Postmodernism

Enlightenment ideas took the West one step away from God, while Modern Philosophy and Postmodernism have been another and a third step away from Him respectively.

The Enlightenment era, though brimmed with the ideas of reason, empiricism, progress and rationality, was also clasped inside a stark insistence on objectivity. So much so that even purely rational lines of thought exposing the inevitable and necessary presence of subjectivity were refuted. And with that religion was pushed into the realms of myth and bad history.

Modern Philosophy of 17th and 18th centuries harboured ideas like Empiricism and Rationalism that emphasised the primacy of sensory perception and reasoning. Then there was Idealism that gave primacy to perceptions and ideas over material objects; and Existentialism that held that humans are fundamentally free and responsible for their choices. So, the debates on whether we have a priori or a posteriori knowledge, on mind and body dualism, and on objectivity and subjectivity have never ceased.

Pure rationality and sheer objectivity do not cater for individual perception and subjective experiences, and the queries of complex human consciousness remain unanswered. Going through this crisis of meaning the West jumped for the other extreme - recognition of the impossibility of metaphysical truths coupled with an embrace of relativism.

The idea that meaning can only be derived by reason from sensory experience alone was rejected. Loosening the foundations of absolute objective truths, the modernist, guided by science and modern arts, sought to find a fragmented reality in place of universal truths and metanarratives.

In early 20th century it was understood that language is a social, cultural and historical construct, and therefore knowledge has contextual perspective. This awareness led science to lose solidity. Now it was understood that theory was not a function of facts, rather facts were a function of theory. Scientist hold theories from their ideation and find facts that suit their theories. This was Postmodernism. It was realised that language was only a symbolic representation of reality and that truth is what can be justified within a particular conceptual framework.

The Postmodernists referred metanarratives to language games. These were constructs of specific cultural, historical or ideological contexts; and they often serve to maintain power structures. These power-structures are everywhere, in societies, in institutions and in politics. Knowledge is fragmented and diverse, and lacks a single, coherent narrative. There is no theory of everything! Language and media through which we collect knowledge are simulations or representations of reality - not the external, objective truth themselves.

So now, we have no access to absolute truth, and our truths are partial and context-dependent, relative and subjective! We approach truth through our 'sense of truth'. Truth is what 'feels true', and this changes with our practices and inquiries. The most persuasive arguments may not seem coherent with scientific data, but we tend to adopt them because they resonate more with our internal conceptual schemes. So, we are left with no definite criterion for deciding the true criterion of the truth; the only criterion comes from inside us and it is relativistic and reflective.

Because all methods of arriving at a theory claiming to represent reality are now seen in relation to the language game being played - this leads to anti-foundationalism and further to logical reflexivity, wherein arguments reflect back on themselves questioning their own validity. This again leads to a radical skepticism, or nihilism, as in we have no knowledge; that theory is ineffectual; that truth is dead.

For instance, like in many sciences, doubts have also arisen in accepted theories in cosmology. Einstein's theory proposes a curved spacetime, but it has long been known that the curvature of the universe is nearly flat. There are questions in the Big Bang Theory too. According to cosmic inflation, the universe expanded at an enormous rate in the immediate period after the Big Bang. Cosmic inflation was assumed because without it, the universe would be much bigger than it seems right now. But later calculations revealed that cosmic inflation involves the universe expanding at many times the speed of light. Then there is also the question of fitting infinite mass inside an infinitely small point of space at the beginning of the universe, an infinite density and temperature in a 'singularity', which is rationally and practically impossible - unless you believe in magic - that also of divine magnitude!

The West started with the slogans of reason, logic and free will and freedoms. And after all these centuries of endeavours, it has again fallen into the pit of uncertainty and ever-shifting relative truths. Many sane voices from the western scientific community have started raising their voice against this behaviour and the dogmas it pushes science into. But the dogma is written on the wall: "only empirically verifiable and mathematically logical statements are meaningful and true." All the rest, the bulk of human thinking, including metaphysics, theology, spirituality, ethics, aesthetics, emotions etc are thrown in the dustbin of 'nonsense' and falsehood.

The problem with this whole journey of ideas and debate is that it is based on one fundamental: the belief that religion and the God it presupposes are non-existent! This belief to disbelieve in God is so essential that it seems to be an underlying assumption whereupon the foundations of science, logic and inquiry are based.

On the other hand, God, who had planned and executed the blueprint of the universe down to the quantum fields, knew that human observation and inquiry will always provide evidence of complex systems and intricate design, but will never be able to objectively touch the larger universal truths that need to be known.

Larger truths that need to be known because the urge to question upon them is embedded in the framework of human thought! Truths that help create the metanarratives and the worldviews that the spirit, the heart, yearns for. In spite of all the structure and laws stitched in nature, this gap in the possibility of knowing had to be filled with one last miracle, that of Scripture, that answers all the question of thought; that gives us the theory of everything; that gives us purpose, and the freedom to act in a predetermined but dynamic environment, going towards an unseen future.