Down the Rabbit Hole and Off With Their Heads

Guess what comes up if you google "postmodernism"? This is so accurate on so many levels...

Does anybody still care about postmodernism as a philosophical movement? Hasn’t it already been laughed out of town?

Apparently not. A friend has sent me a link to a couple of recent blog entries that show postmodernism at its finest. All about “A God That Could Be Real in the Scientific Universe.”

Not the lovely postmodern “nuance” in that statement. No commitment to God being either real or not real. Nor any actual claim that the universe is either scientific or unscientific. Even quotation marks are in quotation marks.

Let’s look at the very first sentence of the piece:

"’God’ is a word.”

What can this mean? Obviously not what the author is saying, because that is self-evident. She means that God is only a word. There is no other reality.

Postmodernists cannot say what they mean plainly, because it then immediately appears absurd. After all, if “there is no truth,” then the statement that “there is no truth” cannot itself be true. But that is what they actually believe. We just make up whatever it is we want to believe (“reality is socially constructed”). It follows that anything they say or write is simply a matter of bullying others into accepting their own preferred world view; which will be whatever they believe for whatever reason to be in their self-interest. Even though, to be rationally coherent, they must indeed believe that they themselves are also not real, they nevertheless invariably choose to believe in themselves as an arbitrary matter.

Our nonexistent postmodernist author continues:

“If we define it, even subconsciously, as something that cannot exist in our universe, …”

Note that not only is there nothing beyond words, but we are free to define words however we like. I guess that follows well enough from there being no objective reality: if there is none, it really makes no practical difference what a word “means.” All meaning is illusion. Except that illusion is also illusion, and cannot exist. Presumably, we only ever delude ourselves, just as we can readily swallow our own face. But since she reserves to herself this power of definition, there is no way of knowing what she is really saying, or rather, meaning. When she writes “God is a word,” she might be using those words to say what I would mean if I said “fish ride bicycles,” or “I buried Paul.” It is nothing but sounds, or at least would be, if there were sounds. Whatever sounds are. And whatever is is.

So why should anyone care what any postmodernist ever writes? You want nonsense? Alice in Wonderland is a much better read.

The postmodern soul on its rigourous quest for God and spiritual meaning.

She continues:

“… we banish the idea of God from our reality and throw away all possibility of incorporating a potent spiritual metaphor into a truly coherent big picture.”

Note that phrase, “our reality.” (And earlier, “our universe”). As we said, there is no objective reality. We simply “construct” whatever beliefs seem pleasing (or “coherent”) to us.

This is why the rest of her piece involves no reasoning, and no evidence. All that is left, given her premises, is simple assertion: God exists. Because I want him to exist. I choose to make him.

Of course, he is not all-powerful. That would be me.

Note the tangent on dark matter. It has nothing obvious to do with the existence or nature of God. Yes, there is pattern in the galaxies; but the discovery of pattern in the physical world is hardly a new revelation. Look at a flower. Look in a mirror. It is important in demonstrating the existence of God solely because it is important to her personally. Since her husband is involved, it is pretty and satisfying to pretend that it is of great theological significance. And so it is.

No need to read further. There really is a crushing banality to evil.

Quite seriously, one would get much more of value and interest in listening to the fantasies of a psychotic than in reading postmodern theorists. At least (and it is far from a small matter) the former has an objective check on his thinking. It is not just narcissistic wish fulfillment.

Isn't the guy on the right Bertrand Russell?