the Week

The modern world can be hard on devout religious believers. Its pluralism denies any one faith the power to organize the whole of social life. Its skepticism about authority undermines the efforts of churches to impose doctrinal discipline on their own members, let alone impose it on those outside the fold. Its economic dynamism unleashes human appetites, and gives individuals the freedom to choose among an ever-expanding range of ways to satisfy them. And its deference to scientific methods of determining the truth erodes received scriptural and theological beliefs.

Centuries later, the philosophical critique of miracles has been so successful that many of the faithful are more comfortable affirming the truth of soft providentialism, which is perfectly compatible with science because it makes no empirically verifiable (or refutable) truth-claims about the world at all. It’s even compatible with Darwinian evolution, which posits the radically non-theistic view that species evolve through a process of random mutation and adaptation, since it’s always possible that God plays a crucial and hidden (but scientifically undemonstrable) role in the process. Perhaps God causes evolution’s seemingly random mutations, or controls the environment to which these mutated organisms adapt themselves.

The good news for religion is that it has survived the philosophical-scientific assault on miracles. But the bad news for religion is that it now lingers on in a profoundly weakened state. Where faith once confidently ventured truth-claims about the whole of creation and its metaphysical underpinnings, now it often offers mere expressions of subjective feeling about a world that science exclusively reveals and explains. That represents a remarkable retreat.

No matter how many people still claim to believe.