OBLIVION, THE SEARCH FOR MEANING, AND THE SEARCH FOR DISTRACTION

Part of being human is about knowing ourselves, even why we are here. The late beloved Jewish philosopher and theologian, Abraham Heschel, asserted this very thing:

• It’s not enough for me to be able to say ‘I am’; I want to know who I am and in relation to whom I live. It is not enough for me to ask questions; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?

Psychologist Arthur Deikman also wrote:

• Human beings need meaning. Without it they suffer… Western Psychotherapy is hard put to meet human beings’ need for meaning, for it attempts to understand clinical phenomena in a framework based on scientific materialism in which meaning is arbitrary and purpose nonexistent.

The late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl affirmed:

• Man’s search for meaning is a primary force in his life.

The late professor of philosophy, Dallas Willard, claimed:

• [Human life] essentially involves meaning. Meaning is not a luxury for us. It is a kind of spiritual oxygen, we might say, that enables our soul to live. (Os Guinness, The Journey, 39)

Even the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche admitted that without a “why” for our lives, we remain fragile:

• “He who has a why to live for can bear any how.” (Guinness)

When we have a goal, a reason for our being here, we can endure far more than if we are just living for pleasure. It is our confident purpose for living that allows us to see beyond our painful circumstances to a joy beyond ourselves.

Nevertheless, there is also the opposite – the pursuit of diversion, a desperate respite from trying to figure out life. The late scientist, mathematician, and inventor, Blaise Pascal, wrote that humanity seeks diversion:

• From thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which takes their mind off it, or by some novel and agreeable passion which keeps them busy, like gambling, hunting, some absorbing show… It is not that they bring happiness nor anyone imagines that true bliss comes from possessing the money won at gaming or the hare that is hunted. (Pensees)

Why is it, if finding our purpose for being is so central to our being, that do we avoid it through distractions? Pascal wrote:

• If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from it. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things. (Pensees)

Well, isn’t the meaning of life and the comfort that it is supposed to bring discoverable? Not according to the late British skeptic and philosopher David Hume:

• Most unfortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature [pleasure] herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bend of mind, or by some avocation and lively impression of my senses, which obliterates all these chimeras. I drive, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends…(Treatise of Human Nature)

Even the brilliant Hume could not figure life out. Therefore, he resorted to sensual pleasures.

However, if Hume couldn’t figure life out, what hope have we? Perhaps Hume started with the wrong assumption or paradigm. It’s like starting with the wrong button. Every subsequent button will be misplaced until we go back to the beginning, but are we willing to?

Well, what is Hume’s misplaced initial button – the button which had become his guarded and cherished bedrock? Atheist Stephen Knight, host of the Godless Spellchecker podcast, acknowledged that, without God, “Oblivion looms”:

• “When we reject the imagined supernatural meaning from our existence, what we’re left with is far from a consolation prize. Sure, it’ll be messy at times, sometimes joyous, sometimes miserable, but it’s all we’ll ever know. And it’s ours. We invent comforting lies to distract us from one simple truth: Oblivion looms. So, what are you going to do about it?”

What is the “comforting lie” to which Knight alludes? Heaven, an afterlife! But perhaps the atheist also has his comforting lie – an oblivion where he will not be judged, which allows him to live in the way he wants, at least for now.

Why would anyone prefer oblivion above the possibility of finding God? The atheist and author of the Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, explained his rejection of the Christian faith:

• I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning [and moral absolutes]; consequently assumed that it had none…We don’t know because we don’t want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless. (Ends and Mean)

Huxley was right. Meaninglessness is a choice of the wrong initial button and not a lack of intelligence or evidence. But why would anyone make such a choice? Jesus explained:

• And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

Consequently, meaninglessness and the pursuit of diversion are the costs for rejecting the light – the choice we make.

NIETZSCHE AND NIHILISM: THE DENIAL OF OBJECTIVE TRUTH

 Nihilism is basically the same thing as moral relativism and postmodernism. They all deny the objective reality of any moral or spiritual truth. Instead, they are just a matter of what we subjectively choose for ourselves. The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said it this way:

• “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”  

However, this statement and all of the statements of postmodernism are logically incoherent; they don’t make any logical sense. How so? Nietzsche had claimed that there was no “correct way.” However, by making this dogmatic statement, he had claimed that there was a correct way – HIS way!

Well, what is his way? His insistence that the correct way “does not exist!” (How does he know this?)

I’m not picking on his wording or phraseology. The incoherence is part of his nihilistic postmodern worldview. He asserts that everything is personal and subjective. However, in order to make this assertion, he must resort to using an objective statement of truth, something he claims that we cannot do.

How do you talk to someone like Nietzsche, and there are many Nietzsches around? I would simply ask him:

• Are you absolutely and objectively certain that a “correct way… does not exist?”

If he answers “yes,” then I would point out that:

• Well, doesn’t your assertion just reflect your OWN thinking?

If, instead, he answers that “no” and that he is merely just expressing the way he feels or sees things, then I would respond:

• If this is just the way you FEEL, well, who cares!

THE DEATH OF GOD AND HOW IT HAS CHANGED THE WORLD

 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 thought that they could 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 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.

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, and who can mediate between those two opinions with any authority if God is dead! But should we have laws that equally protect the survival of the mosquito? A growing number would now argue, “Yes!”

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. 

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.

Perhaps not beyond all reason! In his Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle Paul had written that humanity is without rational excuse for rejecting God:

• For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:18-20)

Consequently, rejecting God is not a morally neutral choice.

Who are we and why are we here?

 

Part of being human is about knowing ourselves, even why we are here. The beloved Jewish philosopher and theologian, Abraham Heschel, asserted this very thing:

• It’s not enough for me to be able to say ‘I am’; I want to know who I am and in relation to whom I live. It is not enough for me to ask questions; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?

Life is filled with suffering and injustice. The innocent become victims in what seems to be a senseless flow of snickering events. These force us to re-ask Heschel’s question – “What am I here for.”

Solomon’s life had been devoted to answering this question:

• I thought to myself, "Look, I have grown and increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge. "Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. (Ecclesiastes 1:16-18)

As hard as Solomon tried, he was unable to grasp life’s meaning. It was like trying to grasp “the wind.” Instead, his wisdom-quest produced “much sorrow” and “grief.” Why? Normally, he extolled the value of wisdom. However, when it came to grasping ultimate meaning, he was frustrated. He needed to know about the afterlife. Only this knowledge could give him the understanding for which he searched. However, his intellect was unable to pass through the curtain separating this life from the next. From the perspective of his limited wisdom-quest, it appeared that there was no meaning to life:

• For the wise man, like the fool, will not be long remembered; in days to come both will be forgotten. Like the fool, the wise man too must die!  So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the work into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless. So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune. (Ecclesiastes 2:16-21)

Without the confident knowledge of life’s meaning, which requires the big picture, Solomon hated life. However, he wasn’t alone. Even secularists have expressed our utter need for life to having meaning.  Psychologist Arthur Deikman writes:

• Human beings need meaning. Without it they suffer… Western Psychotherapy is hard put to meet human beings’ need for meaning, for it attempts to understand clinical phenomena in a framework based on scientific materialism in which meaning is arbitrary and purpose nonexistent.

According to Deikman, meaning could not merely be subjectively created. For “Western Psychotherapy… purpose [is] nonexistent,” and we are not able to create what is “nonexistent.”  Even the atheist and Christianity-despiser, Frederick Nietzsche, wrote that “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how!’” However, once we reject the afterlife, that “why” becomes unattainable.

Despite all that he possessed, Solomon could not bear life without answering this “why.” This is why the Christian is so blessed! Alluding to Solomon’s perplexity, the Apostle Paul wrote:

• If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. (1 Corinthians 15:19)

• If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus for merely human reasons, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." (1 Corinthians 15:32) 

Without heaven, life has no more meaning beyond a mad rush to fulfill ourselves. However, self-fulfillment will not satisfy, even in this life. Suffering is inevitable! How do we deal with it? Paul declared that we can only remain joyous in the hand of suffering as we look beyond it:

• I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. (Romans 8:18)

It is only the fragrance of our confidence in the next life that will enable us to look beyond the suffering. Why then are we here? It is eternity’s boot-camp!