From the outside, the three Abrahamic faiths may look nearly identical. They share texts, prophets, moral codes, and overlapping histories. Yet their subtle distinctions create massive consequences downstream, because the concept they hold in common, monotheism, is foundational. The real question isn’t which tradition is louder in history or politics, but which one actually aligns with objectivity itself.
Ironically, secularism has attempted to claim that word as its own. The Enlightenment didn’t invent objectivity, it stole it. What was once the exclusive grounding of monotheism was rebranded as “rationality” and “science,” stripped of its metaphysical anchor, and then used to marginalize religious perspectives in modern life. The word objectivity wasn’t even fully coined until the early 1800s (etymology), centuries after monotheism had already supplied the framework for coherent thought. What the Enlightenment achieved was not the discovery of objectivity, but its appropriation.
This matters profoundly. When objectivity is detached from its metaphysical ground, human beings lose more than theology—they lose coherence itself.
Monotheism is not simply the belief in “one God” as opposed to many. It is the affirmation that reality has a single, coherent source—a non-contingent foundation that grounds all being, value, and truth. God, in this sense, is not merely a ruler of the world but the vector of being itself. This singularity enabled rational inquiry to flourish. The belief that the universe is ordered, intelligible, and governed by consistent principles rests on the assumption of a unified source. Ethical systems, too, gain stability by being anchored in something beyond human preference or cultural consensus.
Historically, this framework is what made science possible. Medieval Islamic scholars such as Ibn al-Haytham pioneered optics, algebra, and experimental method because they trusted the intelligibility of creation. Jewish philosophers like Maimonides grounded reason and ethics in the unity of God. Christian thinkers such as Aquinas and later Descartes explicitly tied the reliability of human reason to God’s coherent nature. Long before “objectivity” entered modern vocabulary, the Abrahamic worldview supplied the conditions for it.
The Enlightenment reframed this foundation. By the 18th and 19th centuries, intellectuals sought to divorce inquiry from metaphysics, presenting science as self-sufficient. The very term objectivity only enters the English lexicon in the early 1800s, signaling a shift: what had been long assumed under God was now recast as a method, a technique, a neutral stance of the human mind.
Take Isaac Newton: though remembered as a “scientist,” he devoted more time to theology than physics, explicitly rooting his laws of motion in the wisdom and constancy of the Creator. Yet by the late 19th century, positivist thinkers like Auguste Comte claimed science could dispense with metaphysics altogether, reducing inquiry to mere observation and prediction. Secularism claimed ownership of truth-seeking by severing it from its ontological root. God was pushed aside as unnecessary, while the fruits of monotheistic coherence were preserved as if they were inventions of reason alone. Objectivity became framed as a posture rather than a reality, a method rather than a metaphysical fact.
To secure its new territory, secularism introduced new categories of thought: deism, agnosticism, naturalism, atheism. These were not neutral “options” but frameworks designed to push God further and further out of the picture. They bred skepticism not merely about religious claims, but about being itself. David Hume, for instance, famously dismantled the idea of causation, reducing it to habit rather than necessity. This wasn’t just skepticism toward theology, it was skepticism toward coherence itself. Later, Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” reflected what had already occurred: coherence had been uprooted, leaving subjectivity to silently reign.
The result is paradoxical. Modern people can become brilliant at discovery, capable of splitting atoms, mapping genomes, or coding algorithms—yet remain unaware of the very coherence their work presupposes. They can labor brilliantly at the level of facts while remaining cut off from the level of being. This produces a new kind of obedience: populations who are malleable precisely because they lack metaphysical grounding. They are told that objectivity exists in the lab but not in life, in data but not in meaning. They are trained to be exceptional laborers of science while remaining blind to the truth of their own existence.
Small differences between the Abrahamic faiths, whether doctrinal or historical, were magnified by secular thought into insurmountable divides. What was once a shared metaphysical framework was fractured and then dismissed altogether. The downstream effects are everywhere. Without a recognized ground of being, moral reasoning becomes unstable, reduced to preference or consensus. The French Revolution, fueled by Enlightenment rationalism, attempted to replace religion with “reason” as the highest authority, yet quickly collapsed into bloodshed and tyranny. Twentieth-century ideologies like Marxism and fascism carried the same spirit: objectivity claimed without a transcendent anchor, producing systems that devoured their own people.
The irony is painful. We teach children that science requires objectivity while simultaneously telling them that life itself has no objective meaning (which ironically implies that existence holds no value). We cultivate disciplines that depend on coherence, yet deny coherence in the realm of values, identity, and being.
The way forward is not regression but recognition. Objectivity and monotheism are not rivals but two dimensions of the same truth—one within the universe, the other metaphysical. Objectivity requires a singular, impartial reference point. Monotheism names that reality. Restoring awareness of the ground of being that makes knowledge, ethics, and freedom possible in the first place can begin in education by teaching students not only how to analyze facts but also how to question what makes facts meaningful. It can extend into culture by encouraging inquiry that does not shy away from metaphysical grounding. The aim is simple yet radical: to see truth as universal, anchored, and inseparable from being itself. Beyond rituals, beyond consensus, beyond ideology, coherence must be recognized for what it is: the necessary condition of existence and the forgotten gift of monotheism.
There is a final irony worth noting. By claiming ownership of objectivity, secularism inadvertently proved its own dependence on what it denied. For over a century, human progress has been driven by applying objectivity with extraordinary clarity. Scientific discovery, technological innovation, and global advancement all accelerated precisely because the method of objectivity was applied so rigorously.
But this raises an unavoidable question: if objectivity has shown itself to be such a powerful and indispensable framework, should we not ask which worldview actually aligns with it? If monotheism was once the metaphysical ground of objectivity, and objectivity has since been proven through its fruits, then we now have a mirror by which to measure faith itself.
This does not require choosing between traditions by force of identity. It requires testing the coherence of their foundations. When monotheism is loosely defined, it leaves room for fragmentation and contradiction. But when objectivity is applied consistently—across reason, ethics, and being itself—the pattern that emerges is unmistakable. Pure monotheism is not simply compatible with objectivity. It is objectivity expressed at the level of existence.
This point should not offend or threaten. It does not exclude Jews, Christians, Muslims, or even secular seekers. It simply recognizes that truth leaves a trail, and that the same algorithm that makes science possible also reveals the structure of reality itself. The task, then, is not to abandon discovery, but to let discovery lead us back to coherence—to recognize that the unity of truth is the unity of being.