Religion and Revelation

I was thinking about my statements on religion, and I had a couple more things I wanted to say. More broadly, if you think about mankind in its context in the universe purely from a naturalistic, relativistic, man-centered point of view (as the culture would have us believe), then religion and anything abstract simply becomes comical in its absurdity. That is, if you take a cue from postmodern culture today and believe that all religions, worldviews, and truth claims from the perspective of mankind are in effect the same (or they are all viewed as parts of the whole truth, much as in the popular blind men/elephant parable**), then you are really left with a ridiculous notion. This notion being that religiosity does not extend past the minds of humans; or, more accurately, that religion (or anything abstract that mankind comes up with) is imposing meaning and purpose on the universe that is not warranted whatsoever.

If the universe is just material, having a beginning in time with a “Big Bang”, and extending on until all the matter is sucked back into the singularity from which it began, then there really is nothing else to the universe. It simply is what it is. There is no reason for religion if this is all the universe is; humans are nothing but exceedingly complicated conglomerations of chemical reactions and electrical impulses that arose from highly intricate evolutionary changes, initiated from the inception of life that originated in intensely fine-tuned cosmological, geological, climatal, and chemical circumstances. Now I do not claim to be a biology expert and I do not know the extent to which parts of the theory of evolution may be true, but I do know that if what hard-core evolutionists teach about the nature of life and reality is true, then there is absolutely no purpose or reason that humans, and the universe exist. According to this theory, it all began with a bang, and it will all end with a bang; with silence in between the end of this universe and the beginning of the next one. There will be no life, no love, no religion, no meaning whatsoever; just elements, planets, rocks, collisions, fire, explosions, and eventually more life-forms that will be annihilated when the next sun burns out. How could there possibly be meaning in this? And how dare anyone claim meaning and religion that claims this naturalistic theory?

Meaning is something that must be infused into something. An engineer designing a machine must begin with a purpose for the machine. If purpose is not defined, then the machine will never come to be; or if it is made with an unknown purpose, the purpose will never be discovered unless the engineer explains it. If the universe (like a machine in many ways) made itself, as the aforementioned atheistic scientists will claim, then there is no knowing anything as to the purpose of it, except that it has no purpose because no mind, no designer, created it to have one. If this is believed, then anything that is thought about the nature of reality is absolute bunk. You have no basis for claiming how something ought to be, and you certainly have no basis for being religious, since the foundation of all religion (indeed all rational human thinking) is inconveniently plagued with purpose and morality.

The best any atheist (or anyone for that matter) has done to explain religion is to claim that the mind’s sense of religiosity and pursuit of meaning is merely an evolutionary strategy that has arisen to help us survive (this belongs I believe to Richard Dawkins). The problem with this statement, as Tim Keller has pointed out recently, is that if this is true, if all human thinking and beliefs are merely vehicles for human survival as a species, then doesn’t the act of believing in evolution fall into this category as well? Isn’t the scientist’s cerebral act of believing purpose arose from chance merely an evolutionary trick played on the scientist’s mind to help him survive?

What we are left with if this premise is taken to its logical conclusion is the absolute destruction of all human achievement. If there is no purpose in anything (and we can’t avoid this), then that is all there is to say. All creations of man are in the end are just whimsical and nonsensical ingenuity. We are highly decorated and complicated sticks of dynamite, waiting to explode into nothing and into nowhere. Yippee.

While I do not want to give the impression that I am anti-scientific (because I am not), I do want to maintain the utter ridiculousness of believing that the material is all there is and simultaneously claiming purpose for one’s own life. In fact, if the material is all there is, one can make all kinds of unprovable statements about the nature of reality and there is no objective way to denounce them since there is no outside or universal standard of which to view them. For example, I can say that the only purpose in the universe is for me to eat corn everyday, or to learn how to juggle, or for you to learn how to juggle, or to care for the needy, or to always wear a 3-cornered hat. You cannot prove that these are true or false, just like I cannot prove that they are true or false. But we are both left with the fact that neither of us can prove anything, so there is no reason to judge behavior or truth claims since all there is material.

The same can be said about morality. If there is no universal set of morals, then I am just as pleased to kill, maim, rape, and steal as you are to love, give, care, and thank. There is no reason why killing is worse than loving, since we’re all just bunches of arbitrary chemical and electrical reactions. Who’s to say that one is better than another?

But of course no one who has ever claimed relativism will take it this far, to where it logically demands to be taken. This is because everyone has the knowledge and restraint of morality built into their natures and into their consciences. We are all made in the image of God, and as much as we try to escape it, it never escapes us.

The end of my claim is that God, revealed in the man Jesus, is the only possible source of ultimate truth and reality. Since he is the only one ever to have claimed to “come down from heaven”, and historically proven it to be true in the resurrection of his dead body, he is the only one with the credentials to establish himself as such. Man’s search for truth, redemption, and the promised-land on his own merit is useless. All our attempts to get beyond ourselves and get into heaven are futile in comparison with God’s attempt to come to us, and bring us to heaven. Religion is useless. We need Revelation.

** There are literally dozens of different versions of this story that I have seen briefly by searching the internet, but all are essentially the same. Quoting it in the way it is most commonly done is fatally flawed, as pointed out by Lesslie Newbigin in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society:

In the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, so often quoted in the interests of religious agnosticism, the real point of the story is constantly overlooked. The story is told from the point of view of the king and his courtiers, who are not blind but can see that the blind men are unable to grasp the full reality of the elephant and are only able to get hold of part of the truth. The story is constantly told in order to neutralize the affirmation of the great religions, to suggest that they learn humility and recognize that none of them can have more than one aspect of the truth. But, of course, the real point of the story is exactly the opposite. If the king were also blind there would be no story. The story is told by the king, and it is the immensely arrogant claim of one who sees the full truth which all the world’s religions are only groping after. It embodies the claim to know the full reality which relativizes all the claims of the religions and philosophies.

(pg. 9-10)