Much of the early modern project of mass Enlightenment was based on the dogmatic rejection of religious belief as the benighted detritus of pre-scientific consciousness. Similarly, even those who offered foundational critiques of Enlightenment principles during what Philipe Beneton and Chantal Delsol call "late modernity" still tend to cling to a reflexive anti-religiousness, now transformed by its Nietzschean iteration. Although Nietzsche repudiates the Cartesian conception of science as a "mathesis universalis" since it’s always generous with the how but thrifty with the why of human action, he still clung tightly to a modern scientific worldview that simply excluded the possibility of God or the soul. However, the detumescence of religious belief in the modern world, or the death of God as Nietzsche put it, was prematurely reported; as Mark Lilla ruefully puts it in The Stillborn God : "The Twighlight of the Idols has been postponed". A postmodern conservatism recognizes what Tocqueville referred to as our "invincible inclination" towards religious belief borne out of an intestinal desire for personal significance and transcendence as well as the grave limitations of any anthropological reductionism that discounts those elements of human longing and experience resistant to either a narrow, scientific worldview or a playful, deconstructive poetry. A postmodern conservative may not be religious but he is open to religion, and the possibilities that our ineradicable desire for personal significance, and the reasonable limitations of reason itself, make belief in a personal God immune to casual dismissal.
