CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE: CONSEQUENCES AS THE CHRISTIAN INFLUENCE CONTINUES TO VANISH

The West still retains some semblance of Biblical thinking and habits. However, as these diminish, so too will many of the principles that all of us cherish. An atheist had recently informed her audience that we can appropriate Christian principles, like equality, without the Christian religion.

Can we? I don’t think so! The following are principles that secularism/atheism/materialism/naturalism (SAMN) will not be able to sustain for long and are now quickly disappearing from the Western worldview – Human Primacy, Equality, Human Rights, Free Will, Justice, Objective Moral Law; and Meaning/Purpose:

HUMAN PRIMACY – Our legal systems give priority to humanity. Therefore, swatting a mosquito or cutting down a tree is still not a criminal offense.

• Genesis 9:6 “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”

However, SAMN provides no adequate basis to regard the human as more valuable than the mosquito. This is because there is no way to rationally establish human value above that of the mosquito. Judging by its behavior, cows value their lives more than they do our own lives.

Consequently, many are saying, “All life has equal value.” Against this, various measures of value are put forth, like the degrees of intelligence, creativity, or love do not work. Just try to apply them consistently! You can’t! It would mean that those people who have more intelligence are to be more valued!

HUMAN EQUALITY – With the demise of the Biblical faith, there is no reason to regard each human being as equal before the law. From an SAMN POV, we are unequal according to any possible measure – age, sex, strength, intelligence, societal contributions, likeability… Therefore, abortion and euthanasia and many other social evils have now become rampant. 

“Sanctity of all human Life” (SL) has morphed into a “Quality of Life” (QL) worldview. Consequently, seen through the QL lens, society has determined that some are less valuable and therefore more expendable. As this slide continues, it is inevitable that QL will regard some as having less protection under the law.

HUMAN RIGHTS – SAMN has no adequate rational basis to place human rights above the pig’s rights. Instead, SAMN regards human rights as something that the State grants, not God. However, if the State grants these, it can just as easily retract these rights, when it no longer sees them as expedient. Instead, the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence reads:

·       "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The founders understood that if our rights depended upon government to grant them, they could never be regarded as “unalienable.”

FREE WILL and CULPABILITY – SAMN provides no basis to believe in the existence of Free Will. Consequently, there is no guilt, courage, or integrity, just biochemical reactions determining every aspect of choice and behavior.

• …free will, in their view, is obviously incompatible with naturalism, with determinism, and very likely incoherent against any background, so they cheerfully insist that of course they don't have free will, couldn’t have free will, but so what? – Daniel Dennett

Consequently, we are little more than highly sophisticated wet machines. However, when machines lose their socially determined usefulness, they are thrown on a junk heap.

Besides, if all of our choices and behavior are entirely controlled by biochemical laws, then punishment is not a matter of justice but the “tyranny of the majority.” However, the Bible always assumes that we have responsible choices to make, as Joshua had commanded Israel: “Choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15).

JUSTICE – This used to be administered according to the guilt of the individual, but now it is becoming a matter of group-guilt relative to sex, sexual practice, color, race, religion, and to social appraisal of who has been oppressed. This can only lead to distrust and division.

SAMN has no basis to believe in an objective good and bad, just and unjust, right and wrong. These are now regarded as socially evolving ideas, relative to each society. Therefore, we now lack any objective standards to judge anyone or any culture or even a Hitler. In contrast:

·       Hebrews 10:28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses.

OBJECTIVE MORAL LAW (and morality) – Once SAMN rejects the Law-Giver, there remains no basis for objective laws or principles. Laws, therefore, must be humanly created, not discovered. This represents a major shift from principled biblical thinking to a pragmatic cost/benefit analysis. However, human history has shown us that such thinking will inevitably favor those in power, who derive a different cost/benefit analysis. Consequently, here in the States, we find that Congress has been voting for themselves benefits far above those benefits granted to its citizens. In contrast:

• Deuteronomy 17:18-20 “And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment..”

MEANING AND PURPOSE OF LIFE – SAMN has no rational basis to believe in the objective existence of theses. Since the cosmos was not created with any purpose in mind, we are left to fend for ourselves to create our own personal meaning and purpose.

Why then are many SAMN people doing morally good things? Because it produces benefits for them! Once it doesn’t produce those benefits, temptations to do what will produce more benefits arise. A pragmatic cost/benefit analysis will then be unable to ward off self-serving temptations.

SCIENCE – Instead, of the devotion of science to a search for the truth, science has adopted a narrow secularized version – the search for a natural understanding. However, the re-emergence of science is a product of the Christian West. British scientist Robert Clark summed it up this way:

·       However we may interpret the fact, scientific development has only occurred in Christian culture. The ancients had brains as good as ours. In all civilizations—Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, India, Rome, Persia, China and so on—science developed to a certain point and then stopped. It is easy to argue speculatively that, perhaps, science might have been able to develop in the absence of Christianity, but in fact, it never did. And no wonder. For the non-Christian world believed that there was something ethically wrong about science. In Greece, this conviction was enshrined in the legend of Prometheus, the fire-bearer and prototype scientist who stole fire from heaven, thus incurring the wrath of the gods. (Christian Belief and Science, quoted by Henry F. Schaefer, 14)

All of the above principles find their objective support in the Biblical revelation. However, in the absence of any rational basis for these principles, SAMN folks counsel us to make-believe that they do have an objective existence because these principles are pragmatically necessary. Consequently, we are supposed to believe in free will, not because it really exists, but because we rationally need it to exist. We also need to make-believe in a right and wrong, a just and unjust, human rights and primacy, and that some behaviors are just wrong. Outcome – cynicism and alienation! Instead, we need to know that we enjoy equal protection under just laws.

However, playing make-believe is out-of-sync with reality and how we must live our lives. Would not this disqualify SAMN?

The late German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, foresaw the demise of Christianity and the inevitable consequences of the rejection of Biblical constraints. Consequently, he held the “common man” in contempt, because they rejoiced at this “death of God” but was unable to fathom its cost. Accordingly, Donna Gunderson Hailson has written: 

• More than a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that the idea of God was dead and, that if the world were to be without this sense of divine order and attaching moral principles, it would be left with nihilism—no meaning, no purpose, no intrinsic value. Nietzsche attributed two central principles of Western civilization to Christianity: all people are created equal and in the image of God that our lives have moral worth and that we share the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nietzsche’s warning was that none of these values would make sense without the background moral framework against which they were formulated. A post-Christian West, he argued, would have to go back to the ethical drawing board for a reconsideration of its values. (The Rockery, 
  Theology, Nature, and the Arts as Spiritual Ambassadors for the Christian Faith; e-magazine; August 7, 20016)