![What have we become? Inspired by "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris.](http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/hash/84/3b/843be6c61c226cc0da4cb38ea55c0822.jpg "What have we become? Inspired by "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris.")
The new atheists and the postmodernists have at least one thing in common. They have the same enemies, consisting mostly of Judeo-Christian believers, those so-called "misguided" followers of God who have imposed upon humanity moral and spiritual principles that are deemed to imprison people in fear. They therefore share one common major goal – as if following the advice of Friedrich Nietzsche’s parabolic poem Thus Spake Zarathustra, they aim to obliterate the Judeo-Christian believers, or, at the very least, debunk the Judeo-Christian notion of God in popular culture and the academy, a notion that many, if not all, of them perceive to be the single major obstacle to absolute human freedom and creativity.
Not surprisingly, the late American postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty openly endorsed a major work of the new atheist Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Walter Truett Anderson, a major proponent of postmodern politics, does the same with his own work, The Next Enlightenment, where he alludes to Richard Dawkin's neo-Darwinism.
Neo-Darwinism, by the way, is most likely what has attracted the postmodernists to this new brand of atheism that Dawkins and Dennett (along with Christopher Hitchens and Samuel Harris) promote. For one thing, because the postmodernists don't subscribe to the notion that evolution necessarily ends with the Homo sapiens. This, according to Dennett, has been the most common misconception of Darwinism. But Dennett may have gotten it wrong, because Charles Darwin himself said that humanity "stands at the very summit of the organic scale." Or maybe, Darwin believed that's where humanity stands right at the moment until such a time when man must finally give way for a more highly developed species to take his place at the very summit of the organic scale.
For the postmodernists, to think of humanity as the ultimate goal of evolution is arrogant, intolerant and too anthropocentric. Unlike the secular humanists, they simply don't bite the idea that the human species occupies the central stage of the entire evolutionary process, not to mention, of course, their disavowal of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the Imago Dei in man, which assigns to human beings the title of the crowning glory of God's creation. At least, that is almost exactly what leading postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault, Paul de Man and Thomas Kuhn seek to convey, in spite of the fact that they so wish to attain for all humanity unrestrained, libertarian freedom from institutional authorities of every kind.
What else? Both the new atheists and the postmodernists adhere to the notion that chance is the primary catalyst of evolution. Here then is a major component of neo-Darwinism that gives no room whatsoever even for evolutionary creationism (the notion that God created the universe through the long process of evolution) to have its say in the discussion table of the academy. Clearly, there is simply no place for any theologically loaded ideas in this state of affairs.
However, it must be noted that the postmodernists are simply dancing through the tunes of the new atheists' outmoded music. Their endorsement of the new atheists' contributions to the on-going debate surrounding the hypothesis of God's existence does not necessarily mean that the postmodernists agree with what this new brand of atheism has to say.
On the one hand, the new atheists appeal to scientific method (against the advice of many classical atheists) in their attempt to debunk the hypothesis of God. The postmodernists, on the other hand, dismiss the idea that the utilization of scientific method in one's search for truth necessarily results in certainty of knowledge. Science, to the postmodern mind, means nothing at all. For in the postmodern school of thought, there is no such a thing as objective reality that one can know with certainty, only perspective and interpretation of what is said to be objectively real. There is no truth out there for us to know, no meaning for us to pursue to make life desirable, no transcendent reality by which to measure our moral choices and aspirations in life. In short, to be postmodern is to be post-certain.
As a matter of fact, anything goes in postmodernism, including the new atheist's neo-Darwinism. What may be called the latest scientific discovery today will sooner or later be eventually superseded by a more updated discovery. For the postmodern mind, every so-called scientific discovery is anything but neutral, conditioned for the most part by the scientists' own preconceived ideas.
To add more color to it, the scientific enterprise, say the postmodernists, is in many ways politicized. Rightly so, for some of those scientists who are vocal about their belief in God are reportedly being systematically ejected nowadays from academic institutions that have long been put under the spell of godless worldviews like Darwinian evolutionism, philosophical naturalism and atheism.
If one is to follow the postmodern line of thinking, one can therefore conclude that the atheists and evolutionists, classical or new, like the so-called misguided followers of God, must be equally guilty of imposing upon humanity their own set of rules that are also deemed to threaten absolute human freedom and creativity. The same conclusion applies to all the other worldviews out there in the 21st century world, including the various strands of postmodernism.
References:
Anderson, Walter Truett. The Next Enlightenment: Integrating East and West in A New Vision of Human Evolution. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 2003.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York, NY: Collier, 1902.
Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York, NY: Touchstone, 1996.
Noebel, David. Understanding the Times: The Collision of Today’s Competing Worldviews (Revised 2nd Edition). Manitou Springs, CO: Summit Press, 2006.
Rorty, Richard. "Untruth and Consequences," The New Republic, July 31, 1995, pp. 32-36.
Comments
I'm afraid your comparison between the New Atheists and various proponents of postmodernist theory is remarkably inaccurate, indeed, you seem to have colluded two groups that are structurally opposite. This is confirmed by your scant and top-sided bibliography. You have listed a single postmodernist author in your list. The late Richard Rorty was not a postmodernist, but a self-identified "Pragmatist" in the intellectual tradition of Dewey and Pierce, a scholar who came to reject the negative consequences of Continental postmodernism.
Postmodernism as a form of epistemological critique does indeed disassemble truth claims, but it does so generally. Any attack on Judeo-Christian truth claims (which you are being far too reductionist in colluding so casually since there are more differences than similarities within that false category) is incidental. Indeed, many theologians, particularly those from Evangelical Christian traditions have made great use of postmodernist critiques.
For example, a simply citation search will turn up not only scholarly articles, but entire volumes citing the hostility of postmodernism to precisely the scientism that your next group of critics hold as their standard. The New Atheists claim for science a power that is not only descriptive, but prescriptive as well and on this ground they compete with religion. (All religion generally, but it is Islam specifically, not Judaism nor Christianity that is their chief irritant.) Since postmodernism generally results in an relativist epistemology that limits its power of interpretation to deconstructing and emphasizing the differences between truth claims, while emphasizing no single one, there is plenty of room for the articulation of a religion foundationalism. You're misread your subject utterly.
Thanks for the comments, Duncan, I appreciate it. My only problem is that you must have been looking through different set of lens & have consequently missed some major points of this issue.
First, almost all, if not actually all, of most respectable Christian scholars categorize Rorty as a postmodernist. He is indeed a pragmatist, but not of old tradition. In fact, it may be fairly said that his pragmatism is his own innovation, the main target of w/c was the representionalist epistemology of scientism & philosophy. He subscribed to the notion of pragmatic social conventions that look down on scientific & philosophical methodologies as mere "contingent vocabularies." From this he sought to set the human mind free from what he considered as major obstacles put forth both by science & philosophy that stand in the way between the mind & the world. Now, if it cannot be numbered among the various strands of postmodernism, I really don't know what to call it.
Second, the comparison between the new atheism & postmodernism is simple. They both adhere to an anti-theistic worldview. The only difference is that the former is proudly straightforward about it while the latter is hesitant to admit it so as to avoid delivering a rather absolute statement. This is true of postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Bataille, Barthes, Baudrillard, Macherey, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, among others.
Third, the postmodern attack on the Judeo-Christian truth-claims maybe said to be incidental on the one hand but it may also be said to be intentional on the other. If the postmodernists aim to destroy the foundationalistic structure of schools of thought that embrace the notion of objective reality, it may be incidental. However, if we are to consider Nietzsche's contribution to the postmodern way of thinking, not to mention Marx's & Freud's influence, the postmodern attack against the Judeo-Christian God must be intentional.
Lastly, a word about those evangelicals who make use of postmodern critiques. You may have been referring to the works Grenz, Franke, Olson, Webber, McLaren, Sweet, among others. I am an evangelical. Evangelicalism today, in as much as postmodernism is concerned, is divided between 2 major camps: conservative/confessional & postconservative/postfoundationalist/progressive. Those names mentioned above belong to the latter group. In my opinion, by subscribing to a great deal of what postmodernism has to offer to doing both theology & Christian ministry, they have abandoned, in the name of cultural relevance, the very essence of what evangelicalism is all about, particularly its root in historic Protestantism & its supposed to be unyielding commitment to biblical Christianity.
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