Image credit: The Zoological World, How To Preserve A Butterfly
part 1 of a series
Very bad and worse
He always remembered with fear and trembling that that terrible woman had knitted when he talked with her, and had looked ominously at him as her fingers moved. He had since seen her, in the Section of Saint Antoine, over and over again produce her knitted registers, and denounce people whose lives the guillotine then surely swallowed up.
– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Imagine, for purposes of … whatever (maybe just passing the time fated to be passed) … that you’re sort of a normal person in the developed West. That you’re at least moderately educated, moderately thoughtful, moderately curious–but mostly in a pragmatic way. What do I need to know? Or, What am I expected to “know” lest I’m considered an idiot by other people like me?
Here you find yourself, in the most accommodating of worlds: ambient temperature typically within tolerable limits, little concern of where your next meal might be found, a tireless digital psychopomp, ever at your command, who knows not only everything, but you–it gets you.
If that weren’t enough, you have in addition time and resources to pursue pleasurable pastimes. Maybe golf, or travel … or collecting butterflies. Pinning wings to corkboard, thereby condemning to suffocation or starvation a being of transcendent beauty to fulfill the Edenic requirement of cataloguing–or maybe just your appetite for visual delight. Or maybe just because you’re bored and need something to do. Time to pass being both the scarcest and most abundant commodity.
You live, in short, “buffered” in a secular society. You are “not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers”1–which alone makes you more unusual than normal. But set that aside.
And yet….
You have come (not particularly by virtue of any deep thought, or any thought at all) to treat yourself as a brand, in Smithian competition with other brands, ever presenting a self vacuous of authenticity, as there is no essential self, only presentation.2 The endless deceptive (but apparently necessary) selfies taken, the obsessive grooming of your LinkedIn page–to conjure a marketable self to the transactional brandosphere comprising the environment you inhabit. See, here I am, happy, successful, smiling, fulfilled. And here I am again, and yet again. And yet again false, and yet again necessary. Such are the demands to which you find (or have placed) yourself subject.
You have, further, largely reconciled yourself to what you’re told is true–deeply true in some demonstrable way (meaning, what you can understand of science):
- The universe had a beginning, roughly 13.7 billion years ago; said beginning beggars explanation;
- It is expanding at an accelerating rate, driven by dark energy, which no one understands but will lead to eventual heat death;
- Nothing in physics suggests anything resembling a goal or purpose;
- Darwinian evolutionary theory (and its modern elaborations) adequately explain the emergence of ever more complex organisms (including yourself) from the simplest;
- Life itself, while genuinely confounding, is simply complicated chemistry, which is itself complicated physics, which amounts to stuff bumping into stuff;
- Consciousness, even more confounding, seems to be nothing more than the electrochemical firings in your entombed brain;
- Free will is of a very limited sort, if it exists at all–agency is likely an illusion.
That sort of stuff, and probably more.
And through all of this–the tireless branding, the intellectual accommodations made to facts as given–transaction has supplanted transcendence. You have become the butterfly you may have once pinned to corkboard. Dry. And brittle.
Occasionally, this troubles you.
On the other hand, is that so bad? After all, you get on tolerably well. The negative externalities of a world “stripped of the magic of its gods and demons”3 have been overstated. Your days are not filled with existential despair, and you’re generally satisfied with the meaning to be found in the busyness of your life, “the direct brotherly communities of individuals with one another.”4
You’re not so grasping as to require of the purposeless universe more than it has to offer; what you’ve found in it is sufficient, even if dry.
Oh, but it is so bad–and worse still, insist the Apologists.
You are, they hiss, like accusing serpents, a fraud. You are a Christian, in fact, whether you admit it or not. A very inconsistent person.5 Or (more pointedly), Your modern mind is, in fact, demonic in character, bent on power, the only source of meaning.6 Or again (ever more pointedly–and prescriptive), You are, in fact, a nihilist, whether you admit it or not. In which case, your first option would be suicide.7
How do the Apologists know this of you? Because Nietzsche told them as much, and Nietzsche (unlike you) was courageous enough to take the bit between his teeth, whereas you stupidly munch oats in the cozy stall Christianity built. If you had any integrity, you would … read more Nietzsche.8
It is a bit curious, the Apologists’ obsession with Nietzsche. Maybe it’s because he offers–on one reading–a convenient gun to hold to the heads of unbelievers and would-be apostates: Believe or despair! Christianity or nihilism! Abundant life or suicide! And to be sure, passages can be found in Nietzsche’s scribblings that could support such a view:
Christianity cannot be sufficiently condemned for having deprived us, through the idea of personal immortality and the hope of resurrection, of the value of a great purifying nihilistic movement such as was perhaps already in progress – in short, by always dissuading people from committing the nihilistic act of suicide . . .9
The Apologists rub their hands, as if warming them in the fire of their deity’s love.
You lean back in your chair, quieting the guns. The landscape is splintered; creosote drifts in the breeze. Your mind wanders. Should I kill myself? Or have a cup of coffee?
A hazy memory of something you read long ago flickers into view. A ridiculous memory, in the current context, but persistent: Madame Defarge, stone-faced, knitting consequence into a scarf. The Apologists’ apocalyptic scarf, recording your inauthentic, fraudulent, demonic busyness (however unknowing or inadvertent). There will be hell to pay.
Their prophet has spoken, and so it must be.
- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2007), p. 27. ↩︎
- If you think this is an overstatement, see Ervin Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959). As Goffman would have it, there is no “true self” that exists independently of social interactions. So much for authenticity. ↩︎
- Max Weber, Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Letters, ed. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, trans. Damion Searls. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020), p. 31. ↩︎
- Weber 2020, p. 40. ↩︎
- Tim Keller, “Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical,” Talks at Google, October 19, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uIvOniW8xA&t=900s. ↩︎
- Peter Kreft, “The Pillars of Unbelief – Nietzsch,” n.d., https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/pillars_nietzsche.htm. ↩︎
- William Lane Craig, “The Absurdity of Life without God,” Veritas Forum, September 11, 2011, https://www.reasonablefaith.org/videos/lectures/the-absurdity-of-life-without-god-veritas-forum-chicago. See also William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd edition. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), ch. 2, The Absurdity of Life without God. ↩︎
- “Everyone should read more Nietzsche. Believers and unbelievers alike.” Tim Keller, comment on Facebook, February 7, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/TimKellerNYC/posts/everyone-should-read-more-nietzsche-believers-and-unbelievers-alike-short-articl/1398196133553602/. ↩︎
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s, trans. R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti, ed. R. Kevin Hill (Penguin Classics, 2017), Part 1. Nihilism §247. ↩︎
a sampling of apologists’ thoughts on nietzsche
Norman Geisler
Although he was an atheist, even a theist can agree with some of what he said. For example, when God dies, all value dies too. He provided a profound analysis of post-Christian European culture. He stressed the meaninglessness of life without God.
“Friedrich Nietzsche (A.D. 1844 – 1900)”, n.d. https://normangeisler.com/friedrich-nietzsche/.
Timothy Keller
It doesn’t take a huge faith to go from the Hindu view of the universe to humanistic values, or from the Christian view of the universe to humanistic values. But it does from the materialistic, the secular view to humanistic value. You can believe them. But don’t tell me that that’s not a leap of faith. It’s an enormous leap of faith.
And you know who’s going to tell you? Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche is going to say–and this is what he did say, and he argued incredibly–I would say in an incredibly convincing way–he would say, if you say I’m an atheist, and then you say but we should not starve the poor and we should honor their equal rights, he says you’re still a Christian, whether you admit it or not. Because, he says, those ideas came historically into the Western society when people believed in the Christian understanding of the universe–that you’re here for a purpose and you’re made by a loving God and you’re made the image of God and all human beings are children of God. He says those values made sense when we believed the Christian view of the universe.
But we don’t believe that anymore. And therefore, if you hold on to those values, you’re actually being a Christian, and a very, very inconsistent person even though you won’t admit it. I don’t think you can answer Nietzsche.”
“Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical,” Talks at Google, October 19, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uIvOniW8xA&t=900s.
Peter Kreft
But in Nietzsche’s last work, “The Will to Power,” the lack of an end or goal appears as demonic, and mirrors the demonic character of the modern mind. Without a God, a heaven, truth, or an absolute Goodness to aim at, the meaning of life becomes simply “the will to power.” Power becomes its own end, not a means. Life is like a bubble, empty within and without; but its meaning is self-affirmation, egotism, blowing up your bubble, expanding the meaningless self into the meaningless void. “Just will,” is Nietzsche’s advice. It does not matter what you will or why.
We are now in a position to see why Nietzsche is such a crucially important thinker, not despite but because of his insanity. No one in history, except possibly the Marquis de Sade, has ever so clearly, candidly and consistently formulated the complete alternative to Christianity.
“The Pillars of Unbelief – Nietzsch,” n.d., https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/pillars_nietzsche.htm.
William Lane Craig
Most people still do not reflect upon the consequences of secular atheism and so, like the crowd in the marketplace, go unknowingly on their way. But when we realize, as did Nietzsche, the consequences of what atheism implies, and when we stare atheism unflinchingly in the face as Nietzsche had the courage to do, then his question presses hard upon us: how shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?
“The Absurdity of Life without God” (Veritas Forum, 11 Sep 2011), Reasonable Faith, https://www.reasonablefaith.org/videos/lectures/the-absurdity-of-life-without-god-veritas-forum-chicago.
Ravi Zacharias
I say again that one may angrily argue that I am misrepresenting antitheism and that not all antitheists are immoral or despondent. The anger I can understand, but the argument is illogical. It is true that not all antitheists are immoral, but the larger point has been completely missed. Antitheism provides every reason to be immoral and is bereft of any objective point of reference with which to condemn any choice. Any antitheist who lives a moral life merely lives better than his or her philosophy warrants. All denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind, and the antitheist is forever engaged in undermining his own mines. This is precisely what makes Nietzsche’s admission so terrifying.
Can Man Live Without God (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1994), ch. 3, The Madman Arrives.