The Point

"The Post-modern has adopted the idea that there is no such thing as meaning"  Martin Robinson - The Faith of the Unbeliever.

So, it has proved to be a season of debates.

I myself have watched several in the past month via Social Media, and they all verify one key theme of our times - the world (world-system) is as lost as it ever was.

Certainly, there are more folds and wrinkles now in the philosophical 'fabric' of the current culture, but the dark heart of human meaninglessness - so common to every era of our existence - still resides at the core of this tragic world of ours; it's merely a case of that reality being at least in measure acknowledged by some.

Nothing about us has really changed, (move over Bob Dylan - these lyrics cut to the chase) including a seemingly bottomless capacity to lie to ourselves about what really counts. Post-modernism may tend to obscure the nature of the discussion, but when the likes of Douglas Murray speaks of 'preferring' the old religions to the present chaos and then goes on to poignantly state the resurrection never happened, it tells you exactly where secularism lands us.

The truth is that aside from a few nods of the kind just referred to, the West has become predominantly post-christian as it pursues its 300 plus year old quest to allow what it defines as 'reason' to hold full sway as some magic bullet that will finally kill our need for the folly of God, but it must do so whilst dismissing all prior modern attempts at social change as ill-placed or poorly done, even though some of its voices clearly contend with such a diagnosis.

The myth at the core of so much of the current conversation is that science came about to replace the stories and misconceptions of reality that were being propagated beneath the panacea of religion, but that simply is not so.

The Enlightenment, which came much later than the scientific revolution of the 1500s, qualified our 'objectivism' by a very old form of defining what was true and what was not (see Romans 1:18-23), and the 'empiricism' this has lead to is riddled with pit falls that are deadly (interesting to see this in a recent discussion between Dr Hugh Ross and Dr Peter Atkins. Atkins spends a great deal of his time conceiving of 'what ifs' and total conjecture in regards to the material universe, where Ross seeks to principally tie his theological insights to observable, verifiable data, yet Ross is presenting the theological world-view).

The gift of modern rationalism is that it has made us orphans in a meaningless, entirely material universe, with no worth or value, to quote Sam Harris, beyond the moment you currently inhabit - that is all you really have. The basis of this tower of rationality is the supposedly unassailable creed of naturalism that verifies, via natural selection, as interpreted by Darwin, this world view.

Therein lies the problem.
If we accept the understanding such suppositions provide - that there is no 'horizon' beyond a very fleeting and essentially purposeless and accidental existence, how do we derive any sense of meaningful purpose, any sphere of values from that? If the universe is in effect a meaningless mistake, why would anything we do really count?

The question becomes entirely relevant when we encounter anything that makes us aware that naturalism may not be as comprehensive or as correct as it claims, or we experience something that causes us to consider the possibility of the transcendent, the second of these interlocking with a very deep and real longing within. This is why Christianity speaks of the notions of our secular world as being a negation of something we all inherently know to be true.

The vital criticisms of naturalism's presumptions are many, and are essential in the current discussions.
If we make the sole reason for our being here nothing more than the conclusion that nothing actually matters, then we become nothing more than accidental participants in a brief 'blip' on meaninglessness - the universe. If, however, we take Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 15 concerning the life and purpose of Jesus Christ as historical (and the cornerstone of his argument here is that it was), then life and death are not the only truths we have to face - there is a far greater value to who and what we are.

The question we all must face is are we willing to concede that life is just a fluke or that there is much more going on. That is where, fully aware of the debate, we need to begin.