A Secular Age Summary

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you know someone who has de-converted from Christianity or lost their faith in some way. It’s also pretty likely that this person has cited science as a catalyst for that rejection: they finally had a serious encounter with Darwin in college, started reading Richard Dawkins, or some such experience that forced them to accept that what we know about the natural world makes Christian belief impossible.

If you do know such a person or if that person happens to be you, I hope what follows—some fragments from my reading of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, illustrated with my own religio-biography—will urge you to pick up the doorstop of a book that we’ve referenced several times on this blog, and which will only by superhuman effort be surpassed as the most significant contribution to philosophy of religion in the 21st century. I will be cutting and pasting and crudely lopping off corners to serve my purposes, but hopefully it can still provide a taste.

Toward the end of the book, Taylor attempts a textured, multidimensional account of why so many Westerners increasingly see “closed-world structures”—worldviews that posit nothing beyond the natural
For the people who cling to this idea, the second order of conditions, the contemporary moral predicament, is unnecessary or merely secondary. Science alone can explain why belief is no longer possible … This is a view can be held by people on all levels; from the most sophisticated: “We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of physical relations among material entities,” to the most direct and simple: Madonna’s “material girl, living in a material world.” … Religion or spirituality involves substituting wrong and mythical explanations, explaining by “demons.” At bottom it’s just a matter of facing the obvious truth. (8893/561)