Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

History, Henry Ford famously said, is just one darn thing after another.

He meant that human history is no more than a random flow of events with no cause, no purpose, no destination.

Similarly, philosopher Thomas Nagel

described history as the story between two oblivions, where everything starts with a bang and

ends with a bigger bang. The worldview behind this understanding of human history is the dominant

one of our age, not just in the academy and among philosophers, but really at the level of popular culture.

It's behind the pervasive sense of meaninglessness that more and more people feel,

but are not quite sure where it came from.

The only meaning to be found is whatever we can imagine and impose on the world around us,

then that puts the weight of the world on our shoulders,

and we're just unable to bear that kind of weight.

And this points to the fundamental confusion at the heart of this cultural moment.

What kind of world do we live in?

Is it created?

And inherent to that question is whether or not there are any givens to reality or if everything is merely socially constructed.

Think about, for example, the difference between

gravity and speed limits. A speed limit's a social construct. When a road is built, a group of people

get it together, they look at the road conditions and determine a safe number. But if the conditions

of the road change, well, then so can the speed limit. A world that rejects a creator, whether on purpose or just by osmosis,

tends to treat everything, what it means to be male and female, marriage, government law,

...