In 1992, I took a class from the brilliant Dr. Nancey Murphy. She is a doctor two times over, with an earned Ph.D. in Philosophy and an earned Th.D. (Doctor of Theology). About 500 years ago, history watched a seismic shift from the Medieval world into the Modern world—a shift we name as the Enlightenment. Dr. Murphy pushed us to recognize a similar massive change was occurring in our lifetime. The buzzword of the 1990’s was “Postmodern”, because, while we knew the Modern Enlightenment world was ending and changing, while we knew we were “post”—we didn’t really know how to name what was coming.
The heart of the scientific method, and the basis of the shift which created the Modern world, was something called foundationalism. Everything—the physical world, the cultural world, the philosophical world—everything has some unshakeable, undoubtable foundation. Descartes is credited with moving us there, as he doubted and questioned everything until he realized the only UNdoubtable thing was that he was the one doing the doubting. Descartes became the model for discovering reality and truth. Question, test, and doubt everything. Peel back all the “extras.” That is the way to get to what we know is there. That is the way to get to the “kernel of truth”, to the foundation, to the laws of nature. Once you find the foundation, you build everything up from there.
Because we discovered things like the law of gravity, that seemingly made everything behave predictably and the same way everywhere, we intuitively sensed that this is how it all was. There are universal laws, universal truths. They transcend cultures, and undergird all reality. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”)
Modernism believes that when you question everything and remove all the cultural baggage, remove all the bias, you can get to self-evident, universal laws. That’s truth. In this framework, you either discover truth (via rigorous experimentation and the scientific method) or truth is revealed (via the Bible or holy texts or spiritual gurus or authority figures).
(As an aside, this is where Dr. Murphy pointed out that the modernist/fundamentalist division in the early 20th century in Christianity were the only roads left for religion in the modern world. You either became a liberal Christian (in the old sense of the word), with no room for miracles or anything spiritual, only that which you can see and touch; or you rejected science and embraced an inerrant Bible, where truth is revealed unvarnished from the hand of God.)
It’s not the worst thing for us to move out of Modernism.
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