Postmodern Rot and the Death of Certainty — Part 1 | Michael Heiser

Описание: Session 2:    • Gnosticism, Science, And Spirituality — Pa...  
Session 3:    • Gnosticism in Pop Culture & Transhumanism ...  
In his talk, Michael Heiser outlines a multi-session conference agenda blending apologetics and biblical theology, emphasizing how Western culture's intellectual decline—marked by poor thinking, hostility toward Judeo-Christian truth claims, and over-reliance on "harmless" pop culture like Star Wars or Avengers films—stems from a concatenation of postmodern, neopagan, and post-Christian influences that train people to reject certainty, prioritize personal experience over doctrine, and embrace pluralism without boundaries. He critiques the historical roots of postmodernism as a reaction against modernism's myths of scientific omniscience, human progress, and epistemic certainty, tracing it from the 16th-century Age of Exploration, Darwin's evolution, Einstein's relativity, world wars' disillusionment, and the internet's democratization of (often unreliable) knowledge, which supplants traditional gatekeepers like pastors with Google and YouTube, fostering militant skepticism where only empirically discoverable truths (via science) matter, sidelining theology, ethics, and biblical authority. Heiser urges a data-driven apologetic approach—demanding primary sources, coherence, context, and fairness in debates—challenging postmodern relativism as unlivable (e.g., no one truly doubts a doctor's procedure or spouse's love without omniscience), exposing spirituality's inward turn (replacing Providence with "synchronicities" and God with self-authority), and the Emergent Church's pitfalls (good bridges to culture but risks Evangelical paganism via experience over orthodoxy, social justice sans doctrine); he advocates testing worldviews for rational coherence (e.g., God's existence coheres better than alternatives, supported by theist scientists), encourages engaging skeptics patiently to reveal their beliefs' lack of evidence, and calls churches to equip believers with substantive doctrinal teaching rather than forfeiting to secularism.

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