Friday, December 21, 2007

The Great Invention of the West

“The great invention of the West was that of an immanent order in Nature, whose working could be systematically understood and explained on its own terms, leaving open the question whether this whole order had a deeper significance, and whether, if it did, we should infer a transcendent Creator beyond it. This notion of the ‘immanent’ involved denying — or at least isolating and problematizing — any form of interpenetration between the things of Nature, on the one hand, and ‘the supernatural’ on the other, be this understood in terms of the one transcendent God, or of Gods or spirits, or magic forces, or whatever.” (p 15)

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor

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