Western civilization believes in increasingly few Big Things, as the Greek poet Archilochus and the 20th-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin called them. This includes the One Big Thing, God, the numerous philosophical proofs of whose existence many claim to find insufficient and unbelievable.

Among those things the West does believe in are the numerous discoveries that scientists have claimed for themselves, such as the recent discovery that the universe is expanding at its edges – that is to say, it is receding from us – faster than the speed of light, owing to the cumulative stretching of space: a thing that seems to me to be far more unimaginable and unbelievable than the existence of a single triune God who created that universe and everything in it.

Yet if the media are to be believed, the same class of people, roughly speaking, who accept all or most of the findings of modern science deny the existence of metaphysical truth as being no more credible than the God who embodies it and speaks it to all men.

Belief, it seems, is itself a fluid thing, infinitely susceptible of contraction and expansion

Belief, it seems, is itself a fluid thing, infinitely susceptible of contraction and expansion

Rather, all ideas and claims of truth are relative,........

© The Spectator