Has Science disproved God?

Peter May

Peter May serves on the General Synod of the Church of England and on the Trust Board of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF). He is a retired GP.

In January 2005, two remarkable events occurred. The first was that Oxford atheist and Darwinian scientist, Richard Dawkins, was publicly asked what he believed to be true but could not prove. This was an interesting question because he is on record as saying that you should not believe anything without evidence. Now he concedes, “I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all design anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.” He continued, “Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.” In other words, he admits that much of what he believes, including his fundamental assumptions about the universe, are a blind leap of faith, unsupported by evidence.

The other extraordinary event was that the international doyen of philosophical atheism, Prof. Anthony Flew, now aged 81, publicly announced that he has abandoned his atheism, and had done so on the basis of scientific arguments, which now persuade him that there is a God.

So two of the most prominent atheists in their fields have made startling confessions. The scientist admits that much of his belief cannot be supported by scientific evidence, while the philosopher abandons the very atheism that made him famous, precisely because of the scientific evidence. How much intellectual fun is that?

What Dawkins cannot verify concerns the creation of the universe. What persuades Flew that there is a God is the current scientific evidence about the origins of the universe.

So let us begin at the beginning! This is the Cosmological argument.

First premise is this: What ever begins to exist has a cause.

Philosopher William Lane Craig says it is foolish to try to prove this statement because it is obvious. He quotes Aristotle who said you should never try to prove the obvious with arguments which are themselves less obvious. Does anyone want to deny this obvious premise? Speak now or forever hold your peace, for the logic is simple and compelling:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause
The universe began to exist
Therefore the universe has a cause.

The major scientific evidence that the universe began to exist first appeared in 1929 when the astronomer Hubble was studying distant galaxies and observed the Red Shift. This was a Doppler effect of light. Let me explain briefly the Doppler Effect. We are all familiar with the phenomenon of a car or plane coming in our direction emitting a sound at one pitch which then drops to a lower note as it passes. The reason for this is that the wavelength of the sound it emits appears higher than it is, because the vehicle moving towards us is effectively shortening the wavelength of the sound and increasing its frequency by its movement. Having passed us, it lengthens the wavelength and decreases the frequency by moving away. Longer wavelengths have lower frequencies and therefore lower notes, so the tone drops.

In the same way as different notes have different wavelengths of sound, so different colours have different wavelengths of light. By demonstrating a shift towards red instead of blue, Hubble was able to show that the light from distant galaxies showed they are moving away and not getting nearer, and the further the galaxy the faster it is moving away. Hence the conclusion that the universe is not static, as everyone including Einstein had previously thought, but is in fact expanding.(Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.39)

Further evidence was discovered in 1965. If the universe was static, as many scientists such as Fred Hoyle still believed at that time, there would be no background energy observable in the universe. The discovery of background radiation, existing in the same intensity in every direction, confirmed the view that energy released from an initial explosion causing the universe to expand, was still observable in the system.

On the basis of this evidence, few scientists today dispute the fact that the universe is expanding. By extrapolating backwards into the past, the universe is understood to have originated from an immensely dense ‘singularity’, some unimaginably small, compressed, dense speck which originally exploded to yield everything that there is in the universe.

If you have read Stephen Hawking’s famous book, A Brief History of Time (aBHoT), you will have had your brains teased, not only with black holes, but the fact that not only did all matter and energy originate from this singularity, but so did space and time itself. Hence the title of the book. So we cannot think of this singularity existing somewhere in space – because there was no space. Nor can we ask what happened before the Big Bang, because there was no previous time either.

In other words, it is today generally held amongst scientists that the universe and everything in it actually began to exist at a point of origin estimated now at 13.7 billion years ago and that all matter, energy, space and time originated out of nothing! The philosopher points out that what ever begins to exist has a cause. The scientist points out that the cause of the universe must exist outside of our space-time world and, of course, be unbelievably powerful.

The theological implications, as Charlie Brown might say, are staggering. Desperate theories have been devised to avoid the obvious conclusions. These include for instance the theory that the universe is only expanding at this point in time, but this is just a moment in its history, where the universe oscillates from expansion to contraction to expansion indefinitely. Well, this is an interesting theory but it must be said, it has absolutely no evidence in physics or astrophysics to support it. There are a series of other models proposed, such as string theory with its 10 dimensions, branes and p-branes, which all suffer the same lack of data. The available data only suggests that the universe is expanding from an initial point at the beginning of time, some 13.7 billion yrs ago.

I was recently in debate with some Humanists. One of them made the point that either there had always been a God, or there had always been a universe, and that it was no more obvious to believe in the one than the other. That is no longer considered to be the case. The scientific evidence says the universe has not always existed. It began.

Can we therefore say that God has always existed? Is it meaningful to ask how he came into existence? The answer to both questions is ‘No’, if by such questions we suppose that God has always existed in endless time. We cannot speak about time before time existed. God, if he created the universe, must live outside of space and time. Neither is this a theologically novel idea. The New Testament seems to have alluded to it by saying that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. It was anyway put forward by Augustine in around AD 400. Questions therefore about God’s origin or location are outside our capacity for knowledge & comprehension. Similarly our understanding of eternity can only be grasped in metaphors, whether a banquet on the one hand or a smouldering rubbish dump on the other. This should stop us from imaging Heaven as a space-time world or crudely caricaturing hell as a place of torment in endless time.

The second line of argument that has persuaded Anthony Flew concerns the fine tuning of the Universe, known as the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle says that the universe has to be more or less as we see it, because if it were different, there wouldn’t be anyone here to observe it.

There are two issues here, which must not be confused. The human observer should rightly regard it as probable that he will find the basic conditions of the universe are finely-tuned for his existence or he would not be there to observe it. However, he should not infer that it is therefore highly probable that such a finely tuned universe should exist. That is a separate matter entirely.

For the universe to exist as it does and allow us to live within it and reflect upon it, requires an astonishing series of coincidences to have occurred, which are quite sufficient in the mind of Anthony Flew to indicate the existence of an intelligent designer.

Stephen Hawking suggested (aBHoT p.123) that it is like a hoard of monkeys hammering away on typewriters and by pure chance eventually producing one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Let’s face it, it just isn’t going to happen.

It is estimated that there are some 50 fundamental numbers or physical constants present at the moment of the Big Bang that must be precisely fine-tuned in the way they were for human life to become possible.

Hawking wrote: “It seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the (fundamental) numbers that would allow the development of any form of intelligent life. Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at their beauty." (aBHoT p.125)

Physicist Paul Davies calculated that in order for planets to exist, the relevant initial conditions had to be fine tuned to a precision of one part in 10 followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes at least. For electromagnetism, he estimated a change of only one part in 10 to the power of 40 would have spelled disaster for stars, like our sun, thereby precluding the existence of planets.

Gravitational force must be what it is, for planets to have stable orbits around the sun. Otherwise if they had a greater force they would fall into the sun and burn up or if weaker, they would escape from their orbit into a very cold, outer darkness. It is estimated that a change in gravity by only one part in 10 to the power of 100 would have prevented a life permitting universe.

If the electric charge on an electron were only slightly different, stars would be unable to burn hydrogen and helium. and produce the chemical elements such as carbon and oxygen that make up our bodies. Similarly, the orbit of electrons in atoms would not be stable, so matter as we know it would not exist.

Stephen Hawking wrote, “If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed before it ever reached its present size.” (aBHoT p.122)

Not only must each of these quantities be exquisitely fine tuned but their ratios to each other must be finely tuned. As William Craig writes: “Improbability is added to improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.”

Now there are only four possibilities put forward for explaining the fine-tuning of the universe: Multiple Universes, Natural Law, Chance or Design.

The theory of Multiple Universes supposes there are a vast number of quite different universes, allowing the statistical chance that one of them would produce human life. Without a jot of evidence to support it, it is a desperate attempt to deny the existence of God. Ockam’s Razor states that the simpler assumption is always to be preferred.

Natural law implies a physical inevitability that the universe is the way it is; that it would not be possible for the universe not to produce human life. Yet if the universe had expanded just a little more slowly, if entropy were slightly greater or any of these constants been just slightly different, life would not have occurred. As Paul Davies put it, “The physical universe does not have to be the way it is; it could have been otherwise.”

And the chances of the world being as it is, are incomprehensibly small. Which is why Anthony Flew concludes there must be a Designer.

The universe is of course vast. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light yrs in diameter and contains 100 billion stars. “Ours is one of about a million million galaxies in the observable universe” (aBHoT p.126). Well might the Psalmist have wondered, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8) In such a universe, we seem terrifyingly minute and insignificant. But this view can be turned on its head.

As Barrow & Tipler argued, “for there to be enough time to construct the constituents of living beings, the Universe must be at least 10 billion years old and therefore as a consequence of its expansion, at least ten billion light years in extent.” In other words, in order for God to create mankind, the most complex creature and crowning glory of his creation, he had to make a universe as wonderful as ours. So when we look at the stars, we should not think how insignificant we are but consider how very seriously God takes us, how valuable we are in his sight and what great lengths he went to, in order to make us.

Furthermore, this evidence itself suggests a special relationship between the Creator and human beings. There is not only a Mind behind the creation, but the rational creator has created rational beings, who can reflect upon and understand the mind of the creator. We are told in Genesis that we are made in his Image. As Kepler put it, we are capable of thinking God’s thoughts after him. No other living thing is capable of doing that. Let alone your aspidistra, try telling your cat about this. It is completely beyond his grasp.

Conclusion

I have unpacked just two arguments from science which seem to strongly support belief in a divine creator.

Firstly the evidence that the universe began and the logic that everything that begins has a cause. Secondly we have seen how astonishing it is that the Big Bang should have been so finely-tuned as to be capable of creating a universe supporting human life.

I have touched a third argument, that of Rationality itself. And if I had time, I would explain how mind and consciousness totally confounds modern science and remains the greatest mystery in the planet.

We have considered God’s power and intelligence. But none of this tells us much about the character of God. The Prologue of John’s Gospel concludes:o-one has ever seen God. He who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”re is no other claim in the universe like that. No other religion offers anything like it – the sublime claim that the creator of the universe has entered his own creation. The universe tells us that God exists, but Jesus has made him known.

© Peter May 2005

The Absurdity of Life Without God - 'Reasonable Faith', Chapter Two

William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He is well known for his work as an apologist, speaker and debater. He is the author of Reasonable Faith.

One of the apologetic questions that contemporary Christian theology must treat in its doctrine of man is what has been called “the human predicament,” that is to say, the significance of human life in a post-theistic universe. Logically, this question ought, it seems to me, to be raised prior to and as a prelude to the question of God’s existence.

Historical Background

The apologetic for Christianity based on the human predicament is an extremely recent phenomenon, associated primarily with Francis Schaeffer. Often it is referred to as “cultural apologetics” because of its analysis of post-Christian culture. This approach constitutes an entirely different sort of apologetics than the traditional models, since it is not concerned with epistemological issues. Indeed, in a sense it does not even attempt to show in any positive sense that Christianity is true; it simply explores the disastrous consequences for human existence, society, and culture if Christianity should be false. In this respect, this approach is somewhat akin to existentialism: the precursors of this approach were also precursors of existentialism, and much of its analysis of the human predicament is drawn from the insights of twentieth-century atheistic existentialism.

Blaise Pascal

One of the earliest examples of a Christian apology appealing to the human predicament is the Pensées of the French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623-62). Having come to a personal faith in Christ in 1654, Pascal had planned to write a defense of the Christian faith entitled L’Apologie de la religion chrétienne, but he died of a debilitating disease at the age of only 39 years, leaving behind hundreds of notes for the work, which were then published posthumously as the Pensées.1

Pascal’s approach is thoroughly Christocentric. The Christian religion, he claims, teaches two truths: that there is a God whom men are capable of knowing, and that there is an element of corruption in men that renders them unworthy of God. Knowledge of God without knowledge of man’s wretchedness begets pride, and knowledge of man’s wretchedness without knowledge of God begets despair, but knowledge of Jesus Christ furnishes man knowledge of both simultaneously. Pascal invites us to look at the world from the Christian point of view and see if these truths are not confirmed. His Apology was evidently to comprise two divisions: in the first part he would display the misery of man without God (that man’s nature is corrupt) and in the second part the happiness of man with God (that there is a Redeemer).2 With regard to the latter, Pascal appeals to the evidences of miracle and especially fulfilled prophecy. In confirming the truth of man’s wretchedness Pascal seeks to unfold the human predicament.

For Pascal the human condition is an enigma. For man is at the same time miserable and yet great. On the one hand, his misery is due principally to his uncertainty and insignificance. Writing in the tradition of the French skeptic Montaigne, Pascal repeatedly emphasizes the uncertainty of conclusions reached via reason and the senses. Apart from intuitive first principles, nothing seems capable of being known with certainty. In particular, reason and nature do not seem to furnish decisive evidence as to whether God exists or not. As man looks out around him, all he sees is darkness and obscurity. Moreover, insofar as his scientific knowledge is correct, man learns that he is an infinitesimal speck lost in the immensity of time and space. His brief life is bounded on either side by eternity, his place in the universe is lost in the immeasurable infinity of space, and he finds himself suspended, as it were, between the infinite microcosm within and the infinite macrocosm without. Uncertain and untethered, man flounders in his efforts to lead a meaningful and happy life. His condition is characterized by inconstancy, boredom, and anxiety. His relations with his fellow men are warped by self-love; society is founded on mutual deceit. Man’s justice is fickle and relative, and no fixed standard of value may be found.

Despite their predicament, however, most people, incredibly, refuse to seek an answer or even to think about their dilemma. Instead, they lose themselves in escape. Listen to Pascal’s description of the reasoning of such a person:

I know not who sent me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am terribly ignorant of everything. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul and that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects upon itself as well as upon all external things, and has no more knowledge of itself than of them.

I see the terrifying immensity of the universe which surrounds me, and find myself limited to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am set down here rather than elsewhere, nor why the brief period appointed for my life is assigned to me at this moment rather than another in all the eternity that has gone before and will come after me. On all sides I behold nothing but infinity, in which I am a mere atom, a mere passing shadow that returns no more. All I know is that I must soon die, but what I understand least of all is this very death which I cannot escape.

As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I only know that on leaving this world I fall for ever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be everlastingly consigned. Such is my condition, full of weakness and uncertainty. From all this I conclude that I ought to spend every day of my life without seeking to know my fate. I might perhaps be able to find a solution to my doubts; but I cannot be bothered to do so, I will not take one step towards its discovery.3

Pascal can only regard such indifference as insane. Man’s condition ought to impel him to seek to discover whether there is a God and a solution to his predicament. But people occupy their time and their thoughts with trivialities and distractions, so as to avoid the despair, boredom, and anxiety that would inevitably result if those diversions were removed.

Such is the misery of man. But mention must also be made of the greatness of man. For although man is miserable, he is at least capable of knowing that he is miserable. The greatness of man consists in thought. Man is a mere reed, yes, but he is a thinking reed. The universe might crush him like a gnat; but even so, man is nobler than the universe because he knows that it crushes him, and the universe has no such knowledge. Man’s whole dignity consists, therefore, in thought. “By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like a mere speck; by thought I comprehend the universe.” Man’s greatness, then, lies not in his having the solution to his predicament, but in the fact that he alone in all the universe is aware of his wretched condition.

What a chimaera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depositary of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?4

Pascal hopes that by explaining man’s greatness as well as his misery, he might shake people out of their lethargy to think about their condition and to seek a solution.

Pascal’s analysis of the human predicament leads up to his famous Wager argument, by means of which he hopes to tip the scales in favor of theism.5 The founder of probability theory, Pascal argues that when the odds that God exists are even, then the prudent man will gamble that God exists. This is a wager that all men must make—the game is in progress and a bet must be laid. There is no option: you have already joined the game. Which then will you choose—that God exists or that he does not? Pascal argues that since the odds are even, reason is not violated in making either choice; therefore, reasons cannot determine which bet to make. Therefore, the choice should be made pragmatically in terms of maximizing one’s happiness. If one wagers that God exists and he does, one has gained eternal life and infinite happiness. If he does not exist, one has lost nothing. On the other hand, if one wagers that God does not exist and he does, then one has suffered infinite loss. If he does not in fact exist, then one has gained nothing. Hence, the only prudent choice is to believe that God exists.

Now Pascal does believe that there is a way of “getting a look behind the scenes” to rationally determine how one should bet, namely, the proofs of Scripture of miracle and prophecy, which he discusses in the second half of his work. But for now, he wants to emphasize that even in the absence of such evidence, one still ought to believe in God. For given the human predicament of being cast into existence and facing either eternal annihilation or eternal wrath, the only reasonable course of action is to believe in God: “for if you win, you win all; if you lose, you lose nothing.”6

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Another apologetic based on the human predicament may be found in the magnificent novels of the great Russian writer of the last century Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81). (May I add that I think the obsession of contemporary evangelicals with the writings of authors like C. S. Lewis to the neglect of writers like Dostoyevsky is a great shame? Dostoyevsky is a far, far grander writer.) The problem that tortured Dostoyevsky was the problem of evil: How can a good and loving God exist when the world is filled with so much suffering and evil? Dostoyevsky presented this problem in his works so persuasively, so poignantly, that certain passages of his, notably “The Grand Inquisitor” section from his Brothers Karamazov, are often reprinted in anthologies as classic statements of the problem of evil. As a result, some people are under the impression that Dostoyevsky was himself an atheist and that the viewpoint of the Grand Inquisitor is his own.

Actually, he sought to carry through a two-pronged defense of theism in the face of the problem of evil. Positively, he argued that innocent suffering may perfect character and bring one into a closer relation with God. Negatively, he tried to show that if the existence of God is denied, then one is landed in complete moral relativism, so that no act, regardless of how dreadful or heinous, can be condemned by the atheist. To live consistently with such a view of life is unthinkable and impossible. Hence, atheism is destructive of life and ends logically in suicide.

Dostoyevsky recognizes that this constitutes no positive proof of Christianity. Indeed, he rejects that there could be such. Men demand of Christ that he furnish them “bread and circuses,” but he refuses to do so. The decision to follow Christ must be made in loneliness and anxiety. Each person must face for himself the anguish of a world without God and in the solitude of his own heart give himself to God in faith.

Søren Kierkegaard

The Danish existentialist of the late nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), also presents a sort of negative apologetic for the Christian faith. He thinks of life as being lived on three different planes or stages: the aesthetic stage, the ethical stage, and the religious stage. Man in the aesthetic stage lives life only on the sensual level, a life that is self- and pleasure-centered. This need not be a gross hedonism. Man on this level could be very cultivated and even circumspect; but nevertheless his life revolves around himself and those material things—whether sex, art, music, or whatever—that bring him pleasure. The paradox of life on this level is that it leads ultimately to unhappiness. The self-centered, aesthetic man finds no ultimate meaning in life and no true satisfaction. Thus, the aesthetic life leads finally to despair, a sort of sickness with life.

But this is not the end, for only at this point is a person ready to live on the second plane of existence, the ethical plane. The transition to the ethical stage of life is a sort of leap motivated by despair to a higher level, where one affirms trans-personal moral values and guides life by those objective standards. No longer is life lived only for self and for pleasure; rather one is constrained to seek the ethical good and to change one’s conduct to bring it into conformity with that good. Thus, man in the ethical stage is the moral man. But life on this level, too, ends in unhappiness. For the more one tries sincerely to bring one’s life into conformity with the objective standards of the good, the more painfully aware one is that one cannot do it. Thus, the ethical life, when earnestly pursued, leads ultimately to guilt and despair.

But there is one more stage along life’s way: the religious stage. Here one finds forgiveness of sins and a personal relationship with God. Only here, in intimate communion with one’s Creator, does man find authentic existence and true fulfillment. Again, Kierkegaard represents the transition to this stage from the ethical as a leap. The decision to believe is a criterionless choice, a leap of faith into the dark. Although man can be given no rational grounds to leap, unless he does so he will remain in despair and inauthentic existence.

Francis Schaeffer

As I remarked earlier, Francis Schaeffer (1912-84) is the thinker responsible for drafting a Christian apologetic based on the so-called modern predicament. According to Schaeffer, there can be traced in recent Western culture a “line of despair,” which penetrates philosophy, literature, and the arts in succession. He believes the root of the problem lies in Hegelian philosophy, specifically in its denial of absolute truths. Hegel developed the famous triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in which contradictions are seen not as absolute opposites, but as partial truths, which are synthesized in the whole. Ultimately all is One, which is absolute and non-contradictory. In Schaeffer’s view, Hegel’s system undermined the notion of particular absolute truths (such as “That act is morally wrong” or “This painting is aesthetically ugly”) by synthesizing them into the whole. This denial of absolutes has gradually made its way through Western culture. In each case, it results in despair, because without absolutes man’s endeavors degenerate into absurdity. Schaeffer believes that the Theater of the Absurd, abstract modern art, and modern music such as is composed by John Cage are all indications of what happens below the line of despair. Only by reaffirming belief in the absolute God of Christianity can man and his culture avoid inevitable degeneracy, meaninglessness, and despair.

Schaeffer’s efforts against abortion may be seen as a logical extension of this apologetic. Once God is denied, human life becomes worthless, and we see the fruit of such a philosophy in the abortion and infanticide now taking place. Schaeffer warns that unless Western man returns to the Christian world and life view, nothing will stop the trend from degenerating into population control and human breeding. Only a theistic world view can save the human race from itself.

Assessment

The necessity of God and Immortality

Man, writes Loren Eiseley, is the Cosmic Orphan. He is the only creature in the universe who asks, “Why?” Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions.

“Who am I?” man asks. “Why am I here? Where am I going?” Since the Enlightenment, when he threw off the shackles of religion, man has tried to answer these questions without reference to God. But the answers that came back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible. “You are the accidental by-product of nature, a result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death.”

Modern man thought that when he had gotten rid of God, he had freed himself from all that repressed and stifled him. Instead, he discovered that in killing God, he had also killed himself.

For if there is no God, then man’s life becomes absurd.

If God does not exist, then both man and the universe are inevitably doomed to death. Man, like all biological organisms, must die. With no hope of immortality, man’s life leads only to the grave. His life is but a spark in the infinite blackness, a spark that appears, flickers, and dies forever. Compared to the infinite stretch of time, the span of man’s life is but an infinitesimal moment; and yet this is all the life he will ever know. Therefore, everyone must come face to face with what theologian Paul Tillich has called “the threat of non-being.” For though I know now that I exist, that I am alive, I also know that someday I will no longer exist, that I will no longer be, that I will die. This thought is staggering and threatening: to think that the person I call “myself” will cease to exist, that I will be no more!

I remember vividly the first time my father told me that someday I would die. Somehow as a child the thought had just never occurred to me. When he told me, I was filled with fear and unbearable sadness. And though he tried repeatedly to reassure me that this was a long way off, that did not seem to matter. Whether sooner or later, the undeniable fact was that I would die and be no more, and the thought overwhelmed me. Eventually, like all of us, I grew to simply accept the fact. We all learn to live with the inevitable. But the child’s insight remains true. As the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre observed, several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity.

Whether it comes sooner or later, the prospect of death and the threat of non-being is a terrible horror. But I met a student once who did not feel this threat. He said he had been raised on the farm and was used to seeing the animals being born and dying. Death was for him simply natural—a part of life, so to speak. I was puzzled by how different our two perspectives on death were and found it difficult to understand why he did not feel the threat of non-being. Years later, I think I found my answer in reading Sartre. Sartre observed that death is not threatening so long as we view it as the death of the other, from a third-person standpoint, so to speak. It is only when we internalize it and look at it from the first-person perspective—“my death: I am going to die”—that the threat of non-being becomes real. As Sartre points out, many people never assume this first-person perspective in the midst of life; one can even look at one’s own death from the third-person standpoint, as if it were the death of another or even of an animal, as did my friend. But the true existential significance of my death can only be appreciated from the first-person perspective, as I realize that I am going to die and forever cease to exist. My life is just a momentary transition out of oblivion into oblivion.

And the universe, too, faces death. Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding, and everything in it is growing farther and farther apart. As it does so, it grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes. There will be no light at all; there will be no heat; there will be no life; only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space—a universe in ruins. The entire universe marches irreversibly toward its grave. So not only is the life of each individual person doomed; the entire human race is doomed. The universe is plunging toward inevitable extinction—death is written throughout its structure. There is no escape. There is no hope.

The absurdity of life without God and Immortality

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose. Let’s look at each of these.

No Ultimate Meaning Without Immortality and God

If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he ever existed at all? It might be said that his life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But this only shows a relative significance to his life, not an ultimate significance. His life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If all the events are meaningless, then what can be the ultimate meaning of influencing any of them? Ultimately it makes no difference.

Look at it from another perspective: Scientists say that the universe originated in an explosion called the “Big Bang” about 15 billion years ago. Suppose the Big Bang had never occurred. Suppose the universe had never existed. What ultimate difference would it make? The universe is doomed to die anyway. In the end it makes no difference whether the universe ever existed or not. Therefore, it is without ultimate significance.

The same is true of the human race. Mankind is a doomed race in a dying universe. Because the human race will eventually cease to exist, it makes no ultimate difference whether it ever did exist. Mankind is thus no more significant than a swarm of mosquitos or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same. The same blind cosmic process that coughed them up in the first place will eventually swallow them all again.

And the same is true of each individual person. The contributions of the scientist to the advance of human knowledge, the researches of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good men everywhere to better the lot of the human race—all these come to nothing. In the end they don’t make one bit of difference, not one bit. Each person’s life is therefore without ultimate significance. And because our lives are ultimately meaningless, the activities we fill our lives with are also meaningless. The long hours spent in study at the university, our jobs, our interests, our friendships—all these are, in the final analysis, utterly meaningless. This is the horror of modern man: because he ends in nothing, he is nothing.

But it is important to see that it is not just immortality that man needs if life is to be meaningful. Mere duration of existence does not make that existence meaningful. If man and the universe could exist forever, but if there were no God, their existence would still have no ultimate significance. To illustrate: I once read a science-fiction story in which an astronaut was marooned on a barren chunk of rock lost in outer space. He had with him two vials: one containing poison and the other a potion that would make him live forever. Realizing his predicament, he gulped down the poison. But then to his horror, he discovered he had swallowed the wrong vial—he had drunk the potion for immortality. And that meant that he was cursed to exist forever—a meaningless, unending life. Now if God does not exist, our lives are just like that. They could go on and on and still be utterly without meaning. We could still ask of life, “So what?” So it is not just immortality man needs if life is to be ultimately significant; he needs God and immortality. And if God does not exist, then he has neither.

Twentieth-century man came to understand this. Read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. During this entire play two men carry on trivial conversation while waiting for a third man to arrive, who never does. Our lives are like that, Beckett is saying; we just kill time waiting—for what, we don’t know. In a tragic portrayal of man, Beckett wrote another play in which the curtain opens revealing a stage littered with junk. For thirty long seconds, the audience sits and stares in silence at that junk. Then the curtain closes. That’s all.

One of the most devastating novels I’ve ever read was Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse. At the novel’s end, Harry Haller stands looking at himself in a mirror. During the course of his life he had experienced all the world offers. And now he stands looking at himself, and he mutters, “Ah, the bitter taste of life!” He spits at himself in the looking-glass, and then he kicks it to pieces. His life has been futile and meaningless.

French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus understood this, too. Sartre portrayed life in his play No Exit as hell—the final line of the play are the words of resignation, “Well, let’s get on with it.” Hence, Sartre writes elsewhere of the “nausea” of existence. Camus, too, saw life as absurd. At the end of his brief novel The Stranger, Camus’s hero discovers in a flash of insight that the universe has no meaning and there is no God to give it one. The French biochemist Jacques Monod seemed to echo those sentiments when he wrote in his work Chance and Necessity, “Man finally knows he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe.”

Thus, if there is no God, then life itself becomes meaningless. Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.

No Ultimate Value Without Immortality and God

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint. Since one’s destiny is ultimately unrelated to one’s behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As Dostoyevsky put it: “If there is no immortality then all things are permitted.” On this basis, a writer like Ayn Rand is absolutely correct to praise the virtues of selfishness. Live totally for self; no one holds you accountable! Indeed, it would be foolish to do anything else, for life is too short to jeopardize it by acting out of anything but pure self-interest. Sacrifice for another person would be stupid. Kai Nielsen, an atheist philosopher who attempts to defend the viability of ethics without God, in the end admits, We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me. . . . Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.7

But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there can be no objective standards of right and wrong. All we are confronted with is, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, the bare, valueless fact of existence. Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of socio-biological evolution and conditioning. In the words of one humanist philosopher, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion.”8 In a world without God, who is to say which values are right and which are wrong? Who is to judge that the values of Adolf Hitler are inferior to those of a saint? The concept of morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. As one contemporary atheistic ethicist points out, “to say that something is wrong because . . . it is forbidden by God, is . . . perfectly understandable to anyone who believes in a law-giving God. But to say that something is wrong . . . even though no God exists to forbid it, is not understandable. . . .” “The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone.”9 In a world without God, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong.

No Ultimate Purpose Without Immortality and God

If death stands with open arms at the end of life’s trail, then what is the goal of life? To what end has life been lived? Is it all for nothing? Is there no reason for life? And what of the universe? Is it utterly pointless? If its destiny is a cold grave in the recesses of outer space, the answer must be yes—it is pointless. There is no goal, no purpose, for the universe. The litter of a dead universe will just go on expanding and expanding—forever.

And what of man? Is there no purpose at all for the human race? Or will it simply peter out someday lost in the oblivion of an indifferent universe? The English writer H. G. Wells foresaw such a prospect. In his novel The Time Machine Wells’s time traveler journeys far into the future to discover the destiny of man. All he finds is a dead earth, save for a few lichens and moss, orbiting a gigantic red sun. The only sounds are the rush of the wind and the gentle ripple of the sea. “Beyond these lifeless sounds,” writes Wells, “the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”10 And so Wells’s time traveler returned. But to what?—to merely an earlier point on the purposeless rush toward oblivion. When as a non-Christian I first read Wells’s book, I thought, “No, no! It can’t end that way!” But if there is no God, it will end that way, like it or not. This is reality in a universe without God: there is no hope; there is no purpose. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s haunting lines:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.11

What is true of mankind as a whole is true of each of us individually: we are here to no purpose. If there is no God, then our life is not qualitatively different from that of a dog. I know that’s harsh, but it’s true. As the ancient writer of Ecclesiastes put it: “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” (Eccles 3:19-20). In this book, which reads more like a piece of modern existentialist literature than a book of the Bible, the writer shows the futility of pleasure, wealth, education, political fame, and honor in a life doomed to end in death. His verdict? “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (1:2). If life ends at the grave, then we have no ultimate purpose for living.

But more than that: even if it did not end in death, without God life would still be without purpose. For man and the universe would then be simple accidents of chance, thrust into existence for no reason. Without God the universe is the result of a cosmic accident, a chance explosion. There is no reason for which it exists. As for man, he is a freak of nature—a blind product of matter plus time plus chance. Man is just a lump of slime that evolved into rationality. There is no more purpose in life for the human race than for a species of insect; for both are the result of the blind interaction of chance and necessity. As one philosopher has put it: “Human life is mounted upon a subhuman pedestal and must shift for itself alone in the heart of a silent and mindless universe.”12

What is true of the universe and of the human race is also true of us as individuals. Insofar as we are individual human beings, we are the results of certain combinations of heredity and environment. We are victims of a kind of genetic and environmental roulette. Psychologists following Sigmund Freud tell us our actions are the result of various repressed sexual tendencies. Sociologists following B. F. Skinner argue that all our choices are determined by conditioning, so that freedom is an illusion. Biologists like Francis Crick regard man as an electro-chemical machine that can be controlled by altering its genetic code. If God does not exist, then you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life.

So if God does not exist, that means that man and the universe exist to no purpose—since the end of everything is death—and that they came to be for no purpose, since they are only blind products of chance. In short, life is utterly without reason. Do you understand the gravity of the alternatives before us? For if God exists, then there is hope for man. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair. Do you understand why the question of God’s existence is so vital to man? As one writer has aptly put it, “If God is dead, then man is dead, too.”

Unfortunately, the mass of mankind do not realize this fact. They continue on as though nothing has changed. I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s story of the madman who in the early morning hours burst into the marketplace, lantern in hand, crying, “I seek God! I seek God!” Since many of those standing about did not believe in God, he provoked much laughter. “Did God get lost?” they taunted him. “Or is he hiding? Or maybe he has gone on a voyage or emigrated!” Thus they yelled and laughed. Then, writes Nietzsche, the madman turned in their midst and pierced them with his eyes.

‘Whither is God?’ he cried, ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? . . . God is dead. . . . And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?’13

The crowd stared at the madman in silence and astonishment. At last he dashed his lantern to the ground. “I have come too early,” he said. “This tremendous event is still on its way—it has not yet reached the ears of man.” Men did not yet truly comprehend the consequences of what they had done in killing God. But Nietzsche predicted that someday people would realize the implications of their atheism; and this realization would usher in an age of nihilism—the destruction of all meaning and value in life. The end of Christianity, wrote Nietzsche, means the advent of nihilism. This most gruesome of guests is standing already at the door. “Our whole European culture is moving for some time now,” wrote Nietzsche, “with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”14

Most people still do not reflect on the consequences of atheism and so, like the crowd in the marketplace, go unknowingly on their way. But when we realize, as did Nietzsche, what atheism implies, then his question presses hard upon us: how shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?

The practical impossibility of Atheism

About the only solution the atheist can offer is that we face the absurdity of life and live bravely. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote that we must build our lives upon “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”15 Only by recognizing that the world really is a terrible place can we successfully come to terms with life. Camus said that we should honestly recognize life’s absurdity and then live in love for one another.

The fundamental problem with this solution, however, is that it is impossible to live consistently and happily within such a world view. If one lives consistently, he will not be happy; if one lives happily, it is only because he is not consistent. Francis Schaeffer has explained this point well. Modern man, says Schaeffer, resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. Modern man is totally inconsistent when he makes this leap, because these values cannot exist without God, and man in his lower story does not have God.

Let’s look again, then, at each of the three areas in which we saw life was absurd without God, to show how man cannot live consistently and happily with his atheism.

Meaning of Life

First, the area of meaning. We saw that without God, life has no meaning. Yet philosophers continue to live as though life does have meaning. For example, Sartre argued that one may create meaning for his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of action. Sartre himself chose Marxism.

Now this is utterly inconsistent. It is inconsistent to say life is objectively absurd and then to say one may create meaning for his life. If life is really absurd, then man is trapped in the lower story. To try to create meaning in life represents a leap to the upper story. But Sartre has no basis for this leap. Without God, there can be no objective meaning in life. Sartre’s program is actually an exercise in self-delusion. For the universe does not really acquire meaning just because I give it one. This is easy to see: for suppose I give the universe one meaning, and you give it another. Who is right? The answer, of course, is neither one. For the universe without God remains objectively meaningless, no matter how we regard it. Sartre is really saying, “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.” And this is just fooling ourselves.

The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.

Value of Life

Turn now to the problem of value. Here is where the most blatant inconsistencies occur. First of all, atheistic humanists are totally inconsistent in affirming the traditional values of love and brotherhood. Camus has been rightly criticized for inconsistently holding both to the absurdity of life and the ethics of human love and brotherhood. The two are logically incompatible. Bertrand Russell, too, was inconsistent. For though he was an atheist, he was an outspoken social critic, denouncing war and restrictions on sexual freedom. Russell admitted that he could not live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste, and that he therefore found his own views “incredible.” “I do not know the solution,” he confessed.16 The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist. As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.”

But Dostoyevsky also showed that man cannot live this way. He cannot live as though it is perfectly all right for soldiers to slaughter innocent children. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictatorial regimes to follow a systematic program of physical torture of political prisoners. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictators like Pol Pot to exterminate millions of their own countrymen. Everything in him cries out to say these acts are wrong—really wrong. But if there is no God, he cannot. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

The horror of a world devoid of value was brought home to me with new intensity a few years ago as I viewed a BBC television documentary called “The Gathering.” It concerned the reunion of survivors of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, where they rediscovered lost friendships and shared their experiences. Now, I had heard stories of the Holocaust before and had even visited Dachau and Buchenwald, and I thought I was beyond shocking by further tales of horror. But I found that I was not. Perhaps I had been made more sensitive by the recent birth of our beautiful baby girl, so that I applied the situations to her as they were related on the television. In any case, one woman prisoner, a nurse, told of how she was made the gynecologist at Auschwitz. She observed that pregnant women were grouped together by the soldiers under the direction of Dr. Mengele and housed in the same barracks. Some time passed, and she noted that she no longer saw any of these women. She made inquiries. “Where are the pregnant women who were housed in that barracks?” “Haven’t you heard?” came the reply. “Dr. Mengele used them for vivisection.”

Another woman told of how Mengele had bound up her breasts so that she could not suckle her infant. The doctor wanted to learn how long an infant could survive without nourishment. Desperately this poor woman tried to keep her baby alive by giving it pieces of bread soaked in coffee, but to no avail. Each day the baby lost weight, a fact that was eagerly monitored by Dr. Mengele. A nurse then came secretly to this woman and told her, “I have arranged a way for you to get out of here, but you cannot take your baby with you. I have brought a morphine injection that you can give to your child to end its life.” When the woman protested, the nurse was insistent: “Look, your baby is going to die anyway. At least save yourself.” And so this mother took the life of her own baby. Dr. Mengele was furious when he learned of it because he had lost his experimental specimen, and he searched among the dead to find the baby’s discarded corpse so that he could have one last weighing.

My heart was torn by these stories. One rabbi who survived the camp summed it up well when he said that at Auschwitz it was as though there existed a world in which all the Ten Commandments were reversed. Mankind had never seen such a hell. And yet, if God does not exist, then in a sense, our world is Auschwitz: there is no absolute right and wrong; all things are permitted. But no atheist, no agnostic, can live consistently with such a view. Nietzsche himself, who proclaimed the necessity of living “beyond good and evil,” broke with his mentor Richard Wagner precisely over the issue of the composer’s anti-Semitism and strident German nationalism. Similarly Sartre, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, condemned anti-Semitism, declaring that a doctrine that leads to extermination is not merely an opinion or matter of personal taste, of equal value with its opposite.17 In his important essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre struggles vainly to elude the contradiction between his denial of divinely pre-established values and his urgent desire to affirm the value of human persons. Like Russell, he could not live with the implications of his own denial of ethical absolutes.

A second problem is that if God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded. But who can live with such a view? Richard Wurmbrand, who has been tortured for his faith in communist prisons, says, The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no Hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I have heard one torturer even say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.18

The English theologian Cardinal Newman once said that if he believed that all evils and injustices of life throughout history were not to be made right by God in the afterlife, “Why I think I should go mad.” Rightly so.

And the same applies to acts of self-sacrifice. A number of years ago, a terrible mid-winter air disaster occurred in which a plane leaving the Washington, D.C. airport smashed into a bridge spanning the Potomac River, plunging its passengers into the icy waters. As the rescue helicopters came, attention was focused on one man who again and again pushed the dangling rope ladder to other passengers rather than be pulled to safety himself. Six times he passed the ladder by. When they came again, he was gone. He had freely given his life that others might live. The whole nation turned its eyes to this man in respect and admiration for the selfless and good act he had performed. And yet, if the atheist is right, that man was not noble—he did the stupidest thing possible. He should have gone for the ladder first, pushed others away if necessary in order to survive. But to die for others he did not even know, to give up all the brief existence he would ever have—what for? For the atheist there can be no reason. And yet the atheist, like the rest of us, instinctively reacts with praise for this man’s selfless action. Indeed, one will probably never find an atheist who lives consistently with his system. For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.

Purpose of Life

Finally, let’s look at the problem of purpose in life. The only way most people who deny purpose in life live happily is either by making up some purpose, which amounts to self-delusion as we saw with Sartre, or by not carrying their view to its logical conclusions. Take the problem of death, for example. According to Ernst Bloch, the only way modern man lives in the face of death is by subconsciously borrowing the belief in immortality that his forefathers held to, even though he himself has no basis for this belief, since he does not believe in God. Bloch states that the belief that life ends in nothing is hardly, in his words, “sufficient to keep the head high and to work as if there were no end.” By borrowing the remnants of a belief in immortality, writes Bloch, “modern man does not feel the chasm that unceasingly surrounds him and that will certainly engulf him at last. Through these remnants, he saves his sense of self-identity. Through them the impression arises that man is not perishing, but only that one day the world has the whim no longer to appear to him.” Bloch concludes, “This quite shallow courage feasts on a borrowed credit card. It lives from earlier hopes and the support that they once had provided.”19 Modern man no longer has any right to that support, since he rejects God. But in order to live purposefully, he makes a leap of faith to affirm a reason for living.

We often find the same inconsistency among those who say that man and the universe came to exist for no reason or purpose, but just by chance. Unable to live in an impersonal universe in which everything is the product of blind chance, these persons begin to ascribe personality and motives to the physical processes themselves. It is a bizarre way of speaking and represents a leap from the lower to the upper story. For example, the brilliant Russian physicists Zeldovich and Novikov, in contemplating the properties of the universe, ask, Why did “Nature” choose to create this sort of universe instead of another? “Nature” has obviously become a sort of God-substitute, filling the role and function of God. Francis Crick halfway through his book The Origin of the Genetic Code begins to spell nature with a capital “N” and elsewhere speaks of natural selection as being “clever” and as “thinking” of what it will do. Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer, attributes to the universe itself the qualities of God. For Carl Sagan the “Cosmos,” which he always spells with a capital letter, obviously fills the role of a God-substitute. Though all these men profess not to believe in God, they smuggle in a God-substitute through the back door because they cannot bear to live in a universe in which everything is the chance result of impersonal forces.

And it’s interesting to see many thinkers betray their views when they’re pushed to their logical conclusions. For example, certain feminists have raised a storm of protest over Freudian sexual psychology because it is chauvinistic and degrading to women. And some psychologists have knuckled under and revised their theories. Now this is totally inconsistent. If Freudian psychology is really true, then it doesn’t matter if it’s degrading to women. You can’t change the truth because you don’t like what it leads to. But people cannot live consistently and happily in a world where other persons are devalued. Yet if God does not exist, then nobody has any value. Only if God exists can a person consistently support women’s rights. For if God does not exist, then natural selection dictates that the male of the species is the dominant and aggressive one. Women would no more have rights than a female goat or chicken have rights. In nature whatever is, is right. But who can live with such a view? Apparently not even Freudian psychologists, who betray their theories when pushed to their logical conclusions.

Or take the sociological behaviorism of a man like B. F. Skinner. This view leads to the sort of society envisioned in George Orwell’s 1984, where the government controls and programs the thoughts of everybody. If Pavlov’s dog can be made to salivate when a bell rings, so can a human being. If Skinner’s theories are right, then there can be no objection to treating people like the rats in Skinner’s rat-box as they run through their mazes, coaxed on by food and electric shocks. According to Skinner, all our actions are determined anyway. And if God does not exist, then no moral objection can be raised against this kind of programming, for man is not qualitatively different from a rat, since both are just matter plus time plus chance. But again, who can live with such a dehumanizing view?

Or finally, take the biological determinism of a man like Francis Crick. The logical conclusion is that man is like any other laboratory specimen. The world was horrified when it learned that at camps like Dachau the Nazis had used prisoners for medical experiments on living humans. But why not? If God does not exist, there can be no objection to using people as human guinea pigs. A memorial at Dachau says Nie Wieder—“Never Again”—but this sort of thing is still going on. It was revealed a few years ago that in the United States several people had been injected, unknown to them, with a sterilization drug by medical researchers. Must we not protest that this is wrong—that man is more than an electro-chemical machine? The end of this view is population control in which the weak and unwanted are killed off to make room for the strong. But the only way we can consistently protest this view is if God exists. Only if God exists can there be purpose in life.

The dilemma of modern man is thus truly terrible. And insofar as he denies the existence of God and the objectivity of value and purpose, this dilemma remains unrelieved for “post-modern” man as well. Indeed, it is precisely the awareness that modernism issues inevitably in absurdity and despair that constitutes the anguish of post-modernism. In some respects, post-modernism just is the awareness of the bankruptcy of modernity. The atheistic world view is insufficient to maintain a happy and consistent life. Man cannot live consistently and happily as though life were ultimately without meaning, value, or purpose. If we try to live consistently within the atheistic world view, we shall find ourselves profoundly unhappy. If instead we manage to live happily, it is only by giving the lie to our world view.

Confronted with this dilemma, man flounders pathetically for some means of escape. In a remarkable address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in 1991, Dr. L. D. Rue, confronted with the predicament of modern man, boldly advocated that we deceive ourselves by means of some “Noble Lie” into thinking that we and the universe still have value.20 Claiming that “The lesson of the past two centuries is that intellectual and moral relativism is profoundly the case,” Dr. Rue muses that the consequence of such a realization is that one’s quest for personal wholeness (or self-fulfillment) and the quest for social coherence become independent from one another. This is because on the view of relativism the search for self-fulfillment becomes radically privatized: each person chooses his own set of values and meaning. “There is no final, objective reading on the world or the self. There is no universal vocabulary for integrating cosmology and morality.” If we are to avoid “the madhouse option,” where self-fulfillment is pursued regardless of social coherence, and “the totalitarian option,” where social coherence is imposed at the expense of personal wholeness, then we have no choice but to embrace some Noble Lie that will inspire us to live beyond selfish interests and so achieve social coherence. A Noble Lie “is one that deceives us, tricks us, compels us beyond self-interest, beyond ego, beyond family, nation, [and] race.” It is a lie, because it tells us that the universe is infused with value (which is a great fiction), because it makes a claim to universal truth (when there is none), and because it tells me not to live for self-interest (which is evidently false). “But without such lies, we cannot live.”

This is the dreadful verdict pronounced over modern man. In order to survive, he must live in self-deception. But even the Noble Lie option is in the end unworkable. For if what I have said thus far is correct, belief in a Noble Lie would not only be necessary to achieve social coherence and personal wholeness for the masses, but it would also be necessary to achieve one’s own personal wholeness. For one cannot live happily and consistently on an atheistic world view. In order to be happy, one must believe in objective meaning, value, and purpose. But how can one believe in those Noble Lies while at the same time believing in atheism and relativism? The more convinced you are of the necessity of a Noble Lie, the less you are able to believe in it. Like a placebo, a Noble Lie works only on those who believe it is the truth. Once we have seen through the fiction, then the Lie has lost its power over us. Thus, ironically, the Noble Lie cannot solve the human predicament for anyone who has come to see that predicament.

The Noble Lie option therefore leads at best to a society in which an elitist group of illuminati deceive the masses for their own good by perpetuating the Noble Lie. But then why should those of us who are enlightened follow the masses in their deception? Why should we sacrifice self-interest for a fiction? If the great lesson of the past two centuries is moral and intellectual relativism, then why (if we could) pretend that we do not know this truth and live a lie instead? If one answers, “for the sake of social coherence,” one may legitimately ask why I should sacrifice my self-interest for the sake of social coherence? The only answer the relativist can give is that social coherence is in my self-interest—but the problem with this answer is that self-interest and the interest of the herd do not always coincide. Besides, if (out of self-interest) I do care about social coherence, the totalitarian option is always open to me: forget the Noble Lie and maintain social coherence (as well as my self-fulfillment) at the expense of the personal wholeness of the masses. Generations of Soviet leaders who extolled proletarian virtues while they rode in limousines and dined on caviar in their country dachas found this alternative quite workable. Rue would undoubtedly regard such an option as repugnant. But therein lies the rub. Rue’s dilemma is that he obviously values deeply both social coherence and personal wholeness for their own sakes; in other words, they are objective values, which according to his philosophy do not exist. He has already leapt to the upper story. The Noble Lie option thus affirms what it denies and so refutes itself.

The success of biblical Christianity

But if atheism fails in this regard, what about biblical Christianity? According to the Christian world view, God does exist, and man’s life does not end at the grave. In the resurrection body man may enjoy eternal life and fellowship with God. Biblical Christianity therefore provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life for man: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily. Thus, biblical Christianity succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.

Conclusion

Now I want to make it clear that I have not yet shown biblical Christianity to be true. But what I have done is clearly spell out the alternatives. If God does not exist, then life is futile. If the God of the Bible does exist, then life is meaningful. Only the second of these two alternatives enables us to live happily and consistently. Therefore, it seems to me that even if the evidence for these two options were absolutely equal, a rational person ought to choose biblical Christianity. It seems to me positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and destruction to life, meaningfulness, and happiness. As Pascal said, we have nothing to lose and infinity to gain.

Practical Application

The foregoing discussion makes clear the role I conceive cultural apologetics to play: it is not one’s whole apologetic but rather an introduction to positive argumentation. It serves to lay out in a dramatic way the alternatives facing the unbeliever in order to create a felt need in him. When he realizes the predicament he is in, he will see why the gospel is so important to him; and many a non-Christian will be impelled by these considerations alone to give his life to Christ.

In sharing this material with an unbeliever, we need to push him to the logical conclusions of his position. If I am right, no atheist or agnostic really lives consistently with his world view. In some way he affirms meaning, value, or purpose without an adequate basis. It is our job to discover those areas and lovingly show him where those beliefs are groundless. We need not attack his values themselves—for they are probably largely correct—but we may agree with him concerning them, and then point out only that he lacks any foundation for those values, whereas the Christian has such a foundation. Thus, we need not make him defensive by a frontal attack on his personal values; rather we offer him a foundation for the values he already possesses.

I have found the material on the absence of objective moral value in an atheistic world view to be an especially powerful apologetic to university students. Although students may give lip-service to relativism, my experience is that 95% can be very quickly convinced that objective moral values do exist after all. All you have to do is produce a few illustrations and let them decide for themselves. Ask what they think of the Hindu practice of suttee (burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands) or the ancient Chinese custom of crippling women for life by tightly binding their feet from childhood to resemble lotus-blossoms. Point out that without God to provide a trans-cultural basis for moral values, we’re left with socio-cultural relativism, so that such practices are morally unobjectionable—which scarcely anyone can sincerely accept.

Of course, sometimes you find some hard-liners, but usually their position is seen to be so extreme that others are repulsed by it. For example, at a recent meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, I attended a panel discussion on “Biblical Authority and Homosexuality,” in which all the panelists endorsed the legitimacy of homosexual activity. One panelist dismissed scriptural prohibitions against such activity on the grounds that they reflect the cultural milieu in which they were written. Since this is the case for all of Scripture’s commands (it wasn’t written in a vacuum), he concluded that “there are no timeless, normative, moral truths in Scripture.” In discussion from the floor, I pointed out that such a view leads to socio-cultural relativism, which makes it impossible to criticize any society’s moral values, including those of a society which persecutes homosexuals. He responded with a fog of theological double-talk and claimed that there’s no place outside Scripture where we can find timeless moral values either. “But that just is what we mean by moral relativism,” I said. “In fact, on your view there’s no content to the notion of the goodness of God. He might as well be dead. And Nietzsche recognized that the death of God leads to nihilism.” At this point another panelist came in with that knock-down refutation: “Well, if you’re going to get pejorative, we might as well not discuss it.”

I sat down, but the point wasn’t lost on the audience. The next man who stood up said, “Wait a minute. I’m rather confused. I’m a pastor and people are always coming to me, asking if something they have done is wrong and if they need forgiveness. For example, isn’t it always wrong to abuse a child?” I couldn’t believe the panelist’s response. She replied: “What counts as abuse differs from society to society, so we can’t really use the word ‘abuse’ without tying it to a historical context.” “Call it whatever you like,” the pastor insisted, “but child abuse is damaging to children. Isn’t it wrong to damage children?” And still she wouldn’t admit it! This sort of hardness of heart ultimately backfires on the moral relativist and exposes in the minds of most people the bankruptcy of such a world view.

In sharing this material with unbelievers, it’s important also to ask ourselves exactly what part of our case his objections are meant to refute. Thus, if he says that values are merely social conventions pragmatically adopted to ensure mutual survival, what does this purport to refute? Not that life without God really is without value, for this the objection admits. Therefore, it would be a mistake to react by arguing that values are not social conventions but are grounded in God. Rather the objection is really aimed at the claim that one cannot live as though values do not exist; it holds that one may live by social conventions alone.

Seen in this light, however, the objection is entirely implausible, for we have argued precisely that man cannot live as though morality were merely a matter of social convention. We believe certain acts to be genuinely wrong or right. Therefore, one ought to respond to the unbeliever on this score by saying, “You’re exactly right: if God does not exist, then values are merely social conventions. But the point I’m trying to make is that it is impossible to live consistently and happily with such a world view.” Push him on the Holocaust or some issue of popular concern like ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or child abuse. Bring it home to him personally and if he’s honest and you are not threatening, I think he will admit that he does hold to some absolutes. Thus, it’s very important to analyze exactly what the unbeliever’s objection actually attacks before we answer.

I believe that this mode of apologetics can be very effective in helping to bring people to Christ because it does not concern neutral matters but cuts to the heart of the unbeliever’s own existential situation. I remember that once, when I was delivering a series of talks at the University of Birmingham in England, the audience the first night was very hostile and aggressive. The second night I spoke on the absurdity of life without God. This time the largely same audience was utterly subdued: the lions had turned to lambs, and now their questions were no longer attacking but sincere and searching. The remarkable transformation was due to the fact that the message had penetrated their intellectual facade and struck at the core of their existence. I would encourage you to employ this material in evangelistic dorm meetings and fraternity/sorority meetings, where you can compel people to really think about the desperate human predicament in which we all find ourselves.

LITERATURE CITED OR RECOMMENDED

Historical background

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by C. Garnett. Foreword by M. Komroff. New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1957.

—. Crime and Punishment. Translated by C. Garnett. Introduction by E. Simmons. New York: Modern Library, 1950.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Either/Or. Translated by D. F. Swenson and L. M. Swenson. Princeton: Princeton U., 1944. Volume 1 describes the first stage of life and Volume 2 the second.

—. Fear and Trembling. Edited and translated with an Introduction and Notes by H. V. Hong and E. N. Hong. Princeton: Princeton U., 1983. This handles the religious stage.

Morris, Thomas V. Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Edited by Louis Lafuma. Translated by John Warrington. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent, 1960.

Schaeffer, Francis. Escape from Reason. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1968. —. The God Who Is There. Chicago: InterVarsity Press, 1968.

—. How Should We Then Live? Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1976.

Assessment

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1956.

Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. 2d ed. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by J. O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1959.

—. The Stranger. Translated by S. Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1958.

Crick, Francis. “Why I Study Biology.” Washington University Magazine. Spring 1971, pp. 20-4.

Eliot, T. S. “The Hollow Men.” In The Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. Propaedia, s.v. “The Cosmic Orphan,” by Loren Eiseley.

Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf. Translated by Basil Creighton. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

Hocking, W. E. Types of Philosophy. New York: Scribner’s, 1959.

Hoyle, Fred. From Stonehenge to Modern Cosmology. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1972.

Kaufmann, Walter. “Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre.” In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. 2d ed. Edited by W. Kaufmann. New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975. Pp. 11-51.

Kurtz, Paul. Forbidden Fruit. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1988.

Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity. Translated by A. Wainhouse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.

Moreland, J.P. Scaling the Secular City. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987. Chap. 4.

Moreland, J.P. and Nielsen, Kai. Does God Exist? Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990. Rep. ed.:

Prometheus Books, 1993. Part II is an excellent debate over ethics without God.

Nielsen, Kai. “Why Should I Be Moral? Revisited.” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 81-91.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Gay Science.” In The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954. Pp. 93-102.

—. “The Will to Power.” Translated by Walter Kaufmann. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. 2d ed. Edited with an Introduction by W. Kaufmann. New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975. Pp. 130-2.

Novikov, I.D., and Zeldovich, Ya. B. “Physical Processes Near Cosmological Singularities.” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 11(1973): 387-410.

Rue, Loyal D. “The Saving Grace of Noble Lies.” Unpublished address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, February, 1991.

Russell, Bertrand. “A Free Man’s Worship.” In Why I Am Not a Christian. Edited by P. Edwards. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957. Pp. 104-16.

—. Letter to the Observer, 6 October 1957.

Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated with an Introduction by H. E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1966.

—. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” Translated by P. Mairet. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. 2d ed. Edited with an Introduction by W. Kaufmann. New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975. Pp. 345-69.

—. Nausea. Translated by L. Alexander. London: H. Hamilton, 1962.

—. No Exit. Translated by S. Gilbert. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963.

—. “Portrait of the Antisemite.” Translated by M. Guggenheim. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. 2d ed. Edited with an Introduction by W. Kaufmann. New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975. Pp. 329-45.

—. “The Wall.” Translated by L. Alexander. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. 2d ed. Edited with an Introduction by W. Kaufmann. New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975. Pp. 281-99.

Taylor, Richard. Ethics, Faith, and Reason. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985. An excellent illustration of the desperate lengths to which an ethicist is driven once a divine moral law giver is denied.

Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. New York: Berkeley, 1957.

Wurmbrand, Richard. Tortured for Christ. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967.

Notes

1. The definitive ordering and numbering of these notes is that of Louis Lafuma, and the Pensées are cited in reference to the number of each fragment.

2. Blaise Pascal, Pensées 29.

3. Ibid., 11.

4. Ibid., 217, 246.

5. Ibid., 343.

6. Ibid.

7. Kai Nielsen, “Why Should I Be Moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 90.

8. Paul Kurtz, Forbidden Fruit (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1988), p. 73.

9. Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1985), pp. 90, 84.

10. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: Berkeley, 1957), chap. 11.

11. T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1934). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

12. W. E. Hocking, Types of Philosophy (New York: Scribner’s, 1959), p. 27.

13. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), p. 95.

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Will to Power,” trans. W. Kaufmann, in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre , 2d. ed., ed. with an Introduction by W. Kaufmann (New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975), pp. 130-1.

15. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), p. 107.

16. Bertrand Russell, Letter to the Observer, 6 October 1957.

17. Jean Paul Sartre, “Portrait of the Antisemite,” trans. M. Guiggenheim, in Existentialism, p. 330.

18. Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967), p. 34.

19. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 2d. ed., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959), 2: 360-1.

20. Loyal D. Rue, “The Saving Grace of Noble Lies,” address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, February 1991.

© This is a sample from the book 'Reasonable Faith' by William Lane Craig, copyright 1994, page 51-75.

© William Lane Craig 2005

Can a Good God allow suffering?

Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath is Professor of Theology, Ministry and Education, and Head of the Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture at King's College, London. He holds doctorates in molecular biophysics as well as in historical and systematic theology. He is Director of the Oxford Centre for Evangelism and Apologetics.

Suffering poses many problems for Christian faith. At one level, it poses a knotty riddle for the theologian, who has to explain why its existence does not compromise Christian faith. It may reasonably be argued that to treat suffering as a logical, philo¬sophical or theological difficulty is to miss the real point - the emotional and pastoral issues raised for those who are suffering, and for those who care for them. This is a fair point, but its importance must not be overstated. Suffering is a problem for Christian apologetics, the subject of this book, primarily because it is held to demonstrate the logical incoherence of Christianity. The shape of our discussion of the problem of suffering is thus a response to this agenda, set by critics of the Christian faith.

The problem raised for the apologist by the existence of evil or suffering is usually stated in terms of three propositions:

a. God is omnipotent and omniscient.

b. God is completely good.

c. There is suffering and evil in the world.

It is often suggested that these three statements are inconsistent. In other words, the omnipotence and goodness of God is not consistent with the existence of suffering or evil in the world. All three statements cannot be true at one and the same time. The reality of suffering and evil cannot be denied. It is an observation of experience. Therefore either God is not all-powerful, or he is not good. And so the logical coherence of the Christian faith seems to unravel. A fatal logical flaw has been exposed. Or has it?

Let us begin our exploration of this theme by considering the history of this question. From the time of Plato onwards, the existence of pain, suffering and evil in the world have been recognised and acknowledged. Christian theology has long learned to live with the reality of pain and evil. It is not as if suffering was a well-kept secret, whose existence has suddenly been sprung upon a world which fervently believed that it did not exist. But Christian writers prior to the seventeeth century did not believe that suffering posed any serious threat to Chris¬tian belief. Indeed, if I might be allowed a personal reflection, I spent many years working through most of the major works on Christian theology written between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, and cannot recall any of them treating the reality of suffering as a serious obstacle to Christian faith.

That situation has changed. Why? The answer lies in a dra¬matic development which took place during the seventeenth cen¬tury, and which may be argued to lie at the roots of modern atheism.[15] A number of writers on Christian apologetics, such as Leonard Lessius and Marin Mersenne, argued that the best defence of Christianity was to be provided by philosophy. Instead of concentrating upon the significance of Jesus Christ for the question of whether God existed, and what he was like, an appeal should be made directly and exclusively to reason. Instead of an appeal to the Christian experience of the Holy Spirit, an appeal was to be made to nature. Reason and nature were thus the testing grounds on which the credibility of Christianity was to be tested. The end result was inevitable. `Christianity entered into the defence of the existence of the Christian God without appeal to anything Christian.' [16]

Under the influence of Descartes, this approach to apologetics would prove to have devastating results. The enormous emphasis which came to be placed upon the perfection of God by Descartes was compromised by the undeniable fact of the existence of evil and suffering. How could a perfect being allow such imperfec¬tion to exist? Yet Descartes' `god' is not the God of Christianity; it is simply a philosophical idea. `The god of the philosophers' is basically little more than a perfect, ideal and abstract being, constructed out of the distilled elements of human benevolence The characteristics of this god are primarily its omnipotence, omniscience and goodness. Its credibility - but not that of the `God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ' (1 Peter 1:3) - is instantly compromised by suffering. As Alasdair MacIntyre remarks, `the God in whom the nineteenth and twentieth centur¬ies came to disbelieve had been invented only in the seventeenth century.' [17] The god of philosophical theology is a human inven¬tion, a product of our reason; the God to whom Christian faith and theology respond is a living and loving being, who makes himself known to us through Christ, Scripture and personal experience - including, as we shall see, suffering.

Why this digression into history? Because it demonstrates that suffering has only recently been seen as `a final and sufficient ground for scepticism and for the abandonment of Christianity', whereas in the past it was viewed as no more than a difficulty, `an incentive to inquiry but not a ground for disbelief'.[18] It is only since the Enlightenment, with its emphasis upon universal and rational concepts of divinity and justification of beliefs, that the problem of suffering has come to be seen as grounds for dis¬belief. But, as we shall see (pp. 191-201), Enlightenment rationalism is in retreat. Perhaps we shall see a return to the older approach to suffering in its wake.

Second, let us consider the logic of the problem posed by suffering. Let us return to the three propositions noted earlier.

a. God is omnipotent and omniscient.

b. God is completely good.

c. There is suffering and evil in the world.

At least one further premise must be added to this list if a logical inconsistency is to result. As things stand, there is no incon¬sistency. There would, however, be a contradiction if either of the following were to be added to the list:[19]

d. A good and omnipotent God could eliminate suffering entirely.

or

e. There could not be morally sufficient reasons for God permit-ting suffering.

If either of these propositions could be shown to be correct, a major and potentially fatal flaw in the Christian conception of God would have been exposed. But they have not. And the apologist, having been asked some hard questions by the critics of Christianity, has a right to ask some in reply. How do they know that there cannot be morally sufficient reasons for God permit¬ting suffering? Are these critics not putting themselves in the position so devastatingly criticized by David Hume - that of declaring that a better world than that which we know is pos¬sible?[20]

We may explore the issue of suffering further by considering some arguments developed by C. S. Lewis in his celebrated book The Problem of Pain. Lewis begins by stating the problem as follows: `If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty he would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either the goodness, or power, or both.' This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form. [21]

But Lewis is not content to leave the critic of Christianity holding the moral high ground. He demands that this critic clarify what is meant by those terms `omnipotence' and `goodness'. Too often, Lewis argues, such critics bandy these terms about without really engaging with them.

So what does it mean to say that God is omnipotent? Lewis argues, with considerable skill, that it does not mean that God can do anything he likes. Once God has opted to do certain things, or to behave in a certain manner, then other possibilities are excluded.

If you choose to say `God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it', you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: mean¬ingless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire a meaning because we prefix to them the two other words: `God can'. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but non-entities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk it about God.[22]

Lewis then argues that suffering cannot be regarded as arising from a lack of divine omnipotence. Far from it. If God creates a material universe, and gives creatures freedom of action, suffering follows on as a matter of course. Having exercised his omnipotence in creating the universe and endowing his creature ¬with freedom, he cannot block the outcome of that free universe - suffering. ‘Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.’ [23]

Lewis then moves on to consider the implications of that deceptively simple word `goodness'. Too often, Lewis insists, the ¬meaning of that word is assumed to be self-evident, when in fact it requires considerable thought. For Lewis, goodness is the natural outcome and expression of the love of God. Is suffering inconsistent with a loving God? Lewis insists that we pay attention to the term `love', and avoid reading into it trivial and sentimental human parodies of the divine reality. We must learn to discover and appreciate divine love as it really is, instead of confusing or identifying it with our own ideas on the matter. God tells us what his love is like. There is no need for us to guess about it. The love of God, Lewis thus argues, ... is not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels himself responsible for the comfort of his guest, but the consuming fire itself, the love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and vener-able as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. [24]

The love of God, then, is not some happy-go-lucky outlook on life, which makes hedonism its goal. It is a divine love, which proceeds from God and leads back to God, which embraces suffering as a consequence of the greater gifts of life and free¬dom. Real life implies suffering. Were God to take suffering away from us, he would take away that precious gift of life itself. `The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves is insoluble only so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man was the centre of them.’ [25]

So what purpose might suffering serve? There are several echoes of Luther's ideas of the `strange work of God (opus alienum Dei)' - an idea we explored earlier (p. 72) - in Lewis' discussion of the mysterious yet creative role of suffering within the provi¬dence of God. Suffering brings home to us the distressing fact of our mortality, too easily ignored. It reminds us of our frailty and hints of the coming of death. `It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.' [26] In short, it creates a climate in which our thoughts are gently directed towards God, whom we might otherwise ignore. `God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pains; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.' [27] Painful though Lewis' point may be, there is enough truth in it to make us take it seriously. All must die, and any world-view which cannot cope with death is fatally deficient. Suffering gently prods our consciousness, and forces us to contemplate the unpalatable but real fact of our future death, and how our outlook on life relates to this sobering thought. It can sow the seeds of doubt with existing outlooks, and lay the foundation for a new way of thinking, living and hoping.

But the apologist cannot be content to remain on the defensive for ever. At some point, the full relevance of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ must be brought home to the more philosophically-minded critics of Christianity. [28] To discuss suffering without reference to the suffering of Christ is a theological and spiritual absurdity. God suffered in Christ. He knows what it is like to experience pain. He has travelled down the road of pain, abandonment, suffering and death - a road they called Calvary. God is not like some alleged hero with feet of clay, who demands that others suffer, while remaining aloof from the world of pain himself. He has passed through the shadow of suffering himself. The God in whom Christians believe and trust - is a God who himself suffered, and by doing so, transfigures the sufferings of his people.

Some say that nothing could ever be adequate recompense for suffering in this world. But how do they know? Have they spoken to anyone who has suffered and subsequently been raised to glory? Have they been through this experience themselves? One of the greatest tragedies of much writing about human suffering this century has been its crude use of rhetoric. `Nothing can ever compensate for suffering!' rolls off the tongue with the greatest of ease. It has a certain oratorical force, especially if delivered by a skilled speaker. It discourages argument. But how do they know that? Paul believed passionately that the sufferings of the present life - and he endured many - would be outweighed by the glory that is to come (Romans 8:18). How do they know that he is wrong, and that they are right?

Now the situation would be rather different if we could listen to someone who suffers a pitiful and painful death, and then returns to us from the dead. He would speak with authority and insight on this matter. Or if God himself were to declare that the memory of suffering and pain were to be wiped out. And the wonder of the gospel is that Christ has indeed died and risen again. God has indeed spoken on such matters.

It is here that the resurrection of Christ becomes of central importance. The resurrection allows the suffering of Christ to be seen in the perspective of eternity. Suffering is not pointless, but leads to glory. Those who share in the sufferings of Christ may, through the resurrection of Christ, know what awaits them at the end of history. It is for this reason that Paul is able to declare with such confidence that `our present sufferings are not worth com¬paring with the glory that will be revealed in us' (Romans 8:18). This is no groundless hope, no arbitrary aspiration. It is a hard¬headed realism, grounded in the reality of the suffering and resurrection of Christ, and the knowledge that faith binds believers to Christ, and guarantees that we shall share in his heritage.

Christianity has been unequivocal on this point, and its voice must be heard. The sufferings of this earth are for real. They are painful. God is deeply pained by our suffering, just as we are shocked, grieved and mystified by the suffering of our family and friends. But that is only half of the story. The other half must be told. It is natural that our attention should be fixed upon what we experience and feel here and now. But faith demands that we raise our sights, and look ahead to what lies ahead. We may suffer as we journey - but where are we going? What lies ahead?

The word 'heaven' seems inadequate to describe the final goal of faith. Perhaps we should speak more expansively of the hope of eternal life, of the renewing of our frail and mortal bodies in the likeness of Christ's glorious resurrection body, and of stand¬ing, redeemed, in the presence of God. But, however we choose to describe it, the promise and hope of our transformation and renewal, and of the glorious transfiguration of suffering, are an integral part of the Christian faith. This glorious thread is woven so deeply into the fabric of our faith that it cannot possibly be removed.

The language of 'prizes' and 'rewards' is helpful in many ways. It reminds us of the need to complete the race, in order that we may receive the athlete's crown as a prize (2 Timothy 4:7-8). It reminds us of the need for training and discipline in the Chris¬tian life, in order that we may have the stamina we need to persevere. But this way of thinking about the relation between suffering and heaven can also be misleading. It implies an acci¬dental connection between suffering and heaven. It suggests that heaven is thrown in as some kind of consolation, in order to keep us going here below. This danger is avoided if we pay more attention to the intimacy of the connection between suffering and glory.

When a seed is planted in the ground, it begins to grow, and will eventually bear fruit. Can we say that its bearing fruit is a reward for its growth? No. We would say that there is an organic and natural connection between one and the other. One flowing naturally into the other. It is not a question of declaring, in some arbitrary way, that a seed which grows will be rewarded with fruit, or that the prize for growth is fruit. Rather, germination, growth and the bearing of fruit are all part of the same overall process. They are all stages in the natural cycle of growth and development. One follows on naturally from the other.

The New Testament is unequivocal. Suffering and glorification are part of, but represent different stages within, the same process of growth in the Christian life. We are adopted into the family of God, we suffer, and we are glorified (Romans 8:14-18,) This is not an accidental relationship. They are all intimately connected within the overall pattern of Christian growth and progress towards the ultimate goal of the Christian life - being finally united with God, and remaining with him for ever.

We are thus presented with a glorious vision of a new realm of existence. It is a realm in which suffering has been defeated. It IS a realm pervaded by the refreshing presence of God, from which the presence and power of sin have finally been excluded. It lies ahead, and though we have yet to enter into it, we can catch a hint of its fragrance and hear its music in the distance. It is this hope which keeps us going in-this life of sadness, which must end in death.

But is it for real? Is this hope anything more than wishful thinking, a pitiful aspiration on the part of human beings who long for a better world than that which they now know and inhabit? We are all familiar with the tedious taunt of believing in `pie in the sky when you die'. The implication would seem to be that Christians are so unrealistic about life that they need such fictional morsels to keep them going, where others can cope with the grim realities of life unaided.

Karl Marx regarded this outlook on life as little more than nauseating sentimentality.[29] The promise of the final removal of suffering and pain in the kingdom of God distracted us from working for their elimination here and now. To use Marx’ famous phrase, Christianity is `an opiate for the masses', a kind of anaesthetic or narcotic which dulled our senses, and prevented us from changing the world for the better.

Now Marx has a fair point. So great is the attractiveness of the Christian hope that it is natural to become fascinated by it, and want to focus our thoughts upon it. It is all too easy to become so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly use. If Marx' criticism serves any useful purpose, it is to remind us that we have a Christian duty to work for the transformation of the world as we know it, removing unnecessary causes of suffering. The vision that is held before us is that of trying to bring the peace of heaven to the turmoil of the earth. The Christian hope ought to be a stimulus, rather than a sedative. It should spur us to action within the world, rather than encourage us to neglect it.

But when all is said and done, Marx' comment merely reinforces the power and importance of the Christian hope. It does enable us to cope with suffering in the present life. Just as a soldier fights on towards the end of a long war, sustained by the knowledge that peace will one day come, and he will be reunited with his family and friends, so the Christian continues his pilgrimage, sustained by the knowledge of the joys that await him. Marx is a reluctant, yet eloquent, witness to the power of the Christian hope to enable us to cope with the dark side of life. Further, Marx evades the vital question concerning the Chris¬tian hope: Is it true? If it is, Christians can hardly be criticized for believing in it, whereas others can be charged with having run away from reality. Either it is true, or it is not. Which is it? Let us be absolutely clear on this. If the Christian hope of heaven is an illusion, based upon lies, then it must be abandoned as misleading and deceitful. But if it is true, it must be embraced and allowed to transfigure our entire understanding of the place of suffering in life.

Just as suffering is real, so are the promises of God and the hope of eternal life. This is no spiritual anaesthetic, designed merely to enable us to cope with life's sorrows while they last. The death and resurrection of Christ, linked with the giving of the Holy Spirit, are pledges, sureties and guarantees that what has been promised will one day be brought to glorious realisation. For the moment we struggle and suffer in sadness mingled with bewilderment. But one day, all that will be changed for the people of God: God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away (Revelation 21:3-4, RSV).

In that hope, we go forward into life in faith. We may not know exactly where that faith will lead us. But we do know that, wherever we go, the God of all compassion goes ahead of us and journeys with us, consoling and reassuring us, until that day when we shall see him face to face, and know him just as he knows us.

[NOTES]

15 See Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1987).

16 Buckley, At the Origins of Modem Atheism, p. 67.

17 Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricceur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 14.

18 Alasdair MacIntyre, `Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?', in B. R. Wilson (ed.), Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), p. 73.

19 For these points, see J. L. Mackie, 'Evil and Omnipotence', in B. Mitchell (ed.), The Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp92-104; Basil Mitchell, The Justification of Religious Belief (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 15-16.

20 Hume's original point was that, having experience only of this world, we cannot declare that it is `the best of all possible worlds'. For precisely the same reasons, we cannot know that it is not the best of all possible worlds. That judgment requires access to information which we do not possess, and can never possess.

21 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940), p. 14.

22 Lewis, Problem of Pain, p. 16.

23 Lewis, Problem of Pain, p. 22.

24 Lewis, Problem of Pain, p. 35.

25 Lewis, Problem of Pain, p. 36.

26 Lewis, Problem of Pain, p. 83.

27 Lewis, Problem of Pain, p. 81.

28 For what follows, see Alister McGrath, Suffering (London: Hodder & Stoughton, to be published in 1993).

29 We explore and evaluate Marx' views on the nature of Christianity later: see pp. 201-206. 30 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids:

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