Postmodernism

Postmodernism rejects Modernism. So what is Modernism?

Modernism is a high belief in science, and scientific methods, to challenge the ideas of the past, and create new scientific breakthroughs, inventions, and discoveries, so that society improves. The Modernist has faith in science and reason as the forces that cause a society to progress.

Postmodernism rejects Modernism. Why?

• The issue is objectivity -- whether knowledge of truth is possible.

• The Postmodernist believes that subjectivity makes knowledge of truth impossible.

• Science, and the scientific method, cannot discover objective truth, because a scientist’s mind is colored with cultural assumptions and moral value-judgments that he/she brings into the situation and forces onto the data.

• Science is a tool used by people in power to justify the oppression of victim groups (ethnic minorities, females).

• Societies are neither good nor bad. They can only be defined descriptively, in terms of their own internal goals, purposes, and justifications.

• No over-all Theory of Everything exists (or meta-narrative).

• Words are not founded on anything unchangeably real (whether in the sense of a word referring to a physical thing, or being subject to foundational laws of logic).

Common secular criticism of Postmodernism:

• Postmodernism criticizes the use of explanatory theories, but it is itself an explanatory theory.

• Postmodernism uses reason to promote irrationalism.

• Postmodernism criticizes writers for bringing their value judgments to a subject, but criticizing that is itself a value judgment.

• Postmodernism attacks ideas and systems based on inconsistencies, but refuses to apply its own standards of consistency to itself.

• Postmodernism attacks the making of any type of truth claims, but is itself a series of truth claims.

• It produces a suffocating self-focus. For example, since postmodern preacher Brian MacLaren doesn’t believe that objective truth is attainable, his books end up self-focused around him and his own notions and emotions. They end up being about Brian MacLaren, instead of what each book is allegedly about.

• Postmodernism exaggerates the strange or unique features about a topic, but ignores the common, mundane features that it make it understandable.

• It produces a radical self-centeredness that destroys all morals and ethics. E.g., postmodernism teaching means that Nazi Germany, or the Soviet death-camps, were no more morally repugnant or commendable than the work of Theresa of Calcutta, or the Allied liberation of Europe in WWII.

It is a sin for any Christian to be a postmodernist, since it denies God's creative intelligence (a Christian postmodernist is forced to say that God wasn't intelligent enough, or powerful enough, to create the human race with sufficient ability to know truth or reality, which would include Him), it denies the understandability of the Bible (thus damning the soul by institutionalizing the sin of doubt), and re-defines doubt as a virtue (where the Scripture condemns doubt as a sin).