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There is a famous scene found in a paragraph from the great atheist existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea that almost perfectly sums up the dilemma of modern man.  Here the book’s protagonist, Roquentin, spends most of his days living out a humdrum existence – frequenting coffee shops, the public library and just general aimless wandering, all the while attempting to write a book.  Throughout much of the narrative he is frequently struck by feelings of intense nausea that unexpectedly well up within him – mostly they are caused by the various inanimate objects he observes (i.e. a pebble, a newspaper page etc.).

Sartre & Roquentin

One evening, after having dinner at a restaurant and being overcome by an especially intense bout of nausea, he goes for a walk and ends up sitting on a park bench under a chestnut tree, where, in a sort of epiphany moment, he comes to the realization of why he has been afflicted with such sickness.  In essence Roquentin realizes that all of existence is completely meaningless and every object that exists has no reason for doing so.

All life is meaningless?

His nausea was actually the unconscious realization that those objects had no actual reason for existing – the trees, the pebbles, the park bench and even himself.  His contemplation of suicide only served to highlight the fact that death was just as pointless, or ’superfluous’, as life, as existence.  This realization was, for Sartre, the fundamental absurdity at the heart of the cosmos – that everything that does exist should do so for no reason, and that existence and non-existence are equally as meaningless.

Similarly, another famous atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote an oft-quoted line in his essay A Free Man’s Worship:

‘That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.’

Meaningless but purposeful – a contradiction?

Yet, despite such pessimistic views of the ultimate nature of existence, both Sartre and Russell lived what seemed to be immensely full and productive lives – both wrote prolifically and were highly esteemed philosophers in their day, with a continuing influence on the academy years after their deaths.  Both were also active in many of the political and social issues of their time, from Sartre’s activity in the French Resistance of World War II to Russell’s championing of the poor and vulnerable of society.

In a similar way, we can see that many atheists, agnostics etc. can and do live full, meaningful and productive lives – they have successful careers, family and friends, as well as being involved in many pressing social issues.  Indeed they can, and often do, live life as fully as any religious believer and, perhaps in many cases, take hold of such aspects of life with even more enthusiasm.  Yet the paradox remains that, when pressed into the deeper meaning of existence, it appears that most atheists and agnostics have as similar a nihilistic view of meaning and purpose as do Russell and Sartre.

An Inconsistent Worldview

This kind of schizophrenia was famously described by Francis Schaeffer as a ‘two-story existence’, where people live their lives like a kind of two floored building.  On the one hand people no longer believe in a higher power or deity to guide them and give any intrinsic meaning to their existence (call that intrinsic meaning the lower story or ‘the basement’ where the foundations are).  On the other, however, they carry on with their day-to-day lives as if it had all the meaning of just such a fact – everything they do is done as if it really meant something in the grand scheme of existence (call this the upper story or ‘living room’ area).  The problem is when, if ever, they go downstairs to the basement that floor is completely empty and the structure that holds it all together is frail and wasting away.  In other words there is no real foundation for the beliefs and actions that constitute many people’s existence – but as long as they don’t go down into the basement and scrutinize the basis of their lives it can be easily ignored.

Does consistency matter?

But is there anything wrong with living as if life had value while, ultimately, holding that it actually doesn’t?  After all should atheists have such a consistency between their beliefs and their actions? Perhaps an atheist could suggest here that such a consistency is of no real virtue because if life has no ultimate meaning then living with such a consistency is equally as pointless as living with an inconsistency.  But if this is the case then it must also be acknowledged that there is no objective difference between, to borrow an illustration from Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland, a man who spends his entire life playing tiddlywinks or a Mother Theresa who devotes her life to helping the poor and needy.  Both lives are equally as pointless.  But can anyone really and truly believe such a thing?  This is the practical impossibility of atheism.

Humanism – Self-delusion

Sartre himself attempted to overcome the inherent meaninglessness of existence by inspiring a great existential project for humans to create their own meaning in the face of a cosmos devoid of purpose.  This is what the word ‘existentialism’ ultimately derives from – that ‘existence’ comes before ‘essence’ – that human beings create their own meaning and purpose through the way they live their lives (or the way they ‘exist’) and the choices they make, as opposed to some fixed essence of being which gives them a preordained purpose to life.  The obvious contradiction here is with Sartre’s own admittance in Nausea that every action we do and every action we choose is just as pointless as that which we choose not to do instead.  In other words Sartre’s project, and the project of modern atheistic humanism in general, is nothing but a grand act of self-delusion.

Indeed it seems that when confronted with ultimate reality the atheist cannot but admit that human life, qualitatively speaking, is no different from that of a dog – and perhaps the dog’s existence is actually more desirable as it has no true capacity for self-reflection and abstract thought and cannot come to this realization of the inherent meaninglessness of its existence.

Solomon and Nihilism?

The writer of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes made this point almost three thousand years ago:

“The fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. All go to the same place. All come from the dust and all return to the dust” (Eccl. 3:19-20).

Indeed the writer of the book, which reads more like a modern existentialist tract than a book of the Bible, passes judgment on all the world has to offer to provide some kind of meaning in the face of meaninglessness: pleasure, wealth, fame, honour etc. etc..  His verdict on all these things is simple: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (1:2).  For him a life that ends in death and has no God and no immortality is sheer absurdity.

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One key point that has been argued down the ages is that morality is only of intrinsic value if it is objective, which means it needs to come from an external source God, not merely a set of opinions which we temporarily agree on. Here we investigate this point of view.

Introduction & Respect for Persons

Initially most people would think that the obvious answer to this question is ‘yes, of course morality can exist without God.’  It certainly seems that both atheists and agnostics alike can lead what we recognize as good and decent lives, despite their lack of belief in a deity.  Often times, in fact, it appears that many unbelievers’ moral lives put many religious believers to shame.  But the question here isn’t, can we act morally without belief in God, but, ultimately, can morality exist without God? This second question is different from the first – it’s a question about the nature of moral facts and values themselves, as opposed to how someone may or may not act.

Over the centuries various explanations and theories have been offered as to just what such moral facts and values are. Some see them as simply expressions of social and cultural conventions (i.e. like driving on the left hand side of the road as opposed to the right) or as questions of personal taste (i.e. like having a taste for certain kinds of food or not).  In the abstract it’s often appealing for people to treat morality as simply a question of personal taste or social convention.  Such moral relativism, however, often comes unstuck in the face of truly horrific evil – it seems hard for most people to really accept that anyone could seriously argue that the Holocaust or the recent genocide in Rwanda are simply issues on a par with how someone enjoys their curry or how a certain culture views its traffic laws (as crude as this may sound, this is essentially what many moral theories ultimately state). Such acts are evil, plain and simple, and there’s almost nothing to say to people who deny otherwise – in many ways it is equivalent to denying the laws of logic. Intuitively we all seem to know that some things are just wrong, whatever opinion any person or society may have to the contrary. In other words moral facts are objective and binding upon people in a way that’s independent of their individual opinions of them.

How can we best sum up this objective moral sensibility that we all seem to intuitively possess?  The German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idea of respect for persons or to treat people as ends rather than as means, as having inherent worth and dignity simply by the fact that they are human beings and nothing more, seems as good a summary as any. Kant thought that we should always act towards others in a way which considers people as ends in themselves rather than simply as a means to our own ends.  This is why actions such as murder, theft and rape are wrong – because such acts treat others simply as a means and not as ends in themselves, thus discarding the inherent dignity they possess as human beings.

Evolutionary Ethics

For people who do not believe in God, then, and yet still wish to affirm the worth of human beings and the objective wrongness of such actions as murder/rape etc., what are the options?  For most atheists and agnostics the most obvious explanation for how we came about our moral sensibility must lie in our evolutionary past. Though such theories of evolutionary ethics are still highly speculative it would seem that some process of natural selection would have genetically predisposed our species to act in certain ways and with certain ‘herd’ characteristics, for the simple fact that such behaviour contributed greatly to our survival as a species as opposed to some other different behaviour patterns. So, to give one example, perhaps altruism and self-sacrifice became characteristics we admire in people because, ultimately, one person sacrificing his life for others meant that fewer members of the species died, thus greatly enhancing the species’ chances of survival.  Eventually such genetic predispositions came to be enshrined in various laws and cultures across the world.

But does such a naturalistic evolutionary account give us sufficient warrant for the inherent dignity of persons, as well as the objective wrongness of certain acts committed against them? It seems to me that, in effect, we could just as easily argue that the fact human beings have evolved a spleen or a kidney to aid in our survival as a species gives us inherent moral worth – but would anyone seriously propose such a thing? In this case it seems simply arbitrary that we should chose our evolved moral sensibility as something which endows us with inherent moral worth as opposed to something else we’ve evolved, such as a bodily organ – after all both are by products of an amoral evolutionary process aimed at survival and reproduction and not at moral action. In effect this raises David Hume’s old philosophical problem of gaining a non-naturalistic value from a naturalistic fact.

Furthermore, as philosopher of science Michael Ruse has noted, if we ‘roll the dice’ of evolution again, so to speak, there’s a good chance we would end up with intelligent creatures that somehow consider to be morally praiseworthy almost everything that we as human beings consider to be morally repulsive (i.e. cannibalism, murder, selfishness, rape, incest etc.etc.).  From this Ruse concludes that there can be no such thing as objective moral truth – and even if there were such a thing it would remain simply irrelevant to us as a species, for the chances that we have evolved in such a way as to exactly reflect within our internal moral structure whatever such an objective moral order may be is vanishingly small.

As noted at the beginning, this does not entail that the agnostic/atheist cannot live a moral life in the sense of following the rules they intuitively feel they possess. But it does mean that they have no real objective basis for why they should do so. This poses a dilemma for many people – if they stick to naturalism and atheism it appears they must assert that there is no such thing as objective moral values after all and, therefore, no basis for inherent human dignity. But, on the other hand, it appears that most of us – atheist, agnostic or theist alike – sincerely wish to affirm the objectivity of moral values, as well as the inherent worth of persons. Something must give.

Christian Ethics & Conclusion

But what of theism in general and, specifically, Christian theism?  The Biblical doctrine that we are all made in the ‘Image of God’ (Genesis 1:27) gives human beings an inherent moral worth that naturalistic philosophy cannot provide and, thus, a foundation for treating others as ends in themselves and, therefore, an objective morality.  Jesus Himself summed up the essence of all morality in the so-called ‘Golden Rule’ (Mark 12:31) – to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ – or to treat people with the dignity they deserve, in the same way you consider yourself and your own life as intrinsically meaningful.  When we realize that each individual person is created equally in the Image of God we cannot help but see them, and human beings in general, as possessing intrinsic moral worth – something that morality as an evolutionary byproduct cannot provide.

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In the 19th century atheist philosophers would argue that the universe had always existed, but the discovery of the ‘big bang’ by the Roman Catholic priest and scientist Georges Lemaitre in 1927 (popularised by Hubble in 1929) put an end to this way of arguing, and atheists were now forced to admit that there was a beginning to the universe, which brought in a new line of questioning.

Argument from infinite regress

One way that we can end up at this question is through what philosophers of science call the ‘argument from infinite regress’. What this means is that if we ask the question on the origins of our universe, we may well come to the conclusion that the big bang started it. ‘Very well’ you may say, ‘but where did all the energy come from which led to the big bang?’ You may then get into various topics of discussion about different types of positive and negative matter, which again leads us to the question ‘Where did that come from?’

In the end, you logically end up at the position that something unknown created this beginning. As we have looked at in other articles the universe is extremely fine-tuned for us to exist (* See article listed below) it would seem that there are clear reasons to believe that whatever or whoever created the universe was probably quite intelligent; as a Christian I would suggest this is strong evidence for the God of the bible.

Objection, your honour

Some people object to this line of reasoning because they insist that for us to be consistent this leads us to the question ‘Who made God?’ However, although this may sound a plausible argument it is actually a fallacious one described in philosophy circles as a ‘category mistake’.

If Christians believed in a God that was created then this would be a superb argument destroying Christianity in a micro-second. However, Christians believe that God is eternal (Isaiah 26:4, Romans 16:26) and so to ask the question ‘Who made God?’ is the same as asking ‘Who made the unmade?’ This is a category mistake because it is logically impossible, in the same way that the question ‘Where is the bachelor’s wife?’ leads us to an impossible conclusion. In other words, just like the bachelor is single, the God of the Bible is eternal.

The limitations of naturalism

As humans we find it very difficult to conceive of something eternal (we live within space & time) but that does not mean that it can’t exist. God is described in the Bible as holy, which means he is ‘other’ or fundamentally different to us. He is not finite, and therefore we should not expect science (which enables us to measure the natural world) to be able to fully measure something infinite (though it does give us many clues).

Think very carefully when someone says to you, ‘You can only believe in things that are proven by science’. This statement fails to live up to its own claim as Science can’t prove the statement to be true in the first place. This is a faith assertion and is an example of the blind faith that religious people are often criticised for, whereas the idea of an eternal God remains philosophically consistent.

*http://reason.cck.org.uk/how-does-modern-science-show-that-there-is-a-god/

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