#32 Is reality socially constructed?
With Dr James Paul
Contemporary sociologists argue that the way we see the world is socially created within cultures. “Girls wear pink and boys wear blue,” for example, is not a universal law but something created within twentieth-century Western culture through discourse around what it means to be male and female.
If reality is socially created, then it can be recreated. But is this true of all of reality?
Can gender, religion, morality, and even our own humanness be shaped and reshaped as we choose?
Further resources:
Recommended reading:
- Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview by Albert M Wolters
- To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World by James Davison Hunter
- The Abolition of Man Paperback by C S Lewis
- The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann
Dr James Paul
Dr James Paul is director of the English branch of L’Abri Fellowship and before that he practised as a doctor in London, specialising in hospice care for the terminally ill. Many of the questions raised in his recent book What on Earth Is Heaven? are ones that people have asked him in these settings. He has been a speaker at Word Alive and European Leadership Forum, and regularly addresses university Christian Unions and the Christian Medical Fellowship students' conference, as well as speaking at L'Abri conferences globally.
