Why I Am Not An Atheist - Part Four

No Morality. No Hope. And lastly, there is no valid meaning apart from self-defined meaning if there is no God. And here Atheism runs into another contradiction. If there is no overarching meaning to life, the atheist must counter by offering meaning in a purely existential sense. What do I mean by that? I mean that the atheist is forced into the position of attempting to give meaning to the day-to-day and moment-to-moment activities of life. They encourage the finding of meaning on the small scale while under the umbrella of meaninglessness.

Steven Jay Gould, well respected in his field, has said this concerning the meaning of life: "... once you find out that there is no higher answer, no superior cause, it is liberating if not exhilerating."

His words are a throwback to Aldous Huxley who was a bit more honest in his book Ends and Means when he said that science does not have the right to extrapolate its findings into meaning and metaphysics, nor does it retain the sovereignity to dictate philosophical pronouncements. But he was going to take science's view of a meaningless universe anyway "because a meaningless world frees me to pursue my own erotic and political desires." Amazing how something so damaging can be openly and unblushingly admitted.

G.K. Chesterton has written an outstanding book called Orthodoxy in which he details the struggle of the man without God in attempting to live meaningfully and without contradiction. He became a Christian after reading the atheists, and seeing the constant contradiction in which they argued against Christianity. He says this, "The new rebel in our time is a skeptic. He has no loyalties, therefore he cannot be a true revolutionist because all denounciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind, and the revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (a novel) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and as a philosophy that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a police officer for killing a peasant, and then conclude by the highest philosophical standards that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, then denounces aristocratic profiligates for treating it as a lie. He calls the flag a bauble, then blames th eoppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meting where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts, then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality, in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Thus the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything(Orthodoxy, 46-47)."

What happens when you go to that scientific meeting and argue for purely Darwinian evolution, and then go to that political meeting to argue for dignity to be shown to random collocations of molecules, and your teenager asks you why you assign any significance to a life that you yourself have described as being the product of blind processes? Are you not arguing for them to be treated as better than they really are, because we are all but time + matter + chance? And inevitably, without God, whether you move from hedonism to utilitarianism to stoicism, your final answer will have to be because you choose to. And your teenager replies that he chooses not to, along with all that may entail (racism, another Holocaust, etc.) and his (or her) position is, ultimately, just as valid as yours. What happens then?

Without God, eventually all the various contradictory strands of life will take their tolls on us and we will ask what is the point, why we bother, and come to no conclusion whatsoever. As Voltaire put it, the verdict of the vastest mind will be silence, and nothing will make sense anymore.

No morality. No hope. No Meaning. What would this look like in our lives? Look around at ourselves and our society today - I have a feeling that this is very much what it will look like. Where we will see programs on television that put infidelity in the spotlight, and rather than weep over lives that have gone so terribly wrong, we will sit in amusement and entertainment - and then punish our children for doing so.

I will end this series with a poem by T.S. Eliot who saw the same things happening with his generation back in the twenties. And, once again, I would like to say that the vast majority of this material is also not my own, but belongs to the hard work of Ravi Zacharias and his team at RZIM Ministries.


The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz, he dead
A penny for the old guy

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Why I Am Not an Atheist - Part Three

But apart from the problem of being unable to espouse a moral law, atheism runs into the obstacle of not being able to justify any hope in the face of pain and death. We inevitably stumble across these things in our lives. Camut was the one who said that death is philosophy's problem.

I believe it was Hobbes who said that when I die, the worms devour my body and I commit myself to the Great Perhaps. And it was Bertrand Russell who said that, in the end, all of our hopes and dreams come crashing down in despair.

Despair is all we are left with if there is no God because there is no guarantee of continued existence, there is no guarantee of ultimate justice, and there is reason to justify any kind of lifestyle over and against another type of lifestyle. Why live as a Mother Theresa when you can live as Hitler or Heffner, and the end result is the same? The end result will be the same, because we will all be shadows and dust. Dust does not regret.

Indeed, the question of hope is left completely unaddressed by the atheistic position. It openly and unblushing claims for us to make something of it now, because there is nothing more for us beyond this life.

Alright. If that is so, why does Jean-Paul Sarte himself who, on his deathbed (and not many people like to talk about this) questioned his own pleasure-filled existential philosophy to such a point where his mistress Simone looks at him after Sarte questions his own philosophy to such an extent that he doubts the attempt to find fulfillment and meaning apart from any God in mind, she looks at him and says "He, too, is going senile."

If that is so, why does Bernard Shaw, noted atheist and skeptic, say that "I am an atheist who has lost his faith?"

The questions arise because when pain and death rear their ugly head, what does Sarte have to say to himself, or to me? What does Nietzsche have to say to me? What do any of these God-debunking philosophers have to say to someone who has just watched one of their loved ones swept away in a moment by the tsunami?

Silence. They have no answer to give. They have no basis to offer any hope apart from God.

Why I Am Not An Atheist - Part Two

The outworking of Nietzsche's perspective, which I have made reference to before, is that because God is dead then the new superman will go on to become autonomous and determine his own right and wrong. Much like the antagonist in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, who, as the author wrote, had "shaken himself free from the dust of the earth." In so doing, attempting to assume an objective framework that is somehow beyond good and evil.

Hitler took this idea and militarized it. His supermen determined that it was right to collect and massacre Jews and if Nietzsche was right, than Hitler was right also because humanity will then be "free" to determine what is good and what is evil.

We have stumbled into a rabid search for an ethic in our time because we are feeling the after-effects of God's philosophical death. Nietzsche went on to say that because God was dead, that the twentieth century would become the bloodiest one yet - and he was right. But Philosopher of Ethics Robert Fitch said this concerning his field,

"Ours is an age where ethics has become obsolete. It is superceded by science, deleted by psychology, dismissed as emotive by philosophy. It is drowned in compassion, evaporates into asthetics and retreats before relativism. The simple distinction between good and bad is somehow drowned in a waterfall of emotion in which we feel more sympathy for the murderer than for the murdered, for the adulterer rather than for the betrayed, and in which we have actually come to think that the real guilty party, the person who somehow started it all, is the victim and not the perpetrator of the time."

During the Enlightenment however, Kant made a mistake that served as a turning point. He said that "ethics has to be arrived at purely from the vantage point of reason without the introduction of the concept of God and without using happiness as its goal." And to quote Ravi Zacharias, isn't ironic today that we have lost all three, the concept of God, the concept of ethics, and the concept of happiness too. Because of the loss of God in ethics, the objective anchor to keep us pinned down on a moral compass, ethics crumbled away into existentialism and moral relativism, in which whatever is good or bad is merely what I prefer or what I happen to think is right, and not what actually is. And to quite Mr. Zacharias once again, on the heels of the Enlightenment, Existentialism was waiting to be born and on the heels of Existentialism, alienation was waiting to be born. Why alienation? Because there is no common good or bad, right or wrong, anymore. There is no common, objective ethic to turn to.

As McCentire put it, "You cannot design an ought unless you know what is." And you cannot create an ethic without a purpose without God, because there is no purpose because life only has whatever meaning I choose (or choose not to) give to it. Morality without a purpose is useless, because there is no reason or leverage to choose one type of morality over and above another. And that is the problem that Kant, Camut, and the other enlightenment and existential philosophers because they could not, and cannot, justify their position over and against the Nietzsche-type of position.

Indeed, even Kai Nielson, noted atheist scholar and philosopher, says this concerning the question why be moral - "We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by mths or ideology, not be individual egoists or classic amoralists. Reason doesn't decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depressed me... The point is this: Pure, practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality."

Without God, there is no objective moral law to turn to and anything that you call good or bad is merely useful for you to call it such, or merely a statement of opinion. Let us assume I am a murderer. Thus, if I murder your family, when your heart is screaming that what has occured is a horrendous evil, you are wrong to think that - rather you just don't like it. But there is nothing that has been violated in that act of murder. Indeed, for you to say that such an action is wrong is imposing your morality upon my own; I happen to find it useful to kill random people so as to steal money and random victims makes it more difficult for the police to find me. And if there is no objective morality, than we are left with relativism, and in saying that I ought not to push my beliefs on other people, you are pushing yours on me. Utter contradiction.