth about the world, rather truth is determined by your exclusively by group identity. It is not just that you see the world through your particular set of lenses, but that in fact there is no way to get out of your particular set of circumstances and view the world objectively. From this perspective, logic and math can end up being tools of oppression used by a particular group to keep others down as described here. The claim that objectivity can be reached by a reasoned argument is refuted by the idea that even that is simply a culturally relative idea.

As a final example, I point to how various groups responded to the pandemic in this last year. For most people, we did not actually listen to competing scientific narratives and make a choice based upon who made the most compelling argument that best lined up with reality. No, rather most of us listened to the authorities we knew we could trust (likely who said the thing we already wanted to hear.) Therefore, if someone said hydroxychoriquine and zinc was the miracle cure for Covid, you either believed them or totally dismissed them based upon your and their political camp. Likewise, whether or not you believed masks were an effective means to significantly slow the spread also depended upon who you believed. Even when it comes to "scientific" knowledge, our beliefs have been broken down into groups and we believe our authorities, not your authorities. You might think this is just a problem with the regular guy and that the real scientists dispassionately look at all the relevant data, but as we have seen time and time again this last year, various authorities (even Dr. Fauci) have said something with great confidence only to have to walk back their comments or change their opinion. As a result, many of us have developed a jaded view of media and authorities and now make sure to only to listen to those people we "know" we can trust, not the bad ones like Fox News or NPR depending your perspective. 

These three examples illustrate how in our postmodern world we're not only losing touch with reality, but we are even losing the tools necessary to accurately assess what is real and what is not. This can be traced back to our loss of belief in God who grounds reality, and without whom we cannot be sure of what is real or even if there is a real truth to be found. If we are just blobs of carbon and water randomly found on one tiny spec of a much larger but still random universe, then how can we trust anyone, including ourselves. But if instead the universe and each one of us was created for a purpose and headed toward a conclusion, then we can have confidence that the universe makes sense and that we can make sense of it.

When Jesus was brought before Pilate, he asked Jesus, "What is truth?" In his pagan world filled with lots of different finite gods, Pilate could not find a firm place on which to ground truth. Ironically the man to whom he asked the question was the very one who claimed to be, "the way, the truth, and the life," and then backed up that claim by dying and rising again just days after Pilate had asked the question.

I believe that if we're going to be able to move forward as a society, we're going to have to go back and get in touch with the grounding of reality, namely a belief in a God who created it and therefore gives purpose and meaning to reality.