Episode 39 - Navigating a Post-Truth Era and the Quest for a Christ-Centered Cosmos

Are we at the brink of moral chaos, and has the quest for truth become a mere shadow game played by those in power? 

This episode wrestles with the postmodern challenge to what we've long considered solid ground: the realms of truth and morality. We navigate the murky waters where personal experiences eclipse scientific facts, and even the possibility of a universal moral compass seems to wane. 

Delving into Friedrich Nietzsche's prescient critiques of Christianity and the implication of "nothing is true, everything is permitted," we confront the eerie silence that may follow the death of God. 

The power vacuums and the rise of tyrannical forces are not just theoretical; they are tangible dangers in a society that forsakes its connection to a transcendent framework. 

Join me as I argue for realigning with a Christ-centric vision to stave off the disintegration of objective truth and the rise of authoritarian control over the very thoughts we hold private.

Venture further into the episode, and we probe the symbiotic yet strained relationship between science and society. 

Here the idealism of scientific pursuit clashes with the realpolitik of funding, political interests, and cultural expectations. 

We reflect on the bygone era when science sought to decode the mind of Christ, and how the shift in modern priorities has boxed in scientific inquiry. No stone is unturned as we discuss how the weight of tradition and peer pressure can stifle innovation within the scientific community. 

Yet, it is within this very tension that the episode finds hope, drawing from the conviction of the Modern Scientific Project's pioneers who believed in our God-given potential to understand the universe's mysteries. Together, we contemplate the limits of human cognition, inspired by the awe that comes from acknowledging both our smallness and our capacity for cosmic understanding.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Well, welcome to episode 39 of the Christ-centered cosmic civilization. And we're continuing to think about the postmodern threat to the scientific method and the way in which personal experience, personal opinion, lived experience can trump scientific facts in so much of the modern world. And that is not just a culture war issue. It's to do with the way in which there is not a belief in the objective reality of truth, or that we can approximate to that objective account of truth, that all of that is seen as being completely socially constructed, completely vulnerable or not. Well, I was going to say vulnerable to interests of power and money, but I think the word vulnerable isn't enough there. It's produced by interests of money and power, and so whoever has the power is able to determine the truth. So we're at that sort of a place, but how? Not everybody, of course, but that is the threat, particularly in academic institutions. And what would that come from? And we've already suggested that only a refounding of ourselves on Christ and His divine empire can fix it. But how has this happened?

Speaker 1: 2:20

Well, we began to notice or think about Nietzsche, this 19th century philosopher, christian background, and musician, christian music, and he's sometimes described as one of the greatest Christian theologians of the modern age. Because although his entire philosophy is anti-Christian and literally writes a book about the concept of anti-Christ, his appreciation of Christian theologists is very deep and he has. In his opposition to Christ and Christian civilization he reveals, he shows how deeply he understands it and where the really deep issues are. So he noted how Hassan Issaabah, who was the founder of the Hashashim, that's the Islamic sect of assassins, now Nietzsche, noticed that this guy, with his final breath, said that there is no truth and everything is permitted. No truth, everything is permitted. And Nietzsche rejoiced in this slogan and knew that it was the inevitable reality of a godless universe.

Speaker 1: 4:06

So let me give a quotation from his book on the genealogy of morals. That title is itself so important. He wrote a book called On the Genealogy of Morals, meaning that morals are not an objective reality, but our morality has a genealogy. You can find out where morals came from the family tree, and all moral systems have a family tree and then you can look back in human history and culture to account for morality and that's all it is. It's just a socially constructed reality or set of beliefs, but it's not grounded in eternity or transcendent or anything like that. Morals have a genealogy, brilliant title to capture his main argument.

Speaker 1: 5:11

Let me just give you a quotation from that book where he is speaking about this order of the assassins. And obviously, because they were committed to carrying out killing people, it was obviously necessary for them not to have a very strong problem with killing people. But anyway, this is what Nietzsche says. When the Christian crusaders in the Orient encountered the invincible order of the assassins, that order of free spirit par excellence, whose lowest ranks followed a rule of obedience the like of which no order of monks ever attained, they obtained in some way or other, the Christian crusaders, a hint concerning that symbol and watch word reserved for the highest ranks alone, as their secret Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Very well, that was freedom of spirit. In that way, the faith in truth itself was abrogated. Has any European, any Christian free spirit ever strayed into this proposition and into its labyrinthine consequences? Has one of them ever known the minotaur of this cave from experience? I doubt it. There we go. That's Nietzsche Really so good at writing, apart from anything else, and that sense of the minotaur in the cave and tapping into that mythological way of writing, but that recognition there that to really believe that nothing is true and everything is permitted, that it's almost impossible for anyone who is deeply grounded in Christian culture to grasp that experience, that reality. That they may sort of intellectually think they know what that statement's saying. But for Nietzsche in his time he felt no European experience there. Now, of course, that's amazingly untrue. Many, many Europeans and Americans do truly experience that, though maybe not because, if you noticed, at the beginning of that quotation he noted that in the order of the assassins they were able to command a rule of obedience the like of which no order of monks ever attained. And that is an important clue as to what it means to really get to the heart of that labyrinthine maze with the minotaur at the middle.

Speaker 1: 8:36

At a superficial level the feeling is postmodernism is free, like in even Nietzsche there when he talks about freedom of spirit. So it's both freedom of spirit and absolute rule of obedience. The freedom is the freedom from an objective, eternal, transcendent framework. But if there is no such transcendent framework, no divine empire, then the structures upon you are merely human, merely social, and then that can be an absolute rule. Absolute rule.

Speaker 1: 9:23

So the cult exercises, whether it's a political cult or religious cults. Most cults these days, of course are political there's religious cults are quite minor in comparison to political cults in our age, but that sense of the cult that takes away from you. It's such a totalitarian indoctrination that every aspect of your life must be controlled. That is only possible in this context where there is no transcendent truth, nothing to appeal to above and beyond the human cult. If there is no God, there is no divine empire, there is no objective truth, there's nothing beyond human society. Human social power. Well, human social power is so ruthlessly tyrannical. Even what you think in the privacy of your own home is not allowed. Even that must be controlled, contained, directed private conversation. There are no private conversations, not even private thoughts and feelings. Everything must be controlled. So Nietzsche is aware of that, with the order of the assassins, but he still thinks of it as a free spirit Nevertheless.

Speaker 1: 10:53

The point of this is that once a culture rejects the divine empire, it is left with really this fear that nothing is true. How can there be truth so, having killed God, as Nietzsche talks about it? Because for him God is a socially constructed idea which can be killed, killed off, and if that socially constructed idea of God is killed, then human beings cannot any longer hold on to truth or morality. Now Nietzsche is very clear about that. So it's this strange thing that we've lived through. Well, let me just say, in the past 20 years there's been a constant argument from the new atheists of 20 years ago, and now it's a bit more subtle, the debate. But there is this idea that you can be atheist and also have a genuine morality and belief in truth. That is, nietzsche wouldn't believe that People might be bound by cultural impositions or cultural conventions of truth and morality. There that's possible, cultural conventions of truth and morality, and those ideas may be enough to control the majority of humanity. But, and this is Nietzsche's point, those with a clear mind and a will to power can embrace the fact that the loss of Christ is the genuine, absolute loss of truth and morality.

Speaker 1: 13:09

So there's an interesting article in the National Catholic Review from the late 80s I think it might be in the January or February issue 1988, says this with God dies all objective truths, for there's no mind over hours. And objective values, laws and morality die too if there's no will over hours. The soul, free will, immortality, reason, order, love, all these are idols, little gods that are dying now that the big God has died. Fascinating question, that's the National Catholic Review in 1988, january, february edition, just very strikingly saying that the little gods, that's the human soul, free will, immortality, reason, order, love, all of these things that are kind of like little gods, they die too. Once the big God has died, and I think Nietzsche would agree with that, he'd say yeah, that's true, you can't have those things. They all are sustained by Christ, by the cosmic empire.

Speaker 1: 14:35

So here let me give another quotation from Nietzsche. This is from his book Twilight of the Idols, and that's important, that title again, the idols that must go, the Twilight of the Idols. And in this book he ridicules the English idea that we can have morality without Christ. Let me here it is the quotation when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. This point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flat heads.

Speaker 1: 15:30

Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. Nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him what is evil. He believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command. Its origin is transcendent. It is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism. It has truth only if God is the truth. It stands and falls with faith in God.

Speaker 1: 16:36

When the English actually believe that they know intuitively what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion, such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem. Now. I've quoted that at length from Nietzsche because it's just so brilliant as he says English and we might now still say the Western world in general. But it's less true now than it was for Nietzsche a hundred years ago. But Now that there is that feeling like, well, it's obvious what's good and evil, now you meet people who know it isn't obvious. The more like nature, many more people like that.

Speaker 1: 18:02

But there is still this kind of background feeling that we can figure it out, good and evil, whereas, as Nietzsche says within this, that way of thinking like you can't have Christian civilization, you cannot have that Christian morality with its love and compassion and what Nietzsche calls pity and he hates pity, but he can't have all that and that kind of celebration of those who are weak and suffering and the underdog and all that, that which is so, so like pivotal for so much of the modern mind. In fact it's, it's almost become a kind of quite a toxic thing as well once it is detached from Christian morality. But even any of that, any of that idea, that weakness that can be strength and love, compassion, all that stuff, none of that is possible once you have rejected Christ, once you are in rebellion against the divine empire. So Nietzsche is clear on it and he knows the consequences for that, and not just in morality, though he picks on that in that in these books.

Speaker 1: 19:33

But it's really hits, as we're thinking in this series at the moment, around the concept of science. You can't have it like this idea of truth existing independently In the, in the way you cannot have the scientific project in the way that it happened, because the way that it happened was based on and and grew out of Christian civilization. So it might be possible to have something different to that, a different kind of science and technology, like something more like the Romans had, or the Egyptians had, or the, or the Indians had, or Hindu civilizations had. You can have a different kind of science and technology, but not one that has that universal scope and confidence that gave rise to what we would call the modern scientific revolution. So the postmodern world recognizes that without God there is no foundation for truth, and that human beings have nothing more than their own perspectives that grow out of their own cultures and traditions.

Speaker 1: 20:53

So then science can be seen as a culturally generated way of dealing with the world, a community controlled project that is linguistically conditioned also, so meaning that the words that are used to try to articulate the truth of the universe obviously are not actually communicating the truth of the universe, but are, because they're just human words, and human words are culturally bound. Let me just, as a footnote on the way through we are going to have to do a big series in this podcast about language. I am sort of tempted to do it. I think we might do a series on the Lord's Prayer after this, and then I think let's do language, because this is so fundamental, the issues of language. But yeah, so science can be seen as a culturally generated way of dealing with the world, a community controlled project that is linguistically conditioned and constantly provisional, driven by contextual agendas rather than objective truth.

Speaker 1: 22:16

So are we then at this position where science, as it was understood, certainly in the 17th century, or even right up to into the 20th century, is that possible anymore? Can science flourish in that way? Or is it that science genuinely has become something that doesn't exist as an objective belief in this transcendent logic that governs the whole universe? But is science now really a tool of power and money? Is that true? Is it really that now?

Speaker 1: 23:01

And the idea then is each culture just offers vantage points and challenges, and how can anyone claim to have the best or perfect vantage point to see the truth and that that kind of idea that there is, you could genuinely approximate to a cosmic truth? Do people really believe that's possible anymore? I'm not sure they do. If each of us can see only through our own cultural tradition, then no one has, no one can think the mind of God, the mind of God for a post-modern world or in really our current world, to think in a way that approximates to the mind of God is just silly. It's fairytale that none of us can fully and finally adjudicate who is most truthful. Even so, the post-modern recognize there might be some truth out there, but there can't be any definitive way to get to it. So this means there is a genuine tension between the culture of hyper-modernism or post-modernity we won't get into that right now because really post-modernity is hyper-modernity really but there is a genuine tension between this culture that's dominant particularly in the academic world and the scientific project.

Speaker 1: 24:42

So whereas some scientists may be prepared to accept that science is a social construct relying on cultural conditions, there is this still feeling, particularly in the kind of introduction to science or the dream of science or the ideology of science. There is this feeling that science is something more than that. Even just recently I heard somebody speaking about the scientific project as something that was like a holy calling. They still had a memory of that view of what science could be. Now you could argue that the post-modern or hyper-modern or critique or acid doesn't destroy science because of the apparent manifest power and success of the scientific project.

Speaker 1: 25:55

I find that people talk like that they'll go, but no, science obviously works. Obviously it's true, because look how successful it is. Nevertheless, how long is that sustainable as a genuine engine for success? Or it once was the case that people could say things like look at planes, phones and space travel that. Look how successful those things are. Or vaccines, vaccines, phones and combustion engines they are amazingly successful products of the scientific project. Therefore, that validates it. But all of those things combustion engine, phones and computers and vaccines are now not considered to be unmitigated goods. People think that they're like are they just something that is like, obviously a good, that is generate that validates it? Or are they actually things that invalidate science? And particularly younger generations would say all of those things have a sinister aspect to them. So, yeah, what?

Speaker 1: 27:36

As Christian people, we are citizens of the divine empire and we are very aware that all human efforts and thinking outside of Christ is so very provisional, even within the divine empire. We're aware of our fallenness and so on. All the models of the world that we construct fall far short of the perfect and exhaustive knowledge that is in Christ, but we, like as the legacy of the cosmic civilization. The divine empire is to give to humans this confidence that we can approximate to that cosmic order and truth and we want to you know. Now like once, the goal of the scientific project was to know the mind of Christ and to have this tremendous confidence to kind of know and discover truth, regardless of its economic benefits, like the economic benefit of figuring out the things that people were obsessed with in the 17th and 18th century it wasn't clear that there wasn't an economic benefit to any of the things they would were striving to know and understand. But that didn't matter. It was this idea of knowing the mind of Christ as revealed in creation.

Speaker 1: 29:11

But now it's hard for anyone to pursue genuine scientific research unless there is an economic benefit or a political benefit or something, and alternative scientific proposals that go against the mainstream are very hard to hear. Like, the whole scientific community is incredibly bound by tradition and peer pressure, tremendously so, so alternative proposals don't really get any airtime at all. Because there is. It is from one. Once the dream of it was that it was a radically free thinking environment where there was almost like a desire to hear alternative proposals that would undermine the mainstream thought. Now that's exactly the opposite. Now it's very, very difficult to hear genuinely alternative proposals because there's so much money and invested interest and traditions of thinking and so on, and a huge amount of fear, fear to step out of line and be cancelled and stay in your lane, kind of thing. Don't question, that's the mood. So many scientists that I speak to would never seriously question anything.

Speaker 1: 30:57

It's scientific traditions receive patterns of thought which are there. Isn't that freedom? Because you have to believe in the divine empire and that Christ's mind is so much bigger and greater and that we've been made to know that and that the companies and traditions and systems of this present age are not the final word. You have to believe in that to have the confidence to pursue lines of thought and inquiry that are beyond what are the received ones. It's very, very hard to challenge big systems unless you believe in something like the cosmic empire of Christ. So as we come to a conclusion then, to this season, we have to be realistic about the reality of scientific research as opposed to the perfect ideal. The scientific ideal is to understand the universe in that thorough and comprehensive way that Christ, the Lord, does, but in reality, science as it is right now is caught well, no, it's always caught in the problems and limitations of this passing age, but it's particularly under pressure. I think now Real world sciences is controlled by vested interests, pride, longstanding traditions and the very small perspective that each of us brings to our vision of the universe.

Speaker 1: 32:37

And I'll probably end with a quotation from Einstein. He says this the human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. The child doesn't know who or how. It doesn't understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order which it doesn't comprehend but dimly suspects that.

Speaker 1: 33:26

It seems to me, says Einstein, that is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. So we'll end with that sort of a humble word from Einstein, that sense that there is a tremendously deep and wonderful logic and order to the universe but that we are limited in our ability to grasp it all. Perhaps we won't end on that, completely on that note, because I just would like us to remember the confidence that the founders of the Modern Scientific Project had, because for them it wasn't so mysterious that they weren't just like children with no capacity to understand languages wandering in such a library, but that they knew, or they knew, that their minds had been given to them and designed by Christ for the purpose of being able to read that Library of Wonders.