Seen & Unseen: There's More Going on Than We KnowSýnishorn

Revolutions, Breakthroughs and Theories – Shifting Our Collective Gaze

As the scientific revolution (1500s and 1600s) rolled into the industrial revolution (1700s and 1800s), then into the information age (1900s and 2000s), crazy breakthroughs in science and technology turned our collective gaze toward the natural world and away from the supernatural realm. 

Breathtaking theories enabled us to understand and explain the mechanics of our physical world—and of the larger cosmos. These revelations, along with some cascading social currents, resulted in a new cultural mind-set—one in which God and heaven and worship and prayer gradually began to seem somehow less immediate, less relevant, less essential. The idea that there might be something beyond the observable, something more basic than space and time and matter, began to strike many people as improbable. The idea that there might exist a spiritual reality beyond, above, beneath, and intermingled with our physical world became sort of quaint.

The naturalists and humanists among us went ahead and rejected everything spiritual. They refuse to recognize the supernatural. They’ve just decided that none of it is reality at all. They’ve decided that, given our abilities to discover, God and heaven and the rest have become “unnecessary.” They’ve asked, “What role is there for God?”

A philosophical naturalist considers us physical beings and nothing more. He or she believes the natural world, the physical cosmos, is all there is. A philosophical humanist believes that humans are capable, in and of themselves, of discovering truth and devising ways—using the scientific method and reason—to meet all human needs, to answer all human questions, and to solve all human problems. They, like naturalists, reject the idea that there is anything beyond the physical world. 

The atheistic beliefs underlying naturalism and humanism originated in the ancient world but began to have wide cultural influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then they morphed and matured and increased their impact in the nineteenth century. And in our time, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these beliefs have come to dominate many of the cultures of our world.

What’s real, our world has decided, is whatever we can see and hear and touch—and anything transcendent to our physical reality is simply less real (or not real at all). We’ve raised this belief to the level of pseudolaw or pseudoreligion. It’s become an “everyone knows that” kind of thing.

We Christians are neither naturalists nor humanists, at least not in the philosophical sense. But we live in (and work in and raise our families in) a culture that’s influenced heavily by naturalistic and humanistic ideas and ideals. And it’s easy for us to get distracted and forget and begin acting like functional atheists.