ABSTRACT
The ‘disenchantment’ of the world can be traced back to the tendency (from the early modern period onwards) to relegate meaning and value to the subjective domain, leaving us with a bleached out, value-free conception of objective reality. What might it be to recover a reenchanted understanding of the world, where meaning and value regain their objective status? Given that human beings appear to have an ineradicable need to ‘enchant’ their world in some way or another, it might be supposed that rejecting a theistic foundation for meaning and value leaves us free to devise alternative frameworks of our own to do the job. But could such a project succeed? The difficulty here is that of seeing how meaning and value could be constructed or invented, as opposed to being discovered or responded to. Yet if theism is true, we do not have to ‘reenchant’ the cosmos, since it is already enchanted, though not in any magical or ‘spooky’ sense, but because it is replete with objective beauty and goodness. Our task will then be to cultivate responsiveness to the properties that are already there. But the idea of a halfway house, where we can resist theism but preserve genuine objective value is an illusion. If we buy into a worldview that strips out value from the world, then nothing we can do will serve to put it back again.
