(Comerica Park, Detroit)
When we were in East Lansing, as campus pastors at Michigan State University, our church was filled with scientists. Over the years I was privileged to do book studies and Bible studies with many of them. The dialogue we had deeply informed and enriched me.
One common thread was their reaction to the postmodern
anti-realism.
"Metaphysically, postmodernism is anti-realist, holding that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about an independently existing reality. Postmodernism substitutes instead a social-linguistic, constructionist account of reality. Epistemologically, having rejected the notion of an independently existing reality, postmodernism denies that reason or any other method is a means of acquiring objective knowledge of that reality. Having substituted social-linguistic constructs for that reality, postmodernism emphasizes the subjectivity, conventionality, and incommensurability of those constructions." (Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Kindle Location 292)
We cannot speak about a reality that exists independently of the human mind? No method can give us objective knowledge of that reality? (Especially, for postmodern theorists, the scientific method.) For a scientist this is absurd, since science is the study of objective reality (trees, viruses, planets, global warming, the physical brain, etc. etc.)
Theistic philosopher Dallas said:
"The early church did not get stuck in a Cartesian box. Aristotle thought there was a real world and a real mind that could know it. And that is what disappears. I have watched scientists listen to postmodernists and it is a constant display of thinly veiled disgust.” (Willard, Eternal Living: Reflections on Dallas Willard's Teaching on Faith and Formation, Kindle Locations 230-232)
The idea that there is not an objective reality outside of us, and that it can be studied and known, is absurd (even while taking into account how our experience of that reality is socially constructed).
(For an interesting and brave attempt to rescue postmodern ideas, and apply them to a Christian worldview, see James K. A. Smith, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? See esp. Ch. 2, "Nothing Outside the Text? Derrida, Deconstruction, and Scripture.")
