Faith Should Flourish in Postmodern Era

Here’s a question, a bit of advice, and a sales pitch from Christianity Today’s online newsletter: “Is faith intellectual suicide? Many scholars, scientists, and the average person you pass on the street would like to think so. Equip yourself with resources on the relationship between faith and science and the battle for faith in a postmodern culture.”
That’s a nice try but a mile-wide miss by the conservative Christian journal. Apparently, although conservatives love to use the term, they don’t understand “postmodern.” The postmodern era isn’t a threat to faith but an era of opportunity.
A brief history lesson: first came the pre-modern era, which ended just a few hundred years ago. Answers to life’s puzzles came from mythical and mystical sources: legend, belief, ancient documents, intuition and, of course, God. Science had a toe-hold but not a foot-hold. Just ask Galileo. Then came the modern era in which we came to believe our puzzles could be solved, our ultimate questions answered beyond a doubt. In the modern era science and experimentation were kings. We believed there was a single right answer to things, not a group of equally virtuous possibilities.
The post-modern era returned mystery to our attempts to understand the world around us. Some would say it began with the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the 1960s. Kuhn reveals that science’s answers are not absolute or permanent, but work for a while only because we assume a certain set of beliefs to be true. He calls them paradigms. A well-known example is the paradigm of an earth-centered solar system. Under that paradigm, Ptolemy developed charts for the movement of the sun and stars which allowed sailors to navigate quite effectively—even though the basic assumptions were incorrect. But instead of realizing our limitations, the “modern” thinker, convinced of scientific “truth,” looks at the replacement paradigm and says, “Now we have the final answer.” Kuhn shows us that each new paradigm also is destined for eventual failure. Mystery re-enters the equation.
In the postmodern era, science and faith can flourish side-by-side. We can believe in scientific explanations for what we see, while knowing intuitively the universe contains wonders beyond our knowing. This is not intellectual suicide, but intellectual freedom.