Technological innovation, with its appearance of unlimited power, potential, and possibility, is the fuel for this boundless propulsion. But underneath the propulsion, which gives people the feeling of being authentic and passionate because they are living in a pastless and futureless instant, there is boredom and a blasé sentiment that everything, at bottom, is pointless. In the place of meaning, there is either exhaustive scientific or pseudoscientific description—an infinite piling up of words and signs and numbers (data) in a quest for total control—or what might be called irrational self-detonation of one kind or another. Outside of the self’s will to experiment (which, at another level, is being coopted increasingly by unbridled commercialism—the word “totalitarian” would not be out of place here—and becoming simply the self’s will to make money), the propulsion does not seem to have any ultimate aim whatsoever, either in the sense of an objective and determining reality or reference over against the “self-subject,” or in the sense of a finality/end.
I hear in all this an ironic echo, in the new guise of individualism in the context of technological utopianism, of earlier totalitarian proclamations of the new man, proclamations that the actual new men in the West today, those “neutronized autonomous individuals,”23 would, at least in principle, most heatedly oppose. And what is striking is that, just like its communist and nationalist-racist predecessors, this new ideology is a counterfeit of biblical revelation. (We shall look at this matter more specifically in our later discussion of the doctrine of the imago Dei.) Ideologies are modern names for cultural idolatries, for human—and therefore finite and fallible—conceptions that become invested with ultimacy.
It is no accident, therefore, that, wearing the lineaments of divinity in the sense of ultimacy, they should invariably turn out to be secular imitations of divinely revealed truth. Revolution, progress, science, such and such racist myth, communist man, the classless society, capitalist man, history, the new man/creation (whether he/she/it be the product of political, economic, or genetic manipulation), the autonomous individual, self-reinvention, sexual liberation, technology-as-salvation, transhumanist man—all these and others, as ideologies or as varieties of utopia aiming at human freedom, are, in the final analysis, biblical counterfeits or distortions, arising in the framework of a Judeo-Christian civilization that has willed and continues to will, for a host of reasons, to destroy its own foundations and then finds itself left with the impossible and dispiriting task of shoring up the tottering edifice while striving to build new foundations using the wreckage of the old. Obviously, despair, cynicism, consumerist materialism, and the thousand escapes through sensory intoxication must tempt many today, and the more so now as it begins to dawn on thoughtful people that technology is, as a matter of fact, no magic wand or panacea, and cannot possibly, masquerading as a man-made version of God’s creative Word in the book of Genesis, produce a new Eden to replace the old.
IV
The Ultimate Danger that the Skeptical Doctrine of Perspectival Relativism Poses for Human Rights
The priestly account in Genesis of the creation of man reads as follows: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man [humankind] in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female, he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”24
Counterfeits are full of pretense. They are proud. They pretend to be something they are not. Like evil of any sort, they can only arise in correlation with a prior reality, a prior good, of which they are a perverse imitation and distortion. The world that has been emerging in the West in the last centuries, with analytical science as its root and technological innovation as its trunk, branches, and foliage, is at once a logical and proper development from the creation story and man’s place in it as set forth in Genesis 1 and 2, and a counterfeit of that story. Its excellences and accomplishments, its political, scientific, and economic achievements, its productive transformations of the matter of the world, its medical wizardry, its improvement of the quality of life for millions of people around the world, are in keeping with what a close examination of the creation story might lead one to expect. Man (man and woman) is fashioned in the image of God, and so is gifted with reason, moral freedom, and, as a corollary to that freedom, conscience; consequently, and as the practical dimension of the imago Dei, humankind is given a mandate to care for and develop the creation and to represent in its midst the generous and loving lordship of God; and both authority and power are bestowed on man and woman to carry out that mandate. Surely much in the modern age is a fulfillment of this biblical revelation, presented under the form of myth.
Indeed it is. Western civilization has a great deal to be justly proud of. Its achievement of democracy and political freedom and representation, along with a widely generalized concern with and possibility of economic advancement and social well-being, is, though incomplete and flawed to a considerable extent in practice, unique in human history and rightly the wonder and envy of the world. But simultaneously, alongside this modern growth, a counterfeit has grown up, a lookalike weed whose seed may be found by inverting my last formulation (“. . . a fulfillment of this biblical revelation, presented under the form of myth.”) to read: “. . . a fulfillment of this biblical myth, presented under the form of revelation.” The modern mind considers divine revelation to be a mythical category, using the word “mythical” in a nontechnical sense as meaning simply “untrue.” But the grounds for ruling out the possibility and reality of divine revelation are rationalistic, not rational. It is not the brief or competence of science to evaluate what Christian theology calls revelation, but science’s own counterfeit, scientism, has presumed to do just this and has judged revelation to be a specious and outdated religious category.
Western philosophy since Hume and Kant has had the same presumption.25 It works from within a subject-object schema that gives absolute priority to the subject; while disallowing or at least severely limiting the possibility of objective knowledge, it sees the subject as able nevertheless, from within its own finitude, to posit the nature of reality—including that ultimate reality which, we are told, it is actually impossible for him to know. The fountain of Cartesian thought, which characterizes the thinking subject as the epistemological starting point and sets it over against and basically disconnected from the physical world, became, with Kant’s a priori categories, a powerful river that romanticism and the relativizing forces of historicism subsequently extended across a wide valley floor, ending in the submersion of the whole land under modern subjectivism.
But Kant’s disproof, through his antinomies, of the possibility of obtaining metaphysical knowledge by theoretical reason—a disproof that ever since has cast a shadow on Christian faith and made it seem unlikely that the personal God Christians believe in is anything more than a speculative projection—has in fact nothing whatsoever to say about the possibility of divine revelation being given to man, if a personal God exists who wishes to reveal himself. Ironically, Kant’s arguments are actually a philosophical equivalent to theological arguments against natural theology and the pretension that finite and unholy man, by himself, can rise up to a knowledge of the true, infinite, and holy God without that God having first to come down to him in revelation.
The locus of philosophical activity today is no longer the question of whether it is possible to have knowledge