Apologia Christi

‘Dare to think for yourself.’ On atheism and meaning.

This is the second article on atheism from a Christian point of view. The series is response to the atheistic billboard dat appeared close to Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam in March 2009. In this contribution we will take a closer look at the second statement on the billboard: ‘Dare to think for yourself’. According to the atheists behind the billboard it is self-evident that the non-existence of God leads to the call to have the courage to think for yourself.

Is there any daring left after God has fallen away? What independent thinking can we do apart from God? In my previous article we saw that the atheistic worldview does not leave us any morality to guide our lifes. That is, as we saw, because the material reality does not offer a foundation for an absolute ethic. How is it with meaning? In order to think for ourselves there has to be a reason to do so. There has to be meaning. Thinking must be meaningful.

Everything is finite and without meaning
Again we turn our attention to that pillar of atheism, naturalism. Naturalism offers us a closed system of natural causes. The empirical (from the senses) method only recognizes matter. Simply put: everything is dust; other than that there is nothing. There can be no natural cause. Naturalism is a closed box; nothing comes in and nothing goes out. We have to play with the cards that we have been dealt. What you see is what you get. Period. Nothing less, nothing more. We have matter. This matter has developed by chance into what we now know to be the universe including all life forms known to us. It is all stuff, matter, molecules, atoms, etc.

What can we say about this matter? We can say that matter has no meaning or purpose in itself. It is simply there, that’s all. We know now, based on recent cosmological insights, that this matter is finite. We now know that the universe is rapidly expanding towards slow extinction. All matter will eventually decay into lose atoms floating in an area that is endlessly bigger than our current universe.

With that it is becoming immediately clear that life too is finite. Not just finite in the sense that every individual cannot escape death, but finite in the sense that conditions in the universe will eventually make any form of life impossible. Life – including human life – seen from that perspective is completely wthout any meaning. We shall return to this later.

Man as anomaly
First something about man. Who or what is he? This is not the place to develop a full-blown anthropology, but I would like to point out a few things that are related to man’s place in reality. As far as we can see man is different from the animal kingdom in that his behaviour is not primarily driven by his instinct but by his ability to reason. That is not to say that man acts in a purely reasonable way, but that he uses his rationality as his primary instrument of interacting with reality.

Another way to indicate this distinction is to say that man, in contrast with animals, has the ability of self-reflection. He is able to consider himself, his environment and the present time from a distance. He is able to imagine how and where he’ll be in the future. In relation to himself he is able to ask the questions: ‘How did I get here?’ and ‘What is the purpose of my existence?’. Man desires, aspires, has ambition, and strives to reach goals of which he suspects are part of his potential. He hopes and works toward a destination somewhere in the future. With regard to this hope he fears death and the horrible prospect of one day no longer existing.

If only he did not possess this self-reflection; how easy life would be. Man feels – often unconsciously – the painful discrepancy between the meaninglessness and finitude of life on the one hand and his own aspiration on the other. When he faces the facts he sees himself as an anomaly of yearning for meaning in an ocean without meaning. As an atheist that is. In order to compensate for this he tries to attach meaning to himself in different ways.

He will for instance devote himself to art. But art only gives the appearance of meaning. It may be true that art at its best amazes us, leaves us enraptured and overwhelmed. We probably all know the powerful effect of art when we are immersed into it. It creates the feeling of being in touch with something higher than ourselves. In the end, however, the naturalistic view of reality will land us firmly on solid ground again. Van Gogh’s painting offer nothing more than bouncing photons through the lenses of our eyes. Beethoven’s symphonies do little more than creating vibrations of molecules in the air that reach our ears. The painting will pulverize while the last tone fades away. What is left is emptiness and silence.

It doesn’t help either to depict man as part of a huge cosmic drama as if there is an onlooker to whom it all makes sense. Our finitude cannot be elevated to a dramatic tragedy. Our meaning cannot be found either in what we mean to our offspring or in what we leave behind for future generations, because they too will disappear. The whole of humanity will cease to exist.

The atheist who recognizes things for what they are has to make a shift from hope to despair and has few options left, the only one of which hedonism seems to be the most logical. There are but a few willing to face this reality and even fewer who are able to stand under the towering weight of the reality of naturalism.

It takes courage
Bertrand Russel, the famous 20th century philosopher was willing to do just that. He wrote in ‘A Free Man’s Worship‘:

“Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins–all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.“

Though Russel did not mean despair in emotional but existential sense, this despair nevertheless comes riding in as an all-crushing steam roller for whoever is willing to see the consequences. It is difficult to imagine how the soul’s habitation can be safely built there. Our only hope would be that the scaffolding that Russel talks about are not truths but lies.

The tremendous implications of atheism stood clearly before the eyes of the ‘God-is-dead’ atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche when he wrote in his ‘Gay Science‘:

“Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!”

As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

“Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us – for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”

The atheists that proudly and happily promote their worldview do not realize what Nietzsche knew: taking God out of the equation obliterates the meaning of mankind. What daring is there left to engage life when there is such a chasm between our longing for meaning and permanence on one side and the atheistic reality of our finitude and meaninglessness on the other?

Yes one needs courage to live a life like that. But why? one may ask. Is this courage rewarded? Is it admired? If so, by whom, with which purpose and which result? It is all without meaning. Suicide is just as legitimate an answer to the meaninglessness of the atheistic worldview as the courage to stare our meaningless fate in the eye. Because courage itself has become a meaningless word.

But why should anyone decide to live like that when there is no reason at all to assume that there is no God? My next article will deal with that question: ‘There is probably no God’, atheism and proof.

Tagged: Apologetics, atheism