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J.P. Moreland on a Sensate Culture

Love God With All Your Mind (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1997), p. 91.

[P]eople no longer base their decisions on a careful use of abstract reasoning in assessing the pertinent issues, nor are they as capable of doing so compared to earlier generations when thought was communicated by writing and abstract ideas, not by images… In a sensate culture people believe only in the reality of the physical universe capable of being experienced with the five senses. A sensate culture is secular, this-worldly, and empirical. By contrast, an ideational culture embraces the sensory world but also accepts the notion that an extra-empirical, immaterial reality can be know as well — a reality consisting in God, the soul, immaterial beings, values, purposes, and various abstract object like numbers and propositions… [A] sensate culture will eventually disintegrate because it lacks the intellectual resources necessary to sustain a public and private life conductive of corporate and individual human flourishing.