Argument

Changing conceptions of science at the beginning of the twentieth century questioned the link between science and secularism, thus contributing to the development of a process of desecularization.

Science was no longer viewed as automatically relating truth to reality. This development was in part a consequence of the influence of mathematics on conceptions of science. The mathematical “existence” of true yet “non-existent” worlds permitted the inference that the connection between the true and the real is contingent. Alongside this problematization of science's link to nature there also developed a quite different critique of the cultural effects of science, which viewed science as being some kind of threat to human capacities for decoding the self or the social environment. Vis-à-vis both nature and culture, science could no longer serve as the basis for a program of secularization.

One motive for the cultural significance of the non-rational has been the perceived lack of identity between consciousness and rationality. But the equivalence between consciousness and rationality was the essence of the project of modernity. Their perceived non-equivalence made modern secularism untenable.