The interview is interesting and not overlong, but toward the end of the interview Egnor asserts his belief that materialism (the belief that everything that exists is reducible to material stuff) and atheism (the lack of a belief in God) are fading and are giving way to a 21st century paganism.
He states:
That said, I believe that atheism and materialism are on the wane. I believe that New Atheism and materialism were never viable metaphysical or scientific perspectives. They are vacuous nonsense. They were meant to open a door — to discredit the Christian understanding of nature and man — to let in paganism, which is an incredibly malignant force that is on the rise in the West.One might ask who, or what, "meant" for Christianity to be discredited and paganism to be revived, but set that question aside. John Daniel Davidson argues that paganism is the endpoint of a loss of Christian consensus in his book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come.
Child sacrifice — abortion and the castration and sexual mutilation of mentally ill children, sexual grooming of children in schools, drag queen story hour for preschoolers, as well as “assisted suicide” and euthanasia for despondent people, rampant pornography and sexual perversion, and the ubiquitous moral relativism that plagues our culture … these are hallmarks of paganism.
Paganism, unlike atheism or materialism, is a religious perspective that is appealing to billions of people, and in fact, is in a real sense the natural religion of man. It was paganism, not atheism and materialism, that Christianity vanquished, and it is paganism that is returning.
I am very concerned about paganism, which is clearly on the rise in our culture. I believe that materialism and atheism were never meant to be enduring philosophies — they have never been viable ways of understanding man and nature. They are intellectually and morally vacuous. Materialism and atheism were meant to discredit Christianity and open the door to paganism, which is enduring and poses an enormous threat to countless souls and to Western civilization.
Davidson writes:
There is no secular utopia waiting for us in a post-Christian world now coming into being, no future in which we get to retain the advantages and benefits of Christendom without the faith from which they sprang. Western civilization and its accoutrements depend on Christianity.Many others have made the same point in recent years, Tom Holland in his book Dominion, being one of the most noteworthy since Holland is himself a secular man.
Davidson does not limit the definition of paganism just to worshippers of the gods of pre-Christian societies, but rather defines it as "an entire system of belief, which holds that truth is relative and that we are therefore free to ascribe sacred or divine status to the here and now, to things or activities, even to human beings if they're powerful enough....power alone determines right."
His definition is similar to that of the early church fathers who considered anyone who wasn't a Jew or a Christian to be a pagan.
In any case, I'm not sure that paganism is the only possible consequence of a loss of a vibrant Christianity in the West. It may well be the short-term consequence, but in the long term it seems to me that a spiritually effete West will be overwhelmed by Islam.
Whether that would better than paganism I leave it to the reader to decide, but it seems likely that if Christianity continues to lose purchase with modern Western people one or both of those outcomes will be our fate.
