Reading the news over recent months, I’ve been struck by the number of stories pointing to a deep crisis of identity, purpose and meaning in British society. Here are just a few headlines from the BBC’s website: ‘I’m surrounded by people – but I feel so lonely’ (1st October 2018); ‘Fifth of 14-year-old girls in UK ‘have self-harmed’’ (29th August 2018); ‘Help for men ‘struggling with life’ and at risk of suicide’ (4th August 2018). Headlines like these could be multiplied many times over. And it’s not just in Britain that we find these kinds of problems.
This crisis of purpose and meaning has quite rightly resulted in lots of research and therapies to help struggling people. And there is little doubt that our doctors and psychologists can make a significant difference to the lives of people who wrestle with their identity and purpose in life. However, let me suggest that the real solution will never be found within the sphere of the secular worldview. It seems to me that by definition you can never access the meaning of life when you believe that molecules are all that exist. Meaning comes from another realm and you ignore that realm at your peril.
There are many ways that we could try to explain the steady abandonment of a Christian worldview during the last 200 years, but for me one of the most helpful is to see it as a radical change in how we derive knowledge. In a Christian worldview there are two ways to obtain knowledge: first is the Book of God’s Works and second the Book of God’s Words[1]. Reading the Book of God’s Works in creation gave us science, the process by which we seek to understand and define the uniform laws of the universe and unlock them for our advantage and advancement[2]. Reading the Book of God’s Works brings many benefits in the realms of medicine and technology and – if we have the eyes to see – it also discloses the greatness of our Creator who made this remarkable universe and the laws that underpin it.
However, the Book of God’s Works was never designed to furnish us with a full understanding of the world. For that another type of knowledge is necessary, the Book of God’s Words. So for example, for us to understand why the world exists, who we are as human beings, why we and our world is pretty messed up and where to find the solutions to our problems, the Book of God’s Works cannot help us much; we need the Book of God’s Words, the Bible.
During the last 200 years and under the influence of a host of anti-theistic thinkers, the West has unravelled it’s once long-held Christian paradigm for understanding the world. The results have been nothing less than catastrophic, explaining so much of the mess we’re in today. This unravelling has led to the Book of God’s Works (Creation) being reassigned the status of ‘Nature’ and so our universe has been declared nothing more than an accidental occurrence; there is now no Powerful and Personal God that stands behind it all. Moreover, we humans are now nothing more than the product of chance, highly evolved pond slime. The Book of God’s Words (the Bible) has been assigned the status of fable and myth.
Earlier I suggested that a highly fruitful way of understanding the West’s transition from a Judeo-Christian society to a secular society is to realise that what’s occurred is really a change in the realm of knowledge. So today, by and large, we’ve settled for the idea that all real and trustworthy knowledge is obtainable only by human observation and experience (the technical term is empiricism). The problem is that this approach shuts down access to what we might call the inescapable questions of life; questions which will never be answered by the scientist working with the assumption that all that exists is matter. Life throws up massive questions that simply won’t go away no matter how modern and sophisticated we think we’ve become. Here are just a few: who is God, why is the world here, why am I here, what makes life meaningful, what happens to me when I die? All these questions can never be answered by human observation and experience alone.
The necessary data to answer the great questions about life and existence comes from another source of knowledge, one that our society has thoughtlessly discounted over the last 200 years. It is knowledge that comes in the form of revelation given by God in the words of Scripture. The Bible is not some irrelevant and outmoded document but is the means by which our Creator has communicated to us answers to the great questions of life. If a society chooses to reject the (true) Biblical story of creation, fall, redemption and restoration, the result will be a generation of people who are truly lost; answers to the great questions will forever elude us.
Secular societies are forever seeking answers for human problems within their own worldview framework, all the while assuming that everything can be explained and fixed without reference to God. History and experience combine to teach us that lasting solutions for the human predicament will never be found until we realise that secularism is an inadequate framework for making sense of the world. When we come to the issues of human identity and meaning, what’s needed is a revolution in how we understand everything not just a little tweak here and there. Until we realise that we were made by God and for God and need to be reconciled to Him through the cross of Christ, no one will know who they are, nor will true happiness be found. Failure to recognise this will consign our societies to ever-deepening levels of despair.
Picture: Edvard Munch, Despair (1893—1894)
[1] Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) used this kind of terminology.
[2] I derived this helpful definition of science from the Christian apologist Cliffe Knechtle.
First published on Challenging Thinking on 2018-10-03. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.