“You are going to die… And though you may believe you know what will happen after you die, I don’t believe you do. I believe we all tell ourselves things to mediate what otherwise might be a constant whir of pain and doubt”.
Response: I appreciate your openness, honesty, and courage. Most people are not willing to take their beliefs to their logical conclusions and to share this with the whole world. So my hat is off to you.
I think it is fair to say that the logical end of evolution is nihilism – the notion that no one knows what happens when we die, that nothing matters beyond what we identify as our own self-interest, and that any means are justified by this end (self-interest, or in evolutionary terminology, self-preservation).
If evolutionary theory is true, then we are just animals, albeit smart animals, tender feelings are in fact phantom pains, and life has no higher purpose other than self-interest and survival. By the way, I think it takes much greater faith to believe in evolution than creation by an intelligent being.
I would agree that from the evolutionary / nihilist perspective, any means are justified. So because there are no rules, anything goes, including infanticide, abortion, polygamy, bestiality, murder, etc. Life would be a jungle, with self-preservation the one and only life goal.
In your column, you stated: “You are going to die… And though you may believe you know what will happen after you die, I don’t believe you do”.
If someone is lost in the jungle, on what basis might they assume that everyone else is also lost in the jungle. But is it a valid assumption? The most brilliant person in the world may know 5 percent of all knowledge that exists. Is it not possible that knowledge of the sovereign, living God could be in the other 95%?
In his book “The Math of Christ”, retired Army Colonel Stephen Bauer calculated the odds of just 40 of the fulfilled prophecies from the Old Testament to have happened by chance to be one in 1×10 to the 136th power. If you covered the earth with silver dollars, including a red one, and asked a blind man to find the red one, his chances of success are one chance in 3.5 x 10 to the 17th power. Dr. Emile Borel, who created the basic law of probability, stated: “The basic law of probability states that the occurrence of any event in which the chances are beyond 10 to the 50th power is an event that we can state with certainty will never happen.”
There is someone who knows the way out of the jungle – a life of purposelessness and despair, and His name is Jesus. In contrast to the evolutionary / nihilist perspective, Biblical Christianity is based on the notion that we were created in the image of the sovereign, living God, that we have meaning and purpose in our lives, and that we were created with the capacity to have a RELATIONSHIP with God (not just a BELIEF) that continues beyond the grave. That invitation is open to each of us.
Life in the Spirit 