Peter Boghossian, assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and a well-know atheist philosopher and author, has made some interesting allies in recent times.
As The College Fix reported recently, he invited a Christian apologist to his class for a guest lecture and Q&A. It described the unlikely partnership from the point of view of the Christian scholar who’d come to class, but now Boghossian has offered his side of the story in a piece for The American Mind.
Headlined “Welcome to Culture War 2.0: The Great Realignment,” the column describes how some Christian and atheist scholars share common ground based not in beliefs — but in a belief in objective truth — while intersectional “woke” atheists (and even some intersectional “woke” Christians) have abandoned objective truth for subjective reality:
As a point of contact, I am a non-intersectional, liberal atheist. If a conservative Christian believes Jesus walked on water—and believes this either is or is not true for everyone regardless of race or gender—and if she values discourse and adheres to basic rules of engagement, then she is closer to my worldview than an atheist who believes race and gender play a role in determining objective truth and that her opponents should not be allowed to air what she considers harmful views.
The new woke left, using cancel culture, a rejection of objective truth and intersectionality as their cudgels, are fighting to destroy the notion shared by old school liberals and Christians alike that there is an objective truth that can be known through science, reason and other methods and sources:
In Culture War 2.0 the correspondence theory of truth—with its commitment to the idea that there are better and worse ways to come to knowledge about an objectively knowable world—is no longer common ground. For those on one side of this latest fight, the correspondence theory of truth has been replaced with more subjective ways of knowing. But this is not merely a turn away from objectivity to subjectivity. Culture War 2.0 is marked by one side’s turn toward understanding knowledge as determined by identity markers like race, gender, disability status, and sexual orientation. And—so the theory goes—the more “oppression variables” comprise one’s identity, the clearer one’s understanding of reality becomes.
Think about it like this: cis-hetero white males see the world in grayscale. Every oppression characteristic gives one access to an additional color. So cis-hetero black males see the world in grayscale and blue. Cis-lesbian black females see the world in grayscale, blue, and orange. Trans non-binary disabled uneducated black immigrants see the world in a panoply of colors and thus are positioned to have a more accurate view of reality. In Culture War 2.0, correspondence theories of truth aren’t just dead: truth itself is inaccessible to people who do not possess the right identity characteristics.
This new philosophy is at war with the old guard of objective truth proponents, and “what’s at stake is no less than the future of Western Civilization. How this will play out depends on who wins Culture War 2.0,” Boghossian writes.
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