The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, had argued that
once we reject the Christian God, we have also rejected Christian values –
equality, human exceptionalism, and an entire array of values that go along
with them. However, the West naively thinks that they can retain Christian
values after “killing” the Christian God. Os Guinness wrote of Nietzsche’s
disdain for such blindness:
·
Nietzsche was a self-proclaimed “anti-Christ,”
yet he had no time for complacent middle-class thinking that could say, “God is
dead” and go on living as before. If God was “dead” for Western culture, then
nothing was the same. It was time to face the consequences. (The Journey, 136)
What were the consequences? Anything would now be
permissible! With God in the grave, our only moral rudder would be our desires
and fears. Hence, the two great wars!
However, as in Nietzsche’s day, so too in ours! Few can
perceive the consequences of their rejection of God. Atheists confidently explain:
·
We need not sink into a morally relativistic
quagmire once we reject God. We still have absolute moral principles to guide
us. For example, drinking water is absolutely good because it promotes survival
and survival is absolutely good.
However, what makes survival absolutely good? There no
longer exists an absolute principle that makes human survival more important
than the malaria-bearing mosquito. Besides, is there anything that establishes
that survival-is-good apart from our own subjective judgment? If the mosquito
could talk, he might say that his survival is just as important to him as ours
is to us. Besides, who can say otherwise with any authority, if God is dead! Is
there anything left to argue in favor of laws that protect us over the mosquito,
other than human chauvinism? A growing number would now argue, “No!”
This brings us back to moral relativism where morality is
entirely relative to how I think and feel on any given morning. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote:
·
They are rid of the Christian God and now
believe all the more firmly that they must cling to the Christian morality…
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian
morality out from under one’s feet.
Truly, Christian morality rests upon an absolutely immutable
and universal standard – God - but does it really matter? Yes! Our beliefs have
consequences. The German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, noted these consequences
back in 1832:
·
It is to the great merit of Christianity that it
has somewhat attenuated the brutal German lust for battle. But it could not
destroy it entirely. And should that taming talisman break – the Cross - then
will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors.
What would happen once the Cross was broken? Heine
continued:
·
And laugh not at my forebodings, the advice of a
dreamer who warns you away from the Kants and Fichtes of the world, and from
our philosophers of nature. No, laugh not at the visionary who knows that in
the realm of phenomena comes soon the revolution that has already taken place
in the realm of spirit. For thought goes before deed as lightening before
thunder. There will be played in Germany a play compared to which the French
revolution was but an innocent idyll.
It is inevitable that, without God, there will be little to
restrain the madness. The late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Victor
Frankl, reasoned:
·
I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers
of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek, were ultimately prepared not in some
ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and the lecture halls of
nihilistic scientists and philosophers. (The
Doctor of the Soul)
Thoughts and philosophies precede plans and actions. Historian
Richard Weikart, California State University, wrote in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in
Germany about how the anti-God worldview of Darwinism impacted thought and
action:
- By reducing humans to mere animals, by stressing human inequality, and by viewing the death of many "unfit" organisms as a necessary—and even progressive—natural phenomenon, Darwinism made the death of the "inferior" seem inevitable and even beneficent. Some Darwinists concluded that helping the "unfit" die—which had for millennia been called murder—was not morally reprehensible, but was rather morally good.
Hitler didn’t invent eugenics. He gladly imbibed ideas that
had become ripe in the Western world. According to Weikart, Darwinist thinking
brought about policy and behavioral change:
- Those skeptical about the role Darwinism played in the rise of advocacy for involuntary euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion should consider several points. First, before the rise of Darwinism, there was no debate on these issues, as there was almost universal agreement in Europe that human life is sacred and that all innocent human lives should be protected. Second, the earliest advocates of involuntary euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion in Germany were devoted to a Darwinian worldview. Third, Haeckel, the most famous Darwinist in Germany, promoted these ideas in some of his best-selling books, so these ideas reached a wide audience, especially among those receptive to Darwinism. Finally, Haeckel and other Darwinists and eugenicists grounded their views on death and killing on their naturalistic interpretation of Darwinism.
Heine was clearly right. In the same way that lightening
precedes thunder, thought precedes deed. In Markings,
the later Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, wrote:
·
God does not die on the day when we cease to
believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our loves cease to be
illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of
which is beyond all reason.
Our death takes many forms once we kill God. Jesus had
taught: “You are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matthew 10:31). Up to two
hundred years ago, such a statement would not have raised an eyebrow. However,
today it has become quite controversial within certain circles, where it is
claimed that all life is of equal value.
However, most still believe that we are more valuable than
sparrows, mosquitoes, and even cows. How do they justify this claim in our
post-Christian society? They offer various possibilities, like, “Humanity is
more valuable than animals because…
·
We are sentient being, or
·
We feel and love more deeply, or
·
We are intelligent and creative, or…”
However, these criteria of value, by themselves, are totally
inadequate to justify our surpassing value. They merely shift the question of
value to other unjustified criteria – intelligence, feelings, and creativity.
What is able to impart value to these criteria, especially in view of a
God-less world that lacks any inherent meaning?
The atheistic philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, was able to
perceive this problem in the late 19th century. In The Gay Science (Section 125, The Madman), he wrote:
·
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have
killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to
death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there
for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall
we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we
ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Nietzsche realized that without God, we would now have to
“become gods” to arbitrarily and subjectively create our own values. There is
no other alternative. However, we encounter another problem when we try to
create value in a valueless, meaningless universe.
Besides, our determination of value cannot match God’s. For
example, if our value depends on our higher intelligence or sentience, then we
have to sacrifice other values, like human equality, in the process.
Why? Well, some of us are more intelligent, conscious,
sensitive, or educated than others. Adults are more intelligent than babies and
the elderly. They are also more successful and contribute more to society. Do
we want a world where our relative value is socially determined according to
our performance or status? Of course not! However, when we reject God, we also
reject any coherent system of laws and values. Atheist Arthur Leff of the Duke
School of Law had written:
·
“The so-called death of God wasn’t just His
funeral, but was the elimination of any coherent ethical or legal system…As it
stands now, everything is up for grabs…Napalming babies is bad, starving the
poor wicked, buying and selling people is depraved—but, ‘Sez who?’ God help
us.”
Leff understood that, without God, there exists no basis for
any meaningful system of values or laws. Instead, we have banished ourselves into
a meaningless, valueless, and lifeless desert, self-condemned to obsessively and
hopelessly prove that we do have value. Consequently, it is likely that Heine’s
words shall be once again vindicated:
·
It is to the great merit of Christianity that it
has somewhat attenuated the brutal German lust for battle.
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