More On the Godless Universe

The following is a response to a friend of mine who asked me to elaborate on my statements concerning a Christian universe being a better prospect than a Godless one. I hesitated in posting it here, but at the end of the day I think there are things here that should be put in the public forum.

“How would respond to an atheist who believes their life to have more of a point after they gave up belief? Or would you even respond?”

Well, on the one hand my response would be tempered by my relationship with the person in question. There are people I can speak openly with and there are those with whom I must be gentle because I value their friendship. Not just shutting up to get along but some worldviews are so alien from one another that they have to treat each other carefully. Were I to encounter the argument on paper and set about to write a response, my response would go something like this:

                If we were capable of imagining that we had no preconceived notions of Christ, humanity, the world, etc. and were given a choice between a universe where we could live a finite life in as much pleasure as we wish or a universe in which we had the opportunity for eternal life bathed in truth and love and some discomfort, I’d imagine most people would choose the latter. The new atheist has made a similar comparison and concluded otherwise. I believe the reason for this is that they have compared the ugliest Christianity to the sun shiniest Atheism. You’ll note sometimes that an atheist will make a case for a specific Christianity before knocking it down (straw man). I had a friend once that was a Calvinist street preacher before becoming an atheist. When I expressed an interest in pursuing God in the most original context possible (Orthodoxy) before rejecting Him completely, my friend made it his mission to convince me that Calvin’s Christianity is the only possibly true Christianity. Think about that for a minute.

                The atheistic universe is one in which the Universe started one day and will eventually entropy into non-existence. In the intervening time it develops some interesting things, like humanity, that could be appreciated for a while by things like humanity and when either disappears there is no longer anything to appreciate or anything to appreciate it. It’s like the poem Ozymandias, except there won’t even be anyone to appreciate the irony. It might as well have not existed. I am reminded of a description of that time in a Doctor Who episode where “the furnaces were burning and humanity screaming into the night”. Damn God for not existing.

                The Christian universe is one in which the Universe was started and will eventually be sanctified in a final state of perfection. We were created to crown it and we are co-working with the Creator to sanctify it. Even at the end of Time we will continue infinitely into the ever deepening wisdom and love of an infinite God. In Orthodoxy, we even have the hope that all will eventually be saved, even if it is an EXTREMELY cautious hope.

                This is nowhere near an argument for the existence of God. It could just be that bad. It is only a demonstration of how one model is preferable to the other. The new atheist feels that we are free to work out our morality divorced from that of our primitive ancestors. The problem is that a morality based in the fickle and ever changing landscape of popular culture is a morality that is fickle and ever changing. Right now, those who experience same sex attraction are experiencing a certain level of social benefit but I would wager money that the tides of ideologies will change and they will suffer terribly. Remember how the serpent promised us we would be gods and brought us lower than we began. There is something to be said for having your stake (cross?) anchored in something eternal.

                There is only one good reason to believe that an atheistic universe is better than a Christian one and that is that in an atheistic universe there is no answering for anything. Choice and Freedom are maximized. They also mean nothing. 

Of Christ and the Guardians

Jesus is the same as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Except that He isn’t. To say that Christ is the same as Santa is to say that He is the same type of thing as Santa. What type of thing is the Easter Bunny? The Easter Bunny and company are myths and stories that fulfill, at least in the expression of their popular portrayals, specific sociological and psychological niches within the context of the culture in which they are found. Presumably, one could explain “why” the bunny and “why” the jolly fat man. It is outside of the scope of this article but the movie, Rise of the Guardians, comes to mind as an excellent example of this. The characters serve as representatives and defenders of certain things (hope, wonder, etc.).

If one makes the claim that Christ is no more than a myth, one must explain the myth. If Christianity is a made up religion, we must be able to explain the context of the fiction. Under what circumstance was it necessary to create Christ? I would posit(from my own experience in the faith) that if Christianity was invented, it was invented behind a brothel as a man lay in his own vomit and other men passed him by paying no heed. It was founded when every desire was met, every thirst quenched, and every hunger was sated. The moment it was birthed into the world was the precise moment the inventor looked inside and saw a twisted soul and was filled with nothing but self-loathing. If Christianity was not revealed to us by the God-Man, it was hatched in the mind of the most wretched of humanity come face to face with itself. In our lowest state, we conceived it’s opposite.

I’ve heard many theories from the modern atheist concerning the mysterious origins of my faith. Some are as simplistic as asserting that we are afraid of death and others are as absurd as asserting that it was invented to control the populace. The first fails in its scope and the second contradicts any serious study of the faith. But neither of these is as surprising as the assertion by New Atheism that a godless universe is an inherently good thing. Now, free from our archaic superstitions, we can finally reach our full potential. One of the several arguments that come to mind against this is that a godless universe is a universe that is inherently meaningless.

Vast ages of human beings have lived their lives with no meaning. That’s not just numbers. Billions upon billions of individual souls have looked upon the stars, looked upon their hands and could not contemplate that neither had any inherent value or meaning. Each of them had blessings in their lives and knew instinctively that SOMETHING had to be thanked for it. Each of them knew hardship, despair and suffering and cast their eyes to the sky in agony. In a godless universe, they were all mere chemical reactions. No amount of posturing and appeals to emotion can soften that. In fact, there is nothing to soften. It is not that one day we will die and be nothing. It’s that we already are nothing. Or, in a logical formula:

1.       Value is an assigned attribute

2.       Assigned attributes cease when there is no longer anyone to maintain them

3.       Value ceases when there is no longer anyone to maintain it

All of this is to illustrate the difference between Christ and the Guardians. The most striking difference is that Hope exists outside of the Easter Bunny and Wonder exists outside of Father Christmas. They are merely avatars of an already existing reality. Christ, if He is an avatar at all, must be an avatar of that which cannot be without Him; Eternal Life, intrinsic purpose and value, redemption, etc. Christianity has Christ Crucified at the center of the Universe because that is the only place He can logically exist.