We are supposed to live in an increasingly secular age that has abandoned its religious roots and is now governed by non-religious moral and philosophical principles. Religious principles—frequently even religious questions—are artifacts of the past, at least among the educated movers and shakers of the intellectual and cultural world. But over the past decade or so, a number of scholars have challenged this dominant secular narrative.
For instance, Michael Allen Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity argues that modern thinkers like the Renaissance humanists, Hobbes, and Descartes sought to provide better ways to reconcile God’s omnipotence with human freedom. Their goal was the formulation of a new metaphysics, not the abolition of metaphysics altogether. Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual claims that secular liberalism’s core principles were hammered out in the very Middle Ages that it is supposed to repudiate.
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