‘That’s nice for you, but it’s not for me’ | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff

(The failure of postmodernism)

Buzz words like ‘meta-narrative’ and ‘discourse’ identify postmodernists. Many of the humanities faculties (arts, sociology, education, etc.) at universities push this view. It’s quite the fashion.

Postmodernists deny that objective truth exists. But how can they know that their claim, ‘truth does not exist’, is true if there is no such thing as ‘truth’? So postmodernism is self-refuting: its absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth; its absolute ethic is that all ethics are relative; and its objective worldview is that all worldviews are subjective—a quagmire of suffocating, soul-destroying subjectivism.

In postmodernism, gravity does not exist as an objective reality. So someone operating under a different ‘meta-narrative’ (worldview) where gravity did not exist might walk off a cliff and not kill themselves. But no matter what you believe, you will hurt yourself. Also, the fact that they can walk at all and not float off into space is due to gravity! All beliefs are not  equal.

What would have happened if the Wright brothers had been postmodernists? Would they have sought to discover the principles of flight? Hardly! What if an engineer designing a bridge decided that gravity was just a ‘Western’ concept and he decided to take the Hindu view that life is an illusion and (logically) so is gravity and the equations that prescribe the bridge? Would you drive over the bridge?

Some Christians have taken comfort from postmodernist attempts to undo the scientific worldview, which they see as opposed to faith in God. But they are confused in this. There is nothing about experimental science that is at odds with biblical faith, as many scientists have testified in Creation magazine.

The conflicts come from historical science, where people who were not there dream up what happened in the past. But eye-witness accounts (from the Bible and elsewhere) contradict the modern view of history that opposes the Bible, as the careful scholarship of Ussher shows.

Some have even tried to recast the Gospel in postmodern terms to interest those influenced by postmodernism. This is ill-conceived. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me” (John:14:6). The logic is clear: Jesus is either the only way, as he says; or he is wrong, in which case he is not the Son of God so we can forget about him. But the postmodernists say that ‘that’s just “Western”? logic, the product of Western culture’. However, by saying this, they use the same ‘Western’ logic to say that Western logic is not true! Postmodernism denies the very truth claim that Christian faith stands upon, so Christians should vigorously oppose postmodernism.

As Tom McLeish, Professor of Polymer Physics at Leeds University (UK) says, “Our dear friends in the humanities do get themselves awfully confused about whether the world exists, about whether each other exists, about whether words mean anything. Until they have sorted out whether cats and dogs exist or not, or are only figments in the mind of the reader, let alone the writer, then they are going to have problems talking about God.”2

Because postmodernism says that there is no objective truth, it denies that God has spoken. This is not ‘modern’ at all. Didn’t Satan get Eve to doubt the truth of what God told Adam (Genesis 3:1)? And didn’t Pilate ask, “What is truth?” when he interrogated Jesus (John 18:38)?

Postmodernism aptly fits the description of ‘futile’ thinking that people are given over to when they deliberately abandon the knowledge of God (Romans 1:18ff.). But this teaching also immunizes many against the Gospel, putting them on the road to Hell.

https://creation.com/thats-nice-for-you-but-its-not-for-me