Podcast Summary

Know What You Believe with Michael Horton

Episode: Why God Feels Absent in Modern Life with Joseph Minich
Date: July 15, 2025
Guest: Joseph Minich, Teaching Fellow at Davenant Institute, author of Bulwarks of Unbelief

Episode Overview

This episode tackles the pervasive sense of God’s absence in modern life, even among believers. Michael Horton and Joseph Minich explore why faith feels so disorienting today, the atmospheric and cultural factors contributing to this disconnection, and how apologetics and spirituality are evolving in an age marked by technological advancement, fractured communities, and the rise of "spiritual but not religious” sensibilities. The discussion is both philosophically rich and pastorally sensitive, drawing on thinkers like Charles Taylor and C.S. Lewis to illuminate the challenges and opportunities for contemporary faith.

Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. The Problem: Faith Feels Difficult, Even for Believers

• Background: Joseph Minich’s book, Bulwarks of Unbelief, is aimed at understanding why belief in God is so hard—even when one is intellectually convinced by the arguments.
• Struggle Identified: Many Christians, including Minich himself, experience periods where God feels absent or faith seems implausible (01:53–02:00).
• Core Question: Why do rational arguments for God's existence often fail to satisfy at a deeper, existential level?

“I think a struggle that I had... a struggle with the plausibility of atheism. Probably through my 20s and, and maybe into my early 30s, certainly through my seminary education, I watched a lot of my friends lose their faith.”
— Joseph Minich (02:00)

2. Charles Taylor and the "Subtraction Story"

• Minich draws on Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to challenge the idea that unbelief is simply what’s left when you subtract religious propositions; instead, modern atheism has its own "positive orthodoxies" built from historical development (03:19–03:20).
• Taylor’s framework pushes us to see that both belief and unbelief are historically contingent, not timeless defaults.

“The subtraction story. That's not actually how this occurred.”
— Joseph Minich (03:20)

3. The Role of Technology, Labor, and Material Culture

• Minich emphasizes that faith struggles today are less about intellectual arguments and more about changes in the environment—technology, work, and social structures subtly rewire what feels plausible (04:13–05:52).
• The plausibility of God’s existence is shaped not only by beliefs, but also by daily practices and tacit cultural norms.

“It's partly ideas, but it's ideas mixed up with all the ways in which we're practically and tacitly unconsciously engaged with the world... built into our practices that we never barely name, but nevertheless deeply shape our perceptions of reality.”
— Joseph Minich (04:27)

4. Rethinking Apologetics: From Intellectual Certainty to Human Honesty

• Apologetics must move from cold certainty to an honest engagement with doubts and existential struggles (05:53–06:29).
• Minich encourages a posture of patient endurance and confidence in God's love, rather than panicked certainty.

“Calm down and work with God. Live a life and work through those things as a human, and then you will have something to offer apologetically others.”
— Joseph Minich (06:25)

5. The Loss of "Gravitational Pull"—How Modernity Disorients Faith

• Faith crises today are less about new arguments against God and more about the loss of grounding forces (“gravitational pull”)—community, concrete labor, and agency (08:57–14:09).
• The analogy with gender: As traditional roles dissolve, people feel lost not because of lack of theory but lack of the old gravitational structures.
• In premodern life, the world was experienced as full of agents; God as the capital-A Agent was a natural extension. Now, both community and the natural world are less immediately agentic (13:00–15:00).

“In the old world, everything you experienced was a world of agencies. And so the idea that there's a kind of capital a agent at the bottom... was just natural.”
— Joseph Minich (13:19)

6. Modern Anonymity, Technology, and the Self

• Technological advancements, urbanization, and online life erode our immediate experiences of other people's agency and the stubbornness of the world (14:09–16:00).
• This shift makes God-as-ultimate-Agent a much more distant or abstract concept.

“To walk around outside before an automobile in modern technology is to experience a world that's just acting on you stubbornly in your way. You have to navigate around it... In the modern world, what is gone is not Thomas's five proofs, but it's those phenomenological attachments that reinforced that sense of agency.”
— Joseph Minich (13:35)

• Memorable Illustration: “Young people sitting around a fire pit together, but talking to each other on their phones.”
  — Michael Horton (14:09)

7. Rise of "Spiritual but Not Religious," New Age, and Neo-Spiritualisms

• Despite a sense of God’s absence, people aren't turning to atheism as much as to alternative spiritualities (17:35–19:45).
• Many modern spiritualities are fundamentally “naturalist”—they involve inner experiences and energies but lack transcendent agency or “outside” power.

“Even if you get kind of spiritually things or ghostly sentiments... it's still roughly naturalist in the sense that there's nothing from the outside getting in.”
— Joseph Minich (19:45)

• Minich admires Lewis’s approach in Miracles, which focuses on critiquing naturalism more than materialism, to meet both atheists and new-age spiritualists on their own ground.

8. Apologetics and Imagination

• Lewis’s idea: Christian truth must “steal past the watchful dragons” of the soul (16:00–17:28).
• Apologetics should invoke the imagination and offer better stories—not just better arguments.

“We're all instinctually...naturalists, even when we're Christians. And it's hard for some truths to kind of penetrate beneath our intellectual and practical instincts... literature... steals past the watchful dragons of our soul.”
— Joseph Minich paraphrasing C.S. Lewis (16:45–17:28)

9. Endurance, Rewiring Desire, and Hope for Satisfaction

• Enduring in faith means trusting that God meets us in confusion and absence, and that satisfaction in faith is possible.
• Minich shares his own experience that over time, existential doubts can fade—not always through argument, but through a transformed relationship to reality and self.

“The reward for enduring is that God really is faithful and that he really is true and that your mind really can be satisfied. And that surprised me.”
— Joseph Minich (21:55)

Notable Quotes and Timestamps

• “You can struggle and wonder. Are all the theistic proofs so many ornate arguments about the structure of the emperor's clothes or...is there something kind of gravitational pull underneath all of this?” — Joseph Minich (01:59)
• “The plausibility of atheism...it's atmospheric...all the ways in which we're practically and tacitly unconsciously engaged with the world...” — Joseph Minich (04:09)
• “Apologetics becomes a sort of posturing of the answer man before the ignorant...but what apologetics needs to be is, I don't want to call it self therapy...but hey, you're walking around not fully persuaded...” — Joseph Minich (05:53)
• “Maybe God is in fact totally okay with you being in the middle of an epistemic crisis and that's actually where he meets you.” — Joseph Minich (09:50)
• “The agency of others is in one sense epiphenomenal.” — Joseph Minich (13:00)
• “If I really don't see the world as a place full of agents, then it's hard for me to get up the ladder to God as the great agent, the creator of all agents.” — Michael Horton (16:04)
• “Even if you get kind of spiritually things or ghostly sentiments... it's still roughly naturalist.” — Joseph Minich (19:45)
• “This is not just about having the right doctor and having the right ideas, the right beliefs, but having it flood our imagination and rewire our brains.” — Michael Horton (21:25)
• “The reward for enduring is that God really is faithful and that he really is true and that your mind really can be satisfied... it went away.” — Joseph Minich (21:55)

Key Timestamps

• 01:51–03:20: Minich on his personal struggle and Taylor’s “subtraction story”
• 04:09–05:53: The role of atmosphere, culture, and habit in faith plausibility
• 08:44–09:50: The pastoral challenge: enduring faith amid expectation of clarity
• 13:00–15:00: Three-legged stool: “world, self, others” as agents in old vs. modern world
• 16:00–17:28: Lewis, apologetics, and “stealing past the watchful dragons” with imagination
• 17:35–19:45: Rise of “spiritual but not religious” and naturalized spiritualisms
• 21:55–22:41: Enduring doubt, satisfaction in faith, and God’s faithfulness

Tone & Takeaways

• The conversation is candid, reflective, and compassionate, combining philosophical rigor with practical pastoral concern.
• The core message: Christian faith in the modern world requires not only intellectual engagement but also endurance, honest wrestling, and a reimagining of what it means to relate to God, ourselves, and reality.
• Apologetics must adapt—less as a “final answer” and more as patient companionship for people in seasons of confusion, leveraging both clear thinking and evocative imagination.

Final Words

“The reward for enduring is that God really is faithful and that he really is true and that your mind really can be satisfied... it went away.”
— Joseph Minich (21:55)

This episode equips listeners to understand their own doubts, see them in the broader context of modern life, and offers hope that the struggle with God's “absence” can give way to a deeper, more resilient faith.