Response is later.
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Thanks for your concern.
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Be careful here. I left off reading apologetics in the mid-2000s before Reasonable Faith came along, but I read just about everyone before then. I didn’t pick up the habit of reading the original sources until 10 years later. In retrospect, what I found was that I implicitly trusted the word of apologists as a fellow believer, assuming their truthfulness, but their summaries of philosophies such as modernism and postmodernism were most often straw men.
My first red flag goes up when Craig says “postmodern culture is an impossibility…” Again, I haven’t read the book, but that sounds like the same mistake that I’ve heard a thousand times. Namely, postmodernism is equated with Jacques Derrida, who is an easy target, but he’s merely one slice of a very large pie.
Craig is right when he points out that we live in a largely modernist culture, but Christians don’t need rescue from philosophy. Christian discernment means we can and should sift the wheat from the grain. We can take what’s good from modern and postmodern thought and reject what’s incompatible with Jesus’ teachings. For Christianity to be “true,” it’s not necessary to disprove every thought that occurs to someone outside the faith.
Rant over. Sorry! 
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Interesting that postmodernism should come up – my wife was just talking to a friend (and me, also a friend 
) this week about its relationship to Christians with respect to the pandemic. So many distrust authority and buy into conspiracy theory, devaluing reason and science.
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Religious postmodernists can’t stand the fact that there is no narrow objective moral truth… That’s where William Lane Craig is coming from. Been there. All the other critiques of postmodernism, by Chomsky, Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett et al, are perfectly valid of course. I’m so glad that these little men are in Craig’s peerless company…
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is that an objectively true fact?
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In my newsfeed the people most vociferously proclaiming alternative facts or “that’s just the liberal narrative” in response to things like numbers are the same ones who decry postmodernism as a lie from the devil’s mouth. Which means they really just parrot whatever comes along from their favorite icons.
Ironically the idea that scientific consensus gives you a good approximation of truth fits quite nicely with a postmodern worldview.
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Could you elaborate? My impression has been more like this article, but admittingly have a poor grasp of what post-modernism is. I suppose I want to understand it in a modernism framework…
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A crude and over-simplified summary of postmodernism says that since we are all seeing the world from a perspective, we construct different truths to describe our reality. So, consensus is one of the main ways we agree on what is true for more than just me or you. Modernism sees truth as an absolute, objective thing waiting to be discovered.
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I have encountered very few that would be described as postmoderns… either who purposefully use that label, or those who are certainly in that line of thought… who would express a willingness to set their personal and subjective beliefs aside in order to submit their thoughts to the “consensus” of others.
Rather, I’ve found that it seems that “consensus” is more a matter of identifying whose thoughts are deemed acceptable, since they already share the “correct” viewpoints (I.e., their beliefs already happen to align with my own).
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I consider my own worldview to be postmodern.
That presumes that you know you are right, which is a very modernist perspective.
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Might you explain further? I’m not following what you’re trying to say here.
You said consensus was identifying who else had the correct perspective. I don’t think that is a good description at all of the postmodern idea that truth is found in consensus. I think the idea of identifying people who have the correct perspective, i.e., mine, is a very modernist approach.
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I’m not sure if this is accurate, but in speaking with some of this generation, it seems they are very concrete about whether certain things are right (the environment, tolerance) and think that some of the other issues (adherence to a particular faith, sexual orientation for example) to be a less important issue that they are willing to waffle on. So, it’s not so much an issue of lack of definitive right and wrong as a shift in what they think are essentials. It may reflect that we all have some inherited need for security by identifying something that we consider extremely important–right and wrong, good and evil. There’s also a little chronological snobbery in every generation. I’m a Gen Xer, and even my generation is different from the current one.
so, if this is true, I’d imagine it’s not postmodernism in the sense of finding things to be not really truly right or wrong, but a shift in that identification. Consensus is important to deciding that standard, but mainly because of the complexity of truth. It seems that math (eg 2+2=4) is not subject to consensus. Relying on an expert seems to me not to be relying on consensus, either. . I’d be interested in what you think. Thanks.
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And dare I assume that you believe your perspective on this to be correct?
I think it is a good description of reality. There may be better ones. Correct is for math problems.
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Fair enough. I prefer my description of reality, and glad to hear you wouldn’t say that mine is incorrect.
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Is there such a distinction as “hardcore” vs “soft core” or merely epistemic postmodernism, then? Because I had the impression that robust postmodernism paradoxically insists there is no such thing as truth (except for this one claim, obviously, the self contradiction being self-evident), whereas it sounds like yours is more of an epistemic humility that we just can’t know it for sure.
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Epistemic humility does seem to be very apropos–in essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, in all things charity
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And somehow people conceived that idea long before there was something known as “postmodernism.” Lots of people we would call “modernist” embraces that very formula.