I'd like today to discuss the following three 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
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 meaningless. 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?
The universe has no meaning or significance and neither does anything in the universe. On atheism it's all just atoms bouncing around pointlessly, and all our struggles are like the furious running of a gerbil in its 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 in any permanent sense. If, on the other hand, we've 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 reason for thinking 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's 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 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.
We'll conclude this series of posts tomorrow.
