The Best and the Brightest

What The Fool Says in His Folly

The more the secularist investigates the universe by-his-lights, the more he is driven to meaninglessness.  Not despair necessarily.  Some optimistic secularists relish in the meaninglessness of the universe (or so they say) as a backdrop to their own glory.  "Sure all is meaningless; there is no point to any of it--but I choose to deny it; I refuse to bow to it.  I am like the titans of old.  I choose to live heroically, as if there is meaning in it all.  I shake my fist at the storm of  meaningless fate and declare my own grandeur."

Noble stuff.  Pathetic and useless, of course, but nevertheless a powerful testimony to the traitor in the room.  Human nature just cannot live consistently with itself when it propounds a secular, atheistic and materialistic world. 

Bertrand Russell, one of the more celebrated atheists in the middle decades of the previous century, painted graphically and realistically the materialist world-view:

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 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 inspirations, 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. [Cited by Leon Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), p. 409.]

Now, of course, Russell was sufficiently myopic that he never faced up to the paradoxical element in his last sentence.  The "scaffolding of these truths" serves to be a vicious contradiction, if the world Russell describes is actually true.  In a meaningless world to speak of truths and ideals is a contradiction in terms.  Moreover, the very fact that Russell seeks to describe such a world meaningfully and draw forth its implications for human living (". . . can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built") is evidence that Russell's world is not true.  If Russell's world were true, he could never describe it, nor reason about it. If he can describe it, and reason about it, his world-view cannot possibly be true. 

Behold the folly and blindness of the modern secularist.  He is a walking, living, breathing, talking, and reasoning contradiction in terms.  Truly does the Scripture testify concerning us: the fool hath said in his heart there is no God.  (Psalm 14:1; 53:1).  And so we all languish, as the poet says:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night; . . .

unless and until . . .

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

To the merciful and generous and gracious God, be glory forever and ever.