"DEAR GOD, YOU SURE DON'T ACT LIKE YOU'RE ALIVE" - Day 39

Now since an effect can’t be greater than its cause, doesn’t the fact that humans (the effect) are personal mean that the cause (the force) must also be personal?  GREGORY A. BOYD              

Suppose I bring to your house a large box and tell you to open it. When you do, you discover an assortment of letters from the English alphabet. I then ask you to use these letters to spell the following words: LOVE, JUSTICE, MORALITY, and PURPOSE. At first you think this will be an easy task, but you soon find yourself frustrated and angry. What you discover within the box are multiples of the following letters: B,D,F,G,H,K,N,Q,W,X,Z. None of the other fifteen letters are included, and this makes your task impossible, for these are the fifteen letters needed to spell the assigned words. I have presented you a box in which there is no possibility of love, justice, morality, or purpose.

Atheists view the universe in the same way. When they take their atheistic philosophy to its logical conclusion, they find themselves looking at a world in which there is no possibility of love, justice, morality, or purpose. If you doubt this is true, read the works of Freud and Sartre, perhaps the two most quoted atheists. You will discover that neither believed in the existence of true love, real justice, objective morality, or absolute purpose.¹ They knew all too well that a chance universe, one with no God behind it, could not possibly possess these traits. And they knew that human beings, as parts of this random universe, could not possess them either.

A quick look at human history, however, gives us an altogether different picture. Everywhere we see people who seem to possess love. Likewise, it is not hard to find men and women who preach and practice justice and morality. And so vital is purpose to the human psyche that the absence of it in a person’s life is included among the symptoms of the disease called depression. Atheists, attempting to explain all this away, have come up with some naturalistic explanations for these positive human traits.² But, in the end, they have failed to explain how a negative universe devoid of love, justice, morality, and purpose can write these words on the human heart. 

Taking our illustration further may help you see what I mean. Suppose that I return to your house the next day and discover the following individual letters pinned to your bedroom bulletin board: LOVE, JUSTICE, MORALITY, PURPOSE. When I ask you where the letters came from, you point to the box I gave you the day before. Hearing this, I say that you are either a liar or a fool. “How could these words come from that box?” I ask you. “The letters for love, justice, morality, and purpose were not included in it. If these words now appear on the bulletin board, they must have originated from somewhere other than that box. Any other assertion is ludicrous.”

This, in a nutshell, is the Argument from Human Characteristics (5 Reasons, Days 46-51). It claims that the positive traits we possess—like love, justice, morality, and purpose—could not have come to us from nature, for the simple reason that nature lacks the ingredients for them. To use our analogy, nature does not contain the letters to write these words on our hearts. And if nature cannot be that source, then something other than nature must be. There must exist a supernatural Reality—a God—with the characteristics of love, justice, morality, and purpose, and He must be the Source of these same characteristics in us.

Using a previous analogy,³ apples come from apples trees; oranges fall from orange trees. The “fruits” of love, justice, morality, and purpose must come from a “tree” that is loving, just, moral, and purposeful. And nature is not this kind of “tree.” (If you need confirmation, I again refer you to Freud and Sartre.) Something beyond nature must be the source of these human traits. Love, justice, morality, and purpose must be as much a part of God’s character, even more so, than they are a part of ours.   

¹Sartre, a French atheist and existentialist, proclaimed the universe to be amoral. “If God does not exist,” he wrote, “we have no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct... [W]e have no excuse behind us, no justification before us. We are alone...” [“Existentialism,” Existentialism and Human Emotions (trans. Bernard Frechtman; New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 22]. Freud agreed that absolute morality does not exist, stating that he had “no need for a higher moral synthesis” [Quoted in Arnold M. Nicholi, Jr., The Question of God (New York: Free Press, 2002), 63]. In addition, Freud dismissed the possibility of true purpose: “The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence” [Ernest L. Freud, ed., Letters of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1961), 432]. To which Sartre rather tersely added, “It is meaningless that we are born; it is meaningless that we die” [Ronald Hepburn, in Antony Flew and Alasdair, New Essays in Philosophical Theory (New York: Macmillan, n.d.), 140]. Regarding love, Freud defined it merely as conscious and unconscious sexuality. “Nothing runs so strongly counter to the original human nature” as true love. “Obscure, unfeeling and unloving powers determine men’s fate” (Quoted in Nicholi, Jr., The Question of God, 176, 204). Any thought of justice in the universe was also considered absurd. The universe, Freud said, does not reward good and punish evil (Ibid., 205-6). His and Sartre’s denial of love, justice, purpose, and morality in the universe is in keeping with the writings of atheists in general. 

²See 5 Reasons, Day 49.

³Ibid., Day 48.                   

 

Daily Quotation

Gregory A. Boyd and Edward K. Boyd, Letters from a Skeptic (Colorado Springs: Chariot Victor, 1984), 54, 56.