Reasonable Faith Book (part 2)

Transcript Reasonable Faith Book (Part 2)

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, we are going through the book Reasonable Faith which you recently revised. We’ve been through chapter 1 and talked about the relationship of faith and reason. Chapter 2 talks about the absurdity of life without God. Synopsize this chapter – what do you mean the absurdity of life without God?

Dr. Craig: It is very important to understand that by this title I do not mean the absurdity of life without belief in God. That is the way a lot of people misunderstand it. But what I am saying is that it’s the absurdity of life if atheism is true – if there is no such being as God. Then I think life does become absurd as a number of atheist philosophers themselves have claimed. I find the writings of atheistic existentialist philosophers to be very helpful in this area of examining the human predicament of life in a godless universe.

So in this chapter I argue that if there is no God then life is absurd in three respects. There is no ultimate meaning to life, there is no ultimate value to life, and there is no ultimate purpose to life. Meaning, value, and purpose will all become purely subjective or relative, not objective and ultimate. Then I go on to argue that in fact it is impossible to live happily and consistently with this sort of a worldview. So the atheist finds himself in this terrible dilemma that he has a worldview which he cannot successfully live out. If he lives happily, it will only be by giving the lie to his worldview. If he tries to live his worldview consistently, he will be profoundly unhappy. So it is an unlivable worldview.

My hope in this chapter is not to show that therefore God exists but simply to awaken in people a sense of the urgency of this question. To realize that the question of God’s existence is not something that we can afford to be indifferent about.

Kevin Harris: Blaise Pascal talked a little bit about meaning and absurdity in life. What did he have to say about it?

Dr. Craig: Pascal is one of those Christian authors that you just got to read. He was the father of probability theory, a brilliant mathematician. He died at a very young age – only 39 years old when he passed away. When he died he was in the midst of writing an apology or a defense of the Christian religion. He left behind hundreds of little fragments – hundreds of notes on scraps of paper – which have posthumously been assembled into something called The Pensées, which means “Thoughts.” These are the thoughts, the sort of random thoughts (well, they weren’t random but they were these various thoughts) that he had that would eventually be part of his apology for the Christian religion.

Pascal believed that in order to motivate people to think about Christianity you need to both emphasize man’s greatness and man’s wretchedness. He said on the one hand you emphasize man’s greatness by his mental capacity. As physical beings we are puny and miniscule and insignificant; the universe could crush us like a gnat. But he says insofar as I think, I am able to comprehend the entire universe in my thought. So he said “I may be a frail reed, but I am a thinking reed.” This is the greatness of man.

But at the same time he says man is wretched. And here Pascal goes into this profound analysis of the human condition in how people are bored and distracted. They find no ultimate meaning or satisfaction in life. Justice is capricious; it is arbitrary and varies from one country to another country. Basically he shows how utterly hopeless our condition is in life if there is no God. And it is that part of his thought that I tried to pick up on in this chapter to show the wretchedness of humanity without God.

Kevin Harris: It kind of wakes you up a little bit. [1] 

Dr. Craig: Oh, exactly. And that was Pascal’s burden. You see he lived at a time when French libertine thought was enamored with hedonism, gambling, pleasure, skepticism. What Pascal wanted to do was to motivate these secular hedonists to think about spiritual things. And how do you do it? Well, you do it by showing them how, in fact, wretched the human situation is in the absence of God and tried to just motivate people to begin to think about this important question. I think in our day and age in hedonistic, materialistic, Western, 21st century culture, we need a voice like Pascal again to say these questions of God’s existence are not just idle curiosities. These lie at the very core of the meaning of human existence – what it is to be a human being.

Kevin Harris: Here is a line from Pascal that will kind of wake you up. He puts himself in the shoes of an unbeliever and he says, “From all of this I conclude that I ought to spend every day of my life without seeking to know my fate.” Because if you think about it, it is too depressing so it is almost like you have to distract yourself till the day of your death.

Dr. Craig: Exactly. Pascal says the attitude of the unbeliever is insane. Either my life is meaningless or when I die I fall into the hands of a holy God and so what am I going to do about it? Well, nothing; let’s just go out and enjoy ourselves. And Pascal thinks this is madness. Again, Kevin, this is so contemporary because what do Americans do? We have this massive, massive entertainment industry just to keep us from being bored to death. So our celebrities, our rock stars, our actors and actresses, all of this is there just to entertain us and to keep us from, in a sense, thinking about these profound issues that would really drive us to despair, I think, if we thought about them and were not believers in God.

Kevin Harris: Dostoyevsky – he addressed this meaning of life, absurdity of life issue as well.

Dr. Craig: Yes, he is my favorite author. The great Russian novelist, Dostoyevsky, who wrote things like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky was deeply troubled by the problem of suffering in life – the problem of pain or the problem of evil in life. In his novels he sought to try to address this problem by a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, in his novels he will develop characters who through suffering are made better persons. They become more profound, more loving, more compassionate people, people who come to know God in a deep way. So that suffering is redemptive in Dostoyevsky’s novels. But the other prong of his novels is to show that if there is no God then ultimately there is no right and wrong, there is no objective good or bad. Therefore, as Dostoyevsky puts it, “all things are permitted.” So the problem of evil in a sense recoils upon the atheist because on the atheistic view you can’t say that any of these things are really, truly evil, that they ought not to be. Where, in the atheistic system, does that “ought” come from? On the atheistic view, there just is what there is – there is no “ought” and so there is no moral obligation, no moral prohibitions. As Dostoyevsky put it, “all things are permitted” and he shows how this leads to absolute despair. It is an unlivable sort of existence. So in his novels typically people who think like this, who imagine themselves to be Napoleonic men, that is to say they are going to live above the herd morality, they are going to live beyond good and evil, these people’s lives come to catastrophe in his novels because such a life cannot be consistently lived out.

Kevin Harris: You know along these lines, Bill, you quote L. D. Rue. He said that we are forced into believing the noble lie from all this. If life doesn’t have any ultimate meaning, we have to pretend that it does.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, in order to get along. This was an address that was made several years ago to the American Academy of Science. [2] Remarkable. This man basically said the lesson that we have learned from the last two hundred years is that moral relativism is profoundly the case. [3] There is no objective truth, there are no objective moral values – right or wrong – everything is meaningless. But he says the problem with that is that it means that the quest for self-fulfillment or personal happiness and the quest for social coherence in society fall apart. They become independent because everybody makes up his own set of values and makes up his own meaning. So it leads to anarchy. Society would fall apart if you had everybody believing that. So he says what are we going to do? If you are to avoid on the one hand what he calls the madhouse option – where everybody pursues self-fulfillment without any regard to social coherence – if you are going to avoid that on the one hand and avoid on the other hand what he calls the totalitarian option where the state imposes values on the masses he says the only way out is to adopt some Noble Lie that will fool everybody into thinking that life really does have meaning and value and purpose and so will compel us to live beyond self-interest and to live for these noble ideals which in fact are actually false. So, in order to get along, he says we basically have to live in self-deception.

Kevin Harris: It is a placebo effect.

Dr. Craig: Yes, that’s right. And what is ironic about this to me, Kevin, is having read the great existentialist philosophers, this is the central sin for an existentialist philosopher – to live an inauthentic life, a life of self-deception and inauthenticity. Yet this is exactly what Dr. Rue says we must do if we are to survive. We must adopt these Noble Lies that will deceive us into living beyond selfish interests and so forth.

Kevin Harris: You made a point in some of your writing on this that the more convinced you are that it is a placebo, the less it works.

Dr. Craig: Yes, that really is the problem, isn’t it? With a placebo, the reason it works is because the person who is taking it thinks, “Oh, this is really the cure. This is real medicine” when in fact it is just sugar water. In the same way, the Noble Lie will only work on the person who thinks it is true. But what do you do with people like Rue and us and others who know that it is a lie? Well, in their case, it won’t work so what this leads to is a sort of society where you have a kind of cultural elite, the intelligentsia, who know the truth but deceive the masses in order for society to get along and be perpetuated. And it leaves this very sinister kind of 1984 society where you’ve got this government of the elites that basically deceives the masses for their own good to help them get along.

Kevin Harris: This also seems to be leading to the objection that we often hear on this and that is, “Well, it doesn’t matter if there is any ultimate meaning or objective meaning. All that matters is that you have subjective meaning or temporary meaning.” I can create my own meaning and I like to play golf and I’ll play golf till I drop kind of a thing.

Dr. Craig: Right, and that is what Rue says leads to the madhouse option. It leads to anarchy. The only reason it hasn’t so far is because we live in a Western culture which has a vestige of Christianity largely determining what people think to be right and wrong and so forth. So we all kind of agree that it is good to love your neighbor and do things of that sort and that it is wrong to be a psychopath and abuse children or cannibalize other people. But on atheism, as Dostoyevsky said, there is nothing really wrong with those things; all things are permitted. So if pursued seriously, it really would lead to anarchy.

Kevin Harris: What things are required then for life to have meaning?

Dr. Craig: Well, in this chapter I argue that there are two basic requirements in order for life to be meaningful, valuable, and purposeful. And that would be God – and by that I mean the personal God of the great monotheistic faiths – and then immortality. There has to be life beyond the grave. Life cannot end in our physical death. So those would be, I think, the two necessary conditions for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life. And of course, if atheism is true you have got neither of those conditions.

Kevin Harris: If God were to exist but we didn’t survive the grave, that would still seem rather meaningless. We could serve him while we are alive but then one of these days it is all going to be over and all for naught. That is why you are combining the two it seems. [4]

Dr. Craig: Yes, this is a very interesting question, Kevin, that you are raising. I think that the view that you’ve described – namely, you believe in God but you don’t believe in any life beyond the grave – that leads to the worldview of Ecclesiastes. Think of the book of Ecclesiastes. That author clearly believed in God but, so far as he is thinking there is no life beyond the grave, everything ends in death, and his verdict is then it’s all vanity. Pleasure, wealth, political fame, education, it all is ultimately meaningless because it just ends in the grave. So I do think that there is required more than just God’s existence. I think that immortality as well is required.

Kevin Harris: Chase this with me for just a moment, Bill. It seems that if the Bible taught annihilationism – that eventually those who reject God and the unbelievers who die in sin apart from Christ – if they knew that they were just going to be annihilated by God, then it will all be over anyway. There is no endurance, there is no eternal consciousness, and so go ahead and be nihilistic.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, that does seem to me to follow, Kevin. I think there has to be some kind of moral accountability in the afterlife as opposed to just being annihilated. I think that many atheists would be quite happy with that prospect. In fact I know they would because they have said so. People like Aldous Huxley basically said I don’t believe in God because it allows me to do whatever I please. And when you die, the consequences end right there. So annihilationism, I don’t think, would disturb those kind of folks at all.

Kevin Harris: You tell of a science fiction story that you once read about a man on a planet. That seemed to make sense too because this is the other side of the coin. Were you to live eternally but there were no God or no ultimate purpose, well then you are really stuck at that point.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, if there is no God but your life just goes on forever, it would become absolute tedium. It would become horrible boredom. As one person put it, even Shakespeare, even Beethoven after a while will become noxious and unbearable. I think what this expresses is that only an infinite good can satisfy man’s ultimate longings. Any finite good pursued long enough will ultimately become boring and even noxious after a while. It takes an infinite good to satisfy, I think, the human heart. So we need both God as well as immortality if life is to be meaningful, valuable, and purposeful.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, our question of the day: can the non-theist or the atheist be a moral person?

Dr. Craig: I think he certainly can because God exists. If there were no God then none of us could be a moral person in the true sense of the word because morality would just be a human illusion. It would just be an ingrained behavior pattern that is the product of socio-biological evolution. But because there really is a God who is the standard of absolute right and wrong, good and evil, that means that the theist and atheist alike can live lives that, to differing degrees, live up to those objective standards and therefore can be good.

Kevin Harris: A lot of non-Christians or non-theists get rather offended when they think that we are saying that moral values are grounded in God and so forth and they say you don’t have to believe in God to be a good person. I am a good person and I don’t believe in God.

Dr. Craig: Right, they are misunderstanding the argument. We need to be very clear when we offer a moral argument for God’s existence that we are not claiming that belief in God is necessary for moral goodness to exist; we are claiming that God himself is necessary in order for moral goodness to exist.

Kevin Harris: When we apply Christian theology to that, we seem to take it to another step and that would be, “But our good works and our moral values are not what will get us in a right relationship with God.”

Dr. Craig: Exactly. If there are objective moral values that exist, then what this ought to produce in us is a deep sense of shame and guilt because it is so obvious that we failed to live up to that standard. C. S. Lewis put it very nicely when he said no one knows how bad he is until he has really tried to be good. [5]