Check out Dr. Albert Mohler, new addition to the blogroll, in his blog post today:

Moral relativism has so shaped the culture that the vast majority of Americans now see themselves as their own moral arbiter. Truth has been internalized, privatized, and subjectivized. Absolute or objective truth is denied outright. Research indicates that most Americans believe that truth is internal and relative. No one, the culture shouts, has a right to impose truth, morality, or cultural standards…

Though sociologists point to continuing high levels of religious activity and statements of belief–both of these in sharp contrast to other western nations–the truth is that very little of this activity translates into authentic discipleship, active church membership, and bold Christian witness.

The worldview of most Americans is now thoroughly secularized, revolving around the self and its concerns, and based on relativism as an axiom. We Americans have become our own best friend, our own therapist, our own priest, and our own lawgiver. The old order is shattered, the new order is upon us.

He’s echoing themes expounded by many others, but they ring particularly true in light of two books I’ve been reading recently by the late theologian and missionary, Lesslie Newbigin: ‘Foolishness to the Greeks’ and ‘The Gospel in a Pluralist Society’. Newbigin talks about something called a “plausibility structure” in society — essentially an over-arching, shared context for how to think about virtually everything and how to filter information. I.e., a set of common, difficult-to-fight norms defining what is believable and what is not and with it what is acceptable and what is not.

What Mohler and others are pointing out is that the plausibility structure that existed fifty years ago has flipped. God is no longer ‘plausible’ as an explanation for anything important in the public sphere, even among some who profess him. (I’ve found it deeply ironic that even as I see this taking place, others believe that American society in particular has become a ‘theocracy’. A long-ago business colleague who has one of the sharpest minds I know made this comment to me just a few weeks ago.)

Newbigin sets this in a larger context of post- vs. pre-enlightenment — a self-referential, self-certifying, self-congratulatory term that brings along its own moral framework for the ride. It’s akin to the pre- and post-beating-your-spouse period of history. Newbigin says that the shift has taken more like 350 years: from a time in which science was interpreted purely in light of theology (and thus missed some things it ought to have caught) to one in which the reverse was true. And now, Mohler would argue, we’re in a period in which theology is tamed if not irrelevant: i.e., secularized, privatized and a whole bunch of other ‘izeds’.

We’ve moved from a transitional time in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries in which science was not only understood to exist comfortably alongside theology but to rely upon it for its most fundamental assumptions (e.g., a rational universe, knowable laws, Newtonian predictability, a solid basis to matter, the possibility of knowing it all someday, etc.)

What Newbigin points out (and this was a full twenty years ago) is that science, and particularly physics are already well beyond the point where that stuff is credible. Science points back to theology and in a big way. The nature of matter is energy. It cannot be observed coherently without the observer being part of the equation and (the big reason I’m a major global warming skeptic) complex systems are inherently uncertain and fundamentally unpredictable.

A lot of that came to light in the 1930s. More of it (the complexity stuff) only started to come to light in the ’80s. The latter timeframe is way too short to influence the culture. It could be argued that the relativistic stuff from physics 75 years ago is what’s finally starting to whip-saw our culture now. With God, it still makes sense (e.g., matter is, at both the macro- and micro-scopic level, not unlike mind — pure information — and if that mind is God’s then we’re OK). The Einstein comment about God not rolling dice comes to mind.

Which leads us back to Mohler, who is saying, essentially, that society is in a state of fibrillation. With no shared set of assumptions about the nature of truth, it is not only the social ’sciences’ that are the subject of fractious debate. It is all of them. Without God in the picture, even the ‘hard’ sciences fall apart. Let’s hope the Big Guy has the paddles handy.