Toward a contemplative mind, or moving beyond the facts

Guest post by Harvey Edser, originally posted at The Evangelical Liberal

This is a follow-up to my previous post about moving on from old models of reality, in which I critiqued ‘evangelical modernism’ and suggested that our old paradigms need revising both in science and in faith. This time I’d like to expand on that by critiquing our obsession with facts and factuality as the epitome of truth. It’s an obsession which I believe has tended to impoverish our spirituality.

Facts are of course central to the modernist paradigm. The modernist ideal of truth is verifiable scientific fact, something which can be shown to be observably, provably, objectively true and real. Such facts or data can be accurately observed, measured, quantified and analysed.

Then by means of logic and reason, these facts can further be fitted into overarching structures of theory that usefully hold together sets of data in…