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"Postmodern deconstruction" deconstructs any confidence in absolute truth.  The postmodernist believes that "there is no emperical 'fact' that is not already theory-laden, and there is no logical argument or formal principles that is a priori certain."  Interestingly, the Christian apologist Cornelious Van Til of Westminister Theological Seminary also said that facts are never neutral.  If postmodernist and Reformed apologist say the same thing, it is doubtless true!  Unlike the modern mind, which merely assumed that reality is objectively ordered via human reason, and the Christian mind, which assumed it to be regulated by God's will, the postmodern mind rejects all objective truths and true personhood.  All that it can propose are blurred and partial truths - except in one instance.  The postmodern critique of human rationalism is reasonable only if it presupposed the relationality of postmodern reasoning.  

But this is also circular, since, while denying the possiblity of objective truth to modernity, it claims to make an objectively true statement that rational humanism lacks objectivity.  Postmodernism is thus guilty of the same circular reasoning of which it accuses Enlighenment rationalism.

The postmodern critique has stuck partly because secularism has earned a dark reputation, in spite of its optimism for humanity's future.  After all, instead of utopia, it produced two devestating world wars, 150 million killed by "reasonalble" marxists, the threat of nuclear annihilation, dehumanizing industrialization, and material consumerism, not to mention looming ecological disasters.  The West has begun to lose faith not in religion but rather in autonomous human reason.  Postmodern intellectuals now recoil from "the embarrassing intolerance of atheism."  Tolerance has become one of the great values to be respected, even the tolerence of religion and spirituality.

Before we move on:

  1. In what way do postmodernists agree with the Christian apologist Cornelious Van Til?  How are they both responding to modernism's mistaken belief about human rationalism?
  2. In what way do Christians and postmodernists fundamentally disagree?
  3. How is postmodernism circular in its critique of human rationalism?  Even so, why has its critique resonated with many people?  What makes postmodernism seem likely to avoid modernism's failures?