Claim. Sang Hun Lee diagnoses the contemporary collapse of values as caused by four convergent factors: secular exclusion of God, the spread of materialism/Communism, inter-religious disagreement breeding value relativism, and the loss of traditional religion’s persuasive power before scientific minds.
Elaboration. The chapter opens with a sweeping survey of modern disorder — wars, terrorism, drug abuse, family breakdown, corruption — and locates the root not in any single ill but in the decline of the values of truth, goodness, and beauty. Lee names four mechanisms (ut-04-axiology-a-theory-of-value): (1) the exclusion of God from economics, politics, education, and art neglects religion, which is the historical foundation of values; (2) materialism, atheism, secularism, and especially Communism actively infiltrate and undermine values by class-warfare framing that brands tradition as feudal; (3) conflicts among religions and philosophies themselves cause observers to conclude that values are merely relative; (4) the virtues taught by Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam lose persuasive force because their content contradicts scientific findings, and modern people trust science.
The diagnosis is structural and dictates the remedy: a new view of value must (a) embrace the fundamental teachings of all religions, (b) overcome materialism and atheism, (c) embrace and guide science, and (d) be centered on God’s true love. Each criterion responds directly to one cause. This sets up the entire chapter’s project — Unification Axiology is not offered as a fifth competitor among religious value systems but as a meta-framework that subsumes them.
The argument’s vulnerability lies in cause (4): whether the virtues of traditional religions really lose persuasive power because of scientific conflict, or for other reasons (institutional decay, hypocrisy, secular wealth). Critics, particularly sociologists of religion, would push back on the strongly intellectualist framing. The diagnosis also presupposes that Communism remained a live cultural threat at the time of writing, which dates the polemic but does not invalidate the structural points about comparative religion and value relativism.
See also. modern-axiology-failed-greek-and-christian-decline, christianity-cannot-answer-atheism-and-communism, sexual-order-as-core-of-ethics