Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari is a high-demand speaker at conferences worldwide and the author of several books that have sold tens of millions of copies. His work on questions of human consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the future of civilization is fascinating. And it often feeds conspiracy theories.
From a historically materialist world view, Harari argues that human beings are not unique or special, and he predicts that science will soon overtake nature as the driving force of human evolution. Thus, he argues, people should hack themselves with biotech in order to secure a better future. And yet, Harari often misses some of the most basic implications of his own philosophical assumptions, such as denying any basis for morality while also insisting that oppression is wrong. For example, in a recently posted video, Harari referred to Charles Darwin as a prophet of sexual liberation. Though this was almost certainly not Darwin's intent by showing that there is no purpose guiding biology, Darwin freed what's now called the LGBTQ community from fear that they were sinning against God.
And Harari's right. After all, if there's no creator with specific intentions for humanity and their behavior, then people are free to live however they wish. Harari argued this in a post that read this way: quote, Nothing in nature has a purpose, and nothing that exists is unnatural.
So happy International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia, end quote.
However, as Derek Rishmori replied, and I quote, Just to point out the obvious, if there's no God, no teleology, no intrinsic shape or dignity to the person or the sexual act. then while nothing is unnatural and permitted, Neither is prejudice against or persecution of such things. You see, what Harari missed was that if humanity has no purpose, and as he put it, nothing that exists is unnatural. Why would prejudice or persecution be wrong in the first place, when sexual deviancy is not? His moral judgment on such things becomes just as meaningless as the sexual ethics that he's rejecting.
By removing the very concept of evil, Harari has no way to call anything evil at all.
Now, Francis Schaefer articulated this same line of thought back in 1972 in his book He's There and He Is Not Silent. Schaefer argued that a world without God is left empty. It's not just that a physical world can never self-create, although that's true. Is that without God those things that make life worth living become meaningless? Beauty, knowledge, truth, these are all meaningless in a universe that's merely matter in motion.
In such a world a sunset is not really beautiful, a fact cannot truly be known, and our deepest loves are illusions of our chemistry. Atheists often quip that if you need a God or the fear of hell to be a good person, then you're not really a good person. But that misses the point. When Christians say there's no morality without God, we don't mean that without punishment we cannot be good. We mean that without God there's no such thing as good.
When Harari and his fellow materialists insist that humans are just random interactions of subatomic particles, then all claims about justice and oppression are reduced to mere personal preference. The most heinous crimes are unfortunate and inconvenient, but nothing more. In this view, things like slavery, the holocaust, the gulags, all the other horrors of history are of no more moral significance than when a high school kid mixes chemicals in a lab. It's all just matter in motion. In his parable The Madman, German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche declared that, quote, God is dead and we have killed him.
Now, this line was not written as a celebration. Rather, in this piece, Nietzsche warned the smug 19th-century elites about the world they dreamed of, free from God. As the madman said, and I quote, are we not now plunging continually, backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up and down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?
In other words, losing God doesn't just mean losing our religion. It also means losing our morality, losing our meaning. And ultimately, it means losing our humanity. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr.
Timothy Paget. And before I go today, I want to say thanks to Michael and Pat in Hawaii for being a Cornerstone Monthly partner of the Colson Center. Thanks for helping make this episode possible. Possible, and for a printable version of this commentary that you can print out or share with others, visit us at breakpoint.org.
