The human knowledge of God in this so-called great age of information technology

"We live in exciting times," Paul Borthwick proclaims to his Christian audience. "Historians’ veins pump with adrenaline when they observe the changes, events, developments, and growth in our world. As Marshall McLuhan predicted years ago, our world has become a 'global village.'  Electronic communication, jet travel, international networks, and interdependent economies have simultaneously shrunk the world while vastly enlarging the amount of information we try to manage."

If that be the case, it can also be said at the same rate that we are also living in perilous times ... if we are ill-informed.  For to be ill-informed in this age of information, at least about those popular albeit trivial issues that currently animate this 21st century high-tech world, is, to use a Roman Catholic jargon, a mortal sin. Of course, being ill-informed does not necessarily entitle you for a sure place in hell in all eternity. (Biblically speaking, every one of us is hell-bound until we repent of our sins and put our trust in Christ alone for our salvation).

But given the technologically advanced communication facilities now in place elsewhere around the world, which only a generation ago existed only in sci-fi movies and TV programs, chances are, if you are ill-informed, you're dead. That is to say, you're at the mercy of those informed enough to run your life at their whims the way they want to. Now, if you still have the guts to call that life, maybe you're indeed ill-informed.

The flip side of the story of this age of information overload

The flip side of the story of this so-called information age is also tragic. Those who think they are informed enough about things essential when in fact they are not informed enough, especially when they are not informed enough that they are not informed enough, are deluded. In most cases, they are simply misinformed by their own delusion.

This, by the way, is the curse of this so-called great age of information technology. Equipped with the latest gadgets available in the market, it’s easy for many of us to think that we have easy access to every bit of information. The problem, however, is that before we know it, we suddenly find our minds already blown up, overloaded by a great sea of information available out there in the cyberspace. No wonder, somebody dubbed this phenomenon more than a decade ago as information overload.

No, it's not simply about having our minds unable to cope up with too much inputs of information. It's about suddenly losing our capability to separate truth from error, to differentiate white from black, to develop our ability to discern whatever is good or evil. It's about losing our capacity to think deeply enough to be able to accumulate knowledge in the real sense of the term, not of the “copy and paste” type of knowledge now pervasive in human society. In short, genuine knowledge as a by-product of rigorous thinking and careful analysis is, one way or the other, lost in this new arrangement brought about by this age of information overload.

The postmodern protest against the idea of knowledge

To make things even worse, even the idea of knowledge is being contested today in not a few academic circles especially in Europe and North America. There is no truth out there for us to know, we hear the postmodernists protesting. The issue has suddenly ceased to be about what you know, no longer whether what you claim you know is in accordance with truth according to categories set forth by the Enlightenment-infested modernity, not anymore whether it corresponds to reality or not, not in any way whether it's coherently interwoven or not.

The issue, according to the postmodernists, is that what many of us commonly call as knowledge is no knowledge at all. Instead, what we call knowledge, and so they claim, oftentimes emanates from the interpretive grid of our subjective outlook about the world in which we live, which for the most part is locally situated if not politically motivated. Every truth-claim in this regard is suspect, as if the notion of objective, absolute reality, so dear to the classical, pre-modern thinkers and highly valued at so great a price by modern rationalists and empiricists, has forever disappeared in this so-called postmodern world.

Mind you, the biggest casualty in this sorry state of affairs is our knowledge of God. If in the Age of the Enlightenment God was pronounced to be dead by modern philosophy and scientism, or at least relegated to the privacy of the believer’s life, in the postmodern arrangement, where a kind of iconoclastic purge is currently taking place against institutionalized religion, there is simply no space whatsoever for a God who takes full ownership of everything there is in the universe. Such a kind of God necessarily carries with Him the totalizing concept of a metanarrative that the postmodernists spew. As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner put it, “Postmodernists reject unifying, totalizing, and universal schemes in favor of new emphases on difference, plurality, fragmentation, and complexity.”

Unlike the Enlightenment-schooled thinkers of the already deteriorating modernity, the postmodernists appear to be willing to accommodate the religious existential pangs of man in the new postmodern society. However, in light of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls as the postmodern "incredulity toward metanarratives," they prefer to erect a new pantheon of gods or local deities who carry with them their own micro-narratives specifically designed for their own respective local communities.

Measured against the general revelation of God spoken about by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Christians in the 1st century Rome (see Rom. 1:18-32), here then is the spirit of the age manifesting itself in the postmodern milieu, attempting to suppress the truth all the more in a somewhat novel manner. The bottom line of it all is that a vast majority of people now living in this so-called great age of information technology are most likely to be, so far, the most ill-informed in all of history in as much the human knowledge of God is concerned. 

References:

Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn (New York: The Guilford Press, 1997), 55.

Paul Borthwick, How to be A World-Class Christian: Becoming Part of God's Global Kingdom  (Colorado Springs, CO: Authentic Publishing, 2009), 1.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3-43.