In endorsing Cornwell’s strange article about Richard Dawkins, Chris wrote:
Increasingly, I’m coming to think that the big problem with the last few hundred years is that religions developed in a pre-modern world. None of the religions have really dealt adequately with modernism.
I disagree. I think that the “big problem” for Christianity ((Chris’s argument doesn’t really apply to other religions, so I won’t speak of them.)) was that “modernism” ((Is “modernism” a pejorative reference to the Enlightenment?)) caused a number of theological chickens to come home to roost.
Questions of ontology and epistemology didn’t originate with contemporary science; they were of great importance in Greek philosophy. It was (principally) Thomas Aquinas who made it his life’s work to harmonize Christian theology with the ideas of Aristotle and the empiricists. It was he who claimed to have established the idea that “God exists” as a rigorous ontological proposition. And this was not simply a passing fad of the 13th century: Aquinas’ teachings remain an essential part of much of Christian theology and linguistic usage.
What modernism did was to take Aquinas’ ontological propositions at face value, apply the 18th century notions of empiricism, and refute them. While it’s true that some Christians retrenched, and took the position that “existence” was never intended to be taken as a matter of empirical and verifiable fact, they represent a distinct minority. Both Christian fundamentalists and the Roman Catholic Church (for different reasons) remain wedded to the core of Aquinas’ thinking, and it’s not clear how they could ever give it up.