Our founding fathers understood the pursuit of happiness to mean the pursuit of a virtuous life. This concept of happiness comes from the Greek word eudaimonia—which refers to a life well-lived, a life rooted in truth. That is what happiness means, and that is what every man and woman has an inalienable right to pursue—a virtuous life.
And as I wrote in my book The Good Life, this is the definition of happiness that we need to reclaim in American life—especially within the Church. After all, a Barna survey revealed that more than half of evangelicals agreed with the statement: “The purpose of life is enjoyment and personal fulfillment.”
Come on. If the last 50 years have taught us anything, it’s that consumerism and hedonism (the pursuit of unbridled pleasure) do not lead to happiness, but instead to personal and societal misery.
[…]The goal is not pleasure; it is righteous living, decency, honor, doing good—in short, living a virtuous life.
I’ve heard J. P. Moreland write about this, too, in his book “Love Your God With All Your Mind”. (And again in “Kingdom Triangle”)
J.P. says in chapter 1 of LYGWYM that freedom is “the power to do what one ought to do”. he right to the pursuit of happiness means that no individual or government has the power to prevent you from living the virtuous life that God intended for you. That is why I come down so hard on the secular left. When they force Christians to deny their faith and act like atheists in public, (e.g. – to perform abortions or lose their jobs), then the government is thwarting the pursuit of happiness, rightly understood.
God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to give you six (or six billion, billion, billion) of the best if you are bad. Morality is flimflam.
[…]Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers. But it is, and has to be, a funny kind of emotion. It has to pretend that it is not that at all! If we thought that morality was no more than liking or not liking spinach, then pretty quickly it would break down.
[…]So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective.
[…]Now you know that morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator, what’s to stop you behaving like an ancient Roman? Well, nothing in an objective sense.
So what morality is, objectively, is a bad feeling you get as a result of biological evolution and social pressure. It’s just a feeling. An illusion.
But Ruse says that you have to pretend it’s real, or else we’ll all live like barbarians. But if morality is nonsense, then what REASON is there not to act like a barbarian individually as long as you can get away with it? Let the other fools who believe in God be honest. You do what you like in order to be happy in the few years you have to live – just don’t get caught and punished for breaking the arbitrary fashions of the culture in your time and place.
On atheism, your life, the lives of all other organisms, and the life of stars that provide heat and light to planets, will end eventually die in the heat death of the universe. In the end, it will not matter what we do, the universe will still end up cold, dark and inert.
So let’s re-cap the FACTS about Ruse’s atheistic worldview.
Are humans worth more (objectively) than cockroaches on atheism? The answer is no.
Is there any way humans ought to behave (objectively) on atheism? The answer is no.
Is there any purpose to life (objectively) on atheism? The answer is no.
Is there an objective standard of right and wrong on atheism? The answer is no.
Is discourse on what is “right” and “wrong” meaningful on atheism? The answer is no.
Is there free will so people can make moral choices on atheism? The answer is no.
Is there any reason to sacrifice your happiness for others on atheism? The answer is no.
Atheism is the worldview of people who want to escape from morality. They pre-suppose materialism in order to 1) fit in with the educated class and/or 2) justify immoral hedonism. Later, atheists invent pious myths to put up a fig leaf of moral virtue, e.g. – vegetarianism, yoga, recycling, voting for universal health care, etc. That’s atheism. There is no intellectual content to it. It’s not based on arguments and evidence. It’s just a long-running tantrum against parental/church authority, covered over with faddish causes to whitewash the absurdity of life without God.
The universe is running out of usable energy and the end is nearer than expected, according to Australian National University astronomers.
[…]PhD student Chas Egan and his supervisor Charley Lineweaver from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics calculated how run-down the universe was and found it was 30 times more dilapidated than previously thought.
In doing so they measured the universe’s entropy a gauge of how ”disorderly” the cosmos is and how close it is to its cold, lifeless end.
[…]Mr Egan said all the processes that occurred in the universe increased its entropy.
”When you leave any isolated system it gets more and more disorderly,” he said.
[…]Scientists believe that end will take the form of a ”heat death”.
”All the matter currently in stars and planets will be spread out homogenously through space and it will be cold and dark and nothing will be able to live and no processes will go on.
The findings, to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, have implications not just for Earthlings but for any extraterrestrial life as well.
”We’re not just talking about our solar system or our galaxy, we’re talking about our universe,” he said.
”These constraints apply to all life forms that might be in the universe.”
What implications does this discovery have on the question of meaning and purpose in life? If nothing that we do now will survive the end of the universe, then what reason do we have to do anything?
Atheist and Christian responses to the end of the universe
We can get BOTH SIDES of the question from this clip of a formal debate featuring Christian scholar William Lane Craig and atheist writer Christopher Hitchens.
The question being debated is: “Is there objective meaning and purpose in life without God?”. Hitchens and Craig agree that without God, the universe will cool down and all life will die. And they both agree that if there is no God, then there is no objective meaning and purpose in life.
Hitchens says that he can arbitrarily choose a purpose for his life that makes him happy and fulfilled. But notice that this purpose is an arbitrary personal preference. Someone who chooses mass murder or slavery, and has the power to carry it out with impunity, has as much right to choose that purpose as Hitchens does to choose his.
What can we conclude from the atheist view of purpose and meaning?
What does it say about atheism that there is no way to distinguish between William Wilberforce and Josef Stalin? They were both just doing what made them happy, and there is no way either of them ought to have acted, and no objective moral standard by which to praise or condemn them. Some people admire Wilberforce. Some people admire Stalin. No one is right or wrong, because the choice of life purpose is arbitrary, on atheism. So long as you are happy, and the majority of people in your time and place applaud you, anything is permissible.
What would you think of a person whose every action is designed to maximize their pleasurable feelings in this life? What would you make of a person who believed that other people were just bags of atoms, with no human rights and no free will? What would you make of a person who thought that other people were just objects to be used (or dispersed) in whatever way made them feel happiest? What does a selfish attitude do to enterprises like marriage and parenting?
Is it any surprise that we have killed 50 million unborn babies as a result of our own irresponsible search for pleasure? Sex is fun, but taking responsibility for the decision to have sex is not fun. So we kill innocent people who are weaker than us in order to maximize our pleasure in this life. And why not? On atheism, there is no objective meaning in life, no objective purpose to life, and no objective moral standard of right and wrong.
WINTERY KNIGHT 