Roughly speaking, postmodern contextualism has at its heart the twin convictions (1) that claims to human knowledge always come within a linguistic, social, and cultural context, and (2) that this threefold context makes it impossible to know universal, transcendent truths. For the postmodern contextualist, truth is local to a particular culture or society; truth is culturally relative. More modest forms of contextualism might allow that sciences can arrive at universal truths, but a detailed look at the social contexts of sciences and the social flow of scientific claims to knowledge shows that sciences are the product of scientists, and scientists are social people.

This article is excerpted from Vern Poythress’s Making Sense of the World: How the Trinity Helps to Explain Reality.
A Christian view of metaphysics (the fundamental nature of reality) contrasts with competing views from the history of philosophy. A survey of these views could easily fill a large book.[1] The following analyses sample and simplify some of the principal views that have most influenced the Western world.[2]
Criteria for Evaluation
We will evaluate each view from three perspectives.

God. Does this view cohere with the existence of the Trinitarian God?
Knowledge. Does this view give an adequate account of how we can know that something is true?
Ethics. Does this view offer a solid basis for ethics?

Without an ethics that supports truth-telling and honesty, no view can sustain itself plausibly. Ethics is one point at which we can test a view according to Jesus’ principle “Thus you will recognize them by their fruits” (Matt. 7:20). Both actual behavior and proposals for ethical principles can be considered to be the “fruit.” Of course, the fruit has to be judged by biblical standards. If the fruit is bad, it shows that the root is bad, though it does not yet show specifically what went wrong with the root.
Philosophical Materialism
The most prominent metaphysical view today is philosophical materialism.[3] Philosophical materialism says that reality consists of matter and energy in motion. There are some variations among advocates of philosophical materialism. “Hard” materialism denies the existence of anything except matter and motion. “Soft” materialism says that while matter and motion are the foundation and the final explanation of all reality, complex combinations of matter can give rise to complex phenomena that we consider to be distinct—human beings, ideas, conscious experience, moral standards, and so on.
What is wrong with philosophical materialism?
God. God is not material. Either explicitly or implicitly, the various forms of materialism deny that God exists.
Knowledge. Materialism cannot give an account of itself, because the philosophical idea of philosophical materialism is not material. Alvin Plantinga makes a similar point in his extended interaction with materialistic Darwinism—a specific embodiment or type of materialism.[4] Of course, soft materialism can affirm a kind of existence of persons and ideas and abstract concepts. But how can we assure ourselves that our ideas of truth correspond to the world? Materialistic Darwinism promises only that we are constructed so as to enhance survival. But survival would appear to depend on the movements of molecules and nerve impulses and other material events. How do we know that these movements correspond to mental ideas in a way that makes these ideas true?
Ethics. If matter is ultimate, then in the final analysis human beings are nothing more than clumps of matter. Ethical values, commitments, and choices are nothing more than personal preferences. For example, you prefer vanilla ice cream and your friend prefers chocolate. Likewise, you may prefer to help the old lady across the street, but your friend prefers to mug her. There is no transcendental set of values to which to appeal to adjudicate right actions from wrong ones, because a value is not a material thing. Ethical choices are merely the result of the motions of atoms and molecules, and atoms and molecules do not care about ethics! The natural endpoint for the ethics of philosophical materialism is the motto “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32).
Pantheism
Next, consider pantheism. According to pantheism, all is “God.” Or, in panentheism, all is a part of God.
What is wrong with pantheism?
God. The Bible teaches a clear distinction between God, who is the Creator, and the world, which is created. Pantheism and panentheism have a kind of “god,” but it is not the God of the Bible.
Knowledge. Since each individual allegedly “is” God, it would seem that each individual unproblematically knows everything. If that is true, why are there differences in belief? Moreover, the collapse of distinctions among things in pantheism threatens to collapse the distinctiveness of statements about things in the world. If all is genuinely and thoroughly one, there is no room for distinctions. Each individual may indeed know everything that is to be known, but what is to be known is only one thing, which is a blank darkness.
Ethics. Pantheism cannot distinguish between good and evil because both are a part of the ultimate nature of reality.
Skepticism
Next, consider skepticism.[5] Skepticism denies that we can know the ultimate nature of the world. (This position is distinct from the more modest negative observation, “I do not currently know what is true.”) Since this denial is a kind of minimal theory about the nature of the world, we count skepticism as a metaphysical system.
What is wrong with skepticism?
God. Skepticism denies that God can make himself clearly known, as he has in fact done in nature (general revelation) and Scripture (special revelation).
Knowledge. Skepticism has trouble providing a foundation for itself. How can it be known that nothing ultimate can be known? That idea is self-defeating; it implies that we have investigated the world and drawn valid conclusions about it, the most basic of which is that we cannot know the world.
Ethics. Skepticism offers no basis for ethics.
Kantianism (with many variations)
Next, consider the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).[6] Kant argues that true metaphysics (knowing the fundamental nature of reality) is impossible. No one can know what Kant calls “the thing in itself ”—a thing as it really is apart from our perceptions—because all our knowledge of the world is filtered by our mental and perceptual categories of knowing. We know the content of our minds and our perceptions—not the reality of the world. Kant called “things in themselves” noumena and things as they appear to us phenomena. Thus, a rational metaphysical analysis of the thing in itself, as an ultimate constituent of reality, is impossible.
But Kant still offers us a system. Its starting point is epistemology, not the thing in itself. In his epistemology, Kant tries to establish what can and cannot be known, as well as the conditions for knowing anything. Thus, there is an ultimate structure within Kant’s epistemology. The ultimate structure is not the thing in itself, but Kant’s four categories of knowing —quantity, quality, relation, and modality and their respective twelve subcategories—which order our spatiotemporal perception of things.[7] The noumenal is distinguished from the phenomenal, and pure reason from practical reason. Whatever is phenomenal, what comes to us through our senses, comes to us already within a framework of the categories.
What is wrong with Kantianism?
God. Kant’s system is antagonistic to the Bible because in his system God belongs to the noumenal. God cannot directly reveal himself in the world through appearances. But this is precisely what he did at Mount Sinai, and what he did in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Moreover, in Kant’s system, man virtually takes the place of the Christian God. He “creates” the world as we know it by the imposition of the categories that already exist in his mind.
Knowledge. Kant’s system cannot account for scientific knowledge based on the phenomenal, though it claims to offer an account. The laws of science are particular laws, not just a generic deduction from the principle of causality.[8] For example, Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation says that any two massive bodies exert attractive forces on each other. The magnitude of the force is proportional to the mass of each of the bodies and is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.[9]
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A great prayer to memorize and pray for your family, friends, church, and everyone you know.… that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Colossians 2:2-3)

Paul did everything by prayer. Not some things or most things. The secret of his power and usefulness was that he was a man of such clear understanding and humility who knew he must pray without ceasing—prayer with no intermission.
He knew the battle was not against flesh and blood but that it was raging on all sides with every kind of demonic power, powers that can only be overcome by a man clothed in God’s armor and strength and praying at all times in the spirit (Ephesians 6:10-20). It was (and is) a battle for the souls of men and women, boys and girls, to take their every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
And so, listen to his prayer this morning. A great prayer to memorize and pray for your family, friends, church, and everyone you know.
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The biblical command to honour your dad cannot be a licence for dads to be horrible knowing that their christian children have to suck it up and honour them. You are called to honour your dad. But the type of dad your dad is shapes the ways and the extent that you honour him. A father has a wide range of biblical commands as to how he is to live in general, and in particular, how he is to live as a dad. These commands matter to both the father and the child.

Some of you have great dads. Some of you definitely do not; they abandoned and/or abused you. Given this, how can the biblical command “Honour your Father” apply to all of us (Exod. 20:12; Deut 5:6)? Below are nine short points which will, hopefully, help you. 
By the way, I know that the command is to “honour your father and your mother.” However, I was asked to write an article for Father’s Day, so I will only refer to fathers in this article. What I say applies equally to honouring fathers and mothers.
First, Many Evangelical Churches and Ministries Need to Repent
 We have often, far too often, talked in church as if everyone had a terrific Dad. Our advice and exhortations naively assume this. This has the unintended consequence of creating needless guilt and putting heavy loads on people whose fathers were terrible. 
The call to repent also applies to churches and pastors who become aware of how much some in the congregation have suffered under terrible fathers and react by going to the opposite extreme. We become silent on Fathers Day, and all other times of the year. Worse, sometimes churches like this will talk as if there are mainly bad fathers! If the first mistake is to close your eyes and ears to those in our midst who have suffered under terrible fathers and therefore give poor teaching; the “reactive” mistake is to close our mouths on the subject at all, acting as if there is no command in the Bible about honouring Fathers, and thereby depriving the church of any teaching on the command to honour fathers. 
Ignoring a biblical command does not make it go away or become irrelevant. It just impoverishes preachers and hearers alike.
Second, Being a Father Is an Inherent Honour
You are to honour your father because, in a sense, to adapt a phrase about marriage from the Book of Common Prayer 1662, “fatherhood is an honourable estate instituted by God in the time of man’s innocency” and therefore inherently worthy of being honoured. If you read Genesis 1 and 2, you will see that the Triune God created human beings male and female with the intent that a man and a woman would marry and have children. Becoming and being a father to your children was a key aspect of God’s creational intent. The fall, recorded in Genesis 3, means that every aspect of your experience is touched, in small and large ways, by sin. However, while sin affected every father, it did not remove the inherent honour of being a dad. This is woven into the created order.
Okay, how shall we then live? How do we honour great dads and terrible dads and every dad in between? How do we honour dads in this “already/not yet” time between the resurrection of Jesus and His return? My remaining points will address this. 
Third, the Call to Honour Your Father Is a Call to a Certain Posture That Leads to Wise and Beautiful Action
The Bible was written in a particular time and place. But in the providence of God it was written for every people group in every time and place until Jesus returns.
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