The Secular Age

Whoever believes in God today knows that they could also refrain from doing so. They know people who do not believe, and these people live no worse, no more foolishly and no more unhappily than they do. Conversely, whoever does not believe today knows that clever people believe. Belief has become one possibility among several. That is new.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has devoted an extensive work to this change, A Secular Age, published in 2007, in German Ein säkulares Zeitalter. He himself formulates his guiding question simply: why is it so hard in many milieus of the modern West to believe in God, while around 1500 it was practically impossible not to believe in him? The change he traces leads from a society in which belief in God was beyond question to one in which, even for very religious people, it is only one possibility among others.

Taylor also describes this situation in himself. It seems unthinkable to him, he says, to give up his own faith. And yet he knows people who are very close to him and do not believe, and whose way of life he cannot, if he is honest, dismiss as depraved, blinded or unworthy. This is why Taylor matters for this book: he answers the question of whether there is a neutral standpoint from which one can judge belief and unbelief, the human being and the machine.

What is meant here by “God” should not be tacitly presupposed. Martin Luther gave an answer that reaches beyond Christianity: a god, he says, is that from which one expects all good and in which one takes refuge in every need; “whatever you hang your heart on and rely on, that is really your god”. [Translator's note: Luther's sentence uses the German idiom “sein Herz an etwas hängen”, literally “to hang one's heart on something”, that is, to attach oneself to something with one's whole heart. The image recurs below.] The theologian Paul Tillich later said that religion is the state of being grasped by what concerns us unconditionally. In this sense every human being has a god, even those who do not believe. This is why there have been so many gods in history: people have hung their hearts on many things, on fertility, war and success, on their own nation. Where the God of the Bible disappears from life, the place seldom remains empty. Money, success, health, recognition or a political idea can occupy it, and so can technology. Chapter 15 shows how talk about artificial intelligence adopts words of redemption. Whoever asks what a person hangs their heart on is asking about their god, whether or not the word is used.

For the subject of artificial intelligence this change matters for three reasons. First, today's systems are being built in a society that can no longer rely on a shared image of the human being; what a model assumes about the human being is chosen by someone. Second, a few companies make these systems for hundreds of millions of people with very different beliefs, and their answers intervene in precisely the questions Taylor describes. Third, what future generations take for granted shifts, among other things through the tools with which they think. Whoever wants to know what artificial intelligence does to us, and to those who come after us, must understand in what intellectual space it is emerging.

Taylor distinguishes three meanings of the word secular. First, secular can mean that public space manages without God. Church and state are separated, and in the economy, politics, education or work people follow norms that refer neither to God nor to religious beliefs; each sphere follows its own rationality. Second, secular can mean that belief and religious practice decline, that people turn away from God and no longer go to church. And third, it can mean that the conditions of belief have changed: belief in God has become one option among several, and often not the most comfortable one.

The three meanings do not coincide. The United States separated church and state early and yet is among the most religious societies of the West. In the third sense, Taylor nevertheless considers it secular.

What the separation of church and state means is often understood too simply. It does not mean that religion and politics have nothing to say to each other. In the United States the Constitution has, since 1791, prohibited a state church and at the same time protected the free exercise of religion. When Thomas Jefferson spoke in 1802 of a “wall of separation”, he was writing to a Baptist congregation that feared the state might interfere in its faith. In this letter the wall was meant above all to protect faith from the state. Switzerland has a different order. The Federal Constitution begins with the words “In the name of Almighty God!”, and the relationship between church and state is regulated by the cantons. Most of them have a “limping separation”: they recognise certain churches under public law and work together with them; Geneva and Neuchâtel have largely separated church and state. In both countries it is the institutions that are separated, not the convictions. Believers have their say in politics, and the state sets the framework within which religion is lived. This is instructive for artificial intelligence: even where a system presents itself as neutral, the convictions of its makers have not disappeared, they have only become less visible.

It is this third meaning that concerns Taylor, and it is this that concerns us here too. A person today can live devoutly and nevertheless live in a secular age in the third sense. They know that their faith is not self-evident. They must hold on to it against objections they encounter daily, and they cannot rely on the people around them sharing it. This applies to the believer just as much as to the unbeliever. The latter's unbelief, too, is no longer something self-evident, but one position among others.

A widespread narrative about modernity holds that people gradually laid aside superstition, took away God and the supernatural, and that what was left over was reality as it is. Science, on this account, refuted and displaced faith. Taylor considers this explanation unsatisfactory. The arguments that were supposed to refute religion, for instance on the basis of Darwin, he does not consider sound, and in his view they also do not explain why people actually lost their faith, even when they give this as their reason. He calls narratives of this kind subtraction stories. Timothy Keller, pastor and author, adopts the term and likewise rejects this narrative.

According to Taylor's account, the secular order did not simply arise against Christianity, but in part out of it. He gives the first part of his work the heading “Work of Reform”, and in the epilogue he notes that Reform was conducive to disenchantment and helped to destroy the medieval Christian cosmos. Reform movements sought to move all Christians to a more intense piety, to more discipline and personal responsibility. Unintentionally, they thereby made possible what followed later: a disenchanted world in which no spirits are at work any more, the disembedding of the individual from their communities and finally a humanism that manages entirely without reference to anything higher.

The thought has a point that strikes both sides. Whoever believes cannot simply describe modernity as a falling away from faith, for it emerged in part from their own earnestness. Whoever does not believe cannot describe their view as what remains once the illusions are removed. The secular view, too, is learned. It has a history, and it rests on decisions.

With this change, the way human beings experience themselves also shifts. To describe this, Taylor distinguishes between a porous self and a buffered self; Chapter 3 presents this distinction in more detail.

At the same time the human being moves to the centre. In the scholarly discussion Taylor is read as saying that the question of how a good God can permit suffering only gains its present sharpness with this turn. Whoever places the human being at the centre and trusts their own reason to judge God's ways expects an answer to evil. Only then does suffering become an argument against God.

Keller puts it more sharply: before about 1500, he says, no one concluded from suffering that God does not exist. Stated so absolutely, this cannot be sustained. Already in antiquity the question was asked how a good and powerful God could permit evil; it has come down to us under the name of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. What is attested is the weaker claim: in modernity the argument has gained a new force.

What is actually new about the secular age? Taylor describes three phases. First there arises a genuine alternative to Christian faith, exclusive humanism. Taylor defines it as a stance that acknowledges neither final goals beyond human flourishing nor any allegiance to an authority beyond this flourishing, and he notes that this is true of no earlier society. By way of comparison: in the Judaeo-Christian tradition the worship of God does not depend on its serving human flourishing. “Your will be done” does not simply mean “See to it that human beings flourish”, although God wills their flourishing. Then the possibilities multiply. Taylor speaks of a nova effect, after the image of a star that suddenly flares up: an ever greater variety of moral and spiritual options arises, which soon spans the whole range of the thinkable. Finally this variety, which was at first reserved for the elites, spreads to whole societies. Today, Taylor writes, we live in a spiritual supernova, in a kind of galloping pluralism. This third phase is carried by what Taylor calls the age of authenticity. The North Atlantic world, he says, has undergone a cultural revolution: alongside moral and economic-instrumental individualism there has emerged an “expressive” individualism, the search for one's own authentic way of living. What Romanticism reserved for a small elite has, he says, become a mass phenomenon.

In this situation belief and unbelief weaken each other. Taylor speaks of a general fragilisation that affects religious and areligious views alike. The whole culture, he says, is marked by cross-pressures: on the one side stand narratives of a world closed in on itself, on the other the sense that these narratives are not enough, a sense reinforced by encounters with believers or by intimations of the transcendent. In between lies a multitude of intermediate positions that are under pressure from both sides. Chapter 1 described the frame within which this pressure arises: science, society and technology form an immanent frame that can be understood without reference to anything transcendent but leaves open the question of the transcendent. Only a particular interpretation turns it into a closed world.

Taylor is not, in all this, an opponent of secular humanism. He acknowledges its moral achievements and explicitly denies that religion is automatically morally superior. But he asks whether a purely this-worldly humanism can carry the highest moral demands: self-transcendence, sacrifice, unconditional love of humankind.

Keller draws on Taylor, but he goes further than Taylor does. The values to which secular people appeal, equal human rights and universal benevolence, follow logically, according to Keller, from a Creator who creates all human beings in his image; without him, he says, they are an enormous leap of faith.

Taylor himself puts it more cautiously. At the end of his earlier work on the sources of the modern self he expresses doubt as to whether purely secular justifications can motivate the great demands of love of neighbour in the long run. He explicitly calls this thesis a conjecture, not a worked-out argument. Keller turns a conjecture about motivation into a logical derivation. That is an overextension, and this book does not adopt it.

A book that sets out to show that there is no neutral standpoint must also examine the sources it relies on in this respect. Taylor does not argue neutrally, and he does not conceal this. Already in the introduction he speaks of his own faith, and reviews note that his Catholic conviction is clearly visible in the work. For him, the highest good in Christianity is a love that points beyond human flourishing. A contribution to a scholarly symposium, to which Taylor himself replied, sees the work as rhetorically on the side of the believer.

Taylor himself shows how one can deal with this. At the close of his work he explicitly places his narrative alongside other accounts of the same story. And he distinguishes an interpretation that knows it is an interpretation from one that takes itself for granted and smiles condescendingly at those who think differently. This is precisely what this book attempts when it discloses its author's standpoint at the end of each chapter.

Further objections to Taylor concern his reach. Taylor himself explicitly restricts his account to the North Atlantic world. Critics reproach him for nevertheless generalising too much and for overlooking how differently secularity has unfolded in other parts of the world. The picture this chapter draws is therefore a Western picture.

Against the thesis that secularism, too, is a worldview stands a position that distinguishes between two kinds of secularism. The one is a worldview: the conviction that there is nothing beyond the world. The other is a political procedure: the neutrality of the state towards all worldviews, so that people with different convictions can live together peacefully.

Jürgen Habermas, philosopher, defended this second form in 2009 in a public conversation with Taylor. Religious reasons, he argued, may be voiced in public, and the same reason is at work in them as elsewhere. But as soon as enforceable decisions of the state are at stake, religious reasons must be translated into a language that is accessible to all. Taylor countered: secular reasons, he held, have no special status, and religious reasons cannot be translated without loss; religion is only one case of worldview diversity among many. In the scholarly discussion the controversy remains open.

The two positions exclude each other less than it seems. At the level of worldviews it can hold that secularism, too, is an interpretation that rests on trust. At the level of the state it can hold that neutrality as a procedure is the condition for people with different interpretations being able to live together. Whoever distinguishes the two can agree with Taylor and Habermas at the same time.

What neutrality means, however, is itself disputed, and Switzerland in particular knows this dispute well. The word comes from the Latin “neuter”, neither of the two; in Medieval Latin “neutralis” meant belonging to neither party. A tension is already contained in the word. Neutral can mean taking no side on principle, and it can mean evading a decision; the Duden also records this disparaging sense for “Neutrum”. [Translator's note: The Duden is the standard dictionary of the German language; “Neutrum” is the German word for the neuter.] Swiss neutrality has been anchored in the Federal Constitution since 1848 and is regarded as permanent and armed: Switzerland does not take part in the wars of other states and does not support any warring party militarily, but it can adopt sanctions. On 27 September 2026 it voted on a popular initiative that sought to define this neutrality more strictly. It would have largely ruled out sanctions against warring parties, except those of the UN, and restricted cooperation with military alliances to the case of an attack. The supporters argued that Switzerland would be safer this way. The opponents, among them the Federal Council, countered that aggressors and those attacked must not be treated alike. The initiative was rejected with around 70 per cent voting No and in all cantons. The dispute shows that neutrality is not the absence of a stance, but itself a decision about what one takes a position on and what not. This holds for a state just as much as for a system that answers questions from people of all worldviews.

What does the secular age have to do with artificial intelligence? More than one might think at first sight.

First, artificial intelligence touches on the nova effect. As a reminder: by this Taylor means that the possibilities of believing and not believing have multiplied, as with a star that flares up, until today everyone puts together their own mixture (section 2.5). Artificial intelligence acts on this in two opposite directions. It can increase the variety further: a system that adapts to each person gives everyone the answers that fit their view of the world, and the supernova becomes, as it were, personal (section 14.6). But it can also level the variety: when many people consult the same few models, their answers become alike. A study from 2024 found that short stories written with ideas from an artificial intelligence were individually more inventive but more similar to one another. At the same time, hopes and fears that were once directed at religion are migrating to technology. The journalist Fritz Espenlaub says on Deutschlandfunk that the world should not one day stand unprepared before a finished machine god. Chapter 15 takes up this trail. Whether the discourse on artificial intelligence is itself a new offshoot of the nova effect remains an open question of this book.

Second, the question of neutrality arises anew. A system that is deployed worldwide answers questions from people of all worldviews. What neutrality can it claim if even secularism is not a neutral position? Chapter 13 takes up Habermas's rule of translation again and asks what it means for the values that are written into such systems.