Understanding the Times: The Collision of Today's Competing Worldviews

by David A. Noebel

As believers in and followers of Jesus Christ, we need to consider how our commitment to Him affects not only our political and ethical convictions, but also the way we think and act

Atheism is the theological belief that there is no God, no supernatural Creator, no Divine moral lawgiver, and no ultimate Judge of man’s actions. It is the theological backbone of not only Secular Humanism and Marxism, but it is also the predominant theological view of classical Postmodernism.

“Postmodernists agree with Nietzsche that ‘God’—which is to say, the supreme being of classical theism—has become unbelievable, as have the autonomous self and the meaning of history.”[3]

According to Glen Ward, the vast majority of mainstream Postmodernists emerged from the Marxist atheistic tradition.[4]

A sympathetic critic defined Postmodernism as Marxism-lite dressed in a French tuxedo, sippin’ French wine in a French café on the campus of the College International de Philosophie. A less sympathetic critic referred to Postmodernism as linguistic sophistry seeking to save Marxism’s irrelevant posterior.

During its early years Marxism promised a this-world salvation for the enlightened irreligious. However, with the passage of time and countless body bags, the idea of a Marxist utopia was eventually revealed for what it was—a mirage. As a result, Postmodernism was birthed as a “wayward stepchild of Marxism, and in a sense a generation’s realization that it is orphaned.”[9]

On the other hand, Postmodernism is a continuation of other Marxist ideas, namely atheism, socialism, punctuated evolution, and the socially constructed self, among others.

In the pre-modern era God, revelation, and the clergy were the ultimate sources for truth about reality. However, in the modern era science and reason became the key resources for truth about reality. Well into the age of modernism, Friedrich Nietzsche stated the obvious from a modernist perspective: “God is dead; we have killed him.” By this statement Nietzsche did not mean to imply that humanity killed God or that God was once alive and had died. Rather Nietzsche meant that belief in God was no longer necessary.

Both Nietzsche and Foucault agree that after humanity kills God, they sign their own death certificate. A worldview perspective reveals how theological beliefs have implications for other areas of life.

If God is dead, the belief that there is no ultimate reality or eternal truth becomes a philosophical necessity. A firm believer in this, Derrida concluded further that words and sentences have no inherent meaning. He insisted that human beings construct reality through their use of language. In other words, as you read this page, you will construct your own meaning shaped by your culture and life experiences.

Bishop John A.T. Robinson in his book Honest to God sought to explain what it meant to be a Christian in the Postmodern world. This group became known as the “Death of God” theologians. According to Graham Ward, these theologians[20] saw “the potential of [Derrida’s] deconstruction for furthering their project of announcing the end of theology [the death of God].”[21] The “death of God” theologians fastened onto Derrida’s idea that words refer only to other words in a textual setting and cannot be used to describe external realities such as God. They therefore claimed that God is not the Supreme Being who is literally “up there” in heaven somewhere, but instead we should think of God as being “out there” in a spiritual sense. God is “there” when we love another person, and this becomes the main Christian message. In this sense, the traditional concept of God ruling over His Creation is lifeless.[22]

Religious pluralism is the belief that one must be tolerant of all religious beliefs because no one religion can be true.[25]

in our

Postmodern climate where truth is denied, religious claims are based on preference rather than on

standards. For example, either you prefer the notion of the existence of God or you do not. Either you like the idea of Jesus being Savior or you do not. Either miracles appeal to you or they do not.[28...

We . . . [should] give up the correspondence theory of truth, and start treating moral and scientific beliefs as tools for achieving greater human happiness, rather than as representations of the intrinsic nature of reality.[1]

The philosophical ideas of Postmodernism divide modern-day academia. Today’s college students will find Postmodernism ruling the day in their humanities and social studies courses, but will also find Modernism still prevalent in their science, engineering, and mathematics courses.[2]

A metanarrative refers to a unifying story that seeks to explain how the world is—in other words a metanarrative is a worldview. Lyotard suggests that we should be skeptical of such broad explanations. For example, the statement “God so loved the world” is nonsensical to Postmodernists for two reasons: (1) they deny the existence of God, and (2) statements reflecting the whole world (metanarratives) are impossible.

Written or verbal statements can reflect only a particular localized culture or individual point of view. A well-worn catchphrase we hear in this regard is, “That may be true for you, but not for me.”

Yet, by making the universal statement that there are no metanarratives, Postmodernists have put themselves in the position of creating a metanarrative. Their story that explains the world is that there are no explanations of the world, only local stories told by various cultures. For this reason, we refer to Postmodernism as the anti-worldview worldview.

Anti-Realism: The belief that reality is subjectively constructed by human thought

This concept of deconstruction is taken far beyond the area of literature. Just as you, the reader, are creating the meaning of this text, you also construct the world according to your culture and experiences. In other words, there is no “real world” out there—only six billion constructions of the world, a belief known as anti-realism.[7]

There is no universal “Truth,” only personal, subjective truths that exist only in a particular situation or cultural surrounding.

From a worldview perspective, ethics is the logical outgrowth of a prior commitment to a particular theology.

After denying the existence of God, Rorty moves on to deny the existence of a universal moral reality “to which our moral judgments might hope to correspond, as our physical science supposedly corresponds to physical reality.”[7] At this stage, we might ask, If there is no objective moral reality, why concern ourselves with ethical issues? While this seems a reasonable next step, Postmodernists are not comfortable with abandoning ethics completely and instead are driven to search within their worldview for a standard of right and wrong.

Cultural Relativism: The belief that truth and morals are relative to one’s culture

However, Postmodernists are hesitant to use the term “relativism.” Rorty, for example, tries to soften the word ‘relative.’ He comments, “This view is often referred to as ‘cultural relativism.’ But it is not relativistic, if that means saying that every moral view is as good as every other. Our moral view is, I firmly believe, much better than any competing view, even though there are a lot of people whom you will never be able to convert to it.

For Postmodernists, community moral standards are decided by both coercion and consensus. Morality is not connected to God or dictated by any type of natural laws; rather, ethical systems are constructed within societies. Every culture, thus, has its own set of moral standards arising from the various influences within each particular group. Moreover, morality is not stagnant; it changes, adapts, and is constantly evolving according to the dictates of the group.[10]

Since there is no God, no absolute morality, and ultimately no truth, then we get to construct the world in a way that best helps us survive.

There is no need to be logically consistent with words because words are instruments that, if used properly or creatively, invoke individuals to change.

Think of it this way: morality is like a reality TV show challenge. The contestants are forced to work together in order to obtain what they personally desire. Everyone must work together or else no one gets anywhere. However, along the way Rorty wants to persuade others to adopt his ethical principles, and if he can, he wins. However, if someone who has a different set of values can persuade the others in the group, then Rorty’s ideas will lose favor, and he will be sidelined or even kicked off the island!

Worldviews that deny the existence of a Creator, a creation event, and the supernatural must assume some form of naturalistic evolution to explain the origin of life. Evolutionary theory takes three forms: Classical Darwinism theorizes a gradual process of changes in species by means of natural selection[4] or survival of the fittest,[5] Charles Darwin’s original thesis. Neo-Darwinism came into vogue in the 1930s, expanding Darwin’s original theory of natural selection to include change by genetic mutation. Punctuated equilibrium or punctuated evolution arose in the 1970s, theorizing that evolutionary change happens abruptly (geologically speaking) in small, isolated populations.[6]

Postmodernism is anti-science in many respects. Some Postmodernists argue that science is not really knowledge at all. Instead, they speak in terms of chaos theory, the unpredictability of science, indeterminacy, or uncertainty of evolution/devolution, etc. For instance, Paul Feyerabend, former philosophy professor at the University of California (Berkeley) maintains that what is called science in one culture is called voodoo in another: “To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts—their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, ‘objectivity,’ [or]’truth’—it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.”[8]

Postmodernists embrace the only other alternative—one of the several forms of evolution.

Postmodernists tend toward neo-Darwinism.

Postmodernists are drawn to evolution for at least two reasons: (1) they deny that humans are the necessary aim of evolution and (2) they believe chance is the primary catalyst of evolution.

Psychology, understood as the study of the psyche, or soul, has fallen on hard times. Traditionally, we understood our personal identity as what we are born with—a stable, unified soul including mind, heart, will, and conscience. Yet, in recent years, our Postmodern condition has made the concept of a “soul” obsolete. Now, instead of being a soul, we are confronted with a multiplicity of “selves.”[2]

Stephens offers the following example to clarify this point. “Consider . . . Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stones’ lead singer was and, if the tabloids are to be believed, remains a classic libertine, but he is also a father and, until recently at least, a family man. Jagger is a rock’n’roller, a bohemian, whose songs and lifestyle challenge traditional standards of behavior; yet he travels in upper-class British circles, hobnobbing with dukes and princesses. Jagger can be coarse and crude, yet he knows his nonfiction and his vintages. Which is the real Mick? His answer: all of the above. ‘People find it very hard to accept that you can be all these things at almost the same time,’ Jagger has complained.”[4]

“Man is a culture being, not a natural being. What man has from nature [biology] is nothing compared to what he has acquired from culture. A culture, like the language that accompanies and expresses it, is a set of mere accidents that add up to a coherent meaning constitutive of man.”[9]

Traditionally people sensed that both nature and culture are important for human development. But once the move was set in motion to negate nature and accent culture, Postmodernists jumped to banish nature altogether. This left only culture to shape the human psyche.

for example, has begun noting that we all must ‘create’ other selves as we leave our families in search of friendship, success and love—and then move on to new friendships, new successes and new loves. Social psychologists have begun studying not only our ‘child selves,’ our ‘professional selves,’ our ‘friendship selves’ and our ‘parent selves,’ but also what Hazel Markus labels our ‘possible selves,’ our ‘feared possible selves,’ our ‘ideal selves,’ our ‘fleeting selves,’ our ‘tentative selves’ and our ‘chronically accessible selves.’”[22] To illustrate our Postmodern multiplicity of selves, Gergen paints the following collage of Postmodern life: “Connie spent her childhood in New Jersey. After her parents were divorced, her mother moved with the children to San Diego. Connie’s teen years were spent shuttling between father and mother on either coast. After she graduated from the University of Colorado, she moved to Alaska to work on a fishing boat, and then to Wyoming to become a ski instructor. Now Connie is working on a geological-survey vessel in the Antarctic, and is engaged to a man living in Portland, Oregon. Fred is a neurologist who spends many of his spare hours working to aid families from El Salvador. Although he is married to Tina, on Tuesday and Thursday nights he lives with an Asian friend with whom he has a child. On weekends he drives his BMW to Atlantic City for gambling.”[23]

Socially-constructed selves: The belief that one’s identity is constantly changing as a result of ever-changing social factors

it is impossible to know which is our “real” self, since we play so many different roles at different times and with different people. This can be disorienting to some. A theory of multiple socially constructed selves provides a way for those living in a Postmodern world to adjust to the reality of their condition.

Christian psychology is founded on the concept of soul (mind, heart), self-identity, and self-awareness (1 Thessalonians 5:23). In Genesis 2:7, we learn that God breathed and mankind became a living soul. In Matthew 10:28, Jesus warns us not to fear those who can kill the body, but rather fear the one who can kill the body (soma) and soul (psyche) in hell (gehenna).

The Postmodern views of how we live together in society are nontraditional regarding family, church, and state.

Postmodernists, for the most part, want nothing to do with the church.[3]

Sexual Egalitarianism: The belief that all sexual practices—which are based on preference and sexual identity (or polymorphous sexualities) and not physical characteristics—are equal

Many Postmodern socialists consider marriage the greatest of evils.

harsh on Christian parents who teach their children about God, referring to them as “frightening, vicious, and dangerous.”[5]

Other Postmodernists show their contempt for Christian concepts of love, sex, and marriage, preferrin...