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Is God Dead?
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in his seminal work, A Secular Age, poses a brilliant question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, the year 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000, many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?” Over the next 800 pages, Taylor provides a three-part answer to the question. First, He argues that in the pre-modern world, people instinctively viewed the cosmos and their place in it as an unquestionable artifact of a magnificent creation of God.
The natural world, it was believed, was forever giving evidence of Supernatural interactions in the earthly realm, evidenced through events in the natural order: storms, floods, droughts, pestilence, and “exceptional fertility and flourishing.” All of these things inescapably pointed to the supernatural world and God, who actively directed them.
Second, the existence of society itself bespeaks the existence of God. Structured society, it was believed, was not possible without understanding that the cooperative gatherings of people all working for the greater good of society itself were only possible if those societies were interwoven with and tethered by a supernatural reality anchoring cities, towns, and parishes in a centralized Higher Authority.
Third, in 1500, people acknowledged that they lived in an enchanted world. That is, people believed that the barrier between the spiritual world and the earthly world was porous, allowing the actions of spiritual beings to manifest themselves in people’s everyday lives. Almost all people believed that spirits and demons alike not only existed but were actively bringing about particular states of affairs, both good and evil.
It is this third part of the answer to Taylor’s question that I would like to expand upon here as an introduction, of sorts, to the next several articles that look into what are termed the modern-day claims of religious experience.
No doubt, these three answers to Taylor’s question are interrelated by common thread of belief in God. That is, seeing God’s existence in the cosmos, in the infrastructures of society, and the belief of living in an enchanted world all point to a society that all but unanimously believed in God. As people moved away from these beliefs and toward a secular worldview, the natural consequences of secularization became their opposites: the belief that the cosmos has always existed, that man alone is the authoritative anchor of all society, and that people live in a disenchanted world where God does not exist.
In other words, where pre-modern man believed in the living God, modern-day society asks the question, Is God dead? I agree with Taylor on most points. However, I do question his blanket statement that people today consider themselves to be living in a disenchanted world. Sure enough, a compelling argument can be made that the modern Western world is very much secular in belief and nature and has little use for the likes of angels and demons, let alone God. Even so, in America, an impressive majority of people ( as high as 68%) claim Christianity as their faith. To be sure, a lower percentage of the population today are believers than in the year 1500. And there is an even greater decrease in the number of those who believe in an enchanted world, even among modern-day Christians. I say this because it is important to understand that there are people, many people in fact, who still believe that we live in a world enchanted by the supernatural: a world in which the veil between the natural and the supernatural is very porous.
Why do they believe that? More often than not, it is because they have, at one time or another, in some form or another, experienced the enchantment of this world firsthand. These interactions between the natural and the supernatural are simply called “Religious Experiences,” and they stand as additional sources of evidence for the existence of God and the truthfulness of Christianity.
After all, if God exists and if God is not dead, then we should listen to what those who have religious experiences have to say. If God exists and if God is not dead, then we should expect the God who created mankind with the active and particular ability to experience the supernatural to want to interact with those whom He so created.
Christians hold that man was created “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen 1:26). That is, man was created with a dual nature: a material body and an immaterial soul. However, it is the soul or spiritual aspect of man that is in the likeness and image of God. Even so, it is not that God, who is a pure spirit (cf John 4:24), looks like man, but that mankind shares a likeness with God; we might say it is a similitude.
And that similitude with God by virtue of our spiritual soul, allows the veil between the natural and the supernatural to be porous and facilitates religious experiences. Christians speak of the “mingling” of God and man in Jesus and the “mingling” of men and God in Christ (cf John 17). Religious experiences, then, should be viewed as meaningful realities of that mingling.
So here I stand: if God exists, and if God is not dead, there should be abundant evidence of His ongoing interactions with mankind. Join us again next week as we begin to look at the evidence of an enchanted world presented through reports from End of Life Experiences (ELEs), Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), experiences of God had by unbelievers, and much more in between. If God is not dead, isn’t this precisely what we should expect a Personal Creator to do?
Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Ty B. Kerley, DMin., is an ordained minister who teaches Christian apologetics and relief preaches in Southern Oklahoma. Dr. Kerley and his wife, Vicki, are members of the Waurika church of Christ, and live in Ardmore, OK. You can contact him at [email protected].
