Why God Feels Absent in Modern Life with Joseph Minich and Michael Horton

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1. 00:00

   Joseph Minich

   A lot of it is not because we don't have the right Bible verses to quote. It's because the gravitational pulls of reality that former differentiated male and female performance just at such a concrete phenomenological level that clarified the gender question for most of history. You don't have to talk that theoretically about it because this is just what it is. Once you remove that, the crisis—on the one sense, we think of the crisis as positive, oh, the manosphere versus the feminists. But before you can even get there, it's the loss of gravity. It's that you're trying to develop instinct about how to move with that loss of gravity. I think somewhere similarly in the religious sphere, it is just true as a matter of demonstrable historic sociological fact that we live in a humanly odd circumstance, both technologically and culturally and religiously. Lewis puts it this way: “the condition in which plain men must get the truth for themselves or go without it.” That's modernity. And we're doing that with the gravitational pulls removed.

2. 00:59

   Michael Horton

   We don't want to live in the Village Green at the end of the day. We can all leave and return to our houses of worship, but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions.

3. 01:23

   Michael Horton

   Well, I have the privilege of having a conversation with Joseph Minich. I've been looking forward to talking to you, Joseph, because you're a fellow—first of all, teaching fellow at Davenant Institute and written a terrific book that I use now for my Modern Mind class. And I love the book because Bulwarks of Unbelief helps us to understand why it's so hard to believe, even when you accept the arguments and evidence for God's existence. First of all, what got you interested in this subject? Give us an overall framework for your thinking about this. So many—there are many atheists, but there are a lot of people who aren't atheists.

4. 02:07

   Joseph Minich

   Yeah.

5. 02:07

   Michael Horton

   Even Christians like us.

6. 02:09

   Joseph Minich

   Yep.

7. 02:11

   Michael Horton

   Who kind of experience God as absent.

8. 02:14

   Joseph Minich

   Yeah.

9. 02:14

   Michael Horton

   A lot.

10. 02:15

    Joseph Minich

    Yeah. You can struggle and wonder, are all the theistic proofs so many ornate arguments about the structure of the emperor's clothes? Or yeah. Or is there something kind of gravitational pull underneath all of this. It grows out of, like many projects, um, you know, a general interest in philosophical subjects and such. But certainly I think a struggle that I had, and I'd just call it that, a struggle with the plausibility of atheism, um, probably through my 20s and into maybe into my early 30s, certainly through my seminary education. I watched a lot of my friends lose their faith, but, you know, I wanted to work through these questions and try to be really honest about why is this argument not quite scratching the itch even though my mind can't it? What's the remainder left over there? That, that sort of thing. In the mid-2000s, I picked up Charles Taylor's Secular Age, probably around 2010. And one of the things that that book does that's very helpful is it can feel very easy to think that what we have is a situation where we all kind of agree about some things, but some people have these extra things called religious beliefs. And what happens when you get rid of religious beliefs is you get back to just this human remainder of just things we all think or something like that. And what Taylor wants to do is say that conception that you could just get rid of religious propositions and get down to some just human underneath basic belief setting—

11. 03:35

    Michael Horton

    Subtraction.

12. 03:36

    Joseph Minich

    Yeah, the subtraction story. That's not, that's not actually how this occurred. And this is why he says, I have to write a story almost. When you see the genealogy, it's impossible not to see atheism and its plausibility as built atop its own orthodoxies, its own positive orthodoxies. And in a sense, what I tried to do in the book, he has this massive chapter, of course, “Bulwarks of Belief,”which is sort of answering the question, what was going on, as it were, in the atmosphere and background noise that rendered it nearly impossible not to believe in God in 1500? You can kind of hear it now, “Bulwarks of Unbelief.”What is it about the year 2000 that renders it such that even those who are the most in some way persuaded of God can still have those sensibilities, have that worry in a sense? That maybe this is not real after all. And what I try to do to supplement Taylor in the book—

13. 04:26

    Michael Horton

    And if you ask them, they wouldn't say they're atheists, right?

14. 04:28

    Joseph Minich

    Right. Oh, no, not at all. No, no. It's like, yeah, you're talking about—I'm talking about me, right? It's like, I believe in God, but I—this thing still bothers me. And what I try to do is look at—and I think this is—this is more a supplement to Taylor than anything. I think he kind of identifies this, the crucial role that the mid-19th century plays in the transformation of the world and in the emergence of free thought and unbelief in these sorts of things. But he doesn't talk that much about the role that technology and I think human labor systems play, and the kind of the material culture side plays in, in reshaping a world and then reshaping a plausibility structure. This is a lot of words. Where that falls out at the end is I think the reason we struggle with this really is atmospheric, if I could put it that way. That is to say—

15. 05:16

    Michael Horton

    Not just ideas.

16. 05:17

    Joseph Minich

    No, no, it's partly ideas, but it's ideas mixed up with all the ways in which we're practically and tacitly, unconsciously engaged with the world, engaged with one another, all the conceptions that are built into our practices that we never barely name, but nevertheless deeply shape our perceptions of reality. And so a large part of, I suppose, my project and what I wanted to do with the book and want to do with future projects is to think about apologetics mostly as something where if you just engage your own questions very well and get more and more satisfied with your own questions at a—at an almost, if I can put it this way, at a deeply human level, you actually become a much better apologist. Because what can happen is that apologetics becomes a sort of posturing of the answer man before the ignorant.

17. 06:08

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

18. 06:09

    Joseph Minich

    And I think what apologetics needs to be is—I don't want to call it self-therapy or something like that, but the idea that, hey, you're walking around not fully persuaded, you, if you're really honest, like there's things that you're like, how does that work? Answer that. Sit before God and pray about it and be confident—that God loves you is a big thing. I think this is part of it—be confident that God really does love you and wants to bring you to the truth. So calm down. A lot of people get into crises when they don't have the answer right. Calm down and work with God. Live a life and work through those things as a human, and then you will have something to offer apologetically others.

19. 06:45

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, there is a tendency among us as apologists to kind of think that, that we're, we're the, the answer people. And it's a, it's a matter of coming to certainty, intellectual certainty that the arguments work. There's kind of a sense here that I get from your book that, you know, the disciples. Jesus didn't give them the five arguments for God's existence or the best arguments for the resurrection, which I teach my students to use.

20. 07:19

    Joseph Minich

    Yeah.

21. 07:20

    Michael Horton

    Jesus didn't throw them out when they— he didn't expect them to pass an exam before they became his disciples.

22. 07:27

    Joseph Minich

    Right.

23. 07:28

    Michael Horton

    They got it and then they didn't get it.

24. 07:31

    Joseph Minich

    Yeah.

25. 07:31

    Michael Horton

    Over and over again. But they followed him.

26. 07:36

    Michael Horton

    (Joseph Minich] — Yeah.

27. 07:36

    Michael Horton

    Because you have the words of eternal life. But what keeps us from following today? What are some of the things, the background noise you're talking about?

28. 07:47

    Joseph Minich

    Yeah.

29. 07:48

    Michael Horton

    Some of the things that keep us from thinking God is with us.

30. 07:52

    Joseph Minich

    That's a great question. And I think, I think I'll say the pastoral side first and then maybe get to that. Maybe what are those background noises? I think part of the thing that happens is that there really can be, I think, a failure to endure through some of those experiences because there's the expectation that it's not supposed to be like this. This isn't the way faith is supposed to feel. It's not supposed to feel this ambiguous. I shouldn't be able to be this disoriented now. And of course, I don't think it's that faith is that way. I don't think it's that the world is less clear. It's that we're disoriented from reality. So implicitly, it's sort of, I don't think the faith should be such that I should be able to be this disoriented where it's this confusing. Look at all the pastors. Look at all the churches. They're all in confusion. Can God actually want that? And I think there's a voice in our heads that says no, but maybe he does. Maybe God is in fact totally okay with you being in the middle of an epistemic crisis, and that's actually where he meets you.

31. Joseph Minich

    Maybe that's actually not as abnormal as you think it should be. And so a lot of this, I think I want to encourage people to say, actually sit and endure and walk with God, trust him. So there's the spiritual root before all of that at an atmospheric level that of course everyone's going Yeah, why is it so hard? I could focus on the positive things. That is to say, what are the active things, as it were, propelling us into unbelief? But I wonder if it's almost like the removal of gravitational pull. One parallel that's, I think, really helpful for people is to think of it in terms of a parallel with contemporary crises of identity over gender. Part of the reason men and women are all freaking out about what does it mean to be a man and a woman, and how do we do that, and is it complementarianism, are we supposed to kind of LARPily recover, or whatever? Why is that? A lot of it is not because we don't have the right Bible verses to quote. It's because the gravitational pulls of reality that former differentiated male and female performance just at such a concrete phenomenological level that clarified the gender question for most of history. You don't have to talk that theoretically about it because this is just what it is. Once you remove that, the crisis—on the one sense, we think of the crisis as positive. Oh, the manosphere versus the feminists. But before you can even get there, it's the loss of gravity. It's that you're trying to develop instinct about how to move with that loss of gravity. I think somewhere similarly in the religious sphere, it is just true as a matter of demonstrable historic sociological fact that we live in a humanly odd circumstance, both technologically and culturally and religiously. Lewis puts it this way: “the condition in which plain men must get the truth for themselves or go without it.” That's a new condition. That's modernity. That's modernity.

32. Joseph Minich

    And we're doing that with the gravitational pulls removed. And, and if I were to then formalize that and say, what is that background noise? I think the way to very briefly put it together would be to say the reason ancients believed in God—thinking in terms of a three-legged stool that I'd compare to a modern three-legged stool—most of the reason ancients believe in God, if I could summarize it torturously. It's not—even if the five proofs work, Thomas isn't trying to get you to believe in God with the five proofs because he assumes you already do believe in God. This is how people who already believe in God can demonstrate God's existence. That's it. That's all the five proofs are doing. In the old world, most of what reinforces that sense that God is, I would argue, kind of a three-legged stool. I don't put it this succinctly in the book, but—the world, the self, and others. The world is just a world of agents. Um, to walk around outside before an automobile and modern technology is to experience a world that's just acting on you stubbornly in your way. You have to navigate around it. You can't just move it out of the way. Similarly, the community—generally you're in a small community. Generally you don't leave. Generally you don't move very much. The persons you're around, there's an extremely strong sense of the agency of others relative to which you develop your own sense of being in act. And then your own belonging. Even if you hated your life, hated your community, hated your job—let's say I'm a farmer and I don't like doing it—I know exactly why I'm doing it. I know exactly how I plug—all of my labor plugs into life, its benefits, its rewards. That's a long-winded way then of saying, in the old world, everything you experienced was a world of agencies. And so the idea that there's a kind of capital-A Agent at the bottom, as it were, turtles all the way down, if you could put it that way, was just natural. Maybe you could be a pagan or a panentheist of sorts. But, you know, with maybe a little philosophical reflection, you get to know that at the bottom of it is kind of the one, the one God, right? In the modern world, what is gone is not Thomas's five proofs, but it's those phenomenological attachments that reinforced that sense of agency. So we can believe that everything is agentic after all and read our Aristotle but the way we experience persons, they're not actually agents that I have to navigate around. I can ignore them or go away or unfriend on Facebook or not live with my family or move. The agency of others is in one sense epiphenomenal. The agency of the world—

33. 13:04

    Michael Horton

    Even sitting around together, young people sitting around a fire pit together.

34. 13:09

    Joseph Minich

    Yes.

35. 13:10

    Michael Horton

    But talking to each other on their phones.

36. 13:12

    Joseph Minich

    On their phones. Exactly. And so, and if I don't want to talk to you around the fire pit, I don't have to be friends with you. There's 6,000 other kids I can be friends with.

37. 13:20

    Michael Horton

    Who I've never met.

38. 13:21

    Joseph Minich

    Yes. The stubbornness of that agency is gone. You add to that the agency of the world obscured in you know, storms, storms come that would have been an absolute crisis for our ancestors. And like, we live in air conditioning and enjoy the lightning and drink a glass of wine. The world's insistence upon us is something that's abstract and notional rather than immediate. We are highly successful. We can make more money. But how many people do we meet in churches who don't really know what they do or why or how it plugs into the social order? I mean, think of somebody that makes $200,000 but works at a company of 5,000 people or something like that. Sometimes people know what they do, but there's a lot of people in high-competence positions these days where it's like, I don't really know how I plug into the community, and the community doesn't know how I plug into the community. What do you do? I'm an engineer. End of conversation. I don't—I'm sure it's useful, but in the old world, you could see it. Like, that guy grows tomatoes, right? Yeah. It's like all those kind of gravitational reinforcements that the world is an agentic place after all, you remove all of those. And so you, you, you—even people in their own labor will talk about being kind of carried along in our own labor. I'm a passenger. in my own activity. You can feel that sense of the loss of even interior agency. And if you could think of it in the funhouse of foggy mirrors and the reflective feedback loop between all of those things, the idea that there's some capital A agent behind it all, that's not like anything. That's not what it's like to be alive. And yet, of course it is, because we're conscious. And that's—how do you put that together? And yet you're in a sense fighting this other set of signals, perhaps.

39. 14:59

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. So if I don't— if I really don't see the world as a place full of agents, then it's hard for me to get up the ladder to God as the great agent, the creator of all agents.

40. 15:14

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

41. 15:14

    Joseph Minich

    The agency behind, you know, “the same God who works all things,” as Paul puts it, you know, the actor, as it were, behind all act. In a sense, we're almost like, you know, we don't have to overly formalize this, but if you could think of the Aristotelian notion of pure act, it's almost like we're pure abyssalness. We're an abyss. And where does it—it just bottoms out in the abyss. Pure potency, you know, something like that. In one sense, that's less an intellectual thing than an imaginative thing. And so, so much of what we're trying to do, I think, in apologetics—Lewis has this wonderful phrase. He talks about how we're all instinctually—this is what we're talking about right now—we're kind of instinctually naturalists, even when we're Christians. And it's hard for some truths to kind of penetrate beneath our intellectual and practical instincts. But Lewis has this phrase about how literature This is why he's doing apologetics partly through literature. He says, steals past the watchful dragons of our soul. You know, there's these dragons getting rid of everything, but we can, we can sneak past them through almost indirect engagement. Speaking about apologetics, I mean, this is part of the importance of, I think, also an expansive sense of the use of the imagination in apologetics. I think in our context is just enormous.

42. 16:22

    Michael Horton

    Absolutely. No, it's out-narrating the world. Giving a better story.

43. 16:27

    Joseph Minich

    Yeah.

44. 16:28

    Michael Horton

    And not just better answers.

45. 16:30

    Joseph Minich

    Yeah.

46. 16:30

    Michael Horton

    In my research, I've found surprising evidence of not atheism as much as spiritualism. And you talk about this. You say, yeah, there are a lot of atheists, but there are a lot of people who experience God's absence and then they turn within. And I think that's what I've found in my research, look at the spiritual but not religious phenomenon. That's people turning inside themselves because they feel like, you know, they're buffered, as Taylor would say, from anything above, anything transcendent getting at them.

47. 17:10

    Joseph Minich

    Yes.

48. 17:12

    Michael Horton

    Can you talk about that?

49. 17:13

    Joseph Minich

    Yeah. Yeah. This is a—this is just one of the most fascinating things that, of course, there's a lot of scholarship on this, right? Jason Josephs of Storm and others, right, that you're at this era where at the same time you see sort of the number of unbelief rises to this critical mass as well in Germany and in other places. You have, you know, people going to séances and—

50. 17:35

    Michael Horton

    Even atheists, self-professed atheists.

51. 17:37

    Joseph Minich

    Doing all these spiritual practices. So wild. The late 19th and early 20th century is so wild. This is a really important question. Yeah. What do we do with this spiritual phenomenon? My favorite work of apologetics in the 20th century—this is what I teach for apologetics—is actually Lewis's Miracles. If you haven't read Lewis's Miracles in a long time, as a work of rhetoric, it's just majestic. But one of the things he does in the book that I think is really helpful, because of course he's writing in a context where there's British atheism, but there's also British spiritualism, is he frames the whole debate not in terms of a critique of materialism, but in a critique of naturalism. And what's really interesting is he's able to, all throughout the book, incorporate kind of these spiritualisms. But what you said is exactly right. There's a way in which all of these movements toward kind of spiritualisms, even the ones that ostensibly, you know, get a little witchy, and are tapping into the whatever vibes, they nevertheless don't conceive of the spiritual order as having power or agency outside the totality of the world of nature.

52. 18:38

    Michael Horton

    It's all, it's all within nature.

53. 18:39

    Joseph Minich

    Yes, it's all within nature. And so even if you get kind of spiritually things or ghostly sentiments or something like that, it's still—

54. 18:46

    Joseph Minich

    ] (Michael Horton) — Animism

55. 18:47

    Joseph Minich

    Yes. exactly. It's still roughly naturalist in the sense that there's nothing from the outside getting in. And I think we spend a lot of time rhetorically dealing in the last several decades for various reasons with materialism. But I think really getting a sense of like the world of spirituality and such leaves you without getting outside of the order altogether. And do you need that? Do you long for that? In fact, is that satisfying to the human soul or is it, or is it evasive of your real, of your real need? Is it safe for you? And Lewis as a rhetorician is just masterful. And I think, I think working through that.

56. 19:21

    Michael Horton

    Where would you like to go from here?

57. 19:23

    Joseph Minich

    What I want to do is write a book that's really a, as it were, a kind of guided philosophical tour of the Christian faith that's just meant to be given to unbelievers. Like, hey, this is interesting. Yes, virgin births are weird to me too. Yes, this is weird to me too. And then kind of take everything we've been talking about and then work through it as somebody who accepts it. And as it were, just create a little bit of a manual that's kind of half for Christians, half for, I think, unbelievers who just want to explore the faith. The unique part of it, I think the intro is me and some friends have come up with 12 or so letters that just start with Dear Christian, and it's just an atheist, a Muslim, an ex-evangelical, a womanist theologian. It's like everything in the modern world, and they're—and we're trying to steelman them.Very good critiques of the faith. And so I want believers to read 50 pages of like, how in the world would I answer all of that and feel unsettled? And then read a book.

58. 20:17

    Michael Horton

    Nice.

59. 20:18

    Joseph Minich

    Yeah. That's the plan.

60. 20:19

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. I love the way that you're sort of cracking open people's imaginations and letting something in from the outside. This is not just about having the right doctrine, having the right ideas, the right beliefs, but having it flood our imagination and rewire our brains.

61. 20:39

    Joseph Minich

    Yes. Literally.

62. 20:41

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. Yeah. Is what we're after. What do we love? What do we desire? Yeah, not just what do we believe, but what do we desire?

63. 20:49

    Joseph Minich

    The reward for enduring is that God really is faithful and that he really is true and that your mind really can be satisfied. And that surprised me. It's—I thought I'd always struggle with atheism and more or less continue to be persuaded and just kind of go around the merry-go-round forever. But it went away. I don't want to say that in an absolute sense. I'm not dead yet. But for many years, it's just not really been a significant struggle. Part of that is a mind persuasion, part of that is other things in life. But I think what you said, almost the rewiring of the way you are humanly related to just reality itself, because of course it's through reality God reveals himself in creation, and our relationship to this world around us is part of our relation to him. And the reworking of all of that, I think, is part of what it is to, yeah, come to satisfaction on these things.

64. 21:35

    Michael Horton

    Joseph, thanks for taking the time to be with us.

65. 21:37

    Joseph Minich

    My pleasure. Thank you for having me.