Natural Meaning

The belief that the world has an existence and a meaning in and of itself and apart from God is the great heresy of the modern age.
Father Stephen

It is a topic I repeatedly come back to because I think it is fundamentally important. The things that make up the world have no inherent meaning, as such. The contemporary worldview imparts a meaning onto the makeup of this world, and does on the grounds of science and materialism. Minority voices are decrying the materialism – but philosophy knew way back in the enlightenment that this would be the telos of our age. I am not writing that “science is wrong”, rather that it is not an inherent view of the world. It is an imparted point of view brought to the world to organize it. And any worldview (whether it be our contemporary modern one, or an orthodox Christian view) is apriori. It exists before the evidence is accounted for. Yet people are often smashing together facts and what those facts mean as both the domain of science. Science intrinsically cannot speak to meaning. No where is this more recognized than in the field of philosophy where over the last two hundred years they have gotten no where on the matter of “objectivity” (that everyone must agree that facts mean what they mean). Furthermore the growing post-modern movement argues that such a position is not possible.

So then every worldview is inherently equal in its right to speak, since they are all apriori and brought to the world. The superiority of Christianity, however, is that God in Christ entered the world. The highest principle and ground of being entered into the world to bring and show what it is to live according to this worldview. The contemporary modern view remains solely an apriori organizing principle – not an involved living God who was incarnate.