Vanity of Vanity

If you're thinking of becoming an atheist, you may want to reconsider.

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 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, a sunset and nothing in between. Today I'm Renewing Your Mind, though.

Dr. R.C. Sproul will explain the meaning of life, that true significance can be found, but it's found outside of us. As we continue now with our study of defending our faith, the science of apologetics, you will recall that in our last session, I looked briefly at the moral argument for the existence of God that was set forth by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. And I mentioned that he approached this question from a practical consideration, coming to the conclusion that we must live as if there were a God. Kant, from a rational, scientific, theoretical perspective, was agnostic, saying through our normal avenues of research and investigation, we can't know that there is a God. Yet for practical purposes, we must assume 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. 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. 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. It's the idea 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 chiefly in the book of Ecclesiastes where two different perspectives are explored. And if you 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. And 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, 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're 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 ire 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 naïve 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, where I keep saying to the humanist, you have both feet planted in mid-air, and as Francis Schaeffer used to say, you're on a rollercoaster 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 the 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 compromised 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. And when he wrote to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul said, if Christ is not Ray, 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 God. 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 the 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 19th 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. So that the number one argument against theism in the 19th century was that theism is a result of the psychological need of naïve people. Now in 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 week here on Renewing Your Mind for that lesson by Dr. R.C.

Sproul. These are important concepts for us to understand because here in the 21st century we're told that religion is a crutch. Karl Marx took it even further and called religion the opiate of the masses. These secular philosophies are not friendly to those of us who believe in the one true God. When the thinkers of the 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 taught this series that we call Defending Your Faith. There are 32 lessons on 11 DVDs, and we'll be happy to send them to you when you give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. Call us with your gift at 800-435-4343 or find us online at renewingyourmind.org.

High school and college students are taking the brunt of this cultural onslaught against Christianity. This series provides a perfect format to equip your teenagers with a solid foundation to stand firm and defend their faith. So again, contact us today with your donation of any amount, and we'll also add the PDF study guide to your online learning library. Again, our phone number is 800-435-4343. Our online address is renewingyourmind.org. Well, I have to admit that there are times when I look at the grandeur of God's creation when, as the hymn writer says, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, and I wonder, how can you not believe in God? Well, next Saturday, Dr. R.C. Sproul is going to address that question. It's a lesson titled, The Psychology of Atheism. I hope you'll make plans to be with us for Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.