Absurdity of Life Without God: Part 2

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this unit is to explore the following question: Can Life have a Meaning, Value, and Purpose in the absence of God?

By Fr. Gregory Bishay; Inspired by the work of William Lane Craig, Ph.D.

RECAP OF PART 1

The following consequences of life without God were discussed:

No ultimate meaning
- Man needs God. If God does not exist, immortality is meaningless.
No ultimate value
- If there were no God, then there is no objective standard of right or wrong.
No ultimate purpose
- Without God, there is no purpose for the existence of the Universe. Consequently, Man would have no purpose for existence.

PROBLEM OF ATHEISM

The fundamental problem with this solution is that it is just impossible for Man to live consistently and happily within this framework of worldview. If he lives consistently, he will not live happily, and if he lives happily, he will not be able to live consistently. We shall elaborate:

Francis Schaeffer, Modern Man lives in two-story universe:

Lower story: life is without God
Upper story: there is the concept of universal meaning and value.

The atheistic man lives in the lower story with the ideas of atheism but because he cannot live there happily and consistently, he leaps into the second story to affirm that life has value and purpose. But he should not do that because he does not believe in God. Yet, man does it because he cannot live without having a meaning for life. These values and meanings for purpose cannot exist without God.

ARGUMENTS AGAINST ATHEISM

Without God life has no Meaning:

Sartre: one may create meaning for his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of action (he chose Marxism). It is utterly inconsistent that life is objectively meaningless (which is implied by the fact that it ends into nothing) while also saying that one can create a meaning for it. If life really is absurd then one is trapped in the lower story, but to create a meaning is a self-delusion. The universe does not have a meaning just because you try to give it one. Which means it is one.

Going to the second floor from the first one: to pick up a value that can make life with the tenets of the first floor more livable.
Sartre says let us just "pretend" that life has a meaning (because he decided to give it a meaning)

PROBLEM OF VALUE

Can goodness exist where God does not exist? Here are the most blatant inconsistencies:

Love and human brotherhood. Logically, it is incompatible to hold to atheistic humanism on one hand, and ethics of love and brotherhood on the other. Camus is criticized for holding one hand to the absurdity of life, and to the brotherly love on the other. These are logically irreconcilable
- Bertrand Russel: he has been calling for denouncing war and removing restrictions on sexual freedom. Admitted that he could not live, and confessed that he does not find his personal views credible: he confessed "I do not know the solution."
Absence of God, means the absence of objective right and wrong
- Dostoevsky: Man cannot live with the fact that dictatorial regimes are ok. These acts are wrong.
- World devoid of value is a horrific world. BBC called the "gathering," reunion of Jerusalem. Among the horrors that were done was the killing of pregnant women in prisons.
- Dr. Megalo experiments on killing a baby. His mother was offered to run away from prison with the baby who eventually died, and the Dr. was devastated that he could not finish his experiments on the baby. (Compare to the women who offered their kids to martyrdom).
Nietzsche himself who proclaimed the necessity of living beyond good and evil broke with his advisor Richard Wagner over the strident German imperialism.
Sartre: condemned anti-Semitism
- Existentialism is humanism: Sartre struggled to affirm the value of the human person.
- Russel could not live with the ramifications of no absolute value system.

Without God, all evil will go unpunished and all sacrifices will go unrewarded.

Who can live with such a view?? (In fact, we can go to the conclusion of living in sin (as defined by the bible) since it is easier and more fun, and there is no growth in knowing the love of His creator and there is no punishment)

Richard Wumbrant who was tortured for his faith in Communists prisons said: "The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good and punishment of evil. The torturers did inhumane things to the Russians who had faith, here is an excerpt of what one of the torturers said: "I thank the God that I do not believe in, THAT I can express all the evil in my heart"
This is totally acceptable in a world that does not have a supreme moral upholder. This brings to mind what one of the cardinals said: "I would go mad if God did not condemn unrighteousness."

Here is a story on the other side of the spectrum, ...

There was a Midwinter Airplane crash, which occurred in D.C. Potomac River after taking off from Dulles airport, In the rescue effort of the victims, a man pushed the dangling ladder of the rescue helicopter to six people, and the helicopter came back to rescue him, but they could not find him. In one's opinion, this man did the most stupid thing possible, he should have pushed everyone out of the way. Why should he give his own life for people that he does not even know?? And lose the remainder of his own??
Yet the atheist would still instinctively react positively to the bravery of this man. This is the inconsistency. The Atheistic man admires the virtues of the spiritual man, but chooses to live the vices of the carnal man

A universe that is void of value is terrible

PROBLEM OF PURPOSE IN LIFE

As we explained earlier, since the end of our very short life is death, and nothing bigger, then our life has no meaning. So in order to alleviate the conscience from this bleak view, the two ways that an atheist lives is:

That he makes up some purpose outside of the divine to give his existence meaning ( which amounts to self-delusion)
By not carrying out their views all the way through to their logical conclusions / ramifications.

Problem of death, Arens Blogh, borrowing the conclusion that man borrows the belief of immortality of his forefathers. Blogh, that this belief, which is shallow courage, is living off the credit card of another person. Modern Man makes a leap of faith to affirm the purpose for living.

Unable to live with a universe that has no ultimate value and no ultimate purpose since there is no God, the modern man starts to ascribe "personalities" to the things around him, namely: mother nature, the universe, the cosmos ...almost creating idols to take the place of God:

Brilliant Russian Physicist Zelodovich in Novicov: why did not nature choose this universe and not another ? Nature becomes the God-substitute
Francis Crick: "origin of the genetic code", begins with spelling "nature" with a capital "N", and speaks of natural selection of being clever and thinking of what it will do.
Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer, attributes to the universe itself the properties of God.
Carl Sagan, spells cosmos with a capital C, hence he fills the role of God-substitute

They all smuggle in a God-substitute because they cannot live in a universe that is the result of "impersonal" forces. It is their way to "manage" life, that in the absence of God, has no universal manager.

Many atheist thinkers betray their thoughts when they are pushed to think about the consequences of their line of thinking, here is an example to explain what we mean:

Here is an example:

Sociological behaviorism advocated by B. F. Skinner; his theories in this field lead to the society envisioned by George Orwell novel 1984, where the government controls and programs the behavior of all people. If God does not exist, then there is no moral objection to treat humans like animals in experiments. Because man is like any other lab specimen, No moral objection because man is not qualitatively different from an animal.
Again to stay firm to the belief that man is just an electrochemical organism, it will lead you to have to agree that you can do to him what you can do to rats.
Nazis used humans as experiments objects
In the US after the war, some people were injected unknowingly with a sterilization drug, with the end result of this being "population control" to deem who was the fittest.

The only way to protest this consistently is if God exists and hence there is a value of human life that is different from any lab. An Atheistic world is insufficient to sustain a consistent and a happy life.

DILEMMA OF MODERN MAN

Post Modern Man denies manhood when he denies the existence of God. So he lives with the awareness that modernity issues a despair that constitutes anguish of life. It is the awareness of bankruptcy of human meaning, value, and purpose. If that Man lives consistently according to the atheistic view, he shall be profoundly unhappy. If he tries to live happily, he shall be utterly inconsistent with the logical conclusion of what atheistic life leads to.

Man is always finding some means of escape. He is incomplete when he attempts to live between two worlds, both earthly and temporally.

THE NOBLE LIE

Dr. L. D. Rue, 1991, to American academy for the advancement of science, we deceive ourselves by some noble lie that we and the universe still have value, lessons of the past 2 centuries prove it. One's quest for personal wholeness or self-fulfillment, and the quest for social unity becomes independent of one another.When there is no absolute truth, there is a self interest that perverts each person's truth. So each person chooses his own sets of values and meaning, there is no final objective reality regarding the world or the self, and there is no universal way for integrating the creation of reality and morality.

If we are to avoid the mad-house, where self-fulfillment is pursued regardless of social consequences and if we are to avoid the crippling environment where social unity is imposed at the expense of personal gain...

Then we have no choice but to embrace some noble LIE that will inspire us to live beyond self-interest and so achieve social unity. It is a lie because it tells us that the universe has values of its own, which is a great fiction, because it makes a claim to universal truth without a universal Designer, and it tells me not to live for self-interest which is evidently false. But without such lies we cannot live, this is the dreadful verdict pronounced over the modern man.

Like a placebo the noble lie works only on those who believe in it. The noble lie cannot solve the human predicament for anyone who has come to see that predicament.

Dr. Rue's dilemma is that he obviously deeply values BOTH; they are objective values, which according to his philosophy do not exist, he has already leapt to the other story of the home. The noble lie option thus affirms what it denies, and so refutes itself.

CHRISTIANITY: GOD EXISTS, MAN IS ETERNAL, THE RESURRECTION IS REAL

Christianity provides the two conditions necessary for a meaning, and value, for a purposeful life: God and immortality, we can live consistently and happily. Life is ultimately significant because we have eternal life, which is the knowledge of God.

Moral value are rooted in the nature of God Himself
Moral choices: we are held accountable for them
Glorify God and enjoy Him forever,

The Bible succeeds where atheism breaks down: to offer a consistent, joyful, meaningful, purposeful, and valuable life.

It does not prove Christianity is right but it gives the OTHER OPTION where Atheism fails. IF God does not exist then life is futile, if God exists then life is meaningful (because first and foremost it does not end, and its beginning is not just the result of a "wild" chance)

FINAL THOUGHTS

If these two options were absolutely equal; If one is offered with these two choices, then a rational person should choose life, meaning, purpose, and eternity, over death, chance, and despair, hence making up ultimate meanings of every transient thing in this world which includes one's life itself.

As Paschal said: "Nothing to lose and Infinity to gain."

The cosmic orphan can come home -- to His Creator