How Does Truth Relate to Me?

Today on Renewing Your Mind. Everyone, whether born or unborn, has dignity.

No matter where they are born or where they live, they have dignity. But why do we believe this? For the Christian, that question is easy to answer, as you'll hear today.

But how does the unbeliever, the humanist, the secularist make the case for human dignity? Welcome to Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham.

This week, R.C. Sproul is helping us to think. And today, he's helping us to see that how we think about God is tied to how we think about man. So how does truth relate to you and me?

And why do we believe that we all have dignity? Here's Dr. Sproul. In the realm of philosophy, the subject that has been on center stage in the 20th century has not been epistemology. Epistemology dominated 17th and 18th century philosophical investigations.

It has not been metaphysics which dominated ancient philosophy and medieval philosophy. The dominant question of philosophy in the 20th century has been the question of anthropology. What does it mean to be anthropos, to be man or human? That's been the overarching question.

And there's a reason for that. It's not, again, by accident that the crisis in anthropology followed in history the eclipse of belief in God in Western civilization. Where God is no longer at the center of people's thinking, it is inevitable that the question of human dignity becomes a matter of grave concern. The ancient philosophers tried to give definition to what it means to be human.

We know the expression, if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, chances are it's a duck. Sometimes we have difficulty giving precise definition to entities around us and in this world. Plato mused over the question, what is it that makes a human being distinctively human? What separates us from the other animals? And finally, in desperation, he defined a human person as a featherless biped, a duck without feathers, until one of his students hurled a plucked chicken over the wall of the academy with a sign on it which said, Behold, Plato's man.

It was featherless, and it had two feet. What does it mean to be human? What is man? You remember the psalmist asked that question. He said, O Lord, our Lord, how excellent, how majestic is Your name in all of the earth, that when we consider the heavens, the work of Your hands, the sun and the stars, and all that Thou hast ordained, we inevitably ask the question, What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? But you see, how we understand humanity in large measure controls how we treat human beings, how we value human beings.

And so an integral part of any Christian life and worldview must include within it a Christian anthropology, a Christian understanding of what it means to be human. I keep wondering what my guest is pondering. You know, he hasn't said a word since we started this. He doesn't seem to even be bothered by my constant interruptions. He just goes on pondering more and more it seems intently. He's satisfied to be alone, doesn't have to be in a crowd, but I wonder what he's thinking. Perhaps he's pondering the question that every one of us asks sometime or another, Who am I?

What is the meaning of my life? The biblical image that is used more often than any other image for human life is an image drawn from nature. This is the image of grass.

The grass that grows, it springs up, it's germinated by the cool rains and the warmth of the sun and the process of photosynthesis. It flourishes for a season, but then as the sun beats down upon it, it withers and it dies. Sounds as a very pessimistic view of the matter, doesn't it? But even in the most upbeat portions of sacred Scripture, from time to time the writer will stop to remind us, don't forget, all flesh is grass. We live our threescore and ten, then we wither and we die. And in light of the fragility of human existence, we have to ask, What's it all about? Do we have significance? Do we have meaning?

Is there any real value to human life? We live in a time, I believe, of unprecedented pessimism with respect to the significance of human personhood. After the Holocaust of World War II, after the camps were exposed, the soldiers returned, France was liberated. It was then that the works of men like Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre began to receive exposure across the world. And Sartre, perhaps the most penetrating dramatist that the French nation produced in the 20th century, is also a technical philosopher, and he commented frequently out of the milieu of atheistic existential philosophy. In one of his books, I remember trying to secure a copy of it back in the 60s and I had to special order it to get it because nobody had it in stock in the city of Pittsburgh and I had to wait months to get it. It was a little book entitled Nausea.

And the book Nausea was Sartre's perhaps most vivid description of the futility and meaninglessness of human existence. His final comment was that man is a useless passion, a useless passion. A passion, ladies and gentlemen, is a feeling, an intense emotion that we express, something that consumes us and controls our very being. It's not just a casual concern.

Remember Paul Tillich used to say that a person's God can be defined or identified once you identify that person's ultimate concern, that about which you are most passionate, most caring. It is a given about our humanity that we do care about things, don't we? That we have feelings.

Every person in this room has wounds that have never healed in their souls from something they heard somebody say to them or about them in their lifetime. We care. We feel. We laugh. We weep.

We become afraid. We don't just think. Thinking alone does not define the essence of our humanity. In fact, you can even sense in the thinker here that there's not simply cerebral activity taking place, but what else is communicated here is an attitude. I'm not sure what the attitude is, but it's certainly not one of frivolity.

He is not in a mood of partying at the moment. He's got different feelings that are absorbing him in this posture. Our feelings change. The one thing about our feelings is that they always change.

I always say the person who commits suicide, if they would have waited 24 hours, they probably wouldn't have done it. How quickly our feelings and our emotions change. But the question that Sartre was wrestling with is all this caring, all this feeling, all this hurting, all this rejoicing, does it matter?

Does it mean anything? And his conclusion was, no, it doesn't. That we are bundles of passion, bundles of feeling, bundles of care, and all of our caring is nothing more and nothing less than an exercise in futility.

It's useless because humanity has no meaning. At that point, when Sartre made that comment, he was merely echoing the philosophy that Nietzsche had propagated a century before. Even Nietzsche's biological heroism, he understood to be an exercise in futility because Nietzsche's bottom-line anthropology was one that could not be rescued even by the appearance of the Superman because Nietzsche said, at the bottom, all there is is the Stichter, the Neil, the nothingness, the abyss. That man is involved in a chaotic, endless myth of a recurring cycle that has no definitive origin and no purposeful destiny.

Round and round and round we go with no progress and no meaning. I profoundly disagree with Sartre, and I profoundly disagree with Nietzsche. But I'll tell you what, I have so much more respect for those two philosophers than I have for the dominant species of armchair philosopher that we find in our culture today, the modern or the contemporary humanist.

I have to be candid with you. In my judgment, humanism as a philosophy, though it is the dominant philosophy in our culture today, is pseudo-intellectualism. It is a philosophy that I'm convinced does not merit or deserve serious consideration by intelligent people, because bottom line, it's silly.

Well, what do I mean by that? Well, here's what humanism teaches us. The humanist teaches us that the supreme being of this created universe is man, that we are the creatures of highest dignity and value and esteem. And they extol virtues like honesty, integrity, industry, and they march for the preservation of human rights all over the world. The humanists will be in the avant-garde of civil rights, won't they?

Because they want to protect the dignity of mankind. And yet if you ask that same humanist, from whence cometh human dignity, he has no plausible answer. Because the same time that the humanist is telling you how important and valuable and dignified human beings are, the humanist tells us that man emerged from the slime as a cosmic accident, and he is moving relentlessly to non-being. His origin is utterly insignificant, and his destiny is equally insignificant, but somehow in between the two poles of his existence, he has all this dignity and value. That's why I say it's silly. Francis Safer once said about the humanist that the humanist has both feet firmly planted in mid-air.

The humanist is on a roller coaster without brakes. Humanism is nonsense, but it's persuasive nonsense because it speaks to a need in the human heart. We want to believe that we have significance. We want to believe that we have dignity. We want to believe that our passions matter and that they're not useless, that there is more than the abyss of nothingness of which Nietzsche spoke, that there's more to life than contemplating, as Camus said, the ultimate question.

Maybe it's the question the thinker's contemplating, the question of suicide. There's got to be more than that, the humanist says. But the humanist lives on borrowed capital. Humanism could only emerge really from a society that had previously been committed to a meaningful origin and a meaningful destiny to the human race. What humanism has done is rejected Christianity and tried to replace their secular worldview in what they have rejected, not realizing that they have rejected the very foundation for the humanity that they seek to extol. And I say to the humanist with all cynicism, if I come from nothing, if I'm going to nothing, I am nothing, and why should I care who sits in the front of the bus or on the back of the bus?

Who do I care whether it's white germs or black germs that have rights in this world? I keep asking the humanist to give me a reason for his faith. I keep asking the humanist to give me one reason why I should treat any human being with dignity, other than that he simply has the preference that I do it. Do you see that humanism is based on sentimentality? It has no metaphysical foundation, no epistemological foundation, and certainly no theological foundation.

It is an anthropology with no support, based on sentiment. The Christian worldview teaches that man is totally depraved, that mankind is the most wicked creature on this planet apart from the visitations of Satan himself here, that of all the creatures that inhabit this world, man is the worst, that the great ecological problem with planet earth is not because of an overabundance of rats, but an overabundance of people. It's people who have plunged the world into ruin. The whole creation groans in travail because of mankind. The whole creation is under a curse because of mankind, and that which is grass is more than grass. It is unspeakably wicked, and mankind, the moral judgment that God gives to mankind, that there is none righteous, no, not one.

There's not even one who does good, no, not one. And people don't want to hear that. They say that's one of the reasons they reject Christianity, and not only Christianity in general, but it's particularly Reformed Christianity because Reformed Christianity talks about the total depravity of human beings. They're born in sin, the original sin. We extol human freedom, man's free will, ignoring the fact that the term free will never occurs in the Bible. The concept's there in terms of human responsibility, yes, but the emphasis of the Bible is on the bondage of the human heart. It's captive to evil passions, not useless passion. Sinful passion is what defines humanity. People say, I don't want to believe in that kind of a view of anthropology. It's depressing.

It's the highest view of man the world has ever seen. There is no religion, no philosophy under the sun that takes sin as seriously as Christianity does. Do you ever wonder why that is? Because we have a morbid fascination with morality?

No, no, no, no. Christianity takes sin seriously because it takes people so seriously. And Christianity says it is a serious matter when one human being violates another human being, when one human being hates another human being, when one human being steals or rapes or kills another human being.

That's serious, and that's wrong. You see how epistemology, metaphysics fit together, driving us to the concept of God. Our doctrine of God determines our doctrine of man, and our doctrine of man drives us to ethics as an integral and necessary dimension of our life and worldview. The Bible says that man of all of the creatures was uniquely created in God's image, that we alone have a profound capacity and ability to reflect and to mirror to the rest of creation the very character of God, that we are called to be mirrors of God's holiness. That's why when we sin, our sin is so serious because not only do we violate each other, but we lie to the creation about the nature of God.

We're involved in cosmic treason. We have free will in the sense that we have the power to do what we want. We don't have free will in the sense that we have the power to do what we want with impunity, because over above my free will always stands the sovereign authority and the power of Almighty God.

And if your anthropology makes man sovereign, your anthropology is not Christian. You can have man as free, but never autonomous. Remember that God is free, and His freedom is a higher freedom than my freedom.

I am free only within the limitations of God's freedom. I hear Christians say that God's sovereignty is limited by human freedom. When I hear them saying that, I make certain assumptions. The first assumption is it didn't come from this guy. The first assumption I make is that that Christian has really never thought about what they've said.

They heard somebody else say it, and they're just repeating it. They haven't thought about it for five minutes, because I'm afraid if they thought about it and then said it, then they wouldn't even be a Christian, because if God's sovereignty is limited by human freedom, God is not God. That's blasphemy. So we need to integrate our understanding of man in light of our understanding of God, because we get our identity from being made in the image of God. God is not made in the image of man. He is sovereign.

We are not. Our humanity is defined by Him, and therein we find dignity. We have an origin in the divine purpose of God. We have a destiny in eternal glory that the Father has prepared for us from the foundation of the world. Therefore, everything that happens between creation and consummation matters. There are no useless passions. It matters how we treat white people and black people, Jewish people, any kind of people, because they're created in the image of God, and they bear that image even in their sinfulness. We are called to love, to love them as we love ourselves.

That was R.C. Sproul on why we believe that all people have dignity and the emptiness of counterfeit world views. If you scroll social media or catch various news reports in the evenings, it's clear that many people are no longer thinking, people sharing opinions instead of facts, prefacing remarks with, to me, or I feel like, instead of citing sources.

But this isn't new to 2025. That's why Dr. Sproul recorded this series, to help Christians be better thinkers and better students of God's Word. And today, when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800-435-4343, we'll give you lifetime digital access to two series, a blueprint for thinking and the consequences of ideas. We'll also send you the consequences of ideas on a special edition DVD that also includes the study guide with its message outlines and study questions. Request this resource bundle today at renewingyourmind.org or when you click the link in the podcast show notes.

But be quick as this offer ends tomorrow. Thank you for fueling this listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Tomorrow we'll conclude a blueprint for thinking.

Here's a preview. The basic foundation of our culture today is moral relativism. And I call that a myth because what it has in common with a myth is that myths have no real correspondence ultimately to objective truth.

In other words, we are basing our civilization and our culture on a moral concept, ladies and gentlemen, that can't possibly be true. It's Friday here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you. Thank you.