Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor
Keller’s apologetic approach closely resembles Taylor’s. Smith describes Taylor’s apologetic in three steps.
Carl Trueman • Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor
Taylor. He’s careful throughout to avoid asking about the truth of the ideas he discusses. That is appropriate as his task is descriptive and explanatory.
Carl Trueman • Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor
Keller’s three-step process:
Carl Trueman • Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor
The great invention of the West was that of an immanent order in Nature, whose working could be systematically understood and explained on its own terms, leaving open the question whether this whole order had a deeper significance, and whether, if it did, we should infer a transcendent Creator beyond it.15
Carl Trueman • Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor
“To be secular, says philosopher Charles Taylor, is to have no final goals beyond this-worldly human flourishing.
Carl Trueman • Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor
...and everything else is in the way!
this shift eventually fueled Deism.
Carl Trueman • Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor
and buffered the self toward an exclusive humanism in which human flourishing is the only goal and immanence the only frame.
Carl Trueman • Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor
by making the secular sacred it inadvertently created a context where the sacred could ultimately become secular.