The Critique of Theological Reason

Book excerpt: Far from merely reinvigorating relativism, postmodernism has detected and expressed in our time a powerful nihilating process of which truth and reality itself are the final casualties; and with these morality and religion. Beginning from the theological reaches of philosophy, this book argues that gods played a crucial part in modern philosophy, even when it was most critical of them; that the dominant nihilism of Derrida is really an excessive and misleading outcome of a contemporary philosophy which could otherwise resonate with all that is best in our evolutionary image of the universe; that moralists who turn to art in order to overcome the fact–value version of this deadly dualism do not thereby rule out religion; and that a Christian theology which recognises the evolutionary and historical conditions of faith and revelation is once again producing a theology that builds upon the best of contemporary philosophy and science.