Most Replayed Moment: Christian vs Atheist - Is Faith A Human Creation?

Steven Bartlett (0:04)

Theistic, what does that mean?

Greg Koukl (0:05)

A personal god.

Steven Bartlett (0:06)

A god.

Greg Koukl (0:07)

There is a personal god who is involved with the world. He made the world and he still maintains activity, as opposed to deistic, which just wound up the clock and let it go, okay?

So my view is God is still involved, in fact, so involved that he actually came to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to create a rescue plan. Now what's interesting to me about this broader question, going into more details too, is that it's not—if there is a God who made the world for a purpose with meaning, people can participate in that meaning and purpose even if they don't know God. They're not—they won't be experiencing what they were made for, which is to be in friendship with him with the plan that he's made for their flourishing, but they still can flourish in some measure insofar as they touch on these objective features. But insofar as we are able even without belief in God to kind of get in that groove of the things that God made us for, the purposes that he intends in light of being made like him in some way in his image, there's going to be a measure of satisfaction. But what they'll be missing is the ultimate, and that is that friendship with God and being restored in that.

Steven Bartlett (1:17)

Alex.

Alex O'Connor (1:18)

Yes, sir.

Steven Bartlett (1:19)

Same question for you about what you bring to this conversation in terms of your perspective, your experience, and maybe some of your personal journey.

Alex O'Connor (1:27)

Well, for my own part, I was quite swept up in the New Atheism Movement, which was a mid-2000s publishing phenomenon with the likes of the Dawkins and the Hitchens of the world, saying that religion is evil and terrible, and I think promising an alternative, a kind of secular humanist utopia that if you'll only throw off these oppressive religious systems, you will regain your spiritual autonomy and be able to assert yourself and the intrinsic meaning that you have within yourself.

People tried that, and it didn't seem to work, and I think that's because the New Atheist Movement was quite philosophically shallow. It didn't seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place. And I think that is why it exists. I think humans are in a strange predicament due to the mystery of consciousness.

We find ourselves possibly uniquely amongst other animals in a position of being mortal, being physically embodied, being in a world, but also knowing those things. It's one thing to experience the world. It's one thing to be, it's another thing to be aware that you're experiencing it.

Josh Rasmussen once said, there's a difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you've noticed a tree. And we have this sort of second order abstraction that we can do. So we know that death is coming, for example, and death makes a mockery of everything that we do. It seems to just obliterate any sense of purpose or meaning, because anything that we're building will ultimately, as far as we're concerned, be gone. And that may well be unique to human beings. And so I'm not the first to suggest that the principle motivating factor behind meaning-infused activities that humans do is an engagement in death denial or some kind of immortality project. People literally, for fear of, as a result of the knowledge that this will come to an end, engage in what we might call immortality projects. They engage in things which will outlast themselves, which give them a sense of escaping this death. The most obvious example is in religious traditions, which literally promise immortality for your own soul, but if you look just practically where people subjectively report finding meaning, they find it in their children. They might find it in their job, but they're unlikely to find it in their job if they're doing some thing they don't really care about. They'll find it in their job. Maybe they're like a barrister and they find a lot of meaning in bringing justice into the world because they're participating in a system which they believe will outlast them and is bigger than them. So when people talk about meaning, we talk about transcendence, something being above and beyond their own sort of material situation. And I think religion is the archetypal example of this. And I think it's why it evolves in the first place. There is this idea that we are living in a meaning crisis that has cropped up maybe in the past hundred years or so, or maybe in the last few hundred years or so as a response to the enlightenment and the decline of religion. I think that's far too easy. I think that's way too easy. I think that if there is such a thing as a meaning crisis, it is literally the human condition and the reason why these projects were invented in the first place. I think literally speaking, what people are doing in religious traditions is realizing the finitude of their existence and therefore trying to commune with something less finite. Of course.