3.26.2019 POSTMODERN TIMES: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture by Gene Edward Veith, Jr. 1994

*16  according to a recent poll,  66%of Americans believe that 'there is no such thing as absolute truth'.

*33  ..the age of reason, scientific discovery and human autonomy is termed the Enlightenment. its thinkers embraced classicism with its order and rationality (although their version of classicism neglected the supernaturalism of Plato and Aristotle.) however they lumped Christianity together with paganism as out dated superstitions. reason alone, so they thought, may now replace the reliance on the supernatural born out of the ignorance of 'unenlightened' times...
soon  people began to answer ethical questions in terms of the closed system and a new approach to moral issues - utilitarianism - emerged. Utilitarians decided moral issues, not by appealing  to transcendent absolutes, but by studying the effect of an action upon the system.  stealing is wrong, not because the Ten Commandments say so, but because stealing interferes with the economic functioning  of society. something is good if it makes the system run more smoothly. something is evil if it interferes with the

*34  cogs of the vast machine. practicality becomes the sole moral criterion. if it works, it must be good. 
Utilitarianism is the view that justified slavery, exploitive child labor and the starvation of the poor, all in the name of economic efficiency.  today this enlightenment ethic is the view that favors abortion because it reduces the welfare rolls and sanctions euthanasia because it reduces hospital bills. Utilitarianism is a way of facing moral issues without God.

as Enlightenment science continued to gather momenturm into the 19th century, the final tie to god dissolved. the Deists taught that while god is not, strictly speaking, necessary to everyday life, he Was necessary to get everything started. Charles Darwin , however, argued that god was not even necessary to explain the creation. in describing 'the origin of species' in terms of the closed natural system of cause and effect, Darwin removed the need for any kind of creator. nature became completely self-contained. science could now explain everything.

eventually, thinkers discarded even Enlightenment classicism.  the rationalism that had its roots in Plato and Aristotle assumed universal absolutes and nonmaterial truths. in the 19th century, however, the empirical supplanted the rational. according to 19th century materialism, only what we can observe is real, the physical universe, as apprehended by our senses and as studied by the scientific method, is the Only reality.
the philosophers known as the Logical Positivists went so far as to say that any statement that could not be verified empirically  (such as theological, metaphysical, aesthetic and moral statements) are meaningless. you cannot show me 'God' or 'justice'; therefore, they do not exist. abstract philospphy is nothing more than a game of language.  (It did not seem to mater to the Logical positivists that their own criterion of meaning is also nonempirical and this by their own standards must be meaningless.)
the heritage of the Enlightenment blossomed in diverse ways. methodologies designed to dissect natural objects began to be applied to human beings. the 'social sciences' were invented. sociology purported to explain human institutions; psychology sought o explain the inner life of human beings, all in terms of a closed natural system accessible by empirical scientific methods.

societies and economies wee re-thought and re-engineered.

*35  the American Constitution and free enterprise economics, like the natural sciences, had their origin in a Biblical worldview, though they  dovetailed with Enlightenment theories.  the social  theories that excluded God went much further.under the assumption that all problems could be solved by human planning, various schemes of socialism succeeded the noble ideals and brutal practices of the of the French Revolution. the most thoroughgoing attempt to remake society and human planning,  various schemes of socialism succeeded the noble ideals and brutal practices of the French Revolution. the most thoroughgoingattempt to remake society and human beings according to a rationalistic therory came through the imposition of Marx's dialectical materialism on a vast percentage of teh world's population. Marxism eradicated private property, sought to liquidate religion, suppressed natie cultures and tried to abolish individualism i favor of a vast collective community.