Do We Live in a Secular Age?

And what does a secular age mean?

Charles Taylor addresses the question in his monumental work, A Secular Age. Here is an outtake, taken from a New York Times book review:

Some postmodernists speak of the “end of philosophy,” since it supposedly can no longer tell us anything about the world independent of its relation to us — about that which exists “out there” and derives, as Taylor puts it, “from a power which is beyond me.” At present, he writes, “we live in a condition” in which we suspect our own beliefs as having been influenced by sources other than the self and its reasons, with the human subject the mere effect of forces alien to our being. “We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time,” he writes, “looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.” Has religion, then, come to end in doubts about ourselves?

In “A Secular Age,” Taylor answers with a resounding no. He argues for “the ‘deconstruction’ of the death of God view” proclaimed by Nietzsche. To see secularization as simply the separation of church and state, the alienation of truth from power, and the rise of skepticism and worldliness, he writes, is to miss the deeper and more enduring residues of religion and the spiritual life, the true “bulwarks of belief” that in his view have hardly eroded. Taylor argues against the “subtraction stories” of modernity, in which religious belief and other “confining horizons” are “sloughed off,” leaving the mind without faith or piety. Instead, he argues, “Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.” Even the old distinction between the sacred and the profane has taken on new meaning. Instead of disappearing, God is now “sanctifying us everywhere,” including “in ordinary life, our work, in marriage, and so on.”

Philosophy, in Taylor’s estimate, also enjoys a certain sanctification of mind and will. He cites Descartes to suggest how we are rational beings demanding to be ruled by reason governed by will. Freud’s sense of the proud solitariness of the ego is also an example of the inner truth of the emotions asking to be controlled apart from formal religion, and William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” indicates how people everywhere have a need to believe that can be determined by the will.

Perhaps his question about doubt summarizes our true secular age much better than the works of science, technology, and philosophical agnostics (such as me) and atheists (such as Dawkins).

The idea of doubt about our past and our nature is a powerful one. His point about secularity driving much deeper than political issues on the separation of church and state is another. We haven't merely become less religious, or more scientific, we've also become profoundly uncertain.

Science supports us in our uncertainty as it describes the fundamental fuzziness of the quantum universe and the fundamental chaotic nature of apparently orderly systems, such as river systems, weather fronts, and trees. Knowing that we know is no longer a possibility. But knowing we can learn and change me prove to be a more than fair exchange for us.

If philosophers are right about the fact that philosophy consists of only a long series of questions, a conversation of questions, then philosophy is truly not dead and may even revive in our secular age.

I have written an essay on Charles Taylor elsewhere. Please give it a read:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4099635/My-Review-of-Charles-Taylor