Only Two Worldviews

You've heard the idea that man is a cosmic accident, a grown-up germ. He fortuitously emerges out of the slime. His origin is from nothingness, and he ultimately moves towards nothingness. And yet the humanist will be at the front of the parade, crusading for human rights, for human values, and for human dignity. We scratch our heads and we say, Wait a minute. If I'm a cosmic accident, if I begin in insignificance and I end in insignificance, how can I possibly have any significance in between? Despite all the ideas and opinions that are out there, when we boil it down, there really are only two worldviews, one which acknowledges the existence of God and one that seeks to deny His existence altogether. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and thank you for joining us today for Renewing Your Mind. Within an atheist worldview, there really is no difference between animals and humans.

There's no objective standard for morality and no justification for human dignity. In his Ultimate Issues series, R.C. Sproul pushed back on these common ideas that are being taught on college campuses, challenging students in particular to think deeply about the questions of life, these questions that matter ultimately.

To help you give an answer to those who are around you, here's Dr. Sproul with a message titled, Only Two Worldviews. In the summer of 1994, astronomers were treated to an unprecedented spectacle in the sky. Through the use of modern technology with the Hubble spacecraft, they were able to receive telescopic photographs of a massive collision between fragments from a gigantic comet that broke apart and crashed into Jupiter, which is the largest planet, of course, in our solar system. Now, when that happened, the whole scientific community began buzzing and became alarmed about the possibility that something like that could happen here on this planet, although one of the astronomers said the odds are that it would only take place once every million years. Carl Sagan was a little bit more concerned about it.

He said that the odds that it could happen in the next hundred years were a thousand to one against it, and he wasn't happy with those odds. At least we took comfort that planets and worlds don't collide every day. But worldviews do collide every single day. What's a worldview?

Well, the German is what we call a Weltanschau. That is, it's a way of looking at life, a way of looking at the world around us. It's the framework that we bring to life. And each one of us has a way of looking at the world. And you find yourself all the time in disagreements and in conflict over issues with other people.

And did you ever ask yourself, why? I mean, we agree on so many things on this side of the room, but we get over here into another issue and sometimes the debate becomes furious and explosive. The worldviews are colliding against each other. Now, in one sense, every worldview that we have is a system.

Now, systems, of course, are supposed to be integrated and consistent and coherent. Unfortunately, none of us, no, not one, has a perfectly consistent, coherent system of looking at and interpreting life. We gain information from such a wide variety of backgrounds and sources, and we listen to teachers who are coming at issues from different perspectives of their own. And so what happens is that we sort of go through life as if it were a smorgasbord, and we choose a little soup here and a little salad over here and some entree over here, and things tend to get mixed up and confused in our own minds. And we walk through life with conflicting ideas, not only with other people, but within ourselves. Now, every idea that we have is related in some way to an ultimate position. Now, there are thousands of different philosophies that compete with each other in the world.

History of seeing the debates between Marxism and existentialism and logical positivism, various forms of humanism, and so on. But the ultimate division in terms of systems could be described as the conflict between theism on the one hand and atheism on the other hand. And a-atheism simply means a-theism or non-theism.

Now, this little chalkboard that I'm working with here kind of compacts and compresses this more than I would like. If things were ideal in this coffeehouse, I would have a blackboard way over here on this side of the room, and on this blackboard I would put theism, and then I'd walk all the way back to this side of the room, and I would put atheism over here to dramatize for you the enormous gulf that exists between these two ultimate perspectives. Now, most of us, in fact I dare say all of us, walk around trying to live in the tension somewhere between these two poles. Nobody here or out there is a totally perfectly consistent theist, and nobody here or out there is a totally perfectly consistent atheist.

What we do is we live on borrowed capital. We borrow something from theism, we borrow something from atheism, and try to somehow work it out in our own minds. But foundation to all of our thinking is really an either-or perspective. The Danish philosopher and gadfly Søren Kierkegaard once wrote a little book with that title, Either-Or. Now, as a philosopher, Kierkegaard was aware that there is such a fallacy of thinking, a logical error called the either-or fallacy when people try to reduce the options to two when there may be three, four, five, or a whole lot more. But some things are able to be put into the either-or category. In the case of the existence of God, either God exists or He doesn't exist.

There's no tertium quid. There's no third alternative. Either there is or He isn't. And so Kierkegaard was setting that issue before people to think about it, because how you answer that question will systemically influence how you think about everything. For example, the person who comes to the conviction that God really exists, if that person is thinking at all, will begin to think in this manner, what we call theocentrically. That is, the existence of God, the reality of God, will be at the center of all that He evaluates and analyzes.

It's an idea with enormous consequences. On the other hand, if a person denies the reality of God at the outset, at the very foundation of your thinking, then that person will tend to be thinking anthropocentrically. That is, from a man-centered perspective. It's not by accident, of course, that historic varieties of humanism have been subsumed under the category of atheism, with the assumption that since there is no God, then the highest being, at least in our universe, in the known cosmos of our experience, is man. And yet at the same time, we find borrowed capital in historic humanism. You've heard the idea that man is a cosmic accident, a grown-up germ.

He fortuitously emerges out of the slime. His origin is from nothingness, and he ultimately moves towards nothingness. Those are the two poles of human existence, from meaninglessness to meaninglessness, and yet the humanist will be at the front of the parade, crusading for human rights, for human values, and for human dignity. We scratch our heads and we say, wait a minute.

If I'm a cosmic accident, if I begin in insignificance and I end in insignificance, how can I possibly have any significance in between? Well, we have a sort of charm to our humanity. We're biased, we're prejudiced, we're people, we're humans, and so we like to think that we're important. We like to think that we're valuable. But where does the idea come from?

It certainly can't come from an atheistic system, because the atheistic system systemically undermines any possibility of ultimate significance or importance of you or of any human being. In a word, we share a common level or value with animals, with the beasts of this world. We're just a more sophisticated animal, a sophisticated beast.

As I said, a grown-up germ. Well, we went around with our cameras to various universities situations in high school campuses and so on and asked some selected students what they thought about the relative value and importance of human beings to animals. Let's see how they responded to the question. I don't know if humans are more important than animals. I think that's part of the reason I'm in college is to figure all of these types of things out. Well, I think people are just as valuable as animals.

I think it's a combined thing. We're all alive. We're all living creatures.

We all deserve the same. By far, people are way more important than animals. I mean, I consider myself to be a little bit right-wing, conservative, and all these save-the-animals people, well, personally they annoy me. I don't think people are any more important than animals. Every living thing has a right to be here, and we're not to say whether we're more important than just a dog or a cat. People are more important than animals, mainly just because animals can't speak for themselves. The value of individuals and people has to do with being able to take care of what's around you, being able to take care of animals and plants and your environment and each other, which humans can uniquely do.

Living life is important. It's sacred. The Bible says it was set apart. We were set apart from the animals.

We have a position higher. When people kill animals to eat, I kind of cringe a little bit. You know, that's personally my opinion is on that.

I thought we abolished slavery. Well, I think we could see that we have a difference of opinion here on the various responses that we've just heard. One person, the first person, was somewhat agnostic about the question, said, I'm not sure.

This is one of the reasons why I'm going to college to try to inquire and investigate into questions like that. Other people spoke with great assertiveness. One person said, people are way more important. That person identified himself as a right wing. I don't know that that's unique to the right to think that human beings are so important. And other people said, fundamentally, there's no difference. We're all the same.

We're all alive. The last comment intrigued me, that talked about the way we exploit animals and said, I thought that slavery ended, that we were beyond slavery. But notice there was a value judgment hinted at there, wasn't there, that the idea being that there's something wrong with slavery, that we're opposed to slavery. Everybody knows that slavery is evil.

Why? What difference does it make, ultimately, whether we put a horse in a harness and attach him to the buggy and beat him on the back with a whip to transport us around, or if we just hitched up a couple of people and beat them on the back if we're all the same? What difference does it make if one person enslaves another person? I live through the enormous struggle in this country of the civil rights movement with the dream of Martin Luther King, who protested vigorously against discrimination, against the exploitation of a whole group of people in this country, and of a heroic woman from the South who refused to sit in the back of the bus where she was assigned because of the color of her skin.

That changed the whole scope of our history. But think about it. If we're all germs, who cares who sits in the back of the bus? What difference does it make whether one person enslaves another person? Do you see, we make those value judgments about the worth and the value of human dignity on the basis of some intellectual, rational foundation. And if that foundation says at the beginning that human life is insignificant because we are destined to return to the slime from which we came, why should we care? But again, most of us live in a state of confusion, borrowing something from theism and again something from atheism. And I'm not talking here specifically about atheists who are guilty of living on borrowed capital from theism. Theists borrow ideas from atheists. People who call themselves devout Christians will embrace ideas in their thinking that are fundamentally opposed to God and don't even realize it. In the Old Testament, for example, when Israel was set apart by God and given the calling of being a holy nation, the thing that led to the destruction of this experiment, this national destiny, was the emergence of what was called syncretism. And syncretism is the idea of an indiscriminate blending of values and concepts from opposing systems. The Jewish people wanted to worship God at Mount Sinai on the Sabbath day, but the rest of the week they wanted to go over and play in the playground of Baal.

And so they began to hedge their bets. They would have part of their religion devoted to Yahweh, but then they would also build shrines and temples and statues and idols to pagan gods. And God sharply rebuked His people for trying to live in two worlds, for trying to blur the clear antithesis that exists between two systems. Now there's no place that we see this conflict more clearly than at the point of ethics, because if God does not exist, our ethical systems are arbitrary. Nietzsche in the 19th century said, since God is dead, we must be willing to embrace nihilism, that there is no meaning.

All there is is what he called das nichtig, the nothingness. Jean-Paul Sartre in our own day commented on human life and said that man is a useless passion. He has strong feelings. That's what passion is about. We care.

We have what the Germans call bezorgan. We care deeply about things. But Sartre said it's a useless passion, a futile passion, because there is no ultimate truth and therefore there is no ultimate standard of value, no ultimate standard of right and wrong. And so we're left to hang, to flounder, to determine our own ethics. So again we went to the students and we asked them questions about how the existence of God in any way, either the positive affirmation or the denial of it, conditions their thinking about ethical behavior.

Let's hear what they say. Encounter with Dostoevsky will go with 1940s existentialist theories. I am the only human being that exists. Nobody else exists. Everything else is set up for my own personal enjoyment.

Therefore everything goes along to my own personal standards. So I have essentially become my own god. So I mean if he doesn't exist then I'm just going to take over the role. I think we should just go on if there is no god. I think we should just go on as if there was a god.

I think that if there was no god everything would be permissible because there'd be no guidelines for us because he did set the guidelines for us to start off with. I think that you can have a sense of right and wrong without being necessarily Christian or Buddhist or Islamic. I would say people that don't believe in God probably get that sense of right and wrong from just cultural situations, the way society views certain things. If society says to kill someone is wrong then maybe they'll feel that way because society says such but they don't really have a religious basis for what they're feeling. I think for people who do not believe in God the origin of the values and meanings in their life is they decide for themselves what is right and wrong because I know several people, in fact my boyfriend, he doesn't believe in God and he just he believes in himself.

I think they basically believe in themselves. And that's exactly why I think our country is in a state it is now, the fact that people don't have any governing body like that. They don't, so many people don't believe there is a higher being up there so they just do what they want and that's why we have all these just radicals and people are saying I can choose this and I can choose that and that's why there is no real standard of anything anymore the way I see it. Then we see the conflict don't we? And you hear words over and over again in this discussion, well if there is no God then I guess it comes down to my choice where ethics now become a matter of personal preference. And that works for a while if you're willing to live on the surface of things in a superficial way. But inevitably in the history of critical thought when people analyze the implications of a godless universe, a universe without ultimate norms, without ultimate values, without ultimate truth, inevitably the result is some kind of philosophy of despair.

And I admire that because I do believe the issues ultimately boil down either to full orb theism or radical atheism that cuts off all hope. All the props are knocked out from under us and we're left with the statement Dostoevsky made that if there is no God all things are permissible. And if you think of that, that means murder.

That's permitted. That means rape. That means extortion. That means evil because there is no such thing as evil. And if you think about that, the only response you can have as a human being is despair.

This is a coffee house. What's a coffee house without poetry and what's poetry without Edgar Allan Poe? Poe in the 19th century personally anguished over the question of ultimate issues. He anguished over the question of life and of death. And his most famous poem penetrates the deepest feelings of the human heart before this issue. You know the poem.

Let's look at it. It starts this way. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, while I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door.

Only this and nothing more. Distinctly I remember it was in that bleak December when each burning, dying ember cast its ghost upon the floor. Ooh! Gives you the shivers, doesn't it? The way he describes this forlorn moment. What do we have here? We have a story of a man who has lost the woman he loves. Death has intruded and taken away from him, snatched out of his hand, the person in whom he invested his love, his hope, and his entire humanity.

And in his melancholy as he is pondering these things, his reverie is interrupted by this rude visitor from the animal kingdom. A raven, an ominous bird who comes and perches himself above the door of the author's home. And throughout this lengthy poem, the hero enters into dialogue with this bird. But the bird, the damnable bird has a one-word vocabulary. Every time the writer seeks hope and looks for answers, the same reply comes again and again, never more. Until we get to the end of this poem, and there's a rising crescendo of despair if despair could ever be said to rise.

And in his frustration, he cries out to this bird, Prophet, said I, sing of evil, Prophet still, if bird or devil, whether tempter sent or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, desolate yet all undaunted on this desert land enchanted, on this home by horror haunted. Tell me truly I implore. Is there? Is there balm in Gilead? Tell me, tell me I implore quoth the raven never more. What's the question?

Is there balm in Gilead? The question is a question of hope. Is there any hope for the destiny of my beloved? And this raven says no. Finally he says, be that word our sign of parting. Bird or fiend, I shrieked up starting, get thee back into the tempest in the night's Plutonian shore. Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul has spoken. Leave my loneliness unbroken and quit the bust above my door and take thy beak from out my heart. Take thy form from off my door and quoth the raven never more. And the raven never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting on that pallid bust of palace just above my chamber door.

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming and the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor and my soul from out of that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted never more. I love Poe because he understood the antithesis. He understood the question and he didn't try to play games. He was not a syncretist.

If there's no one home, there is no hope, and we cannot have our cake and eat it too, not now or evermore. That was R.C. Sproul challenging each one of us that either God exists or He doesn't.

There is no middle ground. All week on Renewing Your Mind, we've been featuring some of R.C. Sproul's most beloved messages.

In fact, we've compiled 50 of them together on a special USB drive. And when you give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org, we'll send you this 50 message drive. This is a limited edition resource and includes messages from Dr. Sproul's Blueprint for Thinking series, The Cross of Christ, The Holiness of God, select conference messages and many more.

So give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800-435-4343. Would you be willing to lay down your life for Christ? Learning about the great martyrs of church history brings us courage and boldness. Next time, R.C. Sproul will tell the story of perhaps the most famous martyr of the second century. But that's tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind.