Vanity of Vanity

You might like it for a season. It might sound good when you hear that school's out, no more teachers, sassy looks, and so on, because we have a vacation from the God of the Bible who says He's going to hold us accountable for everything that we do. And when we find out that that God doesn't exist, we leap into the air and click our heels together and say, I'm free.

And that sounds terrific until you turn it over and look at the price tag. If the Enlightenment philosophers are correct, God doesn't exist. Morality doesn't exist.

Accountability doesn't exist. But if that's true, there's no point to life, just a sunrise and sunset and nothing in between. Thank you for joining us for this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind as we spend several weeks in R.C. Sproul's extensive series, Defending Your Faith. If you'd like to be able to defend your faith, against the claims that morality is merely a social construct, that there is no God, no moral lawgiver, request lifetime digital access to this 32-part series and its study guide when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or by using the link in the podcast show notes. When you do, we'll also send you two books, a field guide on false teaching and a field guide on gender and sexuality.

But don't delay. As today's resource offer, you'll find a link in the podcast show notes. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Now, at the end of that lecture, I mentioned that not everybody in the philosophical realm agreed with Kant's conclusion that we must be mindful of the fact that there is a God in order for life to be meaningful, for society to be possible, and we looked at how he constructed that practical argument from his awareness of this categorical imperative, this moral imperative that is shared by people around the world. Now, at the end of that lecture, I mentioned that not everybody in the philosophical realm agreed with Kant's conclusion that we must live as if there is a God. Some were what they might be called as hardcore cynics or skeptics, and they said, just because the options to the existence of God are grim, that is no reason to believe in God.

That would be like falling into an Alice in Wonderland scenario where you take a deep breath and close your eyes and wish with all of your might that life is meaningful, life is significant, that somebody's home up there who's going to make justice take place in the final analysis and have that as a ground for faith. Well, let me say this before we continue, that in the history of philosophy and of theoretical thought, I think that we could certainly isolate and individuate at least a thousand different distinctive philosophies, philosophical theories, philosophical movements, and so on. But there is a gamut that these philosophical systems run.

They tend to find themselves somewhere between two poles or two polar extremes. On this side, we have what I call full-bodied theism. And on this side of this pole would be nihilism.

And nihilism is not only that there is no God, but it also goes from that conclusion to the idea that there is no meaning, no significance, no sense to human existence. And all other philosophies find themselves situated somewhere along this continuum in between these two poles. Now, if you look at historic Christianity and Judaism for that matter, if you go to the Old Testament Scriptures, you see that the wisdom literature of the Old Testament wrestled with these two antithetical positions. And that's chiefly in the book of Ecclesiastes, where two different perspectives are explored. There is life as it is experienced under the sun and life as it is experienced under heaven. Now, if I could translate that and indeed transfer it into modern categories, you go back to Kant and Kant's criticism of the distinction between his numinal world, the realm of God, and the phenomenal world, the realm where we observe things in the scientific exploration of our senses. And he saw this wall that existed between this world and the transcendent world. Now, if we took Kant's theory and then moved it backwards into the Old Testament, you could say that the distinction between the numinal world and the phenomenal world would be the distinction between life under heaven, which is the numinal realm, or life under the sun, which is the phenomenal realm.

What was the crux of the conflict that the Koalas is speaking to in the book of Ecclesiastes is this, that life under the sun ends in the final analysis if there is no God, if it is not under heaven, but if life is restricted strictly to this side, under the sun, to the phenomenal realm. Then the conclusion that the philosopher of that day came to was found in the phrase, vanity of vanity, all is vanity. Now, the expression, vanity of vanity, is an expression of the superlative.

Take it over into the New Testament. When Christ is exalted by the New Testament Scriptures and He is seen as the King, He is called what? The King of Kings, the Lord of Lords.

That's a Hebraic way to say the Supreme King, the Supreme Lord, because He's King of the King, Lord of the Lords. And that's the same thought that's in this idea of vanity, vanity of vanities. It's an extreme position to conclude that everything is vanity. Now, what is meant by the term vanity here is not pride that is found in somebody we say is vain and narcissistic because they sit at the vanity in their makeup room and apply all of their makeup and cosmetics because they are so vain. That's not the significance or meaning of vanity here.

Here the term vanity is a synonym for the word futility. So what the author of Ecclesiastes is saying from the vantage point of the phenomenal without reference to God, if there is no God, then of course in the final analysis what we encounter is futility of futility. Everything that we do is futile. We are locked in a cycle, a vicious circle that has no beginning and no purpose, no teleology, no significant end. The sun rises, the sun sets, then as Hemingway described it, the sun also rises again, and it sets, and it's going nowhere. That's the basic underlying philosophy of nihilism.

It's, you know, that the poor player struts his eye on the stage and is heard no more. It's the tale, you know, told by the idiot that is full of sound and fury that signifies the sneer, the kneel, nothing, nada, meaninglessness. Now there are few philosophers who are willing to go to that extreme. Most philosophers in history who have rejected full-bodied theism have sought to develop a worldview or a philosophical system that exists somewhere between these two poles.

And so, in a sense, anywhere you find yourself on this continuum, you are borrowing capital from one or the other. I've always said this about humanism, that in the final analysis, humanism, which is so popular, is extremely naive because the humanist tells us there is no God and that our origins come from nothing accidentally, from a meaningless event, and that our lives are moving inexorably towards annihilation. So that the two poles of human existence, these two poles are meaninglessness at our origin and meaninglessness at our destiny, and yet the humanist fights for human rights and human dignities in between these two poles. Or I keep saying to the humanist, you have both feet planted in midair, and as Francis Schaeffer used to say, you're on a roller coaster without brakes, because you want to have meaning between the two poles of meaninglessness, and in the final analysis, you are resting on sentiment.

You just don't have the courage to go where your atheism drives you, which is to fool nihilism. And so, that's just one example of how systems in between here will borrow capital. There's no basis for believing in human dignity if we're cosmic accidents, but humanists fight for human dignity, and so they try to sneak in that which they are borrowing from Christianity, from Judeo-Christianity, even though they categorically reject the source of human dignity. That's the point I'm saying, so that there are compromise positions between here.

Now, I'm trying to paint here with a broad brush and simplify this with a minimum distortion. But this is what Kant saw in his moral argument. This is what Dostoevsky saw, where he said, if there is no one home here, then the Bible is right with this thesis. Remember, these words that we find in the New Testament, without Christ, without hope. When he wrote to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul said, if Christ is not raised, and if all those who have died have perished, then we are of all people the most to be pitied. And if you don't like that we are believers, don't be mad at us. Don't be hostile towards us. Feel sorry for us.

Just think of all the fun we're missing that you're having and enjoying. And we're walking around, you know, naively looking at God and believing in God and trusting in God and all that, when Christ is a dead man. And if I'm devoting my life to a dead man, what a waste of my energy and of my life.

And if you disagree with my convictions, don't be mad at me. Pity me is what Paul is saying, because we are pitiable. But the idea here is, really, if you have no basis for establishing confidence in the God of the universe, you have no foundation for hope whatsoever, that you must come to hopelessness. Well, Kant didn't want to go to hopelessness. Kant said the whole fiber of our humanity, every bone in our body screams to us from the time we're first awake in consciousness that our lives do count, that our lives have meaning, and that the labor that we are engaged in, the sweat, blood, and tears that pour out from our passion, that those passions have meaning.

And if we thought that they didn't, we would want to end that labor and end our misery. Well, you see, that's where philosophy's gone. Albert Camus, 20th century existential philosopher, came to this conclusion that the only serious question left for philosophers to explore is the question of suicide.

And what Camus is saying, simply, is if you awaken to the reality that there is no God and that there are no absolutes, then you understand that there's no ultimate meaning. You might like it for a season. It might sound good when you hear that school's out, no more teachers, sassy looks, and so on, because we have a vacation from the God of the Bible who says He's going to hold us accountable for everything that we do. And when we find out that that God doesn't exist, we leap into the air and click our heels together and say, I'm free.

Thank God I'm free. I can do whatever I want. I can do my own thing.

And that sounds terrific until you turn it over and look at the price tag. And that's what Camus said. If, for example, if you are not accountable ultimately, it's simple to understand that ultimately you don't count.

Life doesn't count. And if you really think about that consistently, then you understand why Camus says the only serious question left is suicide. That's why Jean Paul Sartre, in a tiny little book called Nausea, he titled the book Nausea because that was his final comment about the human condition, and he defined man as a useless passion. That's a loaded concept for Sartre because Sartre noticed that we as human beings are not automatons. We're not robots.

We're not bumps on a log. We are living, breathing, thinking, choosing, caring human beings. That human life is marked by care. Human life is marked by passion. Now, what if all your passion, everything that you care about is worthless? What if everything that you care about, everything that you love is meaningless? Then your passions are futile. This is what Sartre said. That's what you are, a useless passion. All your cares come to nothing. See, that's what Nietzsche was driving at when he explored his concept of nihilism following Kant in the nineteenth century. In other words, what the atheistic existential philosophers, the nihilists, were saying was this.

If we can't know that God exists, it's not enough to build our faith by crossing our fingers and hoping that somebody's home up there. If the evidence is to the contrary, if it's really true that life has emerged fortuitously out of the slime, then we have to have the moral courage, the intellectual courage to face the grim finality of the results and stare it in the face and say, okay, you're right. I came out of the slime.

I'm going to the slime. I'm a grown-up germ sitting on one cog of one wheel of a vast cosmic machine that is running down and is destined to annihilation. That's where I am, and I'm going to face it, and I'm not going to run to religion as an escapist form. Realize the driving passion in contemporary culture is escapism. Escapism through hedonism, and the whole philosophy of hedonism is that you find meaning through pleasure. Maximize your pleasure. Minimize your pain. It's the philosophy of Timothy Leary. Turn on.

Tune in. Drop out. Let's put daisies down the barrels of rifles, and let's just go on a trip and go to La La Land where I don't have to think anymore. It's an escapist form from pain, from having to consider what the popular music is telling us, what the film industry is telling us, what the high priests of science are telling us. You are a beast in human clothing with no ultimate significance. And this message is being beat into kids' ears over and over and over again, and so they drown it out with the sound of their music or with the drugs or with other forms of substance abuse as a means of escape.

How? What Nietzsche and the skeptics would say is that's not the only drug. The supreme drug to escape nihilism, according to 19th century atheism, was the opium of religion. If you're a Christian, I'm convinced that you haven't been a Christian for two weeks until somebody has already said to you, the only reason you're a Christian is that you're using your faith as a crutch. And that crutch is something that you use to help you function, to help you remain mobile when in fact you are crippled.

That's what a crutch is for. And the charge is that we use religion as a psychological crutch because we can't bear the message that we're getting from all sides. So we turn to religion as the ultimate form of escape, the ultimate drug, the ultimate crutch, what Marx referred to as the opium of the masses, as a narcotic to dull our senses, to minimize pain.

In other words, that religious people are just one brand of hedonists who seek their pleasure in escaping from the real world of futile passions, futile labor of death. Now, again, in the 19th century when we study the voices of the atheists of that period, they really weren't working that hard to disprove the existence of God. Rather, their opening assumption was there is no God.

And the biggest problem that Marx and Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and other titanic thinkers, skeptics of the 19th century, that the question they were trying to answer was this. Since there is no God, why is it that human beings are incurably religious? Why is it that man could be defined not only as homo sapiens, but we could more properly define mankind as homo religiosus, man the religious person? Because wherever we go throughout the world, we find the vast majority of people engaged in some kind of religious activity.

And from a Christian point, that religion may be complete idolatry, but nevertheless, it is still religion. And so the most common and frequent answer that came from people like Marx and Feuerbach and Freud and so on was that the phenomenon that answers the universality of religion is psychological fear. That is that the main reason why people believe in God is because they're afraid of the consequences if there is no God. The main reason we create God in our own image, said Feuerbach, is because we understand that without God, we are doomed.

We are in a hopeless situation. We are indeed a useless passion, and we can't bear the grimness of nihilism. So to escape nihilism, we leapfrog over all of these intermediate options and affirm the existence of God as our bromide, as our narcotic, to dull our senses from the pain. But the number one argument against theism in the 19th century was that theism is a result of the psychological need of naive people. On our next session, I'm going to examine that from a Christian perspective and see whether the shoe may be on the other foot or the crutch may in fact be for the other leg. I hope you'll join us next Saturday on Renewing Your Mind for that message from R.C.

Sproul, as these are important concepts for us to understand. Here in the 21st century, we're still told that religion is a crutch. I once believed that. Another is called religion the opioid of the masses. These secular philosophers are not friendly to those of us who believe in the one true God. When the thinkers of this world attack Christianity, we need to be prepared. We need to be equipped with a sound defense of what we believe.

That's why Dr. Sproul recorded this series, Defending Your Faith. It's a 32-message series and will unlock lifetime digital access to the series and its study guide when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. We'll also put two books in the mail for you, a field guide on false teaching and a field guide on gender and sexuality.

Learn what Islam really teaches or Buddhism or Christian science and receive clear answers to the many confusing questions surrounding gender and sexuality. All this is our way of thanking you for supporting Renewing Your Mind at renewingyourmind.org. An entirely digital version of this resource package is also available for those who prefer it or who live outside of the US or Canada. Simply give your gift at renewingyourmind.org slash global.

Respond today as these offers end at midnight tonight. Living in Florida, we have some spectacular sunsets. I'm sure wherever you live, there are some standout features of creation, at the very least the night sky. You have to wonder, with the majesty of creation, how could anyone not believe in God? That's what R.C. Sproul will tackle next Saturday with a message titled The Psychology of Atheism. Be sure to join us then here on Renewing Your Mind. .