Life & Mortality Quote by Phillip E. Johnson

A lot is smuggled into that neat little “typically defined.” Phillip E. Johnson isn’t neutrally describing modernism; he’s staging a moral diagnosis. By framing modernism as what happens when “people realize God is truly dead,” he borrows Nietzsche’s provocation but strips it down to a single cultural punchline: once transcendence is gone, everything else follows. The phrase “truly dead” doubles as emphasis and accusation. It implies not just disbelief, but a kind of willful finality, as if modernity has slammed a door and then pretended the silence is freedom.

The second half - “we are therefore on our own” - does the real work. It’s emotionally plain, almost parental in tone, and that’s strategic. Johnson translates an abstract intellectual shift into a felt condition: abandonment, exposure, the anxiety of responsibility without a cosmic referee. This isn’t modernism as a style (Joyce, Picasso, fractured form); it’s modernism as a predicament, the story of how epistemology turns into loneliness.

Context matters because Johnson, known for critiques of scientific naturalism and for championing Intelligent Design arguments, has a stake in treating “God is dead” as cultural catastrophe rather than philosophical challenge. His “typically defined” is less a citation of scholarly consensus than a rhetorical move to make secular modernity look like the origin point of relativism, moral drift, and institutional overconfidence. It works because it compresses a messy century of art, war, science, and politics into a single, unsettling mood: the moment the universe stops talking back.