Adiaphora

A Silent But Beneficent Machine

Sorry about the length, but this passage from Charles Taylor is incredibly insightful and goes a long way to helping us understand why most of us can no longer easily “delight in the works of His hands.”:

“Here another supremely important aspect of this whole dimension of human thinking comes to the fore. The framework, the meaning of being, is relative not just to a vision of the world, but also to an understanding of the stance of the agent in the world. Realism about essences bespeaks the predicament of an agent who sees rightful action as following patterns (essences) which must first be descried in things. As against this, in nominalism, the super-agent who is God relates to things as freely to be disposed of according to his autonomous purposes.

But if this is right, then we, the dependent, created agents, have also to relate to these things not in terms of the normative patterns they reveal, but in terms of the autonomous super-purposes of our creator. The purposes things serve are extrinsic to them. The stance is fundamentally one of instrumental reason.

…A radical shift has taken place. We are still in the domain of the ens creaturm. The world is still God’s creature. Moreover it is an ordered whole. But now the order is no longer normative in the sense that the world exhibits the instantiations of a system of normative patters, on which we should model ourselves. Rather the world is a vast field of mutually affecting parts. This has been designed to work in certain ways, that is, to produce certain results.

…Living a godly life in this world is something very different from living in the ordered Aristotelian Cosmos of Aquinas, or the hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysios. It is no longer a matter of admiring a normative order, in which God has revealed himself through signs and symbols. We rather have to inhabit it as agents of instrumental reason, working the system effectively in order to bring about God’s purposes; because it is through these purposes, and not through signs, that God reveals himself in his world. These are not just two different stances, but two incompatible ones. We have to abandon the attempt to read the cosmos as the locus of signs, reject this as illusion, in order to adopt the instrumental stance effectively. Not just on a level of popular belief, as a world of spirits, do we have to disenchant the universe; we have also to bring about the analogous shift on the high cultural level of science, and trade in a universe of ordered signs, in which everything has meaning, for a silent but beneficent machine.”

[Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 97–98]