The World Speaks!

Consider the paragraph below by Steve Talbot alongside: John 1:1-3 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. and Psalm 19:1-3: The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.

The intimate relation between the meaning of our words and the meaning we find in the world may be so obvious as to seem almost trivial, yet its implications are so profound as to have mostly escaped the notice of working scientists. If we took the fact of the world’s speech seriously — the world speaks! — there would be none of the usual talk about a mechanistic and deterministic science, about a cold, soulless universe, or about an unavoidable conflict between science and the spirit. Confronting the many voices of nature, we would inquire about their individual qualities and character, we would look for the direction of their expressive striving, and we would struggle to grasp the aesthetic unity of their various utterances — all of which is to say: we would listen for their meanings. The necessity for such inquiry is implicit in a world that speaks and also in the scientist’s employment of speech to translate the world-text. This turning a deaf ear to a resonant world and even to our own speech accounts for many of the limitations and contradictions of the science we have today.

~ Steve Talbot, “The Language of Nature” in The New Atlantis (Winter 2007), 42.

Bertrand Russell on The Purposelessness of Life in an Impersonal, Random-Chance Universe

Atheistic philosophers like Bertrand Russell are sometimes completely honest about the necessary implications of their basic assumptions. It is sheer folly to suggest that one can discover meaning out of  ultimate meaninglessness. Ponder the sad and terrifying implications of Russell’s atheistic materialist worldview:

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 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 all 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.

~ Bertrand Russell, quoted by Carl Becker The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT; Yale University Press, 1932), 13-14

Ideas Have Consequences

“If we present man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment — or, as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”

~ Viktor Frankl, quoted by Ravi Zacharias in The End of Reason (Grand Rapids, Mi.; Zondervan, 2008), 62-63.

The Sense that Life Makes Sense

“The sense that life makes sense is really the sine qua non for ethical behavior. If the larger thing — existence itself — means nothing, then individual acts performed within that meaningless scheme are themselves meaningless.”

~ William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong (New York, NY; Simon & Schuster, 1992), 196.

Worldviews of the Heart

“Basic beliefs function as the grid or matrix by which we comprehend reality and attempt to live consistently within that framework.

All humans are committed to their basic beliefs; otherwise, these beliefs would not be basic. Our commitments to our basic beliefs are core commitments — we cling to them; they are nonnegotiable; we express them in every facet of our lives. Basic beliefs and core commitments are the fundamental aspects of a worldview, since, by definition, they determine how we understand the world and what aspects of that understanding are nonnegotiable. Thus, having and living out a worldview are inescapable aspects of being human. To be human is to have a worldview. . . .

Basic beliefs are religious in nature because they are basic beliefs; core commitments are religious in nature because they are core commitments. Religion is fundamentally a matter of basic beliefs and core commitments — a worldview. Thus all worldviews are religious, and all people are religious. All thinking and doing arise from or are motivated by our core commitments, our basic beliefs — what the Bible terms ‘the heart’ and describes as the center of our being.”

~ W. Andrew Hoffecker, Revolutions in Worldview, ed. W. Andrew Hoffecker (Phillipsburg, NJ; P & R Publishing, 2007), xi-xii.

The Stupidity of the Intelligent

Consider this testimony by J. Budziszewski in light of Romans 1:21-22 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 . . ..

“[E]verything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things He’s given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. I don’t make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve Him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn’t do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren’t responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students; now that’s sin.

It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself — well, if you are like I was, maybe you can — what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. St. Paul said that the knowledge of God’s law is ‘written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.’ The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structures of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can’t not know them. I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one’s will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that commitments are in his control?

Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all the components that have God’s image stamped on them. The problem is that they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how much he pulls out, there’s still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out more and more, there was less and less that I could think about. But because there was less and less that I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more focused. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I though I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. Of course I was the fool.”

~ J. Budziszewski, “Escape from Nihilism“

Islam’s Most Vulnerable Point

“I find it hard to see how Islam, or, for that matter, any religion based on belief in a unitary god, can possibly account for human personality or explain the diversity in unity of the world. . . . If the Christian faith is to make headway after all these centuries, it must begin at the roots of Islam with the Qur’ran’s dismissal of Christianity as repugnant to reason due, among other things, to its teaching on the Trinity. . . . For now and the future, we must recover our nerve, for this is the root of Islamic unbelief and also its most vulnerable point.”

~ Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2004), 10.

On the Meaning of Everything

“Because reality is theistically grounded, human beings do not have the freedom of, the justification for, or even the capability of creating and ascribing an independent meaning to the universe. They are not free to do so because God already has done it. They are not justified in doing so because it is a violation of their subordinate, creaturely status. And they are not capable of doing so because of their formidable limitations. Only the rebellious, the proud, and the deceived, that is, only a human nature that is corrupt, would attempt such a ridiculous feat. The meaning of the universe and the authority to determine it are not open questions since both are fixed in the existence and character of God.”

~ David Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2002), 261-262.

The Hopelessness of Atheism

I do appreciate it when an atheist is honest enough to state the necessary implications of his atheism. Imagine trying to “safely” build your life on the “firm foundation of unyielding despair”? If talk like this were not so tragic and destructive, it would be funny.

That Man is the product of causes which had no provision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his love and beliefs, are but the outcomes of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve 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.

~ Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship” quoted by Thomas V. Morris in Making Sense of it All (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1992), 27.

A Call to Delight Ourselves in Language

“We must . . . counter the postmodern despair of language with Christian delight, and the main reason we can delight in language is that we believe language is God-given (and hence reliable), and that we believe there is something beyond language to which our poems, our propositions and our prayers all point: the reality of the Creator and the created order.”

~ Kevin J. Vanhoozer, First Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 33.