Dangerous God

A Defense of Transcendent Truth

Albert Norton

• Publisher: World Encounter Institute/New English Review Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781943003501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Why is the world so crazy? Why have we lost the ability to agree on fundamental truths? Everyone seems to be running toward something, but could it be that we are running away from something greater? In Dangerous God: A Defense of Transcendent Truth, Albert Norton makes the case that confronting the reality of God in the postmodern world is a dangerous proposition. Dangerous to our most cherished notions of reality. Dangerous to our comfortable worldview and how we see ourselves. To find out why this postmodern turn has come to pass, Norton insists we must ask ourselves Pilate's age-old question: What is truth?

It could be that in the postmodern age we don't merely disagree about whether something is true, but that we disagree about how truth and values are formed in the first place.To begin to understand this, we really must start with how we think and form value judgments in general. We share an orientation to objective truth, in our thinking, and we build on rational processes of binary differentiation.This should lead us to an objective and real hierarchy of ideals, rather than a subjective or socially-produced narrative.

To understand this, a history of truth formation is presented, distinguishing the medieval to modern periods, and then the modern to postmodern, highlighting the thinking of Descartes, Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, William James, and John Dewey, among many others. This leads to a discussion of truth at the hands of postmodernists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty. The purpose is to trace the intellectual movements shaping the determination of truth and values, from individualism to collectivism, correspondence theory to pragmatism, anxiety about meaning as expressed in existentialism, and Marxism re-worked for cultural application-the "woke" movement.

The author concludes: Truth exists as a real and extant feature of the universe. It is objective and unchanging and "out there." It resides in and emanates from and is personified in God, the ideal of the ideals; the pinnacle of the hierarchy of values that we perceive, rather than create.

1

Binary Reality

There is a binary reality to the cosmos. There is a corresponding binary reality to our ability to perceive it. Physical things exist and are understandable in binary terms. There is something, or there is nothing. Existence/non-existence; presence/absence; good/evil; light/dark; truth/falsity; beauty/ugliness. Each of these dualisms is defined in terms of its opposite. God cannot both exist and not exist. The Biblical assertion by God, “I am,” is either true or it is false. There is no in-between, but we are capable of living as if there were, in an ongoing state of hesitation to avoid this inevitable and ultimate binary opposition.

Binary thinking is a necessary component of the obvious fact that we are time-bound creatures with agency. The temporal dimension means that we live and move and have our being in a series of choices we make, some moral and consequential, some frivolous and less so. But every time we make any choice in life, we are deciding against all the other choices we might have made. Our life unspools in a continuous stream of this-not-that decisions. Each is necessitated by binary opposition, even when there are a near-infinite number of not-taken choices. Because we make choices continually all day every day, we are operating on binary decision-making, whether we are aware of it or not, and whether we like it or not.

We perceive external, objective things over the interval of our subjective consciousness. We rely on a correspondence between our internal subjective discernment of objective things and the fact of those things externally and objectively. Through innumerable verifications, we can know that reliance is well-placed. We are not mere brains in jars, receiving stimuli that evoke false perceptions. Our internal perception of reality also consists in binary oppositions. We make sense of the world because we make binary distinctions continually. In our visual field, we expect the sky above and the distinct ground below because they exist in opposition and re-present themselves to us continually and consistently. In every moment and in every situation, binary thinking makes the world comprehensible, instead of presenting as undifferentiated sludge. We distinguish thing A from thing B and idea X from idea Y by mentally setting them in opposition each to the other. This takes place subjectively in the mind, which receives and discriminates among stimuli on the basis of oppositions. The external world we perceive is objectively comprised of these oppositions, too, in that everything about it is reducible to them, beginning with existence and non-existence.

In this way, dualisms naturally arise and we naturally employ them. They are a necessary corollary to the law of non-contradiction: contradictory propositions cannot be true in the same sense at the same time. According to Aristotle, without the principle of non-contradiction we could not know anything that we do know. We would have no way of distinguishing between subject matters and properties. The inability to draw distinctions in general would make rational discussion impossible. The oppositional nature of things (and ideas and ideals) presupposes that identical things are indiscernible (that is, not opposed) and any two things which do not share all properties are thereby discernible; that is, subject to at least some form of dualism.1 This is consonant with (perhaps equivalent to) Aristotle’s principle of the excluded middle, which holds that for any proposition, either the proposition is true or its negation is true.

Dualism means division of a thing or concept into two, with the two parts comprising all the possibilities for the thing or concept being divided. It means dividing phenomena by two opposing principles, for example, night and day; up and down; alive and dead; right and wrong; present and absent; existent and non-existent. The opposing principles are intended to be the universe of possibilities relating to the subject matter. There is only day and night, for example, as long as we’re talking about our exper...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1 Binary Reality
• 2 Mathematical Realism
• 3 Ideal of the Ideals
• 4 Realism of Information
• 5 Transcending Opposition
• 6 Individualism and Collectivism
• 7 Intersubjectivity
• 8 Modern Philosophy
• 9 Divorce of Theology and Philosophy
• 10 What is Truth
• 11 Pragmatism
• 12 Christian Existentialism
• 13 Atheist Existentialism
• 14 Postmodernism and Deconstruction
• 15 Cultural Marxism
• 16 Default Materialism
• 17 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
• 18 Political Freedom
• 19 Nothing
• 20 God and Creation
• 21 Religious Liberty
• 22 Christian Unraveling
• 23 Knowledge and Belief
• 24 Faith
• 25 Dangerous God
• Bibliography