How (not) to be Secular

This book provides a guide to Charles Taylor's major but rather inaccessible work, A Secular Age. His focus is what the author calls 'a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable' - the conditions of belief. Around 1500, it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, while in our own time 'unbelief has become for many the major default option.' It is very helpful to gain a better understanding of the meaning of the word secular in Taylor's work. In classical and mediaeval accounts, it meant temporal, while post-Enlightenment it refers to a non-sectarian, neutral or areligious standpoint. His third sense is where religious belief is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable, as implied in the quote above about a shift in the conditions of belief. In the Middle Ages, there were cosmological obstacles to unbelief, which were gradually undermined as humanism became more imaginable, partly as a result of new scientific insights. There is an interesting chapter on the transition from Deism to Atheism as the sense arises of living in an immanent and impersonal order - what Taylor calls the immanent frame that leaves no space for or openness to transcendence and represents a 'closed world system' so familiar in contemporary atheist writing. Taylor is, however, optimistic that many young people will want to explore beyond the boundaries of this closed wasteland in the light of what he terms 'the persistent pressure of transcendence that cannot be explained away' - a sense, which, will surely resonate with many readers.