richard,

Your comments remind me of the critic who penned the line to the effect, “A poem doesn’t mean. It is.” Interpretation, as a verbal expression, is of less consequence than the original. But the line between honest and dishonest fiction leads through a narrow gate.

One enemy of religion is superstition, and not because it is powerless but because it is a lie. I still struggle with superstition, as I am in great pain when I feel helpless. I find it very hard to keep my prayers honest, as “Thy will not my will.” So, I need the church.

At the same time I cannot express strongly enough the revolution going on with our understanding of the role of language. The correspondence theory of truth, where nouns get meaning from what they refer to, is “toast.” (Please forgive my crudity, but it expresses my sincerest and best informed conviction as well as my sense of urgency.) The same holds for the other classic theories of truth. The positive results of science are usually explained as proof of verification theory, but that too is vacuous when pushed even so slightly. (I can only offer my assurance that such assertions are based on the current discussion, largely in academia, to be sure.) I agree, the pragmatic theory of truth remains promising, and that’s from one of its biggest critics for many years.

Kant claimed an intellectual revolution in thought comparable to Copernicus in science. We are now in the midst of an intellectual paradigm shift of equal consequence. Whether it will eliminate metaphysics or reform it is not yet clear to me. Whether our biggest worry should be people failing the church or the church failing people is also not clear. Secularists will disagree, of course, but I believe we are in danger of losing something irreplaceable with the growing apostasy. The question whether God is dead or absent is an inquiry into ultimacy and demands a response other than “Never mind.”.