February Issue of The Worldview Bulletin-Pt. 1

Secularism and Modernism | Christian Platonism

Greetings, friends! In this February issue of The Worldview Bulletin, Paul Copan continues his series on worldviews and unpacks the meaning of secularism and modernity. Paul Gould begins a two-part series on C. S. Lewis’s Christian Platonism, explaining in part one how it illuminates our understanding of reality. David Baggett responds to two recent objections to divine command theory, and Melissa Cain Travis explains how J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used stories to communicate Christian truth while stealing past the “watchful dragons” of modernity. We conclude, as always, with a roundup of news of note and exceptional deals on books and resources.

Soli Deo gloria,

Christopher Reese

Editor-in-Chief

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Contents

Part One

1. Questioning Worldviews: Part 5

   Secularism and Modernity (1)

   by Paul Copan

2. The Christian Platonism of C. S. Lewis, Part 1

   by Paul M. Gould

Please see the second email for Part Two of the newsletter.

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Questioning Worldviews 5

Secularism and Modernity (1)

By Paul Copan

Although we have been talking about various worldviews, I want to talk briefly about two overlapping characteristics of contemporary Western culture. These have shaped our worldview thinking and attitudes toward life and reality. These are secularism and modernity.

In June 2021, each of our WB team wrote on one of the “transcendentals.” I wrote on the transcendental of truth and discussed it in that context; so I won’t discuss it here, although it overlaps with some of the themes I touch on below.

Here I address some key features of secularism and modernity. Next month I’ll offer a few responses to these trends.

Secularism

What is “secularism”? Traditionally, it has been understood to refer to an existence independent of God or “religion.” (Think of the “sacred-secular” dichotomy to which Christian thinkers often refer.) Others maintain that it’s the phenomenon of God’s being expelled from culture because many features of culture—film, media, academia, for example—are hostile towards belief in God.

This isn’t quite right. If we think about it, more mainstream liberal Protestantism, say, refers to “God” but accommodates itself to culture quite readily: as long as the “correct” cultural boxes are ticked—regarding sexuality, politics, race, and so on—then this liberal God can fit it just fine. This is, of course, not the case when it comes to traditional forms of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy.

Many of us have become familiar with the monumental work on secularism by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. According to him, “the nature of this modern secular society is that it’s deeply plural. We have to accept that the ultimate grounding of the civilization we share in common is up for grabs. . . . To say we live in a secular civilization is to say that God is no longer inescapable.”[1]

Our civilization once used to live under the “sacred canopy” of Christianity, which provided a plausible explanation for how the world worked and how we should interpret human experience. During the Middle Ages, whether you were at the University of Oxford or the University of Paris, the Christian faith provided the worldview context and the intellectual firepower to understand reality. In Christ, all things made sense.

This world was enchanted by the supernatural, the transcendent, the miraculous, and the mysterious. But, as sociologist Max Weber observed, a certain disenchantment (Entzauberung) overtook Western culture. Eventually, a significant number of philosophers, scientists, and other culture-shapers came to believe that “science” could explain religion and morality. And God—if he existed at all—came to be viewed as a detached, distinct deity.

Eventually, a decline would set in. Personal religious practice and commitment waned; individuals would gradually withdraw from traditional communities, and they came to find meaning in other sources besides religion.  This would lead to a fragmentation, in which belief in God/Jesus was considered just one option among many.

According to the secular-minded, the believer in Christ has a particular burden of proof. Pluralism is taken as the default position, and God turns out to be just one of many options or belief-alternatives.

Modernity

According to Peter Berger, modernity is basically “the institutional and cultural concomitants of economic growth under the conditions of sophisticated technology.”[2] Let’s briefly unpack this.

Consider the effects of technology and economic growth: these are control and convenience (technology) and material comforts (economic growth). Add to this diversity of belief (pluralism) as well as the distraction of entertainment and amusement. These end up leaving very little room for God. Social and cultural life tend toward practical atheism; it’s easy to live as though God doesn’t exist.

Kyle Beshears notes that this admixture lends itself to an attitude of not caring if God exists—that is, apatheism.   When it comes to belief in God, (a) the contestability of belief and (b) the diversity of belief, it seems we lack sufficient reason to take commitment to God seriously. When it comes to status of life, that is, (a) comfortability and (b) distractability, this lends itself to a lack of motivation.[3]

This configuration is, in part, what the Scriptures have in mind about the concept of worldliness or worldly desires (Titus 2:12; 1 John 2:15-17). And what is worldliness? According to Craig Gay, worldliness is essentially an interpretation or approach to reality that excludes the reality of God from the business of life. “Practical atheism” is built into contemporary political, technological, economic, and cultural institutions in modern societies. We can easily go throughout our day without giving God much thought.

Gay observes that at no other time in history has the structural coherence of a social order depended less on religious/theological understanding than it does today in modern societies.  As we saw earlier, this mindset isn’t necessarily hostile as it is indifferent.

According to Gay, modernity is characterized by at least four things, including what he calls “secularity”:[4]

Control: The crucial theme running through this list of modernity’s pursuits—especially economic growth and sophisticated technology—is that of a particular kind of control; it is the desire to have control over reality by rational-technical means.

Secularity: Once the range of controlling the world has been adequately reached, there appears to be very little (or no) room for God.  Social and cultural life is for the most part both theoretically and practically atheistic.

Anxiety:  Despite the apparent “liberation” that humans allegedly find in their scientific and technological potential, this has proven to be a heavy burden.  Without the reality of God moving within the lives of people and the belief that God has revealed himself, Gay notes, humans face the terrifying necessity of having to create their own meanings and purpose to make sense of life.  This “freedom” is very unsettling.

Depersonalization: A common association with modernity is the depersonalization of life.  Personal agency in the world and depth of relationship and community are increasingly diminished.  Removing God from one’s worldview is hard on the human person.  After all, without God, there is no human person either. 

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This is a bit of a sketch of secularism (belief in God is no longer incontestable) and modernity (involving sophisticated technology and economic growth that tend toward control). Stay tuned next month for a biblical response to these tendencies.

Notes

[1] Charles Taylor, interview with Bruce Ellis Benson, “What It Means To Be Secular:  A Conversation with Charles Taylor,” Books and Culture (July/August 2002): 36. Available at: https://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2002/julaug/14.36.html. I follow some themes in this article. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

[2] Peter Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change (New York: Anchor, 1976), 34.

[3] Kyle Beshears, Apatheism (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2021).

[4] Craig Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 12-14.

— Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Learn more about Paul and his work at paulcopan.com.

Image by David Mark from Pixabay

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The Christian Platonism of C. S. Lewis, Part 1

By Paul M. Gould

In this month’s Worldview Bulletin essay, I begin a two-part series on the Christian Platonism of C. S. Lewis. In this essay, I’ll answer the question, What is Christian Platonism? In next month’s essay, I’ll argue that C. S. Lewis is a Christian Platonist.

Let’s begin with Platonism. Perhaps the central notion of Platonism is the two-tiered nature of reality. There is the Realm of eternal, invisible, and immutable Forms or “Being,” and there is the temporal, visible, and changing world of “Becoming.” It is Platonism’s adherence to a transcendent realm beyond the world of our sensory experience that has been particularly attractive to Christians. With this brief sketch of Platonism, I want to describe the mood, method, and doctrines of Christian Platonism.

First, Christian Platonism marks out a particular kind of mood when it comes to intellectual inquiry. This mood can be expressed in terms of a preference for rainforest over desert landscapes. The idea is that reality is rich, abundant, complex, magical, and full of wonders and delights. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet describes,

“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than Dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Contrast this mindset with the modern preference for reductionism, simplicity, and what is sometimes described in philosophy as “desert landscapes.” The idea is that the world is simple: reducible to fundamental particles (Humean corpuscles or whatever turns out to be the fundamental particles according to physics) and the rest of reality is “nothing but” organized clumps of this fundamental bits of reality. To cite but one example of what is sometimes called “nothing-buttery”—the CIT cosmologist Sean Carroll describes humans as “nothing but organized mud.”

Second, Christian Platonism marks out a particular method for intellectual inquiry. In particular, Platonism, and Christian Platonism, are versions of what the scholar Llyod Gerson calls “Top-downism.” The idea, according to Gerson, is that Platonism answers questions about the phenomena within the universe (i.e., the “sensible realm”) by “appeals to first or higher or irreducible principles” and not primarily “in terms of elementary physical particles from which things ‘evolve’ or upon which the phenomena ‘supervene.’”[1] And of course, the same can be said for Christian Platonism: God is the ultimate fundamental uncaused cause and ungrounded ground of all the phenomena of the physical universe; without reference to God there cannot be a satisfactory account of the origin, identity, persistence, or destiny of the universe.

Finally, Christian Platonism endorses a sacramental ontology. The idea is that the universe is a sacrament, for two reasons. First, it functions semiotically, as a sign pointing beyond itself to (what I’ll call) the sacred order. Second, the universe is sacramental because God’s grace and presence are mediated to creatures through the universe (that is, the universe participates in God). This sacramental vision of reality is usually spelled out in terms of a commitment to four doctrines:

·       First, a participatory ontology. The idea is that things in this world “participate” in God in some way. Good things participate in Goodness itself; beautiful things participate in Beauty itself; individual trees participate in Tree-hood itself.

·       Second, a commitment to divine exemplarism. Divine exemplarism relates to the doctrine of creation and provides an account of how God created. The basic idea is that God creates according to divine ideas. So, prior to creating trees, God had in his mind an idea or concept of trees and created according to that idea or concept. Prior to creating C. S. Lewis, God had an idea of C. S. Lewis in his mind. On this view, all creaturely reality resembles a divine idea.

·       Third, a commitment to the hierarchy of beings. The idea here is that reality is ordered and structured along a great chain of being (organized according to an ascending or descending hierarchy of powers or perfections). This is the ancient idea of a Great Chain of Being, with God at the top, followed by angels, humans, animals, plants, inanimate things, and finally non-being.

·       Finally, a commitment to the principle of plenitude. A strong version of the principle of plenitude states that “every possible thing is actual.” Christian Platonism need not (and usually does not) commit to such a strong version of plenitude, but the idea that God creates a universe full of good things is a powerful and pervasive aspect of Christian Platonic thought. 

As we shall see, C. S. Lewis is a Christian Platonist in mood, method, and with respect to these specific doctrines.

Notes

[1] Lloyd P. Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 32.

— Paul M. Gould is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Director of the M.A. Philosophy of Religion program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is the author or editor of ten scholarly and popular-level books including Cultural Apologetics, Philosophy: A Christian Introduction and The Story of the Cosmos. He has been a visiting scholar at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s Henry Center, working on the intersection of science and faith, and is the founder and president of the Two Tasks Institute. You can find out more about Dr. Gould and his work at Paul Gould.com and the Two Tasks Institute. He is married to Ethel and has four children.