Taylorisation

  Onward. After ‘Providential Deism’, the first bit of A Secular Age ’s Part 2 (overarching title ‘The Turning Point’) we come to the second bit: ‘The Impersonal Order’—a brisker 25 pages that moves straightforwardly through its thesis, something of a relief after the much longer and rather more tangled ‘Providential Deism’ chapter.  Taylor’s aim in this chapter is straightforward enough: to map ‘a change in the understanding of God and is relation to the world’, a ‘drift away from orthodox Christian conceptions of God as an agent, interacting with humans and intervening in human history’ to ‘God as an architect of a universe operating by unchanging laws, which humans have to conform to or suffer the consquences’ [p.270]. Does Taylor mean unchanging laws of physics, or unchanging laws of physics and of morality ? I'm not sure. His main business here is to find a way of retelling this narrative that does not also entail what he has previously dubbed ‘the subtraction story’. That