we don't need god to be human

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WE DON’T NEED GOD TO BE HUMAN In 2012, Stephen Anderson was teaching a social ethics course for high school seniors in Ontario, Canada. He decided that he needed a real "attention-getter" – something to shock his students and force them to take an ethical stand. He was certain he had found the perfect vehicle – a photograph of Bibi Aisha. Aisha was an Afghani teenager who as a 12 yr old had been promised in marriage to a Taliban fighter by her father as compensation for a member of their family having killed a member of her husband-to-be’s family. It was a custom that their tribe sometimes used to resolve such disputes. She was married at the age of 14, and was abused by her husband’s family and kept outside with the animals. At the age of 18 she fled, but was captured by the police and returned to her father. He took her back to her husband and his family. To punish her for the shame she had brought upon them, her husband and his father took her into the mountains, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her to die in the mountains. She survived and you may have seen her picture in Time Magazine. It’s similar to the one Anderson showed his class.

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You may not want to look. Picture of Aisha Anderson felt sure his students hearing the story and seeing the picture, would be deeply affected and they would have a clear ethical reaction. Some of the students immediately lowered their eyes once the picture flashed before them. Anderson expected that, but he was not prepared for what followed. He wrote: They became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture. They said, "Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it's okay." Another said, "It's just wrong to judge other cultures." Is that what morality is? Something that’s wrong in one place, but acceptable in another? Moral in one culture because it’s their practice, but worthy of condemnation in a different culture with differing customs? Or is morality a matter of personal taste? Do we have any grounds for ever saying more than, “Well, it would be wrong for me, but who am I to say what’s wrong for anyone else?” If morality is more than personal taste or cultural customs, what is the basis for determining what is right and what is wrong for all of us? Does government make that decision for us? Or should we take a vote to decide what is good and what is evil for the next twelve months and then vote again the following year? If not, then how do we determine what is right and moral?

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We are in the middle of our series, The Big Con: Lies the World Wants You to Believe. I didn’t intend for it to be this way, but it’s turning out to be the way some directors describe the films they make. They say, “One for them and one for me,” meaning they do one film that they think the audience will love, and then one that’s more serious that the director finds fulfilling. This series is starting to look like that. We’ve gone easy, hard, easy – so far. First lie: “You Should be Happy” – easy. Second Lie: “Christianity is Intolerant, Judgmental and Narrow-Minded.” Hard – you had to do some real thinking to get through that one. Last week, “We Don’t Know What a Man Is, But It’s Probably Bad.” Again – easy. Any time half the lecture is me reading 71 different gender types, that qualifies as easy. Now this week, we’re back at “hard.” Thinking will be required. Here’s the lie: We Can Be Human Without God. And here’s what I mean by that. Our culture tells us that we can believe there are real “rights and wrongs” without God, we can possesses meaning without God, and we can be free without God. The qualities that most distinguish us from other species – morality, meaning and the freedom to choose our destinies – we can believe these realities exist without God. We don’t need to believe in God to believe we are truly and fully human.

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My contention is that if God does not exist, human existence is absurd and meaningless. See what I mean that we’re going to have to do some thinking together on this one? But I hope you see how important this lie is. The reality of what it means to be human is at stake. And it has huge implications for how we live. The students’ reaction to the mutilation and attempted murder of Bibi Aisha, should serve for us as a canary in the coal mine. They are the products of our current culture, more so than many of us, who are older and who were raised in a different time. More so than those of us who have come to believe that there is a God who defines reality and who stands above us. The moral confusion displayed in that high school classroom illustrates what our culture is producing and where we’re headed as God becomes more and more irrelevant to our existence. You can fault those students for their reaction, but the truth is they are simply giving the response a post-modern culture has programmed them to give. Attempts to engineer the death of God, will leave him untouched, but the end result will be the demise of what makes us human.

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Let’s start with meaning. 1. WE DON’T NEED GOD TO LIVE MEANINGUFL LIVES. I’m not arguing that you can’t have a sense of meaning or that you can’t have a purpose to live for without God. I am arguing that without God your sense of meaning is a farce. It’s a joke -- and the joke’s on you. Maybe what most distinguishes human beings from other creatures is our ability to ask “Why?” And, in particular, our apparent need to ask the question: Why am I here? In fact, the classic pattern we see in so many men termed the mid-life crisis is usually a crisis of meaning. They have done all that is required of other species. They have survived, propagated the species, and provided for their offspring. But then they get hit with something that only human beings encounter. It’s the question: What’s it all for? What does it all mean? Has my life mattered? Have I lived well? And it’s not just in middle age. Even as young men, we have the sense that we want our lives to matter. We want to live lives that we can be proud of.

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Read ancient literature. This need isn’t something new. For millennia, men have struggled to define what it means to live well and what code they should follow, what purpose should they pursue so that their lives will be honorable and meaningful. People never seem so lost as when they have no purpose to live for. Dr. William Breitbart specializes in end-of-life care for terminally ill patients at New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He became intrigued by the fact that some terminally ill patients lived robustly to the end but others gave up shortly after receiving their diagnosis. In fact, many requested a physician’s assistance with putting an end to their lives by prescribing enough drugs that if taken at once, death would be the result. Breitbart assumed it was because they were in such pain. But as he spoke with the patients, that’s not what he discovered. In fact, many of his patients told him directly, that they wanted out because they had lost meaning in life. Dr. William Breitbart: What I suddenly discovered was the importance of meaning—the search for meaning, the need to create meaning, the ability to experience meaning—was a basic motivating force of human behavior. People never seem so lost or defeated as when they have no purpose to live for. And people never seem so alive as when they do. But is anything truly meaningful without God? Can the impersonal – protons and electrons, quarks and sparks – give rise to personal beings with longings and hopes that matter? Can a meaningless universe create beings who possess meaning?

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Sir John Templeton: Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose `accidentally created human beings who are so obsessed with purpose? But that’s what you must believe if there is no God. Leading New Atheist Richard Dawkins writes Richard Dawkins: The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. A universe with no meaning or purpose has brought forth beings who long for meaning, who need to believe their lives are meaningful, and who convince themselves that their lives and the choices they make truly matter. Richard Dawkins was even more explicit in an interview with online magazine Slate.com. The lead in to the article is: Why are we here on earth? To Richard Dawkins, that's a remarkably stupid question. Here’s part of the interview. Interviewer: It seems to me the big "why" questions are, why are we here? And what is our purpose in life? Dawkins: It's not a question that deserves an answer. Interviewer: Most people would say those questions are central to the way we think about our lives. … Dawkins: If you happen to be religious, you think that's a meaningful question. But the mere fact that you can phrase it as an English sentence doesn't mean it deserves an answer. … It just shouldn't be put. It's not a proper question to put. It doesn't deserve an answer.

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There is no why to our existence. In fact, unless you believe in God, it’s not even a meaningful question. And you’re stupid to ask it. Here’s Dawkins in more detail. Richard Dawkins: A molecule springs into existence which is selfreplicating, then immediately you have the possibility for Darwinism, for natural selection to occur. Then you have this extraordinary process … whereby things start to get more complicated and start to appear as though they've been really designed for a purpose. If you look carefully for what that purpose is, it turns out to be to replicate, to pass on, to propagate that very same DNA … What is the purpose of life? It’s the same whether it’s the life of a mite or a mole or a man: to pass on its DNA. To make sure its genes remain in the pool. Persons without meaning, your parents gave birth to you – a person without meaning – so you could create children whose lives are as meaningless as your own. I’m not making Dawkins the villain here. In fact, I affirm him for being honest and consistent with his beliefs. We have been belched onto the shores of earth by a pointless, meaningless cosmos. Before Dawkins, the greatest atheist of the 20th century was Nobel Prize Winner Bertrand Russell. In one of his best known essays “A Free Man’s Worship” Russell doesn’t pull any punches.

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Bertrand Russell: That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms;… that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Is there any meaning to our lives, our loves, our accomplishments or even to our race as a whole? None. And the only right response is unyielding despair. We may be more developed than other life forms, but we are really no different. We are deluded to think that in some way we matter. And human life is absurd. And clear thinkers who are willing to face reality accept that the best response is despair. You may think, it’s not so bad. I’m a husband and a father – I’m used to being treated like I don’t matter. If you’re OK with the fact that your life has no meaning, that’s fine. But live with this: your child’s life has no meaning. His or her choices have no meaning. What they do with their lives doesn’t matter, because they don’t matter. Not any more than a roach or a sea bass or a cow.

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When they worry about which college they’ll go to, or finding something meaningful to do with their lives, or living honorably and decently, or finding someone to love, man up to your beliefs and tell them it doesn’t matter; none of their choices do. Of course, this truth is difficult to live with. You are, as the band Kansas put it decades ago, dust in the wind, with no meaning and no purpose. Nothing you do matters because you don’t matter. If you can live with that, good for you, but not many folks can send their kids out into the world that way. So what do people who don’t believe in God do? One of two things. 1. They don’t think about it. Those who tell us that we Christians use religion as a crutch, they don’t think about the implications of their beliefs. Why? Because it’s too painful to do so. There was a rather remarkable exchange between the actor and comedian Russel Brand and Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Show last week about where thinking about these things leads.

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Clip: Russel Brand on Colbert Show The culture tells you that you are nothing and it can offer nothing to fulfill your longing for meaning. So, distract yourself from that reality. How? Start with small talk. And if that isn’t sufficient, then choose your drug of choice to sedate the pain. There’s another solution people adopt. 2. They lie. They tell themselves that we can create meaning out of meaninglessness. This is the move the existentialists made to deal with the absurdity and the despair of life. Philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus who became very influential after World War 2 admitted that there was no real basis to believe that human life had any objective meaning. Their solution. We would boldly face that fact that life is absurd and then create our own meaning. We would not let the meaninglessness of human existence keep us from believing and acting as if we had meaningful lives. t was a great move. It plays very well to the natural hubris we find within the human heart. And it lets those who are unwilling to face reality go about their daily lives playing make believe, dressed up in garments of meaning and purpose.

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You will find this remarkable. In 1991Dr. L. D. Rue addressed the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and proposed that because we can no longer believe in God, and because without the existence of God there is no real meaning, and because human beings cannot live without meaning, we, therefore, need to create and believe some “Noble Lie” that will deceive us into thinking that there is meaning to our existence and make life bearable. Here’s a clip discussing Rue’s ruse. https://vimeo.com/219554093 (0.11 “Dr. L D Rue” to end) Rue said that L. D. Rue: (This lie would present a) "universe that is infused with value. And such a universe is ultimately, I think, a great fiction. The universe just is. But a noble lie attributes objective value to it." “The great irony of our moment in history" is that what "we have most deeply feared" - being deceived - "is the ultimate source of our salvation from psychological and social chaos." Can’t we create a noble lie for ourselves that will give us meaning? No. You can create a lie that you believe and that gives you comfort and that deceives you into thinking your life matters so you can sleep through the night. Call it a noble lie or a crutch or a sedative. But what it is –is a lie. It’s a Con Job.

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Without a personal beginning, an impersonal universe can only create dust in the wind. What it cannot do is create human beings whose lives have real meaning and purpose. Only God can do that. 2. WE DON’T NEED GOD FOR MORALLITY. Let’s be real careful here. I am not saying that if you do not believe in God, you cannot be a moral person. People who don’t believe in God can live exemplary lives. People who do can live deplorable lives. What I’m saying is that without God, there is no reason to believe that one view of morality is any better than any other. And there is no ultimate basis for saying that anything is evil. Without God, morality is what individuals choose for themselves or customs that cultures agree to uphold. But it’s nothing more than personal preference. It’s subjective. An objective truth is something like “at sea level water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.” It doesn’t matter how I feel about it; it’s written into the nature of reality. That truth exists outside of me. A subjective truth is something like “vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate ice cream.” That’s my preference. But, other people believe just as strongly that chocolate is better.

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And there’s no independent ice cream authority that we can go to tell us who’s right. It’s just a matter of taste. It’s a personal preference. That’s what those kids in Ontario were struggling with. The idea that there is no overriding, independent, absolute source that can tell us what is objectively good and evil. Right and wrong – we all decide for ourselves. No one is more right than anyone else. So, we shouldn’t make any judgments because good and evil are not independent, objective realities. How could they be? That would mean that what’s right for you is right for everyone. And what’s wrong is wrong for everyone. And you would be expected to believe that, say that, and defend that. And we are much too enlightened to be so narrow-minded. Because we live in a universe without God there are no universal, absolute moral values, only personal and cultural preferences and we should respect those differences – not judge them – even if it means a girl gets her nose cut off for not wanting to be treated like an animal. Again, you don’t have to take my word for it. I’m not trying to make cheap points here. It’s what atheists who are true to their beliefs will tell you.

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Atheistic philosopher Kai Nielsen writes. Kai Nielsen: We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons should not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn't decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me . . . . Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.

Without God, can reason tell you what morality is or convince you to behave that way? Nielsen says, “no.” Not only is it absurd to think that others should follow the same code of morality that you follow or that society follows, even the concept of morality is absurd. Back to Dawkins. Richard Dawkins: The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

There is no intrinsic good or evil in the universe. And if you don’t believe in God, that’s fine, but don’t tell others that they have to believe in your moral views. What put an end to slavery in the Western World? More than anything else, people of faith who believed slavery was wrong and for a very particular reason. Here’s a scene from Amazing Grace in which William Wilberforce tells some of England’s members of Parliament why they must abolish slavery. Clip: Remember the Madagascar

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If you don’t believe in God, fine. But live with the consequences that there are no objective, absolute moral truths. Don’t tell people prejudice, homophobia, racism, slavery and ethnic cleansing are wrong. You may not like them, but others are just as right to promote them. Don’t tell people that destroying the environment is wrong. You may feel like that it is, but who are you to say others should? “Well, what you do to the planet affects others.” “Well, who says I should care about others? I live for me, period. On what basis can you tell me that’s wrong?” Being faithful to our wives, honoring a contract we make, paying a living wage for a day’s work. Those might be advantageous practices to adopt, but moral, right, good? C’mon, are you a child? There is no God who created people with real value. There is no God who cares about a planet that he created. There is no God whose nature is goodness and faithfulness and love. So, there’s no basis for your saying that kindness and faithfulness and love are truly good or that we should adopt those values. We are animals, that’s it.

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We look out for ourselves, we protect our own, and we take what we want. And there’s no reason for me to follow your personal morality. Without God, there are personal preferences and cultural customs. But none can claim to be any more moral than any other. You can live in a world like that. But be consistent and don’t judge. Don’t judge anybody or anything. Because you don’t have any basis for doing so and it makes you look foolish or hypocritical when you do. 3. WE DON’T NEED GOD TO BE FREE. If we are nothing more than atoms, electrical impulses and chemical reactions, then we are just as programmed as any computer. Every choice we believe we are making was predetermined the millisecond the Big Bang exploded matter into existence. If there is no independent decision center within our being, if there is nothing but matter to who we are, then every action we have ever taken or ever will take, is simply the effect of that first cause and all the effects and causes and effects that followed. We are not free to choose our actions and that would also mean, we are not responsible for our actions.

Acts of heroism and acts of horror – we saw them both in Las Vegas last week –

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those who died because they covered others with their own bodies were programmed to do so, and neither the shooter nor those who gave their lives to save others deserve praise or condemnation for their actions. Those who brought down the World Trade Center on 9.11and those who rushed into those buildings to save those who were trapped – neither was free to do otherwise. The men in our congregation who bought boats during Hurricane Harvey so they could go to Houston or Beaumont and rescue frightened families – robots covered in flesh, that’s all. That’s all any of us are if there was no personal beginning. The personal doesn’t come from the impersonal. Meaning doesn’t come from meaninglessness. Human freedom doesn’t come from a chain reaction of particles colliding in predetermined patterns. Look at this quote and when you read the word “mind,” think the ability to choose and make real decisions. Think freedom. Philip Johnson: At the end of the day, you either have “In the beginning were the particles” or “In the beginning was the Logos,” which means “divine mind.” If you start with particles, and the history of the universe is just a story about the rearrangement of particles, you may end up with a more complicated arrangement of particles, but you’re still going to have particles. … If you being with an infinite mind, then you can explain how finite minds could come into existence. … What doesn’t make sense … is the idea of getting mind to squirt into existence by starting with brute, dead, mindless matter.”

I cannot believe that life is absurd.

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I can’t believe that the love I have for my children, or the beauty of Beethoven’s ninth, or the deaths of American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy to fight fascism, or the struggle for justice and human rights – I can’t believe they are meaningless. I believe they matter. I believe they are real. I believe that acts of love and compassion, that sacrifices made to protect the innocent, that the price paid for being honest and living by one’s principles, I believe these things have meaning, that they matter, and that ultimately they are more real and more lasting, than atoms or planets or galaxies. I can’t believe that human life is absurd. Maybe you can. Maybe you do. If not, then reject the world’s lie that we don’t need God to be human. Because without him, we are not.