I'd like to finish up with these four existential traits of human beings:
15. Our desire for justice
16. Our need for meaning and purpose
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self
18. Our desire to survive our own death
Human persons long for justice, but it's a longing for which there's no fulfillment if death is the end of our existence. We yearn to see good rewarded and evil punished. Our hearts break when evil appears to triumph over good, but it's the common human experience that many good people live lives filled with terrible fear, pain and grief and then they die.
Meanwhile, many who were the cause of that suffering come to the end of their lives peacefully and content after many years of pleasure. In a world without God everybody comes to the same end, everyone vanishes, and there's no reward or punishment, just nothingness. In the world of the atheist, it doesn't matter ultimately whether you're Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler, and there's no hope that justice will ever be done.
Only if there's a transcendent moral authority, like God, who has the power to hold us accountable for how we treat others is justice in any ultimate sense possible.
Humans also crave meaning to our existence. We can't bear living a life we know to be pointless and insignificant, but in the absence of God death nullifies everything and renders it all nugatory. There's no fixed purpose or value to anything we do. Everything we strive for is destined to perish either after we die or eventually in a solar explosion that will incinerate the earth, after which there'll be not a trace that humans ever existed. What will all of our efforts and achievements matter then?
All our struggles are like the furious running of a gerbil in his treadmill. Our lives are just a footprint in the sand at the edge of a space-time surf. When all is washed away and the cosmos is left as though we were never here, the greatest acts of heroism, charity, and scientific discovery will mean absolutely nothing.
If the atheist is correct, if our existence is simply a temporary fluke of nature, a cosmic accident, then we have no reason to think that anything we do actually matters at all in any permanent sense. If, on the other hand, we have been created by God we may assume that He had some purpose for making us. We may not know what that purpose is, but we have a basis for hoping that there is one. Indeed, if there is a God then we have reason to hope that what we do is not ephemeral, it's eternal, and that each life has an everlasting meaning.
Another point: In a Godless world the concept of soul becomes problematic and with it the notion of a self other than the physical body. Since our body is constantly changing, however, we are continuously creating a new self, moment by moment, year by year. There is nothing which perdures through time which makes me the same person I think I was ten years ago. There is no permanent "I," only a kaleidoscopic, fragmented bundle of patterns, impressions, memories, none of which has any real significance in determining who I really am.
As T.S. Eliot put it in The Cocktail Party, "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger." Our sense that we are a self strongly suggests, however, that there's more to us than just our physical being. Yet, unless there is a God physical flux is all there is.
If there is a God, then it's possible that our self, our identity, persists through time because He constantly holds us, our individual essence, in being in His mind. So, while in one sense we're constantly morphing into someone different, in another sense we remain the same person we've always been.
Finally, human beings want desperately to live and yet we know we're going to die. In a Godless universe, the fate of each of us is annihilation. There's no basis for hope that loved ones we've lost still somehow exist or that we'll ever "see" them again. There's no consolation for the bereaved, no salve for grief. Many face this bravely, of course, but, if they're reflective, they must acknowledge that their bravery serves to mask an inner despair. Many still harbor a profound wish that their loved ones still exist and that they'll someday be reunited with them.
But if death is the end of our existence our life truly is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," a Shakespeare put it in MacBeth. If death is the end then human existence is completely absurd. But, of course, death is the end if the materialist is right.
Only if God exists is there a realistic basis for hope of something beyond this life. Only if God exists can we have a reasonable hope that our longing for life will be fulfilled.
So, we are confronted with a choice: Either we believe that there is no God and that consequently our existential yearnings are inexplicable and unfulfillable, a view which leads to nihilism, or we believe that there is a God and that we possess those yearnings because they point us to the source of their satisfaction. They point us toward God.
In other words, the existence of God is, I believe, the best explanation for the human condition. The atheist has no good explanation for these yearnings and must take a leap of faith to avoid the nihilism and despair toward which her worldview pushes her. She has to live as if God exists while denying that He does. Many atheists actually repudiate their own naturalism simply by the way they choose to live their lives.
I've sought in this series of posts to briefly suggest why the simplest explanation for the nature of the world and the deepest longings and feelings of the human spirit is that they are what they are because they conform to some existential reality. Those profound convictions are most simply accounted for by positing the possibility of their satisfaction, but they can only be satisfied if there is a being that corresponds to the traditional notion of God.
If theism is correct we can find intellectual and emotional contentment in the hope that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead.
If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is a purpose to our existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which obligates us to respect others, which provides us in this life with an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment and which will ultimately mete out justice.
We feel guilt because we're actually guilty. We feel free because we're actually free. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope and some sense can be made of an otherwise senseless and existentially chaotic world.
The atheist, if he's consistent with his belief that there is no God, finds himself completely at odds in almost every important way with the nature of his own being. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling, indifferent universe that offers no solace nor prospect that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, and solutions to the riddles of existence. The atheist lives without expectation or hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled.
How, then, do we come to have these yearnings? Why would natural selection shape us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically out of phase with the world in which we are situated?
It's possible, of course, that the atheistic answer is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. Yet surely the skeptic should hope that he's mistaken. Surely he would want there to be a God to infuse the cosmos with all the richness it is starved of by His absence.
Nevertheless, I've never known or read one who held such a hope. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually cling to the fervent desire that there be no God. This is tantamount to wishing, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, cruel and absurd joke. Nagel writes in his book The Last Word:
"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."
Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon and commendable, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually wish the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice, human worth and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult, for me at least, to understand.
