hughbiquitous

I’ve been on a little Ravi Zacharias kick in my drive-time listening habits, listening to a ton of podcasts and lectures of his that I’ve packed into my MP3 player over the last couple of years.

One thing I’ve noticed: I really like the way he deals with issues at the level of the heart as well as the mind. To believers, he challenges them to be passionate in the way they follow Christ in a thoroughly biblical way; with unbelievers, he confronts them with the painful emptiness of the soul that they are experiencing — but does so with warmth, empathy, and sensitivity.

Along the way, Ravi will often address existentialism. Now, I’ve never really been able to get a firm grasp of what that means; I only knew it had something to do with Søren Kierkegaard (as came up in the comments of my July 10 post, Becoming What You Understand — remember that thread, John Lee?). But in his September 3, 2006, podcast, taken from his Leadership and Worship lectures, Ravi finally gave me some traction — and explained a bit about Kierkegaard too.

The clearest way to explain it is by contrast:

• The Christian says, “What we are determines what we do.”
• The existentialist says, “What we do determines what we are.”

But Ravi insists that Kierkegaard was not an existentialist in this sense (read the quote below); he was merely focused on the existential, or experience-driven, aspects of life. Christians have plenty to offer when it comes to existential questions; it’s existentialism as an -ism that is incompatible with the Christian worldview.

From a Reformed point of view, this difference is important — we are regenerated first, and then we believe. We are new creations, and because of that, we confess Christ as Lord. As I see it, this means that to reject unconditional election is to take an existential view of man’s fallenness; that is, to say that one can choose to trust God and thereby become a Christian is to say that what one does determines what one is.

If you’re interested in the fuller treatment, here’s an extended quote from Ravi’s podcast and links to the MP3’s. It’s well worth taking in; I’ve only finished part 1 and I look forward to hearing how he develops his thesis that worship is the answer to man’s existential angst.

I’ve talked about the existential predicament. What do I mean by that? … I would call it “the passion of existence.” “The passion of existence.” In other words, whenever a philosopher uses the word, “existential,” he is at least meaning your existence. All right? He is at least meaning your existence.

But in the classical term, what it really means is there is an awful lot of feeling and passion in this existence of mine, and if I can digress a little bit, so that you can build a philosophical base on this as we go along, the fundamental difference between the Christian and the humanist or the existentialist is right here: the Christian, because of who he is, determines what he must do.

The Christian, because of who he is, determines what he must do. I am a creature created in the image of God; therefore, I shall not lie. I am a creature created in the image of God; therefore, I shall not have an overly inflated opinion of myself, as being a mini-creator myself, I am a created, independent individual. “Essence determines existence” is the way I would put it for the Christian. Who I am essentially determined how I exist practically.

If you were to go to the atheistic existentialist — and the reason I’m using “atheistic” before that is because sometimes you might hear someone saying Søren Kierkegaard was the first Christian existentialist, and if that is possible, what you are really hearing them say is, Kierkegaard’s Christianity was highly experience-oriented. That’s all they’re saying. He kept talking about his feelings in the Christian faith, rather than coming up with doctrines. So if you ever asked a fellow like Kierkegaard to write out a doctrinal statement, he’ll say, “Look, that is completely immaterial; I don’t need to know anything about the eternal lostness of man, I don’t need to know anything about the second coming, I don’t need to know anything about the nature of God and this, all I want to tell you is that in my heart I feel a need, and that need is met as I serve God — that’s all that matters to me.”

Basically, atheistic existentialism would say, “what I do determines what I am,” so if a man says, “Look, I find myself running around and being unfaithful to my wife, and you turn around and say there’s something wrong with it, I say, what do you mean there’s something wrong with it — I’m doing it, aren’t I?” We’re all doing it, aren’t we? And you see, this is where they’re coming from.

What I do determines what I am; it’s what I call a “salvation by survey syndrome:” you know, you find out what everybody’s doing, and on the basis of that, decide what everybody ought to be doing. It’s the Masters & Johnson “what’s average is normal; what’s normal is average; what everybody’s doing is good,” and just leave it at that.

Now there is this one thing though: in my experience, what do I feel? I am a creature of feeling; I don’t get up in the morning detached from my sensations and my desires. And may I suggest to you that one of the things we all feel (and sometimes the women are more honest in admitting it than us men, and young people are more honest in showing it than us adults) is what I call the “feeling of loneliness.” We all feel it..

This feeling of loneliness is man’s existential dilemma. Which basically tells me he is driving outside of himself for some kind of fulfillment, and my thesis is going to be how worship ultimately answers these needs that no other relationship can answer.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think Nietzsche was right about this much: “The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.” When all is said and done, I think the Salon.com interview with Paul Davies may go down as an example of this — even though it is more careless than deliberate. In that interview, Prof. Davies suggests that he’s found a way to reconcile cold, hard science with all the meaning and purpose that humanity craves. He does it with faulty arguments, but in so doing, he shows that arguments don’t always carry the day.

But this raises an important question: Why the need for reconciliation? The answer, I think, is that Davies is desperately trying to escape the fact that his preferred worldview — philosophical naturalism — necessarily renders our existence meaningless.

The Nature of Necessity

A thing is necessary if it could not have failed to exist. If a thing could have failed to exist, then it is not necessary, but contingent. Therefore, anything that starts to exist is necessarily contingent, because at some point, it did indeed fail to exist.

This is important for the questions Prof. Davies is raising, because he’s discussing the origin of the universe. If the universe has an origin, a starting point, it is contingent. But contingent on what? Here’s where the absurdity in Prof. Davies’ thinking comes in. He is saying that the universe is contingent on itself:

We can — if we try hard enough — come up with a complete explanation of existence from within the universe, without appealing to something mystical or magical lying beyond it. I think the scientists who are anti-God but appeal to unexplained sets of laws or an unexplained multiverse are just as much at fault as a naïve theist who says there’s a mysterious, unexplained God.

He affirms there must be an explanation for the universe, but he insists on finding that explanation within the universe.

The Line of Despair

The way I understand it, Francis Schaeffer used the term “Line of Despair” to describe what happens to a person when he “escapes” from reason and takes a “leap of faith” to make sense of the world. This isn’t faith in the biblical sense — biblical faith is about trust in objective realities. The leap of faith that accompanies despair is unconcerned with reality.

What is this despair? It arises from the abandonment of the hope of a unified answer for knowledge and life. Modern man continues to hang on to his rationalism and his autonomous revolt even though to do so he has had to abandon any rational hope of a unified answer. Previously, educated men would not give up rationality and the hope of a unified field of knowledge. Modern man has given up his hope of unity and lives in despair — the despair of no longer thinking that what has been the aspiration of men and women is at all possible. (Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape From Reason, found in The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy, p. 236)

It strikes me that Prof. Davies has plunged beneath the line of despair and embraced it, taking a leap of faith into the unreal, non-rational world of convenient fictions that enable his “autonomous revolt.” It is at first irritating to hear him talk about a universe that created itself and in the next breath deride theology as naïve, but it becomes pitiable when you realize what’s going on in the darkened corners of his soul. He is in intellectual rebellion against God and against reality.

Paul Davies’ Leap of Faith

The interview with Prof. Davies is filled with the language of teleology. “Meaning and purpose” seems to be the overriding goal of his research — which is odd, considering his philosophical naturalism. Whatever else you say about him, you’ve got to agree that Prof. Davies is intellectually honest about the implications of his worldview: “Davies acknowledges that if we are stuck with philosophic naturalism, we are robbed of unique value and dignity, and we become one of many living organisms that are qualitatively indistinguishable,” Greg Koukl wrote in the Stand to Reason article, Chance & Dignity.

But the way he overcomes the incompatibility between teleology and philosophical naturalism is to embrace ideas that are wildly implausible, if not patently absurd. What makes a highly intelligent person make such a leap of faith?

I think it’s because the meaninglessness and purposelessness of naturalism is unendurably empty. You can’t live there. He knows it, and he can’t embrace it. But given a choice between a theological answer and a leap of faith into the absurd, he chooses the absurd.

The Tragedy

This is profoundly sad, because he is so palpably close to the truth. “All my career, I’ve been fascinated by the fact that the universe looks not just beautiful but in some sense deeply ingenious. It looks like it’s been put together in a way that makes it work exceptionally well,” he said. Then, when asked if he wants to stay away from God, his answer is an elaborate “yes”:

I want to stay away from a pre-existing cosmic magician who is there within time, for all eternity, and then brings the universe into being as part of a preconceived plan. I think that’s just a naïve, silly idea that doesn’t fit the leanings of most theologians these days and doesn’t fit the scientific facts. I don’t want that. That’s a horrible idea.

Likewise, when asked if these wild theories became popular to “keep the whole idea of God at bay,” his answer was far less elaborate — “Yes.”

I can only turn to Paul for an assessment:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools… (Romans 1:18-22a)

In my last post I was incredulous. Now I’m just sober. The beauty and genius revealed in the creation, together with the oppressive meaninglessness of living life as a cosmic accident, cannot overpower a sinner’s appetite for autonomy. Sin is a much bigger problem than anybody realizes.

Thank God for an invading Savior who has overridden my autonomy and revealed Himself as the ultimate reason and reality in the universe. May His fame spread far and wide.

Take some time and read Salon.com’s interview with Paul Davies titled “We are meant to be here.”

Basically, Davies says that there was no creator of the universe — he “wants to stay away from a pre-existing cosmic magician,” calling that a “naïve, silly idea.” However, he has no problem asserting that the efficient cause of the incredible order and precise fine-tuning of the universe is… (drum roll please)… us.

I’m. Not. Kidding.

Yes, li’l ol’ you and I are behind the laws of the universe. This is like saying that a baby is the efficient cause of its parents’ existence. “The emergence of life and observers causes the universe to have the laws that it does. In the causal sense, it puts the cart before the horse,” Davies said. That’s quite a horse.

Davies continues: “The difficult point is that we have to explain why life today can have any effect on the laws that the universe emerged with at the time of the big bang.”

Well gee, that is sort of a problem, isn’t it…

More from Davies:

We’re trying to construct a picture of the universe which is based thoroughly on science but where there is still room for something like meaning and purpose. So people can see their own individual lives as part of a grand cosmic scheme that has some meaning to it. We’re not just, as Steven Weinberg would say, pointless accidents in a universe that has no meaning or purpose. I think we can do better than that.

It may come as a shock to Dr. Davies that this has been tried and found wanting…

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.

I’ve got a lot more I want to say about this, but I just don’t have time to blog on it now — maybe another time. Still, I’d love to get some discussion going.

If a person does not become what he understands, he does not really understand it.

— Søren Kierkegaard

At first this quote got me thinking about my understanding of the Gospel. Have I become what I have beheld in the Gospel of Christ? That’s a good question to be asking oneself. Sanctification cannot be mere intellectual assent. It must be the working out of a vital and vibrant faith—but this certainly includes the discipleship of our minds.

But then another thought hit me: what about the atheists, the naturalists, the materialists, the nihilists… have they become what they have understood?

I offer that they cannot. Their worldviews are incoherent and cannot be lived in. On those views, any notion of understanding is ruled out because it is immaterial: understanding is a supernatural phenomenon, so if you desire understanding, you must reject a merely naturalistic view of the world.

Rather than try to explain, I’ll let Professor Lewis do it (emphasis mine):

The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

— C. S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?, in The Weight of Glory

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

So concludes C. S. Lewis’s essay, Is Theology Poetry?, in The Weight of Glory.

I’m getting toward the end of that book and two things have become clear:

1. C. S. Lewis was a brilliant writer.
2. This is probably the best book of Lewis’s writings out there. More on that in another post someday…

Anyway, this was the closing of his transcendental argument. He showed that Christianity is true because everything else is demonstrably false, and Christ himself is compelling. Here are some longer quotes that capture the essence of how he made the point:

The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory—in other words, unless Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one…

…More disquieting still is Professor D.M.S. Watson’s defence. “Evolution itself,” he wrote, “is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” Has it come to that? Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice? Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God?

…On these grounds and others like them one is driven to think that whatever else may be true, the popular scientific cosmology at any rate is certainly not. I left that ship not at the call of poetry but because I thought it could not keep afloat. Something like philosophical idealism or Theism must, at the, very worst, be less untrue than that. And idealism turned out, when you took it seriously, to be disguised Theism. And once you accepted Theism, you could not ignore the claims of Christ. And when you examined them it appeared to me that you could adopt no middle position. Either He was a lunatic, or God. And He was not a lunatic.