Meaning

Note: Last Updated 8/29/2024.

Matthew Arnold:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

(Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach;” In: Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, The Merrill Literary Casebook Series, ed. Jonathan Middlebrook, [Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1970], pp. 9-10.)

Cynthia Heimel:

I pity celebrities, no I really do – Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Barbara Streisand, were once perfectly pleasant human beings. But now their wrath is awful. I think when God wants to play a really rotten practical joke on you he grants you your deepest wish and then laughs merrily when you realize you want to kill yourself. You see Sly, Bruce, and Barbara wanted fame. They worked, they pushed and the morning after each of them became famous they wanted to take an overdose. Because that giant thing they were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything OK, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and happiness had happened and they were still them. The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable. 

(Cynthia Heimel, “Tongue in Chic;” Column in: The Village Voice, January 2, 1990.)

Eric Metaxas:

If Life Is Meaningless, Why Rage?

     Most of these polemical atheists seem to be bitter at the state of the world—or at the religious believers whom they blame for the state of the world, as though their inane and irrational beliefs were the only thing standing between mankind and utopia. But even if this were true, is it not logical to ask why a true atheist should protest anything at all?

     Because if there really is no God, then it surely follows that there is no order or meaning in the universe. We are all accidental excrescences who bear no inherent value and who have no transcendent purpose. If this is true, by what standard could an atheist claim one way of being any better than another? And given the fundamental meaninglessness of life, why bother trying so hard to change things anyway? If all of our lives have no more meaning than the life of a gnat or a blade of desert grass in the middle of a vast wasteland—or a scorpion or a grub under the leaves of a forest floor a thousand miles from any road—what does any of it matter? Certainly they must see that according to their doctrine the length of our lives or the size of our brains does not change the meaninglessness of our existence. And if they protest on this somehow, saying that yes, but we are here now and must make the best of it, we still must ask why? On what basis must we make the best of it? If in a few decades we will all be as nonexistent as the ant that scrambles along my windowsill will be in two years—or in five seconds if I decide to crush him—why should we attend to these lives we are leading now in any way at all? Most of us on the planet feel that we should, of course, but isn’t that view in perfect contradiction with the atheist doctrine? Don’t the rest of us feel we should because we have a sense that there is more to everything than mere matter? That our lives have inherent purpose and extraordinary value, even if we can’t say exactly how or why this is?

     The inability of atheists to consistently live out their “views” is the first and most powerful argument against those views. But isn’t the essentially universal feeling that we should all “do what we can” to make things better the best evidence that real atheism is a practical impossibility, that it’s only something that could have been dreamed up by people whose lives really do have intrinsic meaning, even if they cannot understand how that is? If there is no Creator and our lives are perfectly accidental, why should we logically care about anything any more than a worm does, or a piece of lichen? Hundreds of millions of years pass in which they do not exist, and then at some point they exist, and soon enough they cease to exist, and another several hundreds of millions of years pass in which they do not exist and never again will exist. What of it? Is that not our story, according to the atheist doctrine? But is there a soul on the planet who actually believes that and lives as though that is true?

     How then is all the debating and writing these atheists do anything but self-evidently meaningless? And can they not see that all of the debating and writing those of us who believe our lives have meaning do—and that a God, who is perfect love, created us in his own image and longs for us to exist with him in a state of bliss for eternity—is an effort we understand to be worth making? This alone is the most curious of all questions. To what end precisely did Christopher Hitchens and his fellow atheists rail and rage? It is the ghastly conundrum at the heart of all the atheists say. And they cannot explain their way out of it. So they run away from it via clever rejoinders and sudden shifts to other subjects.

     According to his own beliefs, Christopher Hitchens is as nonexistent now as he was before the planets formed. What drove him to bother as he did, to expend himself so mightily, except an internal contradiction that he defiantly refused to acknowledge about what he so histrionically claimed to believe? By his doctrine, putting a bullet in his own head and the heads of anyone he knew to be suffering was by far the more logical way of dealing with the problems of the world. So why didn’t he? Is it because there were undeniable things inside him that made him “know” this was wrong, even though he couldn’t philosophically support those “knowings,” and therefore either assiduously avoided thinking or speaking of them or else manufactured illogical workarounds, which he assumed those on his own side would support because they didn’t see the illogic of them? Did Hitchens refuse to publicly acknowledge these contradictions because he knew that that would end the joy of pretending to fight for something that mattered, that would jerk his fun run to a dead stop at the end of logic’s unforgiving and short leash? 

(Eric Metaxas, Is Atheism Dead? [Washington, D.C.: Salem Books, 2021], pp. 270-272.)

Eric Metaxas:

Any of us who truly wishes to believe that there is no God cannot fully do so. To pretend that we emerged from nothing and go toward nothing is untenable. People who know God exists know that when he created us in his image, he made us long for meaning, and there can be no escaping that, however we wish to try. We may twist away from the truth, but there is a gyroscope in every atom of our being that works against such twisting, that forces us to be righted and to yearn for light and meaning and truth and goodness. And with irony magnificently lost on them, these atheists betray this very fact in the writing of their books and their other advocacy for their position–because as we have said, if there is no God and life is meaningless, why say anything at all? Why bother? Why make the effort to convince anyone of anything if those to whom you are talking are no more than bugs or stones or tumbleweeds?

     And yet these atheist authors cannot help themselves. They write and write and try and try to convince others, but according to everything they seem to say in doing so, these very activities are meaningless, are chasing after wind.

(Eric Metaxas, Is Atheism Dead? [Washington, D.C.: Salem Books, 2021], pp. 274-275.)

Albert Camus: (Atheist Philosopher & Writer)

Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people chose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers?

(Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward, [New York: Vintage International, 1989], p. 121.)

Albert Camus: (Atheist Philosopher & Writer)

At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of life ahead of me. But I simply had to stifle it by imagining what I’d be thinking in twenty years when it would all come down to the same thing anyway. Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.

(Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward, [New York: Vintage International, 1989], p. 114.)

W. Somerset Maugham: (Atheist Playwright)

     If then one puts aside the existence of God and the possibility of survival as too doubtful to have any effect on one’s behaviour, one has to make up one’s mind what is the meaning and use of life. If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good to come nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what I am here for and how in these circumstances I must conduct myself. Now the answer to one of these questions is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning. We are here, inhabitants for a little while of a small planet, revolving round a minor star which in its turn is a member of one of unnumbered galaxies. It may be that this planet alone can support life, or it may be that in other parts of the universe other planets have had the possibility of forming a suitable environment to that substance from which, we suppose, along the vast course of time the men we are have been gradually created. And if the astronomer tells us truth this planet will eventually reach a condition when living things can no longer exist upon it and at long last the universe will attain that final stage of equilibrium when nothing more can happen. Æons and æons before this man will have disappeared. Is it possible to suppose that it will matter then that he ever existed? He will have been a chapter in the history of the universe as pointless as the chapter in which is written the life stories of the strange monsters that inhabited the primæval earth.

(W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, [Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1938], lxxi, pp. 275-276.)

Jean-Paul Sartre: (Atheist Philosopher)

     Then I realized what separated us: what I might think about him could not touch him; it was just psychology, the sort you find in novels. But his judgement pierced me like a sword and called in question my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized that: I hadn’t any right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant, a microbe. My life grew in a haphazard way and in all directions. Sometimes it sent me vague signals; at other times I could feel nothing but an inconsequential buzzing. …‘I was just thinking,’ I tell him, laughing, ‘that here we are, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.’

(Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, Penguin Modern Classics, trans. Robert Baldick, [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965], pp. 123-124, 162.)

Blaise Pascal:

What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.

(Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer, [London: Penguin Books, 1966], # 148 (428), p. 75.)

Søren Kierkegaard:

If there was no eternal consciousness in man, if at the bottom of everything there was only a wildly seething power which, convulsed by dark passions, brought forth everything, both the great and the small, if beneath everything there lurked a bottomless void never to be filled—what else were life but despair!

(Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric, trans. Robert Payne, [Oxford University Press, 1946], p. 10.)

William Shakespeare (Macbeth):

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(William Shakespeare, The Plays of Shakespeare: Macbeth: With an Introduction by George Brandes, [New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1905], Act V, sc. V, p. 87.)

Leo Tolstoy:

     My question—that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide—was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without answering which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: ‘What will come of what I am doing to-day or shall do to-morrow—What will come of my whole life?’

     Differently expressed, the question is: ‘Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: ‘Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?’

(Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, chapter 5; trans. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and What I Believe, The World’s Classics: CCXXIX, trans. Aylmer Maude, [London: Oxford University Press, 1921; reprinted 1927 and 1932], p. 28.)

Alt. Trans. Full. Leo Tolstoy:

My life came to a stop. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, indeed, I could not help but breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. But there was no life in me because I had no desires whose satisfaction I would have found reasonable. If I wanted something, I knew beforehand that it did not matter whether or not I got it.

     If a fairy had come and offered to fulfill my every wish, I would not have known what to wish for. If in moments of intoxication I should have not desires but the habits of old desires, in moments of sobriety I knew that it was all a delusion, that I really desired nothing. I did not even want to discover truth anymore because I had guessed what it was. The truth was that life is meaningless.

     It was as though I had lived a little, wandered a little, until I came to the precipice, and I clearly saw that there was nothing ahead except ruin. And there was no stopping, no turning back, no closing my eyes so I would not see that there was nothing ahead except the deception of life and of happiness and the reality of suffering and death, of complete annihilation.

     …My question, the question that had brought me to the edge of suicide when I was fifty years old, was the simplest question lying in the soul of every human being, from a silly child to the wisest of the elders, the question without which life is impossible; such was the way I felt about the matter. The question is this: What will come of what I do today and tomorrow? What will come of my entire life?

     Expressed differently, the question may be: Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything or do anything? Or to put it still differently: Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?

…I could not attach a rational meaning to a single act in my entire life. The only thing that amazed me was how I had failed to realize this in the very beginning. All this had been common knowledge for so long. If not today, then tomorrow sickness and death will come (indeed, they were already approaching) to everyone, to me, and nothing will remain except the stench and the worms. My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner or later, and I myself will be no more. Why, then, do anything? How can anyone fail to see this and live? That’s what is amazing! It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion! Nor is there anything funny or witty about it; it is only cruel and stupid.

(Leo Tolstoy, Confession, trans. David Patterson, [New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983], chapters 4-5, pp. 27-28, 34-35, 30.)

Bertrand Russell: (Atheist Philosopher)

     Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. 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 no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; 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 débris 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.

(Bertrand Russell, A Free Man’s Worship: With a Special Preface, [Portland: Thomas Bird Mosher, 1927], pp. 6-7.)

Note: If there is no God, and/or if Christ is not risen, then Russell is surely correct.

Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche:

…hope,—in reality it is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human; In: The Complete World of Friedrich Nietzsche: Volume Six: Human, All-Too-Human: Part I, trans. Helen Zimmern, [London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1924], Second Division: The History of the Moral Sentiments, §. 71, p. 82.)

Cf. Jürgen Moltmann:

…living without hope is like no longer living. Hell is hopelessness, and it is not for nothing that at the entrance to Dante’s hell there stand the words: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’

(Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch, [New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1965], p. 32.) 

Yuval Noah Harari: (Atheist Historian and Social Philosopher)

According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’. The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently’. …Equally, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings. And it’s not true that these organs, abilities and characteristics are ‘unalienable’. Many of them undergo constant mutations, and may well be completely lost over time. The ostrich is a bird that lost its ability to fly. So ‘unalienable rights’ should be translated into ‘mutable characteristics’. …Advocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this line of reasoning. Their response is likely to be, ‘We know that people are not equal biologically! But if we believe that we are all equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.’ I have no argument with that. This is exactly what I mean by ‘imagined order’. We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. Bear in mind, though, that Hammurabi might have defended his principle of hierarchy using the same logic: ‘I know that superiors, commoners and slaves are not inherently different kinds of people. But if we believe that they are, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.’

It’s likely that more than a few readers squirmed in their chairs while reading the preceding paragraphs. Most of us today are educated to react in such a way. It is easy to accept that Hammurabi’s Code was a myth, but we do not want to hear that human rights are also a myth. If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn’t there a danger that our society will collapse? Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.

(Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, [New York: Harper, 2015], pp. 109, 109, 110-111.)

Note: Harari Uses the term “evolution” to denote philosophical naturalism (i.e. “atheistic” evolution). It should be noted, however, the evolutionary creation (i.e. “theistic” evolution) is not necessarily antithetically opposed to the Genesis account of creation.

Cf. Yuval Noah Harari: (Atheist Historian and Social Philosopher)

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

(Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, [New York: Harper, 2015], p. 28.)

Note: If Harari is correct, and atheism is true, then the idea of intrinsic human value or “human rights” has no metaphysical (or ontological) basis and is nothing more than a fairytale. If atheism is true, order is no better than chaos, kindness no better than cruelty, love no better that hate.

William Shakespeare: (Prospero)

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack, behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

(William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 4.1.167-177; In: William Shakespeare, The Tempest, eds. Louis B. Wright, Virginia A. LaMar, [New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1961], pp. 68-69.)

George MacDonald:

     “Either the whole frame of existence,” he said, “is a wretched, miserable unfitness, a chaos with dreams of a world, a chaos in which the higher is for ever subject to the lower, or it is an embodied idea growing towards perfection in him who is the one perfect creative Idea, the Father of lights, who suffers himself that he may bring his many sons into the glory which is his own glory.”

(George MacDonald, Thomas Wingfold, Curate: In Three Volumes: Vol. I, [London: Hurst and Blackett, 1876], Chapter XVIII: Joseph Polwarth, p. 159.) See also: ccel.org.

Timothy Keller:

If there is no God, we are here essentially by accident, and when we die, we are only remembered for a while. Eventually, in this view, the sun will die and all that has ever been done by human beings will come to nothing.

(Timothy Keller, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015], p. 299.)

N. T. Wright:

…If the world is the chance assembly of accidental phenomena, why is there so much that we want to praise and celebrate? Why is there beauty, love, and laughter?

(N. T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues, [New York: HarperOne, 2014], p. 111.)

Brian Greene: (Atheist Philosopher)

     In Scheffler’s scenario, as well as in the question I was asked years earlier, the doomsdays are hypothetical but the timescales for the world’s destruction are easily grasped. In this book, the doomsdays we’ve explored are genuine but their timescales make them extraordinarily remote. Does this change of scale, a colossal change at that, affect the conclusions? It’s an issue that both Scheffler and Wolf consider, entertainingly framed by the wonderful scene in Annie Hall in which nine-year-old Alvy Singer has concluded that there’s no point in doing homework given that in a few billion years the expanding universe will break apart and destroy everything. Alvy’s shrink, let alone his mother, considers Alvy’s concern ludicrous. Audiences laugh because they regard Alvy’s worry as farcical. Scheffler shares these intuitions yet notes: that he does not have a fundamental justification for why we think it reasonable to have an existential crisis in the face of imminent destruction but silly to do so when such destruction is far in the future. He chalks it up to the difficulty we have grasping timescales that are vastly beyond the range of human experience. Wolf agrees, noting that if the immediate demise of humanity would render life meaningless, then the same should be true even if the end is far off. Indeed, as she notes, on cosmic timescales the delay of a few billion years is not long at all.

     I agree. Forcefully so.

(Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020], p. 321.)

Oliver Wendell Holmes: (Atheist Justice of the Supreme Court)

I see no reason for attributing to a man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand.

(Holmes to Pollock, Aug 30, 1929, in 2 Holmes—Pollock Letters at 251, 252; Quoted in: Albert W. Alschuler, Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes, [Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000], p. 23.)

C. S. Lewis:

     This brings us much nearer to the real point; but let me try to make clear exactly what I think that point is. What were your views about the ultimate future of civilization before the atomic bomb appeared on the scene? What did you think all this effort of humanity was to come to in the end? The real answer is known to almost everyone who has even a smattering of science; yet, oddly enough, it is hardly ever mentioned. And the real answer (almost beyond doubt) is that, with or without atomic bombs, the whole story is going to end in NOTHING. The astronomers hold out no hope that this planet is going to be permanently inhabitable. The physicists hold out no hope that organic life is going to be a permanent possibility in any part of the material universe. Not only this earth, but the whole show, all the suns of space, are to run down. Nature is a sinking ship. Bergson talks about the élan vital, and Mr Shaw talks about the “Life-force” as if they could surge on for ever and ever. But that comes of concentrating on biology and ignoring the other sciences. There is really no such hope. Nature does not, in the long run, favour life. If Nature is all that exists — in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature — then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. No doubt atomic bombs may cut its duration on this present planet shorter that it might have been; but the whole thing, even if it lasted for billions of years, must be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time which precede and follow it that I cannot feel excited about its curtailment.

(C. S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age;” In: C. S. Lewis, Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper, [San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1987], pp. 74-75.)

Cf. C. S. Lewis:

     You might decide simply to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately, however, there is, on these terms, so very little left to grab — only the coarsest sensual pleasures. You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time”; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.

(C. S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age;” In: C. S. Lewis, Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper, [San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1987], p. 76.)

C. S. Lewis:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

(C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast: And Other Pieces, [London and Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1965], Screwtape Proposes A Toast, “Is Theology Poetry?” p. 58.)

Cf. N. T. Wright:

     A great many arguments about God—God’s existence, God’s nature, God’s actions in the world—run the risk of being like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining. It is all too easy to make the mistake of speaking and thinking as though God (if there is a God) might be a being, an entity, within our world, accessible to our interested study in the same sort of way we might study music or mathematics, open to our investigation by the same sort of techniques we use for objects and entities within our world. When Yuri Gagarin, the first Soviet cosmonaut, landed after orbiting the earth a few times, he declared that he had disproved the existence of God. He had been up there, he said, and had seen no sign of him. Some Christians pointed out that Gagarin had seen plenty of signs of God, if only the cosmonaut had known how to interpret them. The difficulty is that speaking of God in anything like the Christian sense is like staring into the sun. It’s dazzling. It’s easier, actually, to look away from the sun itself and to enjoy the fact that, once it’s well and truly risen, you can see everything else clearly.

(N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006], p. 56.)

Augustine of Hippo [Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis]:

...You made us for Yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in You.

(Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969], 1.1, p. 21.)

Carl R. Trueman:

     For Augustine, the existential problem of humanity can be understood by asking a question: Who or what should I love? The restlessness of the human heart is driven by a single desire to find that which, when made the object of love, gives rest and peace to the soul. As God lives eternally as a communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect, mutual love, so human beings made in God’s image are designed to find their perfection in loving another. But whom or what are they to love?

     The only correct answer, of course, is God. Only when God is made the object of our love and our hearts rest in him can our restless souls find peace. Human beings are made to find their fulfillment and meaning in him in a real and ultimate sense. But the tragedy is that fallen human beings are turned in on themselves. We ask the right question “Whom should I love?”—but we are doomed to give the wrong answer. We love ourselves in the place of God. And this means that our souls will be ever moving on, striving to find peace and never coming to rest.

(Carl R. Trueman, Grace Alone: Salvation as the Gift of God, [Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2017], p. 60.)

Leo Tolstoy:

     ‘The conception of God is not God,’ said I to myself. ‘The conception is what takes place within me. The conception of God is something I can evoke or can refrain from evoking in myself. That is not what I seek. I seek that without which there can be no life.’ And again all around me and within me began to die, and again I wished to kill myself.

     But then I turned my gaze upon myself, on what went on within me, and I remembered all those cessations of life and reanimations that recurred within me hundreds of times. I remembered that I only lived at those times when I believed in God. As it was before, so it was now; I need only be aware of God to live; I need only forget Him, or disbelieve in Him, and I died.

     What is this animation and dying? I do not live when I lose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live, really live, only when I feel Him and seek Him. ‘What more do you seek?’ exclaimed a voice within me. ‘This is He. He is that without which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.’

     ‘Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.’ And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and the light did not again abandon me.

(Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, chapter 12; trans. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and What I Believe, The World’s Classics: CCXXIX, trans. Aylmer Maude, [London: Oxford University Press, 1921; reprinted 1927 and 1932], p. 76.)

R. C. Sproul:

By contrast, Christianity declares that all of nature is the result of the One who is eternal and self-existent, who has the power of being within Himself, and who alone can bring something out of nothing. Only God has this power. If He had not exercised that power in creating all that now is, I would not be writing this book and you would not be reading it. You can take this to the bank—it is utterly impossible to get something from nothing by natural means. If there ever was a time when there was nothing, there would be nothing now. There would be no people. There would be no churches. There would be no Bibles. There would be no philosophers and scientists. Unless something exists eternally in and of itself, something that has the power to give rise to something else, there would be nothing.

     Naturalism is a fool’s errand, and the New Testament is on a collision course with that kind of thinking. If you could persuade me of naturalism in its full skepticism, I would sleep in tomorrow morning, because I would have no reason whatsoever to get out of bed. If the naturalist is correct, then Jean-Paul Sartre’s assessment is accurate—humanity is a useless passion. That means that all the things we care about, all of our feelings of love, hope, aspiration, honor, and joy are futile and meaningless. If the naturalist is right, there is more meaning in an ant on the ground than in the aspirations of our hearts.

     Yet, I constantly encounter naturalists who have both feet firmly planted in midair. They tell us that all we have is nature. However, we still have dignity, significance, and meaning. They have no basis for that assertion if man is nothing more than a biological accident.

(R. C. Sproul, Matthew: An Expositional Commentary, [Sanford: Reformation Trust, 2019], p. 417.)

C. S. Lewis:

God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn that water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see. Either like the Pagans they refer the process to some finite spirit, Bacchus or Dionysus: or else, like the moderns, they attribute real and ultimate causality to the chemical and other material phenomena which are all that our senses can discover in it. But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off. The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.

(C. S. Lewis, “Miracles;” In: C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2014], pp. 13-14.)

Karl Barth: 

Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so); but he cannot make truth falsehood. He can certainly rebel (he does so); but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God. He can certainly flee from God (he does so); but he cannot escape Him. 

(Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: Volume II: The Doctrine of God: Second Half-Volume, eds. G. W. Bromiley, T. F. Torrance, [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1967], p. 317.)

D. A. Carson:

     In our generation, which reflects too little on the future and almost never on eternity, it is distressingly obvious that we need help, help from God, so as to be able to know the hope to which we have been called. Only then will we become more interested in living with eternity’s values constantly before our eyes. What we will have to show before the great King on the last day will be infinitely more important to us than what we leave behind here.

(D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers, [Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2009], p. 176.)

Leo Tolstoy:

…I had indeed come to faith because, apart from faith, I had found nothing, certainly nothing, except destruction; therefore to throw away that faith was impossible…

(Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, chapter 14; trans. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and What I Believe, The World’s Classics: CCXXIX, trans. Aylmer Maude, [London: Oxford University Press, 1921; reprinted 1927 and 1932], p. 86.)

Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:12-19, 29-32: (Cf. Ecclesiastes 2.)

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

…Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them? And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? I face death every day—yes, just as surely as I boast about you in Christ Jesus our Lord. If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus with no more than human hopes, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

(New International Version.)

Secularism.

James W. Sire:

…at the heart of a nihilist’s one affirmation lies a self-contradiction. There is no meaning in the universe, nihilists scream. That means that their only affirmation is meaningless, for if it were to mean anything it would be false. [fn. 31: Another way to put this argument is to point out that constructing sentences is such a fundamental act, such a paradigmatic affirmation of meaning, that to construct sentences to deny meaning is self-contradictory. Keith Yandell in “Religious Experience and Rational Appraisal,” Religious Studies, June 1974, p. 185, expresses the argument as follows: “If a conceptual system F is such that it can be shown that (a) F is true and (b) F is known to be true, are incompatible, then this fact provides a good (though perhaps not conclusive) reason for supposing that F is false.”]

(James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog: Fifth Edition, [Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009], pp. 113, 113-114 fn. 31.)

Note: This might be rephrased: If “there is no such thing as truth,” this begs the question “is that statement true or false” (i.e. are you attempting to convey a true or a false idea/concept to the minds of others via your words)?

James W. Sire:

…nihilism means the death of art. Here too we find a paradox. for much modern art—literature, painting, drama, film—has nihilism for its ideological core. And much of this literature is excellent by the traditional canons of art. Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” Samuel Beckett’s End Game, Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Francis Bacon’s various heads of popes spring immediately to mind. The twist is this: to the extent that these artworks display the human implication of a nihilistic worldview, they are not nihilistic; to the extent that they themselves are meaningless, they are not artworks.

     Art is nothing if not formal, that is, endowed with structure by the artist. But structure itself implies meaning. So to the extent that an artwork has structure, it has meaning and thus is not nihilistic. Even Beckett’s Breath has structure. A junkyard, the garbage in a trash heap, a pile of rocks just blasted from a quarry have no structure. They are not art.

     Some contemporary art attempts to be anti-art by being random. Much of John Cage’s music is predicated on sheer chance, randomness. But it is both dull and grating, and very few people can listen to it. It’s not art. Then there is Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” a brilliant though painful story about an artist who tries to make art out of public fasting, that is, out of nothing. But no one looks at him; everyone passes by his display at the circus to see a young leopard pacing in his cage. Even the “nature” of the leopard is more interesting than the “art” of the nihilist. Breath too, as minimal as it is, is structured and means something. Even if it means only that human beings are meaningless, it participates in the paradox examined above. In short, art implies meaning and is ultimately nonnihilistic, despite the ironic attempt of nihilists to display their wares by means of it.

(James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog: Fifth Edition, [Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009], pp. 114-116.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria