I am really enjoying one of my birthday presents, which was this book:
I’ve read the prologue and the first chapter several times, still trying to digest it. Here the author, Paul Williams, is in diagnosis mode. He notes that the modern world — ‘Characterized by confidence in reason, science, and technological progress to usher in ever-increasing wealth and happiness’–and the last vestiges of the mediaeval Christian settlement are being rejected together and being replaced by ‘nonreligion, amorphous spirituality, moral relativity and authoritian secularism’1
So leading popular atheists and the Archbishop of Canterbury share the same leaky ship and the waves that are pounding them are questioning, for example, the universality of their assumptions, or whether ‘expertise’ is basically about a power-grab rather than a careful exercise of finding truth. ‘We’ve had enough of experts’ is the unsettling cry not just of Brexiteers but of anti-vaxxers, campaigners against mobile phones and people who believe newspapers are about power rather than truth.
Williams then points out that the climate the church faces is internally contradictory but unitedly hostile– Christians are blamed by environmentalsts for the industrialized, science-allied exploitation of the planet and simultaneously blamed by atheists for being anti-science and anti-reason. ‘Western culture is fragmenting into incoherent and incommensurable discourses, but each fragment has a different grudge against the church’ (p xv). This is fine stuff, even if it is at a certain level special pleading. (Lots of groups, perhaps, think that everyone is against them; and it actually isn’t true for the Church: there is more to society and to human individuals than broad intellectual currents. Many people are still finding life within Christian walls, just like bees find nectar even in weedy railway sidings.)
Looking forward to the rest, though it’s going to be slow work if the rest of the book has as much good stuff to digest.