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Nov 17, 2018 · Despite its many strengths, Engelhardt’s After God displays two surprising features: an affinity for voluntaristic ethics and a tendency to oppose Eastern Orthodoxy (as a purely revealed religion) to philosophy.
- David Bradshaw
- 2018
Nov 17, 2018 · In After God: Morality & Bioethics in a Secular Age, Professor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. argues that the now dominant intellectual culture of the West actively shuns any transcendent point of orientation, such as an appeal to God or to a God’s eye perspective on reality.
- Mark J Cherry
- 2018
- I. Introduction: An Outlook on The Book
- II. The Growth of Atheism and The Great Change in Morality and Bioethics
- III. Why The New Situation Is Supposed to Be So Troublesome
- IV. An Examination of Engelhardt’s First Concern
- V. An Examination of Engelhardt’s Second Worry
- VI. An Examination of Engelhardt’s Third Worry
Engelhardt’s After God is a thick (454 pages) and wonderful book, which gives a comprehensive perspective on the deepest and hardest issues in both moral philosophy and bioethics of our times. It should be clear that “bioethics” indicates not only the simple analysis of a list of issues, such as whether abortion (or euthanasia, etc.) is to be prohi...
Engelhardt remarks that when he arrived in Italy for the first time, in the spring of 1954, “The moral and metaphysical texture of the then-dominant life-world was radically different [from now]. There was a pronounced folk piety” (2017, 57) and in that world “even within the public square one could still speak of sin” (2017, 59). In contrast, and ...
A recurrent thesis of Engelhardt’s book is that “never before has there been a large-scale, politically established culture that explicitly acted as if God did not exist . . . No culture like this existed before the 20th century” (2017, 28). For Engelhardt, this seems to be great trouble: something of which to be scared. However, at least prima fac...
The first (and major) concern that Engelhardt suggests is that without God everything is meaningless. As we have seen in the now-dominant culture in the West, “[a]ll is to be regarded as if ultimately coming from nowhere, going nowhere, and for no enduring purpose” (Engelhardt, 2017, 28). This is the reason for so much social discomfort and disappo...
Engelhardt’s second grand worry is about the nature of morality itself. In a society after God, in which “the dominant secular culture positively eschews any grounding in the transcendent,” it makes no sense and it is impossible to speak of sin in the public square (Engelhardt, 2017, 58). He says: In the now-dominant culture after God, “the secular...
We have seen that for Engelhardt secularization produced the now-dominant secular culture in which everything is meaningless and where morality has collapsed. The next step of Engelhardt’s analysis consists of doubts concerning the future of human society itself. As I hinted, he never makes it explicit, but in several passages, he alludes to this p...
In his final book After God: Morality and Ethics in a Secular Age he. addressed the moral implications of a society after the rejection of God, and how this may impact bioethics and...
Dec 31, 2018 · In particular, Engelhardt is doubtful that a morality after God is possible, while I argue that it is going to be produced and possibly will be more adequate than traditional morality.
In After God, the late Engelhardt starts taking for granted that “Bioethics provides some of the most important battles in the culture wars” (p. 12), so that the old moral strangers transformed themselves in “moral enemies”.
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Engelhardt invites readers to understand what it means to live in a world after God, where questions of sin and virtue have been replaced with life-and-death-style choices. After God provides a dark prophetic vision. But there is still hope.
