Taylor’s Question Our goal in trying to understand our “secular age” is not a descriptive what, and even less a chronological when, but rather an analytic how. The question is not whether our age is less (or more) “religious”; nor is it a question of trying to determine when some switch was tripped so that, in the world-historical language of Will Durant & Co., we went from an “age of belief” to an “age of reason.” Instead, Taylor is concerned with the “conditions of belief” — a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable.
