December 15, 2007
taylor and the dialectical fantasy
We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,” the Russian critic Belinsky once shouted across the table at Turgenev, “and you want to eat!”Charles Taylor would prefer that we feast upon the 874 pages of his new book “A Secular Age,” which offers musings and perceptions from every field of knowledge except knowledge of God, which he leaves off the menu. Taylor’s quarrel is with secularism — the idea that as modernity, science and democracy have advanced, concern with God and spirituality has retreated to the margins of life. Calling this thesis “very unconvincing,” Taylor seeks to prove that God is still very much present in the world, if only we look at the right places and allow the mind to open itself to moral inquiry and aesthetic sensibility rather than traditional theology as the gateway to religion.
more from the NY Times Book Review here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:54 AM | Permalink
Comments
This is precisely the sort of drivel that drives a good materialist, even one who isn't a "new atheist", up the wall:
* assertion that the irreligious should be nihilists CHECK
* suggestion that religion is coextensive with an interest in aesthetics and art CHECK
* claim that morality requires religion CHECK
* assumption that to be irreligious one must lack emotion CHECK
Are we even surprised the man won the Templeton?
Posted by: D | Dec 15, 2007 12:14:04 PM
"Taylor, in contrast, sees science as reinforcing religion, since God is implicated in a social existence where the contemplation of meaning and order suggests “something divine in us.”"
Or a really awesome brain? If I take out his frontal lobes, what would that implicate about God?
For all his fancy pancy philosophyness, is his reasoning all that different from the typical youth pastor down the street? Not so much.
Posted by: chris | Dec 15, 2007 3:13:22 PM
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