The new president of the Methodist Church in Ireland, the Rev David Kerr, said last night that "as we approach the 21st century, there is no longer an authentic story which helps define what is real". In his presidential address at the opening of the church's annual conference in Dublin last night, Mr Kerr said: "What is real is what is real for me at any given point. I create my own world view, my own morality, my own reality . . . This is partly what is meant when people talk about living in the post-modern world.
"There was a time when reality or truth was defined by what authority, normally religious authority, said it was. Shaman, druid, witch-doctor or priest - no matter the title - over thousands of years authoritative tradition defined what was real. With the dawning of the Enlightenment in the 17th century, this reality began to be called into question."
Most people were products of the scientific method. "All knowledge and reality is verifiable by the scientific method; if it cannot be so verified then it is not real. At its most stark, that is the scientific world view." Faith, meanwhile, "struggles to add another dimension to that definition, but finds itself at the margins of Western civilisation."
Mr Kerr said there were now three definitions of reality: religious fundamentalism, which appealed to those attracted to the authoritative definition of what was real; the vast range of research still being conducted on the basis of the scientific method; and "a rising generation [who], faced with the opportunity to create their own reality and morality, flounder towards a technologically created virtual reality and still search for meaning in drugs, new age and eastern religions, yes, and also in Christianity.
"For me the story which will help define a new reality concerns a naive young countryman who shared his dreams and visions with a few friends and then dared to challenge two opposing views of reality in his day," he said. A view of the status quo was of a comfortable accommodation with the imperial power and the other was of armed revolutionaries intent on the overthrow of a puppet state by violence.
"Against these the young idealist set a third way, of love and service, of acceptance and forgiveness, of an inclusivity which embraced friend and enemy and gave a new definition of neighbour," he said. "For his pains he was arrested and executed as dangerous subversive, both opposing groups colluding in his death."
