By "I'll address it tomorrow," I apparently meant "the day after tomorrow."
Quick recap: postmodernism (that fiendish enemy of worldview-apologist evangelicals) posits that "truth" changes over time, that it's contingent upon factors like culture and era. Any one human in a particular time and place certainly experiences various "truths" as solid and binding, but none of those truths are consistent enough, universal enough, to qualify as trans-historical or trans-cultural. Humans lack any unambiguous access to Ultimate Truth since the only tools they have to conceive of, identify, investigate, and communicate that Truth are culture-dependent variables like language.
I reiterate that this characterization of postmodern belief is actually agnostic regarding the question of Ultimate, Capital-T "Truth" except to say that such Truths aren't available as such for human consideration. All we have are small-t truths that may be (in the long run) changeable and multiple. A worldview-analysis evangelical would take issue with that on a couple of points, insisting that 1) singular, unchanging Truth does exist and 2) humans can in fact know that Truth. I'm dealing here only with the first criticism.
The criticism, then: what about the postmodern truth about the contingency/multiplicity of truths? Does postmodernism apply its position about truth to itself? In other words truth only flexible or multiple within a postmodern context? Worldview analysis teaches to its evangelists-in-training an ace-in-the-hole comeback to postmodern views that runs along these lines, albeit in a more simplistic form: If you don't believe in Singular, Universal Truth, what about the truth-status of your belief about human's inability to know Truth?
As I see it, I have two obvious answers at my disposal. First, I could deny that postmodern arguments about truth apply to postmodernism itself. I could claim that postmodernism's only Certain Truth is the ever-changing nature of truth as humans experience it. In other words, the only thing certain is nothing's certain (except for this statement about nothing being certain, 'cause that's certain). That's a bit too blatantly circular for me.
I prefer option two: postmodernism does accept the contingency of its own truths about Truths. Paradoxical as it seems, truth at some other point in history/geography isn't (wasn't) contingent and multiple but eternal and singular. Contingency and multiplicity are recent epistemological events (at least in the west).
Traveling back in time past 500 years or so would plop you into a world in which many of the truths we now see as culture-contingent or variable existed only as a Singular Way Things Are. Truth back then was not contingent, not postmodern, but singular and eternal. It isn't that the 500 years ago folk were simply incorrect, not seeing the flexing/changing/multiple truths that must have existed; it's that those other, different/competing truths didn't exist as possible Things To Believe.
I'm reading a book by Charles Taylor called A Secular Age that echoes this line of thought. On its face, Taylor's work is a history of the rise of skepticism (i.e., disbelief in religion, especially in Christianity). Taylor refuses, however, to write either a simple replacement story where Science (or Reason) comes to displace Christianity or a "subtraction story" about how Christianity simply got cut out of culture. Rather, his is a narrative of multiplication. He wants to know how western culture went from a point in c. 1500, when belief in God was a given, to c. 2000, when belief in any religion is seen as but one option among an ever-expanding variety of possible belief/non-belief options.
In other words, in 1500, it was virtually impossible to be an atheist in the same way (and certainly with the same ease) with which it is possible to be an atheist today. Crucially, the lack of widespread atheism wasn't due to churches' waging some widespread campaign of repression against the atheist ancestors of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. Certainly there were many repressive campaigns and inquisitions, but these were mainly about heretics--people who were seen as faking orthodox faith in favor of some heterodox faith--not atheists in the modern sense. We have tons of records from such heretics, their heresy trials, their horrendous (and to our eyes unjust) punishments. Repression of that sort produces a lot of historical records, a lot of martyrs whose ghosts (and writings, and followers) cry out.
But none of the ghosts of inquisitions past wail a dirge about how "God is not great." None of them died arguing that scientific reason was a superior alternative to religious faith. In other words, it's not the case that there were tons of atheists back then being held down by church power. The church didn't repress Dawkins-esque atheists on any kind of grand scale because the option to be atheist (or agnostic, or "spiritual" instead of "religious," or anything of that sort) simply did not exist as it does today.
Taylor demonstrates that the situation of Christian faith as one truth among many conceivable options is a relatively new development in western culture. This situation relies upon--developed from--a number of cultural and historical and geographic factors that did not obtain in times past. Religious truth, then, was at one point relatively singular in the West. Now it is multiple, postmodern.
It's tempting to say that past generations were just plain wrong. I could argue, perhaps, that the present range of religious/non-religious options did indeed exist in the past--even if only as theoretical possibilities. Past generations just failed to be aware of them as such, much like past generations failed to apprehend the heliocentric solar system. I suppose that's true, but only in the most abstract, hypothetical sense. It's possible, for example, to imagine that someone back in 1300 imagined a whole profession in which people would be hurtled into orbit so as to explore space. But functionally, really, the option to be an astronaut--the truth of astronautics--only emerged in recent times. Only through an act of anachronistic imagination could we even conceive of astronauts sitting around in 1300s France waiting impatiently for rockets et al. to be invented.
It may be odd to consider secularity (or the notion of multiple/contingent truths) as a recent innovation/invention in the same sense as astronautics. But all of these are, I argue, dependent upon technologies, sciences, ways of thinking, tools, and discourses that are utterly of the here and now. In the past they were not merely as-yet-undiscovered but wholly unimagined.
So, in that sense, yes--the postmodern fact of truth's contingent, multiple status is itself contingent and multiple, dependent upon features unique to this time and place. Truth has been different--not postmodern--in the past, and it likely will be different--not postmodern--in the future. Indeed, you don't have to travel far to find places in the present where a postmodern understanding of truth as multiple/contingent simply isn't a viable possibility except perhaps as crazy philosophical science fiction.
More tomorrow,
JF
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