CREATING OUR OWN MEANING IN A MEANINGLESS UNIVERSE

Can we thrive in a meaningless, purposeless world that cares nothing for us? Atheist Bertrand Russell believed that humanity could impose their own will and purpose on the purposeless, filling the emptiness with meaning:

• Undismayed by the empire of chance, [man determines] to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyrant that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces... [He determines] to sustain alone... the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power. (A Free Man’s Worship)

However, there are dreams that will not take wing no matter how confident we might be about them. Years later, Russell confessed that his dreams folded like a rose dropping its dried pedals:

• I wrote with passion and force because I really thought I had a gospel. Now I am cynical about the gospel because it won’t stand the test of life.

Why did his dream die? It wasn’t able to deliver what humanity requires. But why can’t we simply create our own meaning? Perhaps, it’s like trying to create an imaginary family and mate, which we can enjoy in our minds without the messiness of relationships. And when we get tired of our “wife,” we can simply exchange her for “another” mental construction.

Ludicrous? Of course! However, this is just what we do when we exchange a genuine relationship with God and the meaning that can only come from such a relationship with our own mental creation. Yes, I can be the captain of my own ship, but this ship ultimately will not take me where I need to go.

FROM WHERE DO WE OBTAIN AN ACCURATE ROADMAP FOR LIFE?

Why do some people seek out God? They understand that the secular, materialistic worldview cannot account for their experiences and perceptions; it cannot explain the facts of our lives. Nor can it provide an accurate roadmap for life. In “Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical,” Timothy Keller wrote:

·       One of the world’s most prominent philosophers, Jürgen Habermas, was for decades a defender of the Enlightenment view that only secular reason should be used in the public square. Habermas has recently startled the philosophical establishment, however, with a changed and more positive attitude toward religious faith. He now believes that secular reason alone cannot account for what he calls “the substance of the human.”

For one thing, materialism is unable to provide a basis to believe in the things that we must. It cannot provide a basis for objective moral law. Consequently, with the rise of irreligious states, there has also been a rise in genocide:

·       Habermas tells those who are still confident that “philosophical reason . . . is capable of determining what is true and false” to simply look at the “catastrophes of the twentieth century—religious fascist and communist states, operating on the basis of practical reason—to see that this confidence is misplaced.” Terrible deeds have been done in the name of religion, but secularism has not proven to be an improvement.

Secular humanism is unable to provide any moral basis for our indignation for the surrounding evils. The poet and atheist, W.H. Auden moved to Germantown in NYC from his Ireland in the early 1930s. While he was watching a news clip in the movie theater about the Nazi invasion of Poland, he was horrified to see the audience rise to its feet, applaud and cry out, “Destroy the Poles.” Auden wanted to take a strong moral stance against their response, but he realized that, as an atheist, his values were merely self-constructed and, therefore, lacking in any persuasive value. This sent him into a moral tailspin, resulting in his becoming a Christian.

Materialism could not give Auden what his heart demanded – objective moral truth to combat evil. There are also many other things that materialism cannot provide. Keller writes:

·       Habermas writes: “The ideals of freedom . . . of conscience, human rights and democracy [are] the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. . . . To this day there is no alternative to it.”

Nor can science provide the ideals that are so essential to human thriving, like the concept of human equality. Keller writes:

·       In 1926 John T. Scopes was famously tried under Tennessee law for teaching evolution. Few people remember, however, that the textbook Scopes used, Civic Biology by George Hunter, taught not only evolution but also argued that science dictated we should sterilize or even kill those classes of people who weakened the human gene pool by spreading “disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country.” This was typical of scientific textbooks of the time. It was the horrors of World War II, not science, that discredited eugenics.

When we find that our roadmap will not take us where we need to go, it is time for find a better one.

SUICIDE AND HOPELESSNESS

Suicide has reached epidemic levels. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide is now the 10^th leading cause of death in the US. In 2014, approximately 42,773 died of suicide and 25 times as many attempt suicide. That means approximately 100,000,000 Americans! They add:

·       In 2014, the highest suicide rate (19.3 out of 100,000 yearly) was among people 85 years or older. The second highest rate (19.2) occurred in those between 45 and 64 years of age. Younger groups have had consistently lower suicide rates than middle-aged and older adults. In 2014, adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 24 had a suicide rate of 11.6. 

These rates have been rising steadily since 2000, especially among Whites (14.7 per 100,000, vs. Blacks – 5.5 in 2014).

What accounts for rise? Kelly Crace, VP of Health and Wellness at the College of William and Mary, offered a surprising assessment:

·       Suicides on college campuses move us toward myopic criticisms of stress and academic pressure. We want to blame the suicide on how stressed out or pressured a student was made to feel. But stress and academic pressure are not strong predictors of completed suicide attempts. What is a strong predictor is a complex mental health state that goes untreated. Stress and pressure can deteriorate someone’s well-being and can compound a complex mental health state but they in themselves are not the indications that someone will commit suicide. (Catherine Cook, Christian Research Journal, Vol. 39/Number 04, 60)

If stress is not the culprit, what is? It seems obvious that the problem is hopelessness. Victor Frankl, the late holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, perceptively wrote about the decline of his fellow inmates:

·       The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay.

When we despair of ourselves and our predicaments, we decline and sometimes decide to check-out.

What will make the difference? There are probably a lot of things that will address the despair: friends, social connections, confidants, and even our responsibility for others.

The late American novelist Norman Mailer also understood the need for our lives to have meaning and purpose:

·       “We are healthier if we think there is some importance in what we’re doing…When it seems like my life is meaningless, I feel closer to despair.”

It seems that Mailer realized that he could not merely create his own meaning. Instead, it has to be discovered within the fabric of objective reality.

Even worse, secularism slams the door on meaning, according to sociologist David Karp:

·       “Cosmopolitan medicine banishes that knowledge [of the necessary purpose for suffering] by insisting that suffering is without meaning and unnecessary… [Suffering is] secularized as mechanical mishaps, and so stripped of their stories, the spiritual ramifications and missing pieces of history that make meaning." (Speaking of Sadness, pg. 191) 

In contrast to the secular sterility, the late Zen Buddhist, psychiatrist and author of The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck, introduced his readers to Zen spirituality. However, fifteen years later, he wrote Further along the Road Less Traveled to bring us up to date with his spiritual pilgrimage:

·       The quickest way for you to change your attitude toward pain is to accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.

The best medicine for despair is the knowledge that there is a good purpose for our pain and that, in the end, everything will work out for the best:

·       Now what better news can there be than we cannot lose, we are bound to win? We are guaranteed winners once we realize that everything that happens to us has been designed to teach us what we need to know on our journey.

How did Peck learn this lesson? He had observed his Christian patients, who had this confidence, consistently improve. Peck realized that a trust in a loving God had been the missing critical element. Consequently, he became a Christian.

When we understand that we belong to Christ (Galatians 2:20) and that He has such a love for us that He is working everything out for the good (Romans 8:28), we can rest back and leave the driving to Him.

THE NEW PAGANISM

We are all interconnected. The priestess’ sermon communicated this point very clearly. She had vacationed on an island off the coast of Maine, which had eliminated its mosquito problem by draining the cranberry bogs. However, along with the mosquitoes, they also eliminated the cranberries, birds, night sounds, and an assortment of fish.

From this she reasoned that by changing one thing, all is changed. One action flows everywhere like water. Likewise, we are not merely a single drop of water, but a drop that impacts all other drops. What we say and do will impact those around us, and they will impact those around them.

This principle is undeniable, but what do we do with it? We ritualize it. The church gave water to each person. They were instructed to pour their water into a common trough to symbolize our connectedness. Then, this new batch was combined with last year’s water to symbolize our continuity with the past.

This principle also pertains to our beliefs. When we change one belief, we also change every other belief. When we eliminate God from our thinking, we are compelled to fill this faith-void with substitutes. Clearly, this is exactly what this church has done. It has invented new rituals, accompanied by meditation and an assortment of radical causes.

If meaning, love, validation, and forgiveness are no longer the product of a relationship with God, then alternatives must be found. Instead, we are taught to forgive ourselves and to validate ourselves through our activism. And, we can derive meaning and dignity from knowing that we are like a drop of water that flows everywhere, right?

However, will this awareness truly ennoble us? Will it cause us to respect and cherish every other drop of water? Will it enable us to honor others more?

Another way to envision these questions is to think about the water in a toilet bowl. Even though we might understand that this water will flow into the great oceans of this world and will be gathered up in clouds to water the earth, it fails to give us the honor and dignity that we so need as human beings.

Instead, this is an honor that can only come from the Creator who has created us in His image and has called us to represent Him, endowing us with a value and a purpose far in excess of every other created thing.

It is because of our special status that we are constrained to honor and love all other people.

·       Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. (Romans 12:10)

This is something that we cannot do for every drop on the planet. To love everything is to love nothing.

Besides, it is because I know that God loves, forgives, and cherishes me that I can pass it on to others, however imperfectly. It is because He accepts me that I can accept others. In contrast, we use water for very menial purposes. However, humans are not to be used but to be served.

At the end of the service, we sang, “There is a river flowing in my soul…telling me I’m somebody.”

It cannot be a literal flow of water that tells me I’m somebody, but rather the fact that God has created me and loved me so much that He has died for me. I need to know that I am more than an interactive part of the universe. Instead, I need to know that I am part of God’s family, and that this is something that will never change.

I was disturbed by the sight of this new paganism. I wanted to scream, but I also must love.

THE QUESTION OF HUMAN THRIVING

If we are really interested in the question of human prospering, we should also be interested in the question of faith in God. Here are some thoughts about things identified for human prospering:

1.     GRATITUDE/THANKFULNESS – Only the promise of an afterlife can make us feel grateful in a life of cancer, rejection, and depression. Besides, how can we be grateful if humans have hurt us so?

2.     MORALITY – While living morally is related to well-being, we will not be able to get excited about a morality that is relative, man-created, and always evolving.

3.     FORGIVENESS – How can we rationally be forgiving to someone who has destroyed our family, if life ends with death?

4.     INTEGRITY – Why should we live with integrity if morality is just relative? Instead, rational pragmatic considerations would argue in favor of compromise.

5.     OTHER-CENTEREDNESS – We cannot be truly and coherently other-centered if our rationale is based on pragmatic returns. Instead, other-centeredness becomes more coherent when it results from faith that God has been other-centered towards us.

Rather than continuing on with this list, let’s take a look at what surveys have revealed about human thriving. Professor of philosophy, Michael Rota, has written:

Harvard’s Robert Putnam…and Chaeyoon Lim note that “the association between religion [it is assumed that the vast majority of subjects surveyed are Christian] and subjective well-being is substantial”:

·       “28:2 percent of people who attend a service weekly are predicted to be ‘extremely satisfied’ with their lives, compared with only 19.6 percent of those who never attend services. This result is roughly comparable to the difference between someone in ‘good’ health and another in ‘very good’ health.” (Christianity Today, May 2016)

These findings are reflective of many similar studies. In “God: The Evidence,” former atheist, Patrick Gynn, investigated many lines of evidence in favor of the notion of Christian prospering. As a result, he reports having become a Christian.

Why don’t people consider God? Many have confessed that they don’t want to consider Him:

• We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs . . . in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated commitment to materialism. . . . we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (Lewontin, Richard, Review of The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. In New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997.)

• Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic. (Todd, Scott C., "A View from Kansas on the Evolution Debates," Nature (vol. 401. September 30, 1999), p. 423.)

• We cannot identify ancestors or "missing links," and we cannot devise testable theories to explain how particular episodes of evolution came about. Gee is adamant that all the popular stories about how the first amphibians conquered the dry land, how the birds developed wings and feathers for flying, how the dinosaurs went extinct, and how humans evolved from apes are just products of our imagination, driven by prejudices and preconceptions. (Bowler, Peter J., Review of In Search of Deep Time by Henry Gee (Free Press, 1999, American Scientist; vol. 88, March/April 2000, p. 169.)