From his book ‘Making Sense of God’, Timothy Keller wrote (in chapter Five an invitation to the skeptical), Continued from a previous post.
The History of the Idea (continued)
How did freedom become not just one valuable thing among many but the ultimate good?
Older societies were much more religiously and culturally homogeneous. It was believed that a society could be cohesive only if it was built on the basis of commonly held moral and religious beliefs. But the wars between Catholic an Protestant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced a religion-fatigue reaction among the elites of Europe.5 They began to theorize a new basis for society. All these early theorists expected that the citizens would be Christian, but they wanted a government whose laws were not tied to one Christian church or type of orthodoxy. Thinkers such as Hugo Grotius and John Locke conceived of a new political order based not on divine law but on the consent of the governed.6 Government is seen as legitimate when it consisted of individuals coming together for common gain, providing each person the freedom to live in ways that satisfied his interest. In this conception of society, the only ethic required was “the ethic of freedom and mutual benefit.”7
In the twentieth century, historical trends contributed further toward freedom’s ascendancy to become the ultimate value. Both fascism in Germany and communism in Russia led to totalitarianism and violence on an unprecedented scale. Thinkers were aghast who had, both on the left and on the right, thought their respective political systems would ameliorate social problems and human suffering. Both Nazism and Stalinism were highly scientific and efficient. Both global capitalism and state socialism began to be seen as bringing about dehumanization and oppression, each in its own distinct way. This led many philosophers and thinkers to move toward making freedom the animating ideal and standard by which to judge all cultural organizations. They “refused to identify freedom with any institutional arrangement or fixed system of thought” and finally became “deeply skeptical of . . . all absolute claims.”8
So in late modern secularism (sometimes called postmodernism), we are no longer seen as free because we are God’s creation, nor because of our rationality and free will, nor because of rationality and free will, nor because of unfolding historical processes moving the human race toward inevitable progress. Those had been the bases of freedom in the past, argued by Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel, respectively.9 Instead for post modern secular thinkers today, freedom is based on the discrediting of each of those very ideas.10 We are considered to be free because there is no cosmic order, there is no essential human nature, there are no truths or moral absolutes that we must kneel to. Today the view is that “there are no longer any foundations at all” because “the universe itself is arbitrary, contingent, aleatory.”11 Nothing, then, has any rightful claim on us, and we may live as we see fit.
It is only fair to observe that John Locke himself would have been astonished to see where we have come. He helped begin the process by championing political freedom and democratic self-determination, but he was a Christian who believed in moral truths and obligations that were independent of our minds and feelings which limited our freedom. Today we hold a new unqualified kind of freedom (only and exclusively excepting and impingement on others’ freedom). We understand freedom as the right of the individual to choose his or her own values together, something neither Locke nor his compatriots ever envisioned.12~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God (New York, New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2016), 98-99. (continued)
