Exploring Meaning: God, Morality, and Nihilism

Kant, from a rational, scientific, theoretical perspective was agnostic, saying through our normal avenues of research and investigation we can't know that there is a God; yet for practical purposes, we must assume that there is a God in order for life to be meaningful, for society to be possible. [00:00:39]

On this side we have what I call full-bodied theism, and on this side of this pole would be nihilism. And nihilism is not only that there is no God, but it also goes from that conclusion to the idea that there is no meaning, no significance, no sense to human existence. [00:02:48]

Now, if I could translate that and indeed transfer it into modern categories, you go back to Kant and Kant's criticism of the distinction between his neumenal world -- the realm of God -- and the phenomenal world -- the realm where we observe things in the scientific exploration of our senses -- and he saw this wall that existed between this world and the transcendent world. [00:04:04]

Now, the expression "vanity of vanity" is an expression of the superlative. Take it over into the New Testament when Christ is exalted by the New Testament Scriptures, and He is seen as the King. He is called what? The King of kings, the Lord of lords. That's a Hebraic way to say "the supreme King, the supreme Lord" because He's King of the kings, Lord of the lords, and that's the same thought that's in this idea of vanity -- "vanity of vanities." [00:05:41]

I've always said this about humanism -- that in the final analysis humanism, which is so popular, is extremely naïve because the humanist tells us there is no God and that our origins come from nothing -- accidentally from a meaningless event -- and that our lives are moving inexorably towards annihilation, so that the two poles of human existence -- these two poles are meaninglessness at our origin and meaninglessness at our destiny; and yet the humanist fights for human rights and human dignity in between these two poles, where I keep saying to the humanist, "You have both feet planted in midair, and as Francis Schaefer used to say, you're on a roller coaster without brakes because you want to have meaning between the two poles of meaninglessness, and in the final analysis, you are resting on sentiment. [00:09:02]

Remember these words that we find in the New Testament, "without Christ, without hope," and when he wrote to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul said, "If Christ is not raised, and if all those who have died have perished, then we are of all people the most to be pitied, and if you don't like that we are believers, don't be mad at us. Don't be hostile towards us. Feel sorry for us. Just think of all the fun we're missing that you're having and enjoying. [00:11:20]

Albert Camus, the twentieth century existential philosopher came to this conclusion: that the only serious question left for philosophers to explore is the question of suicide, and what Camus is saying simply is if you awaken to the reality that there is no God, that there are no absolutes, then you understand that there's no ultimate meaning. [00:13:12]

That's why Jean-Paul Sartre, in a tiny little book called "Nausea" -- he titled the book "Nausea" because that was his final comment about the human condition, and he defined man as a useless passion. That's a loaded concept for Sartre because Sartre noticed that we, as human beings, are not automatons. We're not robots. We're not bumps on a log. We're not bumps on a log. We are living, breathing, thinking, choosing, caring human beings -- that human life is marked by care. Human life is marked by passion. [00:14:45]

Realize the driving passion in contemporary culture is escapism -- escapism through hedonism, and the whole philosophy of hedonism is that you'd find meaning through pleasure. Maximize your pleasure; minimize your pain. It's the philosophy of Timothy Leary -- turn on, tune in, drop out. Let's put daisies down the barrels of rifles, and let's just go on a trip and go to Lala Land, where I don't have to think anymore. [00:17:27]

Now, what Nietzsche and the skeptics would say is that's not the only drug. The supreme drug to escape nihilism, according to nineteenth century atheism was the opium of religion. If you're a Christian, I'm convinced that you haven't been a Christian for two weeks until somebody has said to you, "The only reason you're a Christian is that you're using your faith as a crutch, and that crutch is something that you use to help you function, to help you remain mobile when, in fact, you're crippled." [00:19:01]

Now again, in the nineteenth century, when we studied the voices of the atheists of that period, they really weren't working that hard to disprove the existence of God. Rather, their opening assumption was, "There is no God," and the biggest problem that Marx and Feuerbach and Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and other titanic thinkers, skeptics of the nineteenth century, that the question they were trying to answer was this: Since there is no God, why is it that human beings are incurably religious? [00:20:43]

Why is it that man could be defined not only as Homosapiens, but we could more properly define mankind as Homoreligiosis -- man, the religious person -- because wherever we go, throughout the world, we find the vast majority of people engage in some kind of religious activity. And from a Christian point, that religion may be complete idolatry, but nevertheless, it is still religion; and so the most common and frequent answer than came from people like Marx and Feuerbach and Freud and so on was that the phenomenon that answers the universality of religion is psychological fear -- that is that the main reason why people believe in God is because they're afraid of the consequences if there is no God. [00:21:29]