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For the past two centuries, philosophers, scientists, artists, and theologians have turned in large numbers away from the supernaturalistic faith of historic Christianity and have sought an understanding and perspective of the world on a naturalistic basis.
But just as modern civilization seemed to be closing in on this goal, the whole project began to break down.
The breakdown of the modern worldview and the resulting abandonment of the notion of objective truth is called postmodernism.
At the heart of the postmodernist revolution is the claim that truth and values do not exist independently of our perceiving them or believing in them. Not only has God been declared dead, but Truth also has been pronounced dead.
The seeds of postmodernism were sown in 18th-century debates about epistemology — the branch of philosophy that asks how and whether we can know anything and how we know what we know.
Some philosophers, called rationalists, maintained that we know things through our mental reasoning faculties. The problem with this claim was that by itself, the mind would not have any information about which to think or reason.
Other philosophers, called empiricists, maintained that we know things because we get information from the external world through our senses.
One difficulty with this claim was that it could not explain how we know that certain things are always so (for example, how we know that two plus two always equals four).
Below are three ways the postmodernist does this.
With this debate came the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued that the rationalists and empiricists were both half right and half wrong. “Pure reason” by itself has nothing to know, and mere sensations by themselves cannot be known.
The mind, Kant argued, imposes a structure on the world as it receives information through the senses. We can and do gain knowledge this way — but, Kant concluded, not knowledge of things in themselves, but things as they are perceived by us.
This way of looking at knowledge, Kant claimed, was akin to a Copernican revolution in epistemology. In the Copernican revolution, we learned that the appearance of a regular motion of the sun is an illusion.
In the Kantian revolution, we were told that the appearance of a regular structure of the world is an illusion and that we are imposing our own structure on the world.
Kant believed that all of our minds imposed the same structure on the world and expected knowledge gained by one person to be recognizable and shareable with other persons.
But this idea did not follow from his own epistemology, and once the assumption is lost, the radical relativism of the postmodern era follows naturally.
Not surprisingly, then, as the modern civilization of the West became global, the modernist assumption of common rationality fell by the wayside. In its place arose relativism, the idea that all knowledge is a construction, a way of looking at things.
Because the constructions used by a group are typically similar, many postmodernists speak of “the social construction of reality.”
This means that there is no objective reality “out there.” There are only varying constructions of that reality that differ because of our differing experiences, capacities, and conditions.
Constructions of reality are often considered valid if they make sense of everything or nearly everything that members of a group experience or encounter in life.
Alternately, constructions of reality are seen as of value to the extent the worldview enables members of the group to succeed in life.
If the first approach asks whether it makes sense, the second asks whether it works. The question that cannot even be asked is whether it corresponds with external or objective reality — that is, whether it is true.
Such a question is regarded as meaningless. For postmodernists, the only thing that is meaningful is the choice to embrace a worldview that has no objective reality.
Despite the enormous cultural influence of postmodernism, its relativistic view of truth suffers from a simple, fatal flaw: relativism is self-defeating.
Perhaps the most blatant example of a self-defeating affirmation of relativism is John Caputo’s assertion, “The truth is that there is no truth.”
If this is true, it is false (since there would be at least this one truth). One would think such transparently self-refuting statements would be rare, but they are commonplace in the literature, probably because they sound profoundly paradoxical. The fact is, though, that they are simply nonsense (that is, they make no sense).
This self-defeating nature of relativistic statements cannot be avoided by changing the terminology used. For example, if I claim that “all knowledge is a human construction,” that claim must apply to my knowledge that all knowledge is a human construction.
But if my “knowledge” is itself a construction, it is only one way of looking at the question, and there is no basis for asserting it to be true of all knowledge possessed by other persons. Nor can the problem be avoided by adopting a softer, more humble form of relativism.
For example, suppose someone were to say, “Well, I don’t know if all knowledge is relative to everyone else, but I know that all knowledge is relative to me.”
But this raises the question of whether the humble relativist’s knowledge of the relativism of his knowledge is subject to change. If it is, then it is not always or necessarily true even for him; if it is not, then it is an absolute, and his relativism is false — even for him!
Not only can no one affirm relativism without refuting it, but no one can argue for it or provide evidence for it without refuting it.
Relativists often appeal to the differing belief systems that human beings espouse as proof of relativism.
However, the existence of different belief systems does not prove that none of them are objectively true. Some people believe the earth is flat; this does not prove that we cannot know the shape of the earth.
It is true, of course, that we “construct” our worldviews through interacting with our environment and with each other.
This implies that none of us knows everything and that even what we know in common will have different associations and be set in somewhat differing contexts.
We must part company with the relativist and the postmodernist; however, when they conclude from these facts, that reality itself is a construction.
Rather, reality is the setting and parameter for our efforts to construct a worldview. In other words, reality is both the field on which we play the game of knowledge and the rules that govern the game.
The postmodernist is right in claiming that the modernist project of acquiring an objective, complete, and comprehensive knowledge of the world is impossible for finite humans. But postmodernists have not abandoned modernism; they are instead ultra-modernists.
They believe that human beings must determine for themselves what is real and what is right, but they take this more literally than the modernist: to determine what is real now means to make it real.
Postmodernism and its relativistic view of knowledge are more widespread than the number of persons who self-consciously accept these labels.
Throughout our civilization, the belief in objective truth and objective reality is under assault. Relativism shows up in some of the strangest places. In every case, the argument is ultimately self-defeating.
For example, we are told that all texts, from the Bible to the U.S. Constitution, have different meanings depending on the ideology of the reader.
Those who disagree with the traditional interpretation of these texts advocate “deconstructing” them, that is, dismantling their actual meanings by showing their ideological assumptions.
But if this theory were true, then it applies even to itself. Thus, the postmodern theory of textual interpretation can itself be dismissed as reflecting a particular ideological stance.
Or, again, it is claimed that modern physics, especially Einstein’s theories of relativity, have proved relativism.
This claim, of course, is self-defeating since it could only be true if Einstein’s theories of relativity were themselves absolute truths, not truths judged only from a certain perspective.
Moreover, the argument completely misunderstands Einstein. Relativity is not the same thing as relativism.
Relativity theory correlates space and time, matter and energy, according to certain constant (i.e., absolute) truths for all observers. Thus, relativity theory assumes that relativism is false and that some things are true for everyone.
For further discussion, join Dr. Boa’s weekly live interactive webinar, Think on These Things
For further reading:
Eternal Perspective Trilogy by Dr. Ken Boa
Why Do Some Believe That God Is Dead?
Why Are There So Many Questions about ‘In the Beginning’?
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Kenneth Boa equips people to love well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a writer, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life in the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.