Dennis Prager's column, to which we alluded the other day, got me to thinking about the matter of worldviews or what post-moderns like to call "metanarratives."
Worldviews are inescapable. Everyone has one. It's a lens through which we view the world, the set of assumptions we hold, consciously or unconciously, that help us to make sense of the world.
Any worldview offers answers to the following questions:
- Who am I?
- Why are we here?
- Where am I going?
- What's wrong with the world
Different worldviews offer different answers to those questions, but consider the answers given by just two of the major worldviews on offer in the U.S. - Judeo-Christianity and atheistic materialism.
In the Judeo-Christian view the above questions are answered as follows:
- A child of the Creator of the universe.
- Because God wanted to love us.
- To be with Him forever.
- It spurns God's love.
Those answers have been the well-springs of human creativity and discovery for two thousand years. Belief in those answers leads to a high view of humanity, it's what gives men reason to believe they have dignity and, consequently, human rights. The anticipation of eternity is a source of hope, meaning and happiness in life.
By contrast consider the answers that the atheistic materialist must give to those same questions:
- A chance product of blind, impersonal forces.
- No reason.
- Nowhere.
- Nothing.
Could anything be more sterile, more nihilistic, more likely to sap the life and vitality out of a culture than a view of things that declares that there's no hope, no real truth, no meaning, no dignity to being human? A culture which rejects the Christian worldview in order to embrace this view of life is a culture that will soon be empty and effete.
Ideas have consequences. One may think that the only difference between the atheist and the Christian is that the atheist gets to sleep in on Sunday morning, but one would be profoundly wrong. The difference between the two worldviews ripples across every aspect of life. It's the difference between hope and despair, meaning and pointlessness, values and worthlessness, dignity and degradation.
The question that puzzles me the most about atheism is not why people believe it, although that is indeed a puzzle, but rather why people would want it to be true. Why, for example, would Christopher Hitchens say that he would find it very depressing if he should discover that God really did exist? Why would philosopher Thomas Nagel write that he doesn't want the universe to be the kind of place where God existed?
These men are essentially saying that they would be depressed and disappointed if the universe were in fact a place where life had meaning, where there was a hope for life beyond the grave, where justice will ultimately prevail, where morality is based on something far more substantial than subjective feelings, where humans have dignity and worth and thus rights, where love is something more than a chemical reaction in the brain, where reason can be trusted, where there is a reason for our existence, and on and on.
To hope that God doesn't exist is to hope that none of this is the case because surely none of it can be the case if God is not there.
RLC