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The Contemporary Worldview Struggle

America — A Divided Nation

On Sunday morning May 9, 2004, I was in the Seattle airport waiting to board my flight home. Having finished a weekend of speaking, I wanted to relax, so I picked up a copy of The Seattle Times and made a beeline for the sports page. But before I got there, the lead editorial in the opinion section caught my eye. It was entitled "A Nation Divided," and in it Joel Kitkin argued that America is more divided today than at any time since the Civil War.¹

America is two nations, he claimed, and the fundamental dividing line is not political, economic or racial. Rather, it is "a struggle between contrasting and utterly incompatible worldviews." These two competing worldviews consist of the secular perspective championed by the universities, Hollywood and the major media; and its enemy is ethical monotheism, whose center of gravity is Evangelical churches.

In my view, Kitkin was painting with too broad a brush, and he over-generalized to make his point. But his fundamental idea seems to me to be correct. The secularized perspective actually consists of two worldviews: naturalism and postmodernism. Both of these worldviews have tenets that oppose ethical monotheism, especially when it comes to knowledge. According to naturalism and postmodernism: There is no non-empirical knowledge, especially no theological or ethical knowledge.

I assume the typical reader of this article is reasonably familiar with a Christian worldview, so in what remains, I shall briefly sketch a picture of the other two and reinforce the main challenge they present to Christianity.

Scientific Naturalism

Just what is scientific naturalism (hereafter, "naturalism")? Succinctly put, it is the view that the spatio-temporal universe of physical objects, properties, events and processes that are well established by scientific forms of investigation is all there is, was or ever will be.

There are three major components of naturalism. First, naturalism begins with an epistemology (a view about the nature and limits of knowledge) known as "scientism." Scientism comes in two forms: strong and weak.

Strong scientism is the view that the only thing we can know is what can be tested scientifically. Scientific knowledge exhausts what can be known and if some belief is not part of a well-established scientific theory, it is not an item of knowledge.

Weak scientism allows some minimum, low-grade degree of rational justification for claims in fields outside of science, like ethics. But scientific knowledge is taken to be so vastly superior to other forms of reasonable belief, that if a good scientific theory implies something that contradicts a belief in some other discipline, then the other field will simply have to adjust itself to be in line with science.

Second, naturalism contains a creation story — a theory, a causal story, about how everything has come to be. The central components of this story are the atomic theory of matter and evolution. Though the details of this story are not of concern here, two of its broad features are of critical importance.

First, observable macro-changes in things are explained in terms of unobservable micro-changes — changes at the atomic or sub-atomic level. Some examples: Chemical change is explained in terms of re-arrangements of atoms, and phenotype changes (that is, changes in a species' physical characteristics) are due to changes in genotype. Causation is from bottom-up, micro to macro. Second, all events that happen are due to the occurrence of earlier events plus the laws of nature, regardless of whether the laws of nature are taken to be deterministic (causal events like a flash of lightning are sufficient to determine the effect like the sound of thunder) or probabilistic (causal events like the decay of a Uranium atom fix the chances of the effect occurring like the exact time the Uranium decays into lead).

Third, naturalism has a view about what is real: physical entities are all there are. The mind is really nothing but the physical brain at work, free actions are merely happenings caused in the right way by inputs to the organism along with its internal "hardware" states, and there is no teleology or purpose in the world. History is just one event following another. The world is simply one big cluster of physical mechanisms affecting other physical mechanisms.

In a nutshell, naturalism says the only knowledge we have is scientific knowledge. The creation story that knowledge certifies is one that involves bottom-up causation and a view of the universe's history as an unfolding chain of events linked by natural laws, and a physicalist view of reality.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism, on the other hand, is a loose coalition of diverse thinkers from several different academic disciplines, so it is difficult to characterize postmodernism in a way that would be fair to this diversity. Still, it is possible to provide a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism in general, since its friends and foes understand it well enough to debate its strengths and its weaknesses.²

Postmodernism is both an historical, chronological notion and a philosophical ideology. Understood historically, postmodernism refers to a period of thought that follows, and is a reaction to, the period called modernity. Modernity is the period of European thought that developed out of the Renaissance (14th-17th centuries) and flourished in the Enlightenment (17th-19th centuries) in the ideas of people like Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz and Kant. In the chronological sense, postmodernism is sometimes called "post modernism." So understood, it is fair to say that postmodernism is often guilty of a simplistic characterization of modernity, because the thinkers in that time were far from monolithic. Indeed, Descartes, Hume and Kant have elements in their thought that are more at home in postmodernism than they are in the so-called modern era. Nevertheless, setting historical accuracy aside, the chronological notion of postmodernism depicts it as an era that, in some sense, replaces modernity.

As a philosophical standpoint, postmodernism is primarily a reinterpretation of what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge. More broadly, it represents a form of cultural relativism about such things as reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, the self and other notions. On a postmodernist view, there is no such thing as objective reality, truth, knowledge, value, reason and so forth. All these are social constructions, creations of linguistic practices and, as such, are relative not to individuals, but to social groups that share a "narrative." Roughly, a narrative is a perspective such as Marxism, atheism or Christianity that is embedded in the group's social and linguistic practices.

Important postmodern thinkers are Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Some postmodernists are thorough-going relativists, though most allow that the hard sciences provide reliable knowledge of reality.

Focusing on the Main Lesson

Given these two worldviews, the central defining feature of our secular culture is this: There is no non-empirical knowledge, especially no theological or ethical knowledge. Science and science alone carries authority in culture because the alleged possession of knowledge gives people authority, and only science is perceived to have knowledge.

Outside of science — especially in theological, ethical or political discussions — the makeup man is more important than the speechwriter (feeling and image are more important than reason, knowledge and truth).

Let me illustrate how this view of knowledge carries authority today. A few years ago, Time magazine did a cover story about how the universe is going to end.³ It said, basically, that scientists now know that the universe will eventually reach a point where it's going to wind down, and it will run out of heat, light and motion. So there won't be any heat anymore; there won't be any light; and there won't be any motion. Now it never occurred to any of them that if things are winding down, they had to be wound up. And if things have to be wound up, there must be a "winder-upper," but that's a line of thought for another occasion.

For present purposes, the importance of the article was this claim: For centuries, millennia it said, we've wanted to know how all this would end. Unfortunately, the only place we could turn was religion and philosophy, which amount to idle speculation. Now, for the first time in the human race, science has moved into this area of inquiry, and for the first time, we now have knowledge in answer to our questions.

The idea conveyed is that science gives concrete answers, but studies like religion, ethics and politics merely call for faith.

Here's another example from "The California Framework," California's guidelines for teaching evolution in public schools. You can pick this up in any elementary, junior high, or high school principal's office anywhere in the State of California. Here is what it says:

At times, some students may insist that certain conclusions of science cannot be true because of certain religious or philosophical beliefs they hold. It is appropriate, if that happens, for the teacher to express the following: "I understand you may have personal reservations about accepting the scientific evidence, but it is scientific knowledge about which there is no reasonable doubt amongst scientists in their field, and it is my responsibility to teach it because it is part of our common intellectual heritage."⁴

When the average Christian reads this, he/she walks away thinking that the primary matter of concern is the Framework's statement about creation and evolution. However, the key issue is not about creation versus evolution. It is about the Framework's view of knowledge, specifically, the limitation of knowledge to the hard sciences. Observe the descriptors used of science: "scientific evidence," "scientific knowledge," "no reasonable doubt," "common intellectual heritage." Do you see the deeply cognitive descriptors that are used of science? "Evidence," "knowledge," "reason," "intellectual heritage."

Contrast that with the descriptors used for a religious claim: "personal reservation," "belief that you hold," "faith commitment." It is easy to see the difference between the way science is being conveyed here as a source of knowledge, and Christianity and religious claims, which is a source of "personal reservation," or "personal feeling."

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How have you seen naturalism affect the culture?

Join the discussion!

The current worldview struggle raises a question: Do we, the disciples of Jesus, possess through Scripture and other means a reliable source of knowledge of reality or do we not? That question will be the task of next month's installment Christianity as a Knowledge Tradition.