Fundamentalists and Sterling's Six Philosophical Commitments

Would these fundamentalists be opposed to the replacement commitments.

Essay Concerning Jewish Religious Fundamentalism

Claude:

Yes, almost certainly — and the alignment is striking enough to be philosophically interesting rather than merely sociological.

Fundamentalists across the major monotheistic traditions — evangelical Protestantism, traditional Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, conservative Islam — would instinctively reject each of the progressive replacements, and not simply out of religious prejudice. They would have substantive reasons rooted in their own theological commitments.

Physicalism threatens the soul, personal survival, and the entire framework of moral accountability before God. Determinism and compatibilism threaten the reality of sin and repentance — if assent isn't genuinely free, neither is the choice to turn toward or away from God. Moral constructivism and relativism are precisely what fundamentalists identify as the root of modern moral collapse — the replacement of divine moral order with human preference. Anti-foundationalism strikes at revealed truth as bedrock. Pragmatism and constructivism about truth are essentially the intellectual form of what fundamentalists call relativism. Moral anti-realism is simply nihilism with academic credentials.

What's philosophically interesting is that fundamentalists and Sterling arrive at the same six positions by entirely different routes. Sterling grounds them in classical philosophy and Stoic rational ethics. Fundamentalists ground them in revelation, scripture, and theological tradition. But the convergence is real and substantial.

This creates an unusual situation. Sterling's Core Stoicism is in some respects more intellectually congenial to a serious fundamentalist than to a mainstream academic philosopher trained in contemporary analytic or continental traditions. The fundamentalist and the Core Stoic are, on these six questions, broadly on the same side of every major divide in modern philosophy — even though their ultimate justifications differ considerably.

It also helps explain why progressive academic philosophers tend to find both fundamentalism and classical metaphysics equally uncomfortable. They recognize correctly that the same intellectual commitments underlie both, and that accepting any one of Sterling's six positions creates pressure toward the others.