Well, basically, they weren’t fooled by pop-science into thinking they understood much….of anything. Mystery was a live option. And this life was only a small part of one’s overall journey, scarcely enough to make any judgment on existence over.
There's an old saying, suffering is not a problem to be solved but a cross to be born. But now we look on the world with instrumental rationality, reducing the wonder of existence to it's bare minimum to control and solve all mysteries....
Though it was Chesterton who noted God's mysteries were more satisfying than man's answers....
James KA Smith summarizes Charles Taylor’s massive book in his How Not to be Secular, he says :
Taylor describes the second aspect of this anthropocentric shift as the “eclipse of grace.” Since God’s providential concern for order is reduced to an “economic” ordering of creation to our mutual benefit, and since that order and design is discernible by reason, then “by reason and discipline, humans could rise to the challenge and realize it.” The result is a kind of intellectual Pelagianism: we can figure this out without assistance.
Oh, God still plays a role — as either the watchmaker who got the ball rolling, or the judge who will evaluate how well we did — but in the long middle God plays no discernible role or function, and is uninvolved (pp. 222-23). This is why Taylor describes all these as features of a “providential deism” — a deism that opened the door for exclusive humanism.
Since what matters is immanent, and since we can figure it out, it’s not surprising that, third, “the sense of mystery fades.” God’s providence is no longer inscrutable; it’s an open book, “perspicuous.” “His providence consists simply in his plan for us, which we understand” (p. 223). Mystery can no longer be tolerated.
Finally, and as an outcome, we lose any “idea that God was planning a transformation of human beings which would take them beyond the limitations which inhere in their present condition” (p. 224). We lose a sense that humanity’s end transcends its current configurations — and thus lose a sense of “participation” in God’s nature (or “deification”) as the telos for humanity.
But what underlay these shifts? Again, Taylor emphasizes economic-centric harmony as the new focus and ideal:
“The spreading doctrines of the harmony of interests reflect the shift in the idea of natural order . . . , in which the economic dimension takes on greater and greater importance, and ‘economic’ (that is, ordered, peaceful, productive) activity is more and more the model for human behaviour” (p. 229).
Like the roof on Toronto’s SkyDome, the heavens are beginning to close. But we barely notice, because our new focus on this plane had already moved the transcendent to our peripheral vision at best. We’re so taken with the play on this field, we don’t lament the loss of the stars overhead.
In this context Taylor offers an analysis of the apologetic strategy that emerges in the midst of these shifts — not only as a response to them, but already as a reflection of them. In trying to assess just how the modern social imaginary came to permeate a wider culture, Taylor focuses on Christian responses to this emerging humanism and the “eclipses” we’ve just noted. What he finds is that the responses themselves have already conceded the game; that is, the responses to this diminishment of transcendence already accede to it in important ways (Taylor will later call this “pre-shrunk religion” [p. 226]).
As he notes, “the great apologetic effort called forth by this disaffection itself narrowed its focus so drastically. It barely invoked the saving action of Christ, nor did it dwell on the life of devotion and prayer, although the seventeenth century was rich in this. The arguments turned exclusively on demonstrating God as Creator, and showing his Providence” (p. 225). What we get in the name of “Christian” defenses of transcendence, then, is “a less theologically elaborate faith” that, ironically, paves the way for exclusive humanism. God is reduced to a Creator and religion is reduced to morality (p. 225).
The “deism” of providential deism bears many marks of the “theism” that is often defended in contemporary apologetics. The particularities of specifically Christian belief are diminished to try to secure a more generic deity — as if saving some sort of transcendence will suffice.
Rather than seeing ourselves positioned within a hierarchy of forms (in which case we wouldn’t be surprised if “higher levels” are mysterious and inscrutable), we now adopt a God-like, dispassionate “gaze” that deigns to survey the whole. In this mode, the universe appears “as a system before our gaze, whereby we can grasp the whole in a kind of tableau” (p. 232).
And it is precisely in this context, when we adopt a “disengaged stance,” that the project of theodicy ramps up; thinking we’re positioned to see everything, we now expect an answer to whatever puzzles us, including the problem of evil. Nothing should be inscrutable.
But this apologetic project — particularly with respect to the “problem” of evil — is taken up in a way that is completely consistent with the “buffered self” (p. 228); while earlier the terrors and burdens of evil and disaster would have cast us upon the help of a Savior, “now that we think we see how it all works, the argument gets displaced."
People in coffee-houses and salons [and philosophy classes?] begin to express their disaffection in reflections on divine justice, and the theologians begin to feel that this is the c
hallenge they must meet to fight back the coming wave of unbelief. The burning concern with theodicy is enframed by the new imagined epistemic predicament.
This sort of skeptical argument could only take hold within the modern moral order (MMO) and its epistemic confidence: “Once we claim to understand the universe, and how it works; once we even try to explain how it works by invoking its being created for our benefit, then this explanation is open to clear challenge: we know how things go, and we know why they were set up, and we can judge whether the first meets the purpose defined in the second. In Lisbon 1755, it seems clearly not to have.
So the immanent order ups the ante” (p. 306). But we have to appreciate what has changed here: precisely the emergence of the disengaged, “world picture” confidence in our powers of exhaustive surveillance (cp. p. 232).
Prior to this stance, the conditions would have yielded lament, not theodicy: “If one is in a profoundly believing/practicing way of life, then this hanging in to trust in God may seem the obvious way, and is made easier by the fact that everyone is with you in this.
The new epistemic expectation that comes with enclosure in immanence — namely, that whatever is within the sphere of immanence should be understandable to us — means we expect an answer to such matters. Inscrutability is no longer an option; so if believers have no rationally demonstrative answer, but can only appeal to something like the “hidden” will of God, then the scales tip in favor of what we know and understand.
Rather than seeing ourselves positioned within a hierarchy of forms (in which case we wouldn’t be surprised if “higher levels” are mysterious and inscrutable), we now adopt a God-like, dispassionate “gaze” that deigns to survey the whole. In this mode, the universe appears “as a system before our gaze, whereby we can grasp the whole in a kind of tableau” (p. 232).
And it is precisely in this context, when we adopt a “disengaged stance,” that the project of theodicy ramps up; thinking we’re positioned to see everything, we now expect an answer to whatever puzzles us, including the problem of evil. Nothing should be inscrutable.
But this apologetic project — particularly with respect to the “problem” of evil — is taken up in a way that is completely consistent with the “buffered self” (p. 228); while earlier the terrors and burdens of evil and disaster would have cast us upon the help of a Savior, “now that we think we see how it all works, the argument gets displaced."
People in coffee-houses and salons [and philosophy classes?] begin to express their disaffection in reflections on divine justice, and the theologians begin to feel that this is the c
hallenge they must meet to fight back the coming wave of unbelief. The burning concern with theodicy is enframed by the new imagined epistemic predicament.
This sort of skeptical argument could only take hold within the modern moral order (MMO) and its epistemic confidence: “Once we claim to understand the universe, and how it works; once we even try to explain how it works by invoking its being created for our benefit, then this explanation is open to clear challenge: we know how things go, and we know why they were set up, and we can judge whether the first meets the purpose defined in the second. In Lisbon 1755, it seems clearly not to have.
So the immanent order ups the ante” (p. 306). But we have to appreciate what has changed here: precisely the emergence of the disengaged, “world picture” confidence in our powers of exhaustive surveillance (cp. p. 232).
Prior to this stance, the conditions would have yielded lament, not theodicy: “If one is in a profoundly believing/practicing way of life, then this hanging in to trust in God may seem the obvious way, and is made easier by the fact that everyone is with you in this.
The new epistemic expectation that comes with enclosure in immanence — namely, that whatever is within the sphere of immanence should be understandable to us — means we expect an answer to such matters. Inscrutability is no longer an option; so if believers have no rationally demonstrative answer, but can only appeal to something like the “hidden” will of God, then the scales tip in favor of what we know and understand.
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