ARE WE REALLY SO MODERN? by Adam Kirsch

Interesting overview in The New Yorker of philosophy and asking fundamental questions about existence, God and modernity. 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/05/the-dream-of-enlightenment-by-anthony-gottlieb?utm_content=bufferde25f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer 

"Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us. Modern life, which we tend to think of as an accelerating series of gains in knowledge, wealth, and power over nature, is predicated on a loss: the loss of contact with the past. Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as either a disinheritance or an emancipation; much of modern politics is determined by which side you take on this question. But it is always disorienting"

"One of the most popular names for the unexplainable is God: God is how we answer questions about creation and purpose that we can’t answer in any other way. Certainly, both Descartes and Leibniz relied on God to balance the equation of the universe. Without him, they believed, the world did not make sense. The philosophers’ God was not necessarily identical to the God of Christianity, but he had some reassuringly familiar attributes, such as beneficence and providential oversight of the world."