An Impartment of Truth

“[I]f Truth is objective, if we live in a world we did not create and cannot change merely by thinking, if the world is not really a dream of our own, then the most destructive belief we could possibly believe would be the denial of this primary fact. It would be like closing your eyes while driving, or blissfully ignoring the doctor’s warnings.”

-C.S. Lewis

“You are free in our time to say that God doesn’t exist. You are free to say he exists and is evil. You are even free to say that God would like to exist if he could. You may talk of God as a mystification or a metaphor, you may boil him down with gallons of long words, or boil him to the rags of metaphysics; and, it is not that nobody punishes you but that nobody protests. But if you speak of God as a real thing like a tiger, as a reason for changing one’s conduct, the modern world will stop you somehow if it can. We are long past talking about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It is now thought irreverent to be a believer.”

-G.K. Chesterton

"If the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone."

-Jean-Paul Sartre

A Few Problems with the Atheistic Worldview

1. There is no possibility of an objective moral law because there is no possibility of a moral lawgiver. Without God to give the moral law, there is no room for an objective moral law. The only possibilities of a moral law become subjective, and relativistic--which amounts to no moral law at all. But, this doesn't coincide with what we know of ourselves as people. People think in terms of antithesis (right and wrong, black and white, yes and no), and when people attempt to defend the position of relativism, they are forced to base their reasoning on antithesis. (e.g., Relativism is right, absolutism is wrong.)

2. Atheism offers no meaning for life. The atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre understood that if finite man had no infinite reference point, then finite man has no meaning, and there is no consequence or meaning to anything he does. Life is, under this philosophy, "absurd." It has no meaning. Theism offers an anchor for finite man to compare his life, his actions, and their consequences to a constant, immutable source: God. God gives life meaning.

3. Atheism cannot explain the genesis of the Universe. To believe atheism is to believe that all we know: matter, energy, motion, everything came from nothing. Nothing means absolutely nothing. Nothingness. Something cannot come from nothing. This is a philosophical problem for atheism, and atheism has no answer for this. Even if Darwinism were true, that doesn't explain what caused Darwinism.

4. Atheism has no concept of divine retribution, or just desserts. As it happens sometimes, bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. A theistic view allows that a wrongdoer will get his just desserts in the after-life. Atheism does not offer this.

5. If atheism is true, we have to explain how we as personal beings came from an impersonal Godless universe. Atheism has no coherent answer to this.

6. Atheism causes its leading advocates to viscerally hate a God they don't believe exists.

As Ravi Zacharias frequently propounds, only the Christian worldview sufficiently and coherently answers the questions of origin, condition, meaning, and destiny.

Quick Passage from Genesis in Space and Time

I found a particular passage in Genesis in Space and Time not so much interesting as consistent with some other things I have come across. I'm quoting now:

• Among contemporary philosophers Martin Heidegger in his later writings suggested a sort of space-time fall. He said that prior to Aristotle, the pre-Socratic Greeks thought in a different way. Then when Aristotle introduced the concept of rationality and logic, there was an epistemological fall. His notion, of course, had no moral overtones at all, but it is intriguing that Heidegger came to realize that philosophy cannot explain reality if it begins with the notion that the world is normal. This the Bible has taught, but the Bible's explanation for the present abnormal world is in a moral Fall by a significant man, a fall which has changed the external flow of history as no epistemological fall could do.

What I find interesting here is not the content of what Heidegger thought, but instead the fact that later in life he came to some realizations that more closely represent Biblical reality than ever before. Sure, it is a completely different type of Fall; a Fall in the realm of knowledge and the ability to know as opposed to a moral Fall, but it is a Fall nonetheless.

No close nexus here, but what happened to Sartre is also somewhat revealing. Sartre spent his life explaining the absurdity of life and the world. He spent a life of total atheistic hedonism writing his perverted worldly philosophy, and rejecting the concept of God. Sure enough, on his death bed (and I unfortunately can't find anything on this, but have heard Ravi Zacharias talk it) Sartre renounced his atheism, and professed a belief in a God. It is highly unlikely Sartre came to belief in the Christian God on his death bed, but the fact that on his last days he came to believe in a God at all is significant.

What I also remember from hearing Zacharias talk about this is that he was so steadfast and absolute in his atheism before that point, that when he proclaimed a belief in God, his mistress thought he had lost his mind.

And, whether or not he requested it or asked for it, on his deathbed, Catholic priests performed an unction on/for Oscar Wilde.

What Happens When You Take God Out of The Equation but Still Attempt to Answer the Tough Questions?

In my opinion, and from what I have read of him, Jean Paul Sartre was as perverted a thinker as Nietzsche ever was--and far more damaging in that he was more subtle and appeared less insane. Sartre was a french philosopher/atheist existentialist (1905-1980) who to his credit attempted to answer life's biggest questions such as origin/meaning/condition/destiny, but was only able to deduce that life was "absurd."

Sartre's philosophy, which can be found his in his more popular books Nausea and Being and Nothingness, was really nothing more than nihilism which led to a belief that life and the universe were "absurd." A pessimistic hedonist, Sartre "philosophized" that there was no order to the universe, no meaning to experience, nothing to life or man, just one big smoldering heap of nothingness and absurdity. I find it hard to believe that such a line of thought can pass as philosophy and get pawned off on university students today.

Although Sartre believed that rationally the universe was "absurd," humans were still under an obligation to "authenticate" oneself. (I'm confused as to why a person is under obligation when life is nothingness...) And, you can "authenticate" yourself by an act of the will. That idea while a little nebulous in its own right is not completely bizarre and devoid of sense until you delve a bit further into what passes as "authenticating" oneself. Essentially, since the universe and EVERYTHING in it is absurd, and has no content or meaning, all attempts to authenticate oneself are completely equal. Therefore, followed to its logical conclusion, there was no right or wrong, good or bad, only "authenticating oneself by an act of the will." So, it wouldn't matter whether you spend every day of your life collecting roadside litter, dedicate yourself to removing landmines from the Earth, helping the elderly, or molesting children, beating the elderly, or engaging in general mayhem and serial murder: all acts are acts of the will and a successful completion of self-authentication.

Isn't it hard to wrap your mind around such thought? How can people of such towering genius come to believe such Godless, insane stuff?

The funniest thing about Sartre was that he was not able to even come close to putting his own philosophy into practice. Sartre dabbled in politics later in his life (which, if all is equal there can be no good or bad politics), and later signed the Algerian Manifesto making himself a moral declaration.

Jean Paul Sartre is further proof that the only philosophy or worldview that can answer life's four toughest questions--origin/meaning/condition/destiny--is Christianity. As Zacharias says, Christianity is the only worldview that can answer all four with coherency and stand up in its own right in doing so. Other philosophies and religion will be able to answer one or two, but will fall apart when attempting to answer all four. People like Sartre take the really really really hard way out when the answers and truth (which is what they are all after) is right there for them, and end up living a life of absurdity themself.

Art

I have read about this work of "art" somewhere else, but I read about it again tonight in a book by Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There.

Schaeffer lays out the degradation of thought, culture, and life in general by showing how western culture crossed a line: "the line of despair" into which many "great" modern thinkers and artists gave up on finding a coherent worldview to explain life, and came up with some of the most nonsensical, outlandish, and profane ways to explain life and the world.

This is all kind of vague until you consider the philosophy of Nietzche or Sartre, and there you see it exactly. Profound men of genius who spend their intellect coming up with philosophies of "nothingness," and popularizing the idea (which nobody could ever possibly support) that "God is Dead." (Go into the Barnes & Noble Philosophy section and you'll find a book by Jean Paul-Sartre that is around 600 pages entitled "Being andNothingness." How do you spend 600 pages talking about "nothing"?)

Anyway, Schaeffer was writing about what passes as "art" today, and then talked about Marcel Duchamp. And now, I'm quoting the book

• His last work, which no one knew existed, came to light at his death. it is now in the Duchamp collection in the Philadelphia Musem of Art. One must look through a small peephole in an old Spanish door to see it. And it is indeed both pornographic and totally absurd. Why is this placed in the staid Philadelphia Museum of Art by the staid directors? Because it is "Art," and so the message is passed on to the population!

Schaeffer writes about once we passed "the line of despair" (1935 in the U.S., 1890 in Europe) everything which was once great--including art--basically went down the toilet. And we are left with things such as "Piss C*****" (which got NEA funding!).