“DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.”[1]
Richard Dawkins
The atheistic, naturalistic worldview is bleak. If your worldview’s origin story says you are nothing but a product of time, matter, and chance and you merely dance to the beat of your DNA, the moment you give the meaning of life any serious thought you are left with a harsh conclusion. Dawkins continues, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”[2] This is not, however, how humans live. We are aspirational. We long for more. As Huck says to Tom, “…oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”[3] Are humans deluded, frustrated romantics, longing for a meaning to life they will never find? We latch on to all manner of earthly things: achievement, relationships, “stuff”, love, various escapes; good things and bad things, but none which offer deep, guaranteed satisfaction. C.S. Lewis helpfully points to human longing as proof of meaning rooted beyond ourselves. He writes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity – read it all J)” This merely echoes the wisdom of Solomon found in Ecclesiastes, that all pursuits outside of God are vanity and he comes to the simple yet profound, “Remember your Creator. (Ecc 12:1)”
[1] Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, (New York, Basic Books, 1995), p132.
[2] Ibid, p133
[3] Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Detective (Lanham, MD: Start Publishing LLC, 2015)
Something to Praise:
Our meaning and value is not found in ourselves, in others, in anything here on earth. It is rooted in God’s creating of us, the making of us in his image and for his glory! The irony is that it is when we stop chasing after earth-bound meaning that we find meaning, purpose, and fulfilment – even in this life!
“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. (Mark 8:35)”