Taylor’s Critique of Secularism from a Naturalist Perspective

ABSTRACT This article argues that Charles Taylor’s apologetic for religious belief in A Secular Age—in particular, his argument for the equivalence of the closed and open interpretations of the “immanent frame” of nature—is persuasive to the extent that the reader shares Taylor’s conviction that human-level structures of meaning are not subject to the standards of truth and verification operative in the natural sciences. Absent this assumption, an acceptance of a self-sufficient immanent order, although it does not lead inexorably to atheism, nevertheless contains an inherent bias away from the metaphysical claims of traditional religions. The article concludes by identifying a current in contemporary scientific thought that expands the conception of science beyond the classical nomothetic and reductionistic model presupposed in Taylor’s analysis at the same time that it challenges, as effectively as Taylor’s appeal to a premodern religious worldview, the modern “ethic of rational control” that is the dubious legacy of Descartes.