If natural Philosophy in all its parts, by pursuing this Method [i.e., experiment], shall at length be perfected, the bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged. For so far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature.
– Isaac Newton, Opticks, 405.

Sir Isaac Newton was the father of modern science. John Locke founded the modern philosophy of classical liberalism and the moral principles of individual rights. As the above quote suggests, Newton was a firm believer in Divine Providence, grounding moral philosophy in the law of causality—the same scientific principles pursued in the experimental method. Locke believed that the law of nature is the law of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: law that no government can alter. Both of these men were English Puritans, devout Christians who strictly adhered to the Hebrew Bible and formulated their worldview by studying it. How, then, during the Age of Reason, did the fundamentally secular worldview of modernism emerge from Scripture? This evolution would seem diametrically opposed to the conventional wisdom of contemporary culture, even confounding our understanding of the origins of Western philosophy. Moreover, why does the postmodern academic establishment—which claims to be atheistic and scientific— abhor the objective moral philosophy of ethical monotheism while idolizing the divine intuitions of ancient, mystical, pagan, collectivistic cults?

Is it possible that primeval, pagan mysticism has overtaken the postmodern Western mind by masquerading as science in the name of progress? Have its adherents schemed to discredit and dispose of the competing monotheistic worldview that created the modern world? Or, is it as Freud believed, that “instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests,” and these “intellectuals” are actually conformists who indulge in superfluous rationalizations of a crowd mentality, while unconsciously herding into the abyss?

Postmodern philosophy, which dominates the humanities in Western academy today, is a philosophical direction that criticizes the foundational assumptions and universalizing tendency of modern Western philosophy. The term postmodernism reveals that its adherents define progress as ending the age of modernism, in order to reach a new age. Through the ideas they espouse, the postmodernists actually want to retreat from the modern worldview, which elevated the independent mind’s capacity to reason. They denounce and deprecate the concepts of logic, objectivity, truth, and any knowledge of reality. Moreover, their regression toward primitive, pagan mysticism and nature worship they ironically view as progress from the restrictions that arise from recognizing reality, the primacy of existence, and the limitation set by the natural laws that govern the universe. Those who wish to end the modern age resort, hypocritically, to attacking the biblical faith as ancient superstitions, while simultaneously disparaging and unreservedly abashing its objective and rational worldview.

The unique achievement of the Bible was to introduce into the pagan worldview objective moral standards: the sanctity of human life and the primacy of individual liberty. These concepts are considered today as conventional wisdom and are universally embraced throughout civilized societies, where they are taken for granted. Ancient Israel, founded after the exodus from Egypt, was the first nation in recorded history formed on the idea of liberty from the oppression of tyranny. The foundations of Western science and philosophy lie between the pages of Hebrew Scripture, and its ideas, indeed, have consequences. The monotheistic revolution introduced with the Abrahamic covenant was profound, even radical. It was antithetical to ancient mystical creeds, greatly displacing and transforming the commonly held dogmas in all previous polytheistic religions and cultures. So fundamental was this alteration that most people, even many today, professing to adhere to monotheistic faith, do not comprehend its philosophical profundity. Although it has been almost four millennia since monotheism first emerged, and it has already transformed the world we live in and know, the depth and magnitude of its ideas have hardly been fully recognized, and only a portion of its intellectual fruits have been harvested.

It bears repeating that the essential revolutionary concept introduced through the monotheistic worldview was objectivity: there are objective laws to nature, which man can discern and know through his reasoning mind. The biblical cosmology establishes that God, or the divine, is completely separate from the physical or temporal reality. By divorcing the supernatural and infinite from the objects of the material world, the Bible originates the concept of objectivity, which determines that each object has a definite identity by which it acts. This fundamental concept is at the heart of a rational and coherent worldview.

The absurdity of the postmodern culture is evident in its demagogic scorn of the Bible as primitive, barbaric, and illiberal by people who deny that the value system forming the moral basis of their attack originated exclusively from the very Bible they are attacking. Unfortunately, it is not surprising that the mystics who wish to sacrifice individual liberty for the ideology of a collectivized society find it necessary to discredit and attack the foundations of Western civilization explicitly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Thus, Kant the father of postmodernist philosophy, could easily shift Western philosophy off course, simply by falsely fabricating a refutation and intentionally discrediting the concept of objectivity, and destroying man’s capacity to know reality. Since reason is the faculty of the individual mind, the mystics attack human reason for the purpose of collectivizing society. The potency of the individual consciousness is invalidated in order to allow for the collective consciousness to take hold of society.