William Lane Craig on Postmodernism

(1) This is a short interview on God and time but Craig opens with some insightful comments on postmodernism:

Question: "How do students respond to your 'rational' approach? Does it meet with postmodern resistance?"

Craig's Response: "Frankly, I don't confront many students who are postmodernists. For all the faddish talk, I think it's a myth. Students aren't generally relativistic and pluralistic, except when it comes to ethics and religion. But that's not postmodernism, that's modernism. That's old-style verificationism, which says things that are verifiable through the five senses are factual, but everything else is just a matter of taste (including ethics and religion). I think it's a deceit of our age to say that modernism is dead."

(2) Craig in the book, To Everyone An Answer (page 21 & 22):

"...Enlightenment rationalism is so deeply imbedded in Western intellectual life that these antirationalistic currents like Romanticism and postmodernism are doomed, it seems, to be mere passing fashions. After all, no one adopts a postmodernist view of literary texts when reading the labels on a medicine bottle or a box of rat poison...In the end, people turn out to be subjectivists only about ethics and religion, not about matters provable by science. But this is not postmodernism; this is nothing else than classic Enlightenment naturalism--it is the old modernism in a fashionable new guise."

Comments

[tony montano]

The Matrix overrated? Ok now I’m pissed. Someone better prepare to eat a big slice of curb.

Anyway, I think it’s a fair point but merely a subtle belief categorization exercise that’s only interesting to people who use the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. God knows everyone I met at uni was “relativistic and pluralistic when it comes to ethics and religion”.

Call it pomo or call it something else, but the current is definitely there on these particular issues.