It has long been a tool in the toolbox of the apologist to appeal to things which are transcendent across the spectrum of humanity and to point to them as phenomena whose existence can only be accounted for by the existence of God. The most recurring of these phenomena are the universal sense of morality that humans possess, and the universal desire for something beyond the here and now.
What I have been picking up on recently through my explorations of philosophy and literary theory, however, is a trend which seeks to disconnect these universals from some omnipotent being and to adopt a bottom-up approach for explaining their existence. I hope here to show how the fields of ethics (universal morality) and desire (something beyond the here and now) have been disconnected from God and reconnected elsewhere in an attempt not to be reliant upon an onto-theological worldview. The ultimate drive here is not some rebellious urge to kill God, but rather to obtain an understanding (and therefore a kind of power) over those things which have long been assumed to lie exclusively in the realm of the divine.
It might surprise some that the most often quoted champion of postmodernism, the recently departed Jacques Derrida, set forth an "ethics" that parallels rather closely the ideas of self-sacrifice, unconditional love, and uncompromising duty the Bible has traditionally espoused. In his The Gift of Death, he even illustrates his principles by referring to Biblical texts such as Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac and Matthew's repetition of "thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee." Derrida anticipates, however, that others might construe his arrival at a Christian ethic as evidence for the "correctness" of Christianity:
"Once such a structure of conscience exists, of being-with-oneself, once I have within me... a witness that others cannot see and who is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call God exists, (there is) what I call God in me, (it happens that) I call myself God. God is in me, he is the absolute "me" or "self"... And he is made manifest... when there appears the desire and power to render absolutely invisible and to constitute within oneself a witness of that invisibility."
In fact, he condemns a traditional faith in the Christian God as "idolatrous stereotyping and representation." This strange, emotional reaction to the possibility of God is actually pretty cliché among modern academics, and it is disappointing to see such a great mind fall prey to one of the very norms he spent his career trying to debunk.
Another Jacques, the infamously obfuscating Jacques Lacan, offers us a way to explain the fact that humans are universally desirous of some utopic, better world by dusting off and appropriating Freudian psychoanalysis. To quote Lacan is to invite confusion, and I myself lean heavily upon other's interpretations of Lacan. What I gather, however, is that Lacan identifies the source of all this desire as a subconscious desire to return to the mother's womb. He sees the point at which an infant becomes conscious of itself as a kind of splitting of the self in which the conscious mind (self 1) perceives the physical body (self 2). Self 1 is constantly trying to reunite itself with self 2 by becoming fully self-aware, a state of being which is impossible to attain. This paradox of striving for self-awareness and yet never being able to attain it is reminiscent of the Christian struggle to become the Imago Dei (perfection) while at the same time being aware of the fact that perfection is unattainable. Lacan proposes that this self-splitting is the source of all desire. It explains why we are constantly struggling towards utopia, and why we have to have Freitag's Pyramid in all of our narratives.
While my faith in God is opposed to the path that both Derrida and Lacan decide to take at the fork in the road of ontology, it makes me happy to know that our paths are at least parallel on some levels. I personally don't believe that disconnecting the fields of ethics and desire from God is a necessary move in order to study them. Regardless, my prayer is that more Christian academics will become conversant in these topics. The field of Critical Realism has opened the door in the academy once more to admit those who openly profess a faith in God, and I think it is just as important as the fall of the Iron Curtain was to missionaries.