1. Os Guinness, Art Lindsley, Dennis Hollinger Discerning the Times Tapes: http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/books1.htm

2. Dennis Hollinger, C. S. Lewis Institute Summer 1999 Report Volume 1, No. 2, http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/hollinger.htm.

3. Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal, www.marshillaudio.org

4. Roger Lundin, The Ultimately Liberal Condition, First Things, 52 (April 1995): 22-27. www.firstthings.com.

1. Modernism (1789-1989), Reason without Faith

''It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness." Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities

"[The Enlightenment] began with such hope, certainty and vigor, but seems to be ending with despair, skepticism and malaise." Dennis Hollinger, C. S. Lewis Institute Summer 1999 Report Volume 1, No. 2.

Optimism

"Modernity hijacked the idea [of hope], and instead of waiting for God to act, it decided to usher in the consummation by substituting redemption with progress" Michael Horton

"Perhaps the most significant aspect of our conception of what it means to be modern is the idea that we can consciously change the character of society and the condition of our lives.... We are committed to the idea that we can make the future.... Where once we thought that consequences were God's will, we now deliberately program, regulate, and organize our own future" (Oxford sociologist Brian Wilson, Contemporary Transformations of Religion, p. 1).

Science over speculative philosophy & commitment to truth

The modern world has been characterized intellectually by a commitment to truth. Moderns were not always in agreement with how truth was grasped, but they were one in its pursuit and a belief that certainty was possible. ..The two schools were rivals in epistemology (how we know), but both rationalism and empiricism believed truth could be known with certainty in an ordered world in which we live. Dennis Hollinger, ibid

Secularization

Secularization is "the process whereby religion losses its social significance. Peter Burger.

"What then happens to religion in a pluralistic, secularized society? It doesn't vanish, but rather becomes privatized. Religion no longer plays a significant role in the public square, but finds expression primarily in the private arena of personal relationships, family or within the inner-self. Increasingly religion is therefore seen to be irrelevant to the larger culture, public policy, community relations, or our jobs." Dennis Hollinger, Ibid

Humanist Manifesto

[The Humanist Manifestos (1933, 1973, 1999)] show how an antireligious worldview became an unofficially established religion but had to stop calling itself a religion to finish the job.

Both Manifestos call for a form of democracy with certain rights, some kind of socialism, and the renunciation of force as a step toward world government. They propose that children and adults be educated in their ideologies, and through the thirties expression "social and mental hygiene" and the seventies expression "altering the course of human evolution and cultural development" they hint at much more. "Social hygiene" and "altering the course of human evolution," of course, mean eugenics; "mental hygiene" and "altering the course of human cultural development," indoctrination.

The Manifestos are also naturalistic: they think nature is all there is. Scorning "salvationism" as a distraction from the pressing problems of the present life, they disavow belief in God and call upon human beings to "save" themselves. While holding that traditional Western morality is defective, they are cagey about which commandments they would jettison–except the ones about sex, naturally. The rest of the answer is found in Manifesto II, where we read that ethics is "situational." This means, of course, that the rest of the commandments must also go." J. Budziszewski, First Things 101 (March 2000): 42-43.

Ethics from Science

"Empirical knowledge of our biological nature will allow us to make optimum choices among the competing criteria of progress." Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature

"The scientific doctrine of progress is destined to replace not only the myth of progress, but all other myths of human earthly destiny. It will inevitably become one of the cornerstones of man's theology, or whatever may be the future substitute for theology, and the most important external support for human ethics." Julian Huxley

"The principles of justice are ... the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality." John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

2. Collapse of Modernism

"Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal story teller." (Robert Jenson, First Things, October 1993:21)

The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats http://www.well.com/user/eob/poetry/The_Second_Coming.html

Inconsistency: G. K Chesteron Tape (Ravi Zacharis)

"The Christian ideal of man has lost none of its power over minds [that] have rejected the faith; striking proof of this is found in the failure of these minds, while accepting as true the hypothesis of natural selection, to give practical effect to it. If it is true that matter, having received life, progresses from lower to high forms of organism, two conclusions seem to flow from the fact. First, the progress of our species will be the better assured the more care and advantages that we lavish on the higher types without bothering about the lower types, whose reproduction it will be reasonable to prevent. Secondly, human societies being themselves regarded as living organisms, it will be reasonable, as in every other complex organism, to make the less developed cells serve to maintain and foster the higher forms of life. Natural selection logically demands an inequality of rights favoring the human specimens who carry the best chances for the future of the species. " Bertrand de Jouvenel, Sovereignty. An Inquiry into the Political Good (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1997), p. 268.

In other words, Darwinian biology would justify social Darwinianism, applying the survival of the fittest to the present races of man, not merely to the animals of the past. Eugenics, both the more therapeutic variety endorsed by Margaret Sanger and the genocidal system of Adolf Hitler, not merely makes sense in the world of naturalistic evolution; it would seem not merely reasonable, as de Jouvenel says, but logically and morally necessary. If Professor Gould succeeds in defending Darwin against Johnson, Michael Behe, and his other opponents, he will not be able to resist indefinitely the social implications of a world without a Creator, without design or purpose. For this reason, the struggle against the domination of naturalistic evolution, politically incorrect though it may be, and waged largely by persons often derided as "right-wing religious extremists," has a vital part to play in defending the races of man against the bellum omnium contra omnes, a logical implication of the survival of the fittest.

The Religion and Society Report, 17, #3

The Secularism Project has destroyed the humanism Project.

"The utopia of man’s perfect autonomy and the hope of unlimited perfection may be the most efficient instruments of suicide ever to have been invented." Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial

"We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent." Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"Through this process over several centuries of destroying universal moral ideals by questioning their scientific objectivity, the supposedly enlightened industrial nations with democratic governments repeatedly face crises of social conflict and violence that they find it hard to oppose." Richard Gelwick, The Calling of Being Human, Polanyia, 1996

Ken Myers Tape "Christian Humanism in a Post-Christian Age"

3. Post Modernism (Feeling without reason or faith)

If modernity no longer had a universal story teller, the postmodern world no longer has a story… Postmodernity, at its heart, is primarily a reaction to the certainty, progress, optimism and universal ideals of modernity. While most of the technological and sociological realities of the modern world continue on, postmodernity involves shifts primarily at the cultural level, that is in the realm of ideas, world views, and values. Postmodernists reject the belief that truth can be discerned by reason or empiricism, and the euphoric notion that technology can be harnessed to relieve most human burdens without dire consequences. Such notions, they contend are not only false, but are interpretations of reality that at heart leverage power to maintain the privileged status of the interpreters and beneficiaries of the ideas. Truth is an illusion, and the only value we can herald with confidence is tolerance. Postmodernity, at one level, is an intellectual strand of thought emerging in various disciplines, but it is also endemic in every-day realities we now experience in the media, major social institutions, and the world of cyber-space. Denis Hollinger.

Fragmentation: Incredulity to all meta narratives.

We can never see or experience the whole of things, only our small portion of existence.

"postmodernism" … is merely the self—conscious collapse of modernity’s project. It is the despairing or gleeful recognition that you cannot very well have a drama without a dramatist. The recognition should not, of course, have been quite so long in coming, but humanity has a notable capacity for persistence in self—deception. If God is not, or is of deist persuasion and entertains no histories, that leaves only two possibilities: either we are to make up the world’s story, or the world just happens to have one. The latter possibility is remarkably implausible. As to the former, postmodernism proclaims the further unsurprising discovery that whatever universal stories we make up, whatever "metanarratives," must be oppressive. Robert W. Jenson, First Things, 16-17 March 2000, www.firstthings.com.

Subjectivism

"All preferences are principled all principles are preferences. Stanley Fish, Duke University

Robert Simon, professor of philosophy at Hamilton College, reports upon his experiences discussing the Holocaust in his class on ethics. While none of the students deny the reality of the Holocaust, an increasing number, he says, do worse: they acknowledge the fact, even deplore it, but cannot bring themselves to condemn it morally. "Of course I dislike the Nazis," one student comments, "but who is to say they are morally wrong." His students make similar observations about apartheid, slavery, and ethnic cleansing. To pass judgment, they fear, is to be a moral "absolutist," and having been taught that everything is relative, they now see any judgment as arbitrary, intolerant, and authoritarian. (Hamilton College students are not unique. James Q. Wilson reports that some of his Harvard students were similarly reluctant to pass judgment on the perpetrators of the Holocaust. "It all depends on your perspective," one said. And another: "I’d just have to see these events through the eyes of the people affected by them.") Gertrude Himmelfarb, A Tribute to Sidney Hook, Academic Questions, Winter 2000 Page 27.

Melissa Müller Video, Anne Frank, The Biography

All of reality is subjectively construed and constructed primarily by the social situations in which we find ourselves.

Joke: The one ump said, "There are balls and there are strikes; I call em the way they are" (The modernist assumption). The second umpire said, "No I don't think it's quite that way. There are balls and strikes, but I call em the way I see em." The third ump responded, "Nah, you've both got it wrong. There's balls and there's strikes, but they ain't nothin till I call em." Increasingly our postmodern world identifies with umpire number three. All of reality is subjectively construed and constructed primarily by the social situations in which we find ourselves. For many postmoderns there is no such thing as truth.

Postmodern thinkers commend a hermeneutic of suspicion, in which we must mistrust any and every form of interpretation. This is most evident in the deconstructionist movement in literature, which argues that there is no meaning in literary texts, only the hidden (oppressive) agenda of the author.

See Art Lindsley, Absolutes without Absolutism, C. S. Lewis Institute Report (Spring, 1999, Volume 1, No. 1) http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/absolute.htm

Tolerance is the only virtue

Because contradictions aren't necessarily anathema, obvious incongruence is shrugged away.

"One of the reasons I welcome postmodern discourse is because it exposes how Enlightenment humanists illegitimately repudiated vocabularies of faith in their assumption that rationalism was the only way to access truth. Postmodernism, as I have written elsewhere, "entered the den of modernism and closed the mouths of its once lionized attackers of Christianity."

It is because of postmodernism that a recent issue of Academe, the bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, printed articles legitimizing those professors who desire to talk about their faith on university campuses. It is because of postmodernism that African American literary theorists bell hooks and Cornel West could open a presentation at Yale’s African American Cultural Center with someone singing Thomas A. Dorsey’s "Precious Lord" and say, "Both Cornel and I come to you as individuals who believe in God. That belief informs our message." It is because of postmodernism that I was invited to give a Christian apologetic on a secular university campus. And it is be cause of postmodernism, and its "incredulity toward metanarratives," that I was taken seriously as I discussed problems with the narratives of postmodern ethics. " Crystal Downing, Richard Rorty for the Silver Screen:Waking Ned Devine as apologetic for postmodernism, Books & Culture, September/October 1999, Vol. 5, No. 5, Page 8-10.

"Tolerance taken alone seems to be self-contradictory, for if you are intolerant of someone who doesn't tolerate a given behavior or belief, you have violated your own principle. Too often tolerance is either a covering for a PC agenda which turns out to be not very tolerating for those outside its ideology, or it is merely the driving force for self-centered living that wishes to throw off all restraints. As G.K. Chesterton once put it, "Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions."

"Tolerance is an arbitrary principle if isolated from a larger framework and divorced from other virtues like truth and justice. It is our Christian world view of humanity created in the image of God which provides a foundation for a proper kind of tolerance, one which legally allows falsehood and large doses of immoral behavior to exist. But within that tolerance of falsehood and immorality Christians will seek to articulate, defend and live the truth. Tolerance does not mean affirmations without critiques, or life-styles without moral judgments, but rather agrees to allow for a variety of pursuits in a pluralistic society, not because there is no truth, but because truth can tolerate (at a societal level) that which contradicts it, knowing that God's truth will ultimately be victorious. "It is our commitment to truth and justice that compels us to affirm such tolerance, not our commitment to the modern value of tolerance or the need to be inoffensive" (Gaede, p. 28). But it is precisely our commitment to truth, mercy and justice that compels us to remind our culture that tolerance is not the moral trump card; it's not all there is." Hollinger, ibid.

Therapeutic categories dominate cognitive categories: Human feelings replace God as the arbiter of truth, goodness, and spiritual wholeness.

"In the absence of any objectifiable criteria of right and wrong, good or evil, the self and its feelings become our only moral guide" (Robert Bellah Habits of the Heart, p.76.)

Feminist logic: "If you feel you have been raped, you have been raped."

"The latter begins, not so much with sin as morally framed, but with sin as psychologically experienced, not so much with sin in relation to God, but with sin in relation to ourselves…with our anxiety, pain, and disillusionment....God, in consequence, is valued to the extent that he is able to bathe these wounds, assuage these insecurities, calm these fears" (David Wells, Losing Our Virtue, p. 42).

Given to Academic nonsense:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which

power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a

form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a

renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power." Judith Butler, University of California at Berkeley. (Quoted in the Wall Street Journal, 2/5/99)

4. Spirituality in the Post Modern Era

Nihilism: Post Modernity leaves great questions unaddressed:

"Postmodernism as a philosophical groundwork for politic ultimately is as shifting sand when it comes to having something solid on which to base what we want in

society, be it the emancipation of groups within society, the promotion of democracy abroad or encouraging the spread of the human rights culture. This is an issue

we need to consider carefully, for few of us hold that the powerful should do what the powerful can do, and fewer of us still would like to live in a world where such

attained." Anthony J. Langlois, Postmodernism and a Hurting World

"Scientists generally believe their own narratives. Postmodernists are supposed not to. No one ..believes modernity’s social narrative, but we find none other to cling to… For the scientists’ narratives do not seem to be about us, … and the postmodernist narratives, which are obsessively about us, finally conjure spiraling contradiction. " Robert W. Jenson, First Things, 16-17 March 2000.

Jacques Derrida, Post modern thinker, recognizes the problem:

"I have been given this image, and I have to face some responsibility, political and ethical. It is as if I am indebted to–I don't know to whom–to thinking rigorously, to thinking responsibly. I am in a situation of trying to learn to whom, finally, I am responsible. To discover. . . who is hidden, who gives me orders. It is as if I have a destiny which I have to interpret and decipher."

Thoughtful individuals know there must be both a drama and a dramatist.

Old Fashioned Materialism. The Dow Jones makes up for Paula Jones.

Graphs on Well-Being in US.

New Age

Norman Geissler (http://members.tripod.com/~vantillian/geisler.html)

Art Lindsley

Gaia: Enviro-spiritualism (from Ken Myers)

In the 1960’s Rachel Carson published what is considered by many to be the most influential book of the century, The Silent Spring.

Carson traced the declining vitality of the carrier pigeon population to DDT, a analysis that was possible because of the invention of a very sensitive analytical device by British scientist James Lovelock.

Lovelock then went on to work for NASA where he was asked to establish tests for the existence of extra terrestrial life. Believing that such life might be substantially different from life on earth, Lovelock suggested that standard chemical and physical tests were inadequate. Rather, he reasoned, decreasing entropy was the only test general enough to spot life on other planets. All cosmic clocks inevitably run down. If the clock is winding up, he reasoned, somebody, or something, called life, must be present.

Lovelock then began to apply this reasoning to the earth itself. He concluded that chemical and physical laws could not account for the delicate balance that characterized this planet let alone Mars. Dead things don’t order, so there must be some invisible hand, some living thing to account for the planetary equilibrium.

"The entire range of living matter on earth from whales to viruses, from oaks to algae may be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of manipulating the earth’s atmosphere to suite its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond its constituent parts. Gaia is a complex entity involving the earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil, the totality constituting a feedback system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet."

"At some time early in the earth’s history before life existed, the solid earth, the atmosphere and oceans were still evolving by the laws of physics and chemistry alone. It was careening downhill to the lifeless state of a planet almost at equilibrium. Briefly in its headlong flight through the ranges of chemical and physical states it entered a stage favorable for life. At some special time in that stage the newly formed living cells grew until their presence so effected the earth’s environment as to halt the headlong dive towards equilibrium. At that instant the living things, the rocks, the air and the oceans merged to form the new entity, Gaia. Just as when the sperm merges with the egg, new life was conceived. Gaia is no static picture. She is forever changing as life and the earth evolve together. But in our brief life span, she keeps still long enough for us to begin to understand see how fair she is. The evolution of Homo Sapiens with his technological inventiveness and his increasingly subtle communications networks has vastly increased Gaia’s range of perception. She is now, through us, awake and aware of herself." James Lovelock

Earth Day prayer:

"Gaia, mother of all I sing. Oldest of gods, firm a foundation who feeds all creatures living on earth, as many as move on the radiant land and swim in the sea and fly through the air, all those does she feed with her bounty. Mistress, from you come our fine children and bountiful harvest. Yours is the power to give mortals life and to take it away."

These ideas were fringe in the 1960s, but they are mainstream now. In 1999 President Clinton awarded the National Medal of Science to Lynn Margolis (one of Carl Sagan's former wives), a believer in Gaia. We can expect government sanctioning of pantheistic religious language in schools to capture the minds of children for what is called deep environmentalism.

Bill Moyers reverentially discussed Gaia in his PBS series on mythology with the late Joseph Campbell. In a piece on Natural History of the United States, The NOVA team favorably contrasted the mature, environmentally friendly animism of a native American medicine man with the silly superstitions of the Puritans. Vice President Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance is shot through with Gaian pantheism. Earth Day has displaced Easter as America’s spring holiday. The ACLU seems openly tolerant of the Gaian hypothesis. Carl Sagan published Lovelock’s first article in the late 60s in Icarus after it was rejected by other science journals.

Deep Environmentalism: In Jan. 1990 the NY Times reported an unusual environmental conference under the headline: "Sagan urges clerics to join in effort to save globe"

The call for joint action by science and religion was issued on the opening day of a conference in Moscow sponsored by the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival. Besides recognizing the power of religion to shape behavior, the 23 scientists said, ''Many of us have had profound experiences of awe and reverence before the universe.''

''Efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment need to be infused with a vision of the sacred,'' they concluded.

5. Pentecostalism