Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
What does it take to live a meaningful life? Why are so many people in affluent nations so anxious and unhappy? What difference does believing in God really make? Does belief in the God of the Bible truly make sense today? In this revised edition of The God Question, philosopher J. P. Moreland invites us on a journey to a rich, flourishing life. He digs into the causes of our cultural crisis of unhappiness and considers how the God revealed in Jesus provides the most rational solution to our deepest needs. With special sensitivity to skeptics, seekers, and Christians who are disenchanted with their faith, he helps us see the Christian story—its reasonableness and its relevance—in fresh ways. For anyone wrestling with big questions about life and faith, Moreland provides insight from his many years of philosophical studies and his own experience as a Christian. Filled with personal stories, this book explores evidence for the existence of God, the reliability of the Gospels, essentials of a flourishing Christian life, the reality of miracles, and more. This edition features a new section on overcoming anxiety and depression. Wherever you are on your journey, The God Question will help you see anew what difference Jesus makes in a human life.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 484
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
REVISED EDITION
AN INVITATION TO A LIFE OF MEANING
TO BETH AND KLAUS ISSLER
Two fellow sojourners who have accepted the invitation gladly
Contents
Preface
ONCE UPON A TIME there was a man who thought he was dead.
His wife tried everything she could to convince him he was very much alive. But try as she might, he would not change his mind. After several weeks of this, she finally took him to the doctor, who assured the man he was alive. Sadly, it was to no avail. Suddenly, the doctor got an idea. He convinced the man that dead men do not bleed, subsequently stuck him with a needle and smiled as blood ran out of the man’s finger.
The man was downtrodden for several days. He had been certain he was dead, but he could not dispute the fact that he could bleed. Finally, he figured out what to do. Returning to the doctor, the man blurted out, “Good Lord, dead men do bleed after all!”
Our friend had a view of things that he clung to regardless of the evidence that came his way. His “worldview” was immune to revision. As a result, he continued to embrace and assert his view without integrity. If you are like me, you want to live a life of integrity. But there’s a problem. I find myself to be a broken person in so many ways, and these areas of fracture and fragility easily distract me from living a full, rich life with the sort of wisdom I deeply desire. Therein lies a big story that I will unpack in the pages to follow.
But my purpose is not merely to inform you of our brokenness, such as it is, and of our need for wisdom. I need more than that, and I suspect you do too. No, I want to give you the hope of a way out and a way forward. And I very much wish to share with you some deep insights that have helped in my own journey. As much as anything, the pages to follow are an invitation to a full life, to an adventure, filled with meaning and drama. And along with that invitation, I offer as much wise counsel and practical advice as my seventy-something years have afforded me.
Unfortunately, it is precisely here that the story of the man who thought he was dead challenges us. Receiving counsel is sometimes difficult if it requires us to adjust our view of things and adopt the resulting sort of life that follows. This is especially true when we think we have heard that counsel before and find it angering, threatening, boring, silly, or worse. Familiarity does indeed often breed contempt. This book offers fresh new insights that I trust will be intellectually stimulating and personally enriching. But we humans have been at this thing called life for a considerable time. And you, the reader, should rightly be suspicious of anyone who completely reinvents the wheel without taking any advice from the accumulated wisdom of the ages.
I have eagerly appropriated that wisdom and woven it into a tapestry that combines fresh new ideas with (quite often) forgotten ancient ones. The result is, I hope, something that will be as exhilarating and life changing for you as it has been for my entire family and me. I ask of you only that in the pages to follow, when you encounter something familiar, give it a fair hearing. Let me, perhaps, shed new light on the topic. You have nothing to lose by doing this and much to gain. You may discover that it makes a lot more sense to believe that dead men don’t bleed than to hold on to cultural myths that have deadened Western culture to an ancient path that is more relevant today than ever and that leads to a rich and full life.
CHAPTER ONE
Why Can’t I Be Happy?
IN THE MID-1980S, hard evidence revealed that something was seriously wrong with the American way of life. Rumors about the problem were prominent since the 1960s, but when the evidence was published, the rumors became public knowledge, though few today know what is going on. And more evidence has piled up in the past twenty years.
Some of the causes and symptoms of the problem shape the way we approach our lives and make it difficult to face this evidence. Not long ago, I was watching reruns of television commercials of the 1950s. In one quite typical ad, a medical doctor encouraged viewers to smoke cigarettes for their health. Smoking, he assured the viewers, calmed nerves, aided appetite, and helped one sleep better. This widely accepted belief hindered Americans from realizing that cigarettes actually harm one’s health. Similarly, the conditions of contemporary life make the evidence mentioned above hard to accept.
And even if someone accepts this evidence, it is very, very difficult to know what to do about the situation. And I say to you with all my heart that you have been hurt by what the evidence shows. No, it’s worse than that. You and your loved ones have been harmed, not merely hurt. In the following pages I have some good and bad news. Let’s start with the bad news. What are the problems and the evidence to which I have been referring? What are the causes and symptoms that have hindered us from facing the evidence and overcoming our dilemma? Let’s look at these in order.
AMERICANS DON’T KNOW HOW TO BE HAPPY
The cover story of the December 2006 issue of the Economist was about happiness. The Economist is about as far from a pop psychology magazine as you can imagine, so the topic must have been something of great concern to the editors. Based on research data from 1972 to 2006, the article concluded that people in affluent countries have not become happier as they have grown richer, had more leisure time, and enjoyed more pleasurable activities and a higher standard of living.1
In 2005, the results of extensive study on American happiness were released with similar findings: Americans are on average twice as rich, far healthier, more youthful, and safer than they were fifty years ago, but they are not as happy.2 Since the 1960s the percentage of Americans who say they are “very unhappy” has risen by 20 percent, and depression rates are ten times higher than they were during and before the 1950s. Each year, 15 percent of Americans (approximately 40 million people) suffer from an anxiety disorder.
For decades, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman has been the nation’s leading researcher on happiness. His study released in 1988 sent shock waves around the country. Seligman studied the happiness quotient and depression rate among Americans at that time compared to those of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Are you ready for this? He discovered that the loss of happiness and the rise of depression were tenfold in the span of one generation—the baby boomers. Something has gone terribly wrong with American culture, said Seligman, and the tenfold, short-term explosive loss of happiness and growth of depression—a factor that has continued to increase since the 1980s—is clearly epidemic. What is going on?
DIGGING DEEPER
Without being harsh, I must say that we would be naive if we didn’t believe this epidemic has affected all of us. There is a way out of this mess, and the chapters that follow are my best offerings for embarking on a journey to a rich, deep, flourishing life. In fact, I would like you to read this book as my invitation to you for such a life—one that is brimming with drama and adventure, flowering with meaning and purpose. However, I am not interested in merely offering you an invitation. I also want to give you wise counsel that has been repeatedly tested and found trustworthy and helpful for the journey.
A journey has to start somewhere, and the best place to start this one is by digging more deeply into the causes and symptoms of our cultural crisis. We are looking for broad cultural factors that have generated a shift in the way we do life, a shift that has caused the epidemic. These factors are not likely to be things we regularly think about. If they were, most people would have made a priority of avoiding them, and that is not the case. I am not suggesting that people will reject the alleged factors once they are made explicit. Quite the opposite. I believe that once they are laid bare, most folks will experience an ah-ha moment and readily identify with them. No, in order to do their destructive work, these factors have to fly under the radar. They must be so pervasive that they are hardly noticed.
In their excellent book on anxiety and depression, psychologist Edmund Bourne and coauthor Lorna Garano identify three causes for the epidemic: (1) the pace of modern life, (2) the loss of a sense of community and deep connectedness with others beyond the superficial, and (3) the emergence of moral relativism.3 The increased pace of life does not merely refer to more work and less free time, though those are certainly factors. Well into the late Middle Ages, Europeans had 115 holidays a year!4 Besides free time, the sheer pace and speed at which we live—our language is filled with terms like rush hour, hurry up, and fast food—and the technology we use (including iPods, email, television, and cell phones) make it difficult to be quiet and hear from ourselves. As a result, we feed off adrenaline, our brain chemistry is not normal, and we are incapable of handling the stress of ordinary contemporary life. Maybe we were never intended to, but I get ahead of myself.
On the surface, the loss of community reflects two things: Western individualism (which is a good thing in moderation) gone mad, and the supposed lack of time required to cultivate deep friendships, especially among contemporary men, who have often been described as “the friendless American males.” On a deeper level, it reflects misplaced priorities due to a shift on our view of the good life. I will say more about this in the next chapter, but for now I simply note that we define success in terms of the accumulation of consumer goods and the social status that they and a culturally respected line of work provide. We seldom measure a successful life by the quality of family and friendship relationships we cultivate.
Regarding the factor of moral relativism, Bourne and Garano make this note:
Norms in modern life are highly pluralistic. There is no shared, consistent, socially-agreed-upon set of values and standards for people to live by. . . . In the vacuum left, most of us attempt to fend for ourselves, and the resultant uncertainty about how to conduct our lives leaves ample room for anxiety. Faced with a barrage of inconsistent worldviews and standards presented by the media, we are left with the responsibility of having to create our own meaning and moral order. When we are unable to find that meaning, many of us are prone to fill the gap that’s left with various forms of escapism and addiction. We tend [to] live out of tune with ourselves and thus find ourselves anxious.5
I cannot resist making an observation about their insightful point concerning moral relativism. The damage it does is one reason why the contemporary idea of tolerance is really an immoral, cold, heartless form of indifference to the suffering of others. The classic principle of tolerance is both true and important: we take another group’s views to be wrong and harmful, but we will treat the (alleged) errant people with respect, will defend their right to promote their views, and will engage in respective, civil debate in attempting to persuade them and others to reject their viewpoint. The contemporary idea is grotesque: we are not to say others’ views or behavior is wrong. This is immoral because it allows for genuine evil, such as racism and child molestation. We must judge the behavior to be evil before we can stop it! Bourne and Garano show us that it is also cold and heartless: if you think another is engaged in a lifestyle that is deeply immoral and flawed, the most loving thing to do is to help that person face and get out of that lifestyle. Even if you are wrong in your assessment, at least you cared enough to try to help. By contrast, contemporary tolerance creates indifferent people who don’t have the moral vision or courage to intervene in the lives of others and try to help.
We might summarize Bourne and Garano’s insights this way: First, our resistance to depression and anxiety is weakened by the pace of our lives. Second, we don’t have the relational connection we need for support and strength in finding a way out of unhappiness. And third, we lack the intellectual framework required to admit that there is a right and wrong way to approach life and to fuel the energy we need to seek, find, and live in light of the right approach. In fact, believing that there actually is a right approach seems intolerant to many.
I have spent hours thinking about these three points and how they inform my own journey.6 If I may say so, it wouldn’t hurt if you set the book down, took out a sheet of paper, jotted down these three factors, and brainstormed about how they have had a negative impact on you or your loved ones. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Bourne and Garano have identified the heart of the matter. We must probe more deeply.
DIGGING DEEPER STILL
Psychologist Carl Jung once observed that “neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”7 Jung is referring to our tendency to avoid feeling genuine emotional pain and facing real personal suffering and dysfunction by creating, usually subconsciously, a neurotic pattern of thinking or behaving that allows us to be distracted from our real issues.
When I was attending seminary, my roommate was in constant fear that he had committed the unpardonable sin, an act for which there is no forgiveness. Try as I might, I could not reassure him that he had done no such thing. One day while probing him more deeply, I realized that his real issue was fear of abandonment, loneliness, and feelings of inadequacy due to harsh treatment in his early years by his father. However, it was too painful for him to feel and face these—something he needed to do to get well. Such self-awareness would have been legitimate suffering in Jung’s terms. Instead, he projected his anxiety on something more manageable, on something that distracted his anxiety from the real issues—the unpardonable sin—and neurotically worried about this repeatedly throughout his daily life.
I am convinced that this inability to face our deepest anxieties is at the heart of why we have trouble being happy. In chapter two, I will expose why this inability is a distinctively contemporary problem for Western culture since the 1960s. For now, I want to mention two forms of “neurosis” characteristic of many of us. Just as my roommate obsessed about the unpardonable sin, we use these two items to manage our anxiety and cope with life while avoiding the deeper issues we have trouble facing.
The two items to which I am referring are hurry and worry. When I speak of hurry, I am not simply referring to the (sick) pace at which we live our lives. That’s a problem in its own right. No, I am referring to the role that busyness and being in a hurry plays in coping with our fears in an unhealthy way. People are afraid to slow down and be quiet. As one thinker put it, the hardest thing to get Americans to do today is nothing. We fear solitude, silence, and having nothing to do because we fear what will happen if we aren’t busy. What do we fear? We fear that our anxiety will bubble up. We dread feeling insignificant. We fear hearing from ourselves because we might experience pain if we do. We all have responsibilities in which we invest time and effort. But if you compare our lifestyles with folks in earlier generations, it becomes apparent that our busyness and hurried lives are avoidance strategies.
We all have worries and things that could hurt us. But the degree to which we worry is, again, symptomatic of something much deeper. When I refer to worry as a coping strategy, I am not referring to worry about a threatening situation—losing one’s job, being sick, not getting married, and so on. I am talking about worry as an approach to life. In this sense, worrying is actually a learned behavior. As dear as she was, my mother was a very anxious person who worried about everything. I lived around her and absorbed her approach to life, so by the time I was a young adult, I had learned how to worry from an expert. And now I was the expert!
What roles do hurry and worry play in your life? I encourage you to spend some time pondering this question. As a help to you, I suggest you find some safe friends or family members and ask them to give you honest feedback about this. This issue is so deep and so much a part of the warp and woof of American life that it is hard to get in touch with the way we neurotically use hurry and worry to avoid problems.
One of our main fears is boredom and loneliness, and hurry and worry keep us from facing these fears. In fact, some patterns of ideas and beliefs that permeate the arts, media, and educational institutions of our culture make it all but impossible to face boredom and loneliness. More on that in chapter two. Here I want you to ponder an additional fact: it takes a lot of emotional energy to “stuff” our real problems and manage appropriate anxiety by the hurry and worry strategy. And given the three pervasive cultural patterns we mentioned earlier—our pace of life, the loss of community, and the emergence of moral relativism—we have a very dangerous situation in our culture.
To live the way many of us do takes a lot of energy, so we are vulnerable to addiction. Various addictions provide some form of relief from a neurotic life and offer some reward on a regular basis in the form of the satisfaction of desire, usually bodily desire. However, all such addictions obey the law of diminishing returns. The more one turns to addictive behavior, the less it pays off and the more one must turn to the addiction. It may be social recognition, sexual stimulation, drugs or alcohol abuse, eating, acquiring consumer goods, and so on. Over time, we shrivel as authentic persons, and we become less and less in touch with our real selves. Instead, we must project a false self to others—a self we wish others to believe about us, a self that is a collage of parental messages, strategies for remaining safe and hidden, and behaviors that avoid shame and guilt. The range of our free will diminishes, and we become enslaved to safety, social rules, and bodily pleasures and their satisfaction.
It’s time to summarize. For at least sixty years, Americans have become increasingly unable to find happiness and, instead, are ten times more likely to be depressed and anxiety filled than Americans of other generations. Clearly, something about our culture is deeply flawed. As a first step toward identifying the flaws, I noted the adrenalized pace of life, the loss of a sense of community, and the emergence of moral relativism in American culture. Digging more deeply, I noted that for these and other reasons, we find it hard to face our real, authentic emotional pain and, instead, opt for lifestyles of hurry and worry that allow us to cope with our boredom, emptiness, and loneliness without having to face our true situation. Such an approach takes a lot of emotional energy and, partly to comfort ourselves, we turn to addictive behaviors that increasingly turn us into false selves who no longer know who we are.
AN INVITATION AND A WORD OF CONCERN
I have received much help from others in my own journey, and I believe I have some genuinely good news for you in the pages to follow. I invite you to read on with an open mind and heart. However, I’m concerned about something. I am troubled that you may not be willing to think afresh with me about what follows and won’t benefit from whatever wisdom is offered. Why am I so concerned? It’s because of my topic and the two primary types of people with whom I want to travel.
Beginning with chapter two, I am going to mention the G word—God—more specifically, the Christian God and Jesus of Nazareth. As we will see, whenever we focus on living a rich life and face our inability to be happy, broad questions about the meaning of life inevitably surface. This is as it should be. And lurking in the neighborhood will be questions about God. It has been said that the single most important thing about a person is what comes to mind when he or she hears the word God. This is a trustworthy saying.
So why am I concerned? Because it is so very hard to invite someone in this culture to give this topic a fresh hearing, especially from my two audiences. The first person to whom I am writing is not a follower of Jesus. You may be an aggressive atheist, mildly agnostic, or inclined to think that religion should be a private matter and that “Live and let live” should be one’s motto. If you fit this category, you may have picked up this book at a bookstore or found it online, or a friend or relative may have given it to you. If the latter is the case, you may feel defensive about reading the book. You may feel that your friend or relative wants to fix you or to “win” in your longstanding dialogues about Christianity. If you read this book with an open mind and fresh start, and if you come to agree with some of my offerings, you could lose face, as it were. Others could say you were wrong all along and this proves it.
I completely understand such defensiveness, having practiced it myself in various contexts. But to be honest, if you are concerned about such matters, you are actually not being true to yourself. Instead, you are letting others control you. You are giving them free rent in your mind. It’s as though they are looking over your shoulder as you read, just waiting to jump on you if you come to see things as they do. My advice is that you not let others have such power over you. Be yourself. Think for yourself. Give me a hearing, and when you have read the entire book, step back and decide for yourself what you think about these matters.
Besides friends or relatives, if you fit into this first group, I actually have a deeper concern—really, two concerns—about you being defensive in reading what follows. Having talked to atheists and agnostics for forty years, I’ve seen that many of them don’t want God to exist. In a rare moment of frankness, atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel makes this admission:
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, I hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.8
Such an approach to life is hard to sustain. Influential atheist Douglas Coupland frankly acknowledges how difficult it is:
Now—here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.9
Fathers and freedom. If you are an atheist or something close to it, I believe there may be two reasons why you think this way. I am sharing these with you to be helpful, not to throw this in your face. No one is here but you and me, so please see if these describe you. The first reason you may approach the question of God with anger or rejection is unresolved conflict with your own father figure. I have spoken on more than two hundred college campuses and in more than forty states in the last forty years, and it has become apparent to me that atheists regularly have deep-seated, unresolved emotional conflicts with their father figures. To think that this plays no role in their atheism would be foolish. Paul Vitz, a leading psychologist in this area, claims that, in fact, such conflict is at the very heart of what motivates a person to reject God or be indifferent to religion.10
Let’s be honest. You owe it to yourself to see if this is causing you to be defensive about the topic of God. If it is, I urge you in the safety of our conversation to follow, to try to set this aside.
The second reason you may not want the Christian God to be real has been identified by Dinesh D’Souza: people want to be liberated from traditional morality so they can engage in any sexual behavior that satisfies them without guilt, shame, or condemnation.11 The famous atheist Aldous Huxley made this admission:
I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. . . . For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was . . . liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.12
If you have a vested interest in wanting to look at pornography or to engage in sexual activity outside of a traditional marriage, your hostility to God may well be a way of enabling yourself to sustain your lifestyle while flying in a no-guilt zone. I take no pleasure in saying this, and I am not trying to be harsh or judgmental toward you. The opposite is the case. I have help for you and will offer it in the chapters to follow. All I ask of you is that you give me a hearing and not allow these factors to fuel your defensiveness in such a way that you are not teachable and open to exploring these issues together.
Caricatures of Christians. My first concern about defensiveness, then, is due to the role that unresolved father issues and sexual practices may play in preventing you from facing this topic honestly and with a good and open heart. My second concern is the associations that come to mind when people in our culture think of conservative Christians, most of whom would be called evangelicals. You may see red at the very thought of Christians. They are hypocrites, intolerant bigots, nosy members of the Religious Right who try to tell others what to do and how to think. Christians are irrational, unscientific, nonthinking sorts who will gullibly believe anything. Comparing Christians (and other religious zealots) and secularists, University of California at Berkeley professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich gave this warning:
The great conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The true battle will be between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.13
With friends like that, who needs enemies! Reich needs to lighten up a bit. Still, you may share his opinion of what it means to be a Christian. May I suggest two counterarguments that may help you get something out of this book? First, Reich’s statement and the description of Christians in the preceding paragraph are gross caricatures that are far from the truth. It’s a cultural lie that the more educated you become the more you reject Christianity. In 1998, University of North Carolina sociologist Christian Smith published what may be the most extensive study to date of the impact of contemporary culture on American evangelicalism. Smith’s extensive research led him to this conclusion:
Self-identified evangelicals have more years of education than fundamentalists, liberals, Roman Catholics, and those who are nonreligious . . . Of all groups, evangelicals are the least likely to have only a high-school education or less; the nonreligious are the most likely. Furthermore, higher proportions of evangelicals have studied at the graduate-school level than have fundamentalists, liberals, or the nonreligious.14
Sure, there are a few bad (ignorant and bigoted) eggs in our basket, but the whole basket should not be judged on this account.
Even if this demeaning picture of Christians contains more than a small grain of truth, becoming a follower of Jesus doesn’t have to make you like this. And there’s still the issue of you and your own life and welfare. You have a life to live, and if you are anything like me, you need all the help you can get to live it well. The real issue is whether the Christian God is real and can be known, whether Jesus of Nazareth was really the very Son of God, and whether the movement he started is what you need and have been looking for (consciously or not). At the end of the day, the issue is not whether Christians are hypocrites, Republicans, or whatever. The issue is Jesus of Nazareth and your life.
Familiarity. The second person to whom I am writing is a Christian who has become too familiar with the form of Christianity often present in our culture. If this is you, you may have become inoculated from the real thing. You are bored with church, you don’t like religious games, and you believe you have given the Christian thing a try and it isn’t what it was cracked up to be.15 In a way, you’ve lost hope. The fire in your belly has dimmed, and you despair of finding more as a Christian. You think you have already heard and heeded the invitation I am about to unpack, and you are not interested in hearing the same old stuff again. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.
Dallas Willard puts his finger on this problem: “The major problem with the invitation now is precisely overfamiliarity. Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity—unsuspected unfamiliarity, and then contempt. People think they have heard the invitation. They think they have accepted it—or rejected it. But they have not. The difficulty today is to hear it at all.”16 I’m asking you to listen again to the invitation as though for the first time. In some cases, that won’t actually be true. You will likely read things in subsequent chapters that you have heard before. If so, I promise to try to give these things new life, to cast them in a new light. In other cases, that may actually be true. Some brand-new insights may follow. If you are a Christian who fits my description, all I can do is to ask you to read on with an open heart.
So let’s move on. You and I have lives to live. How can we get better at it? In chapter two, we jump out of the pan and into the fire. We move to what I believe is at or near the bottom of why you and many of our fellow Americans can’t find much happiness in life. The central issue revolves around broad cultural ideas about life, reality, and confidence. The fundamental issue involves the mind and how we think about and see things. But before I can tell you that story, I’ll need to let you in on something about your brain.
CHAPTER TWO
Hope for a Culture of Bored and Empty Selves
YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK
According to a famous song, it’s never supposed to rain in Southern California, but my wife and I drove toward the campus of UCLA in a downpour. I was scheduled to participate in a debate with two other scholars on whether humans have a soul and free will. One professor could not come, so I was to square off with one of the nation’s leading neuroscientists—UCLA professor Jeffrey Schwartz. I was in for a big and pleasant surprise.
As it turned out, Schwartz and I were in almost complete agreement that the soul or self is a spiritual substance different from the brain and that people therefore have free will. So the debate turned into a rich evening in which a philosopher and brain scientist shared evidence for the same conclusion from different academic disciplines. During his presentation, Professor Schwartz shared something of deep importance to you and your journey toward a rich and full life.
Several years earlier, Schwartz had taken brain scans of obsessive-compulsive people who engaged in repetitive handwashing rituals. They all had a very distinctive, abnormal brain configuration. Schwartz then told the patients to do something for a few weeks and come back: every time they felt the compulsion to wash their hands, they were to exercise free will, choose to think different thoughts (for example, I don’t need to wash my hands; a little dirt isn’t going to kill me), and repeatedly practice this. When new scans were performed, all the patients had different and normal brain configurations. Lesson: by exerting free will, the mind can change the physical structure of the brain.1
Subsequently, Schwartz has done experiments in which people’s brains are monitored as they watch videos of carnage from automobile accidents. The anxiety center of the brain goes wild. Then he tells them to pretend they are paramedics who must make snap decisions about who to treat first and what to do. When showed the same scenes the anxiety center remained calm. We can alter our brain and its role in facilitating anxiety, anger, and so forth by changing the way we think and adjusting our perspective. Here was Schwartz’s punch line: people who see the glass half full regarding their lives are healthier, happier, and more functional than those who don’t. And, he said, Christian theists who have a background belief that God is real, good, and caring will have a substantial leg up on those without such a belief.
The bottom line: you are what you think. Even better, you are what you believe because studies show that to change your brain chemistry, defeat anxiety and depression, and have a pervasive sense of well-being, you must spot false ways of thinking about life and replace them with thoughts you take to be true. As it turns out, your beliefs are the rails on which your life runs. You almost always live up to—or down to—your actual beliefs. Your worldview—the set of things you actually believe about God, reality, meaning, value, what counts as success, what constitutes a good person and whether or not you are one, what we can and cannot know, and other significant topics—is the most important factor about your life. It’s more important than having a flat stomach, being healthy, or fulfilling the American dream.
This is the conclusion of the studies reported by Seligman and Campos to which I referred in chapter one. Campos explicitly states that we are healthier, live longer, are twice as wealthy, have more leisure time, and are better off than our parents and grandparents. But we are less happy. Why? According to Campos, our lives are built on a mistaken premise: if we achieve the American dream and the items just listed, we will be happy. But that doesn’t work. What should we do about this? Campos says that we should seek meaning and purpose in life instead of pleasure and so forth.
Seligman comes to a similar conclusion. According to his study, the baby boomer generation is ten times more depressed and less happy than earlier generations. Why? Because boomers stopped trying daily to live for something bigger than they are—such as God, country, or extended family—and instead lived for themselves and their own happiness 24/7.
I wonder if you can identify with all this. Without being judgmental, think for a minute about your neighbors, relatives, coworkers, and other acquaintances. What exactly are they living for? What picture of success makes the most sense of the way they spend their time, money, and efforts? Now, think about yourself and ask the same question. Be ruthlessly honest about this. Take a personal inventory, and if you have trouble being self-aware, ask a loved one or close friend to give you feedback.
One thing was missing in Seligman’s and Campos’s reports. Neither could explain why Americans in the 1960s made this sudden and harmful shift. There’s an answer to this question, and I’m going to tell you what I think it is in the remainder of this chapter. Before I do, two further preliminaries must be put in place.
First, let’s take stock of what we’ve learned so far. Since the 1960s, most of us struggle with unhappiness, boredom, and emptiness, according to all the data. Fewer and fewer of us experience a deep, full sense of well-being day to day. The surface reasons for this include our pace of life, the loss of community, moral relativism, and hurry and worry. But there is a deeper root cause. Something about the way we think, something about our pervasive belief patterns, something about our culture’s plausibility structure (the things we take to be plausible or implausible as an unconscious default position inherited from our culture) has shifted. It has contributed to the formation of people who see the glass half empty, who do not have a set of life-enhancing, brain-restoring beliefs, who no longer exert the effort to live for something bigger than their own lives and instead focus all their energies on personal pleasure and affluence.
From what we have learned, this much is clear. But before I can give you my take on what underlies all this, there is another preliminary to ponder. We must probe the current situation from a slightly different perspective.
RUMORS OF EMPTINESS
In 1979, Christopher Lasch’s bestseller The Culture of Narcissism appeared on the scene. It remains one of the most insightful analyses of American culture I have ever read. Lasch analyzed cultural patterns during the previous twenty-one years, and the book’s subtitle was grim: American Life in an Age of Diminished Expectations. According to Lasch, beginning around 1958, therapists began to face an escalation of patients who did not suffer from any specific problem. Instead, they suffered from vague, ill-defined anxiety and depression that seemed “to signify an underlying change in the organization of personality, from what has been called inner-direction to narcissism.”2
Something had gone wrong with the American psyche itself, which had become numb with pervasive feelings of emptiness and a deep fracture in self-esteem. More and more Americans were preoccupied with their own self-absorbed, infantile needs, along with the instant gratification of desire. As a result, they found it impossible to form intimate relationships with others and to live for something bigger than they were, to identify with some historical stream (for example, the outworking of the kingdom of God or the progression of American ideals and values) that gave meaning to their lives and with respect to which they could play a role.
The epidemic explosion of pervasive American narcissism since the 1960s is a manifestation of an underlying shift in the meaning of the word happiness away from a steady understanding of the word from the time of Moses and ancient Greece up to the 1700s in Great Britain and the 1960s in America.3 The current understanding of happiness identifies it with a pleasurable feeling, a sensation we experience when our team wins, we get a raise, or something exciting happens to us. In fact, the lead definition of happiness in the fourth edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary is “a feeling of great pleasure.” Thus, today we have “happy hour.” The classic definition of happiness—a life well lived, a life of wisdom and virtue—has dropped out of the dictionary. Now, pleasant feelings are surely better than unpleasant ones, but the problem today is that people are obsessively concerned with feeling happy. People are enslaved and addicted to such feelings.
There are two problems with this. For one thing, while pleasurable satisfaction is a good thing, it is not important enough to be the goal of life. As we will see in a moment, we have bigger fish to fry. Second, the best way to find pleasurable satisfaction is not to seek it, but rather to seek something else—objective meaning in life and the classic sense of happiness—for which pleasurable satisfaction is a byproduct. In general, feelings are wonderful servants but terrible masters. When people make happiness their goal, they do not find it, and as a result, they start living their lives vicariously through identification with celebrities. People literally need to get a life. They have to find something bigger and more important to live for than pleasurable satisfaction, and they have to find a new strategy for daily life besides self-absorption.
Here we must confront the classic understanding of happiness embraced by Moses, Solomon, Jesus, Aristotle, Plato, the church fathers, medieval theologians, the writers of the Declaration of Independence, and many more, the understanding now replaced by “pleasurable satisfaction.” According to the ancients, happiness is a life well lived, a life of virtue and character, a life that manifests wisdom, kindness, and goodness. For them, the life of happiness, the life about which to dream and fantasize, for which to hunger and seek, that should be imitated and practiced, is a life of virtue and character. At its center, such a life includes a very deep sense of well-being, but this sense should not be confused with pleasurable satisfaction. Table 1 may help clarify the difference.
The abandonment of the classic notion for its trivial, superficial contemporary counterpart has given rise to what psychologists call the empty self. The empty self, now an epidemic in America (and much of Western culture), is that to which Lasch, Seligman, and Campos refer. Philip Cushman agrees: “The empty self is filled up with consumer goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathetic therapists. . . . [The empty self ] experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning . . . a lack of personal conviction and worth, and it embodies the absences as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger.”4 Pop teenage culture provides a clear example of a social system that produces and contains an abundance of empty selves. Sadly, the traits of the empty self do not leave at the age of twenty; studies show that these traits continue until around forty years of age, and increasingly, they last longer than that.
Table 1. Two understandings of happiness
Contemporary Happiness
Classical Happiness
1. pleasurable satisfaction
1. virtue and well-being
2. an intense feeling
2. a settled tone
3. dependent on external circumstances
3. springs from within
4. transitory and fleeting
4. more permanent and stable
5. addictive and enslaving
5. empowering and liberating
6. split off from rest of self, doesn’t color rest of life, creates false and empty self
6. integrated with entire personality, colors everything else, creates true self
7. achieved by self-absorbed narcissism; success produces a celebrity
7. achieved by a life of self-denial for an objective, larger good; success produces a hero
Whether we like it or not, you, I, our neighbors, and our coworkers have been damaged by this shift in culture. The empty self is a culturally pervasive phenomenon. Its emergence is due to a widespread, generalized sense of existential angst—a deep dread or fear that something is wrong with the world, that something very deep is absent. The empty self cannot face this deeper issue, and narcissism is the result. Neurosis is always a substitute for genuine suffering. Note very carefully that this cultural situation is a distinctively contemporary phenomenon of Western culture. So, what happened? Why the shift in the meaning of happiness?
THE FUNDAMENTAL CAUSE OF THE EMPTY SELF
I neglected to tell you Lasch’s concluding description of the narcissistic personality ubiquitous in our culture: “The ideology of [narcissistic] personal growth, superficial optimism, radiates a profound despair and resignation. It is the faith of those without faith.”5 In referring to “those without faith,” Lasch is talking about the rise of secularism, along with religious skepticism, cynicism, and indifference that go with it. And secularism is responsible for the “profound despair and resignation” that lies in the subconscious bosom of many of us.
We are fed secular ways of thinking at our mother’s knee. We are socialized into a naturalistic, atheistic (or agnostic) way of seeing the world. It is the very air that we breathe. In 2007 the New York Times published an article claiming that the difference between Europe and America is that Europe embraces secularism and America embraces religion.6 The article recommends that America follow in Europe’s steps. Secularizing factors such as this pelt us daily, and they are so widespread and frequent that they are hardly noticed.
Indeed, their stealth nature explains how secularization gets past our defenses and forms the deepest part of the American psyche, even for religious believers. My graduate students from Africa, South America, and Asia tell me that they regularly see miracles of healing (including blind or lame people made well through prayer) in their services. They are befuddled by the weak faith characteristic of the American church. Dallas Willard makes this note about the negative impact of secularism:
The crushing weight of the secular outlook . . . permeates or pressures every thought we have today. Sometimes it even forces those who self-identify as Christian teachers to set aside Jesus’ plain statements about the reality and total relevance of the kingdom of God and replace them with philosophical speculations whose only recommendation is their consistency with a “modern” mind-set. The powerful though vague and unsubstantiated presumption is that something has been found out that renders a spiritual understanding of reality in the manner of Jesus simply foolish to those who are “in the know.”7
The subconscious fear that God is dead is responsible for the loss of real, classic happiness among the American people. With real insight, Lasch correctly saw a connection between a secular perspective and a profound sense of despair and fatalism about life. To see why this connection is correct, suppose I invited you over to my house to play a game of Monopoly. When you arrive I announce that the game is going to be a bit different. Before us is the Monopoly board, a set of jacks, a coin, the television remote, and a refrigerator in the corner of the room. I grant you the first turn, and puzzlingly, inform you that you may do anything you want: fill the board with hotels, throw the coin in the air, toss a few jacks, fix a sandwich, or turn on the television. You respond by putting hotels all over the board and smugly sit back as I take my turn. I respond by dumping the board upside down and tossing the coin in the air. Somewhat annoyed, you right the board and replenish it with hotels. I turn on the television and dump the board over again.
Now it wouldn’t take too many cycles of this nonsense to recognize that it didn’t really matter what you did with your turn, and here’s why. There is no goal, no purpose to the game we are playing. Our successive turns form a series of one meaningless event after another. Why? Because if the game as a whole has no purpose, the individual moves within the game are pointless. Conversely, only a game’s actual purpose according to its inventor can give the individual moves significance. For example, if the purpose of Monopoly were to see who could lose their money first, all of a sudden the utilities would be treasures, and Boardwalk and Park Place would become lethal properties!
Two things follow from our little thought experiment: (1) If we are playing Monopoly, yet the game has no purpose, then what we do with our turns doesn’t matter. In fact, the very act of taking a turn becomes pointless and empty. If the game as a whole is without purpose, then the individual moves within the game are meaningless. (2) If the game was actually invented by someone who established its goal or purpose, players must know what that purpose is. Misinformation about the purpose could easily harm players if their efforts are directed at an end inconsistent with the game’s actual goal. Sincerity is not enough.
It is not just the fear of God’s death that is creating the contemporary crisis of meaning. It is also a deep angst about our own deaths. UCLA professor Daniel Siegel is a world-renowned psychiatrist. In his blockbuster book Mindsight, Seigel analyzes and presents some solutions to our modern mental health crisis with a special focus on anxiety and depression. Appropriately, he reserves to the last chapter of the book a treatment of the most important issue—finding purpose in life in the face of an uncertain destiny and the fact of mortality. It is the pervasive, underlying fear of death that causes so much hopelessness and despair today. To illustrate the point, Siegel cites one of his colleagues who works seven days a week: “If I don’t work at solving these scientific puzzles, I’ll think about death and become riddled with anxiety and depression. I work like this to stave off becoming morose.”8 Let’s be honest: whatever solution we adopt for the malaise described in the previous pages, it must—must—contain a rationally and psychologically satisfactory solution to the death problem.
IT’S THE EPISTEMOLOGY, STUPID!
This is where we stand today. Pervasive, subtle, almost subconscious patterns of ideas in our culture imply that life has no meaning. All that is left is addiction to contemporary happiness, the instant satisfaction of desire, and deep anxiety. Let me explain.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself: What is it, what are its limits, how do we acquire it? The fundamental characteristic of contemporary secularism lies in an epistemological principle. Given the two worldviews (which I’ll describe in a moment) that permeate the marketplace of ideas, the central defining feature of our secular culture is this epistemological principle: knowledge is limited to what can be tested by the five senses and the hard sciences are our only sources of knowledge of reality. There is no nonempirical knowledge (knowledge outside the five senses), especially no theological or ethical knowledge. Science alone carries authority in culture because knowledge gives people authority and science alone has knowledge.
Unfortunately, science cannot even formulate (much less answer) the central questions of importance to life: Is there a God, is there meaning to life, is there such a thing as right and wrong, what is a good person and how do I become one, and so on and so on?
It can hardly be overemphasized that the primary characteristic of modern secularism is its view of the nature and limits of knowledge. It is critical to understand this because if knowledge gives one power—we give surgeons and not carpenters the right to cut us open precisely because surgeons have the relevant knowledge not possessed by carpenters—then those with the cultural say-so about who does and doesn’t have knowledge will be in a position to marginalize and silence groups judged to have mere belief and private opinion.
There simply is no established, widely recognized body of ethical or religious knowledge now operative in the institutions of knowledge in our culture, such as the universities and schools. Indeed, ethical and religious claims are frequently placed into a privatized realm of nonfactual beliefs whose sole value is that they are “meaningful” to the believer. Such claims are judged to have little or no intellectual authority, especially compared to the authority given science to define the limits of knowledge and reality in those same institutions.
The pervasive denial of truth, knowledge, and rationality outside the hard sciences has left people without hope that true, knowable forms of moral and theological wisdom can be discovered as guides to a flourishing life. As a result, people have turned to emotion and the satisfaction of desire as the decisive factors in adopting a worldview. In turn, this affective approach to life, now embodied in art and culture generally, has created the conditions for the emergence of the empty self I have described. And I repeat an important point: never before in the history of Western culture has this personality type been seen so pervasively and profoundly; indeed, it is a post-’60s phenomenon. And this destructive phenomenon results from a shift in worldview from a Judeo-Christian one to two alternatives to be mentioned shortly. The result is a shift in our culture’s default position about knowledge: it is limited to the hard sciences and is not available as guidance in the most important areas of life.
Just recently I spoke to a woman who is a doctor at the University of California at Irvine. She is a Christian, and her colleagues regularly express shock and disgust to her that she believes such superstitious things.
The two worldviews that have created this situation and have replaced a Judeo-Christian worldview are scientific naturalism and postmodernism. I want to provide a brief sketch of these secularizing ideologies and explain how they have impacted your life.
Naturalism.9 Just what is scientific naturalism (hereafter, naturalism)? Succinctly put, it is the view that the spatio-temporal universe of physical objects, properties, events, and processes that are well established by scientific forms of investigation compose all there is, was, or ever will be.
Naturalism has three major components. First, it begins with an epistemology, a view about the nature and limits of knowledge, known as scientism. Scientism comes in two forms: strong and weak. Strong scientism is the view that the only things we can know are things that can be tested scientifically. Scientific knowledge exhausts what can be known, and if some belief is not part of a well-established scientific theory, it is not an item of knowledge. Weak scientism allows some minimum, low-grade degree of rational justification for claim in fields outside of science like ethics. But scientific knowledge is taken to be vastly superior to other forms of reasonable belief—so much so that if a good scientific theory implies something that contradicts a belief in some other discipline, then the other field will simply have to adjust itself to be in line with science.
Second, naturalism contains a creation story—a theory, a causal story, about how everything has come to be. The central components of this story are the atomic theory of matter and evolution. The details of this story are not of concern here, but two broad features are of critical importance. First is the explanation of macrochanges in things (a macrochange is a change in some feature of a normal sized object that can be detected by simple observation, such as the change in a leaf’s color) in terms of microchanges (changes in small, unobservable entities at the atomic or subatomic level). Chemical change is explained in terms of rearrangements of atoms; phenotype changes are due to changes in genotypes. Causation is from bottom up, micro to macro. We explain why heating water causes it to boil in terms of the excitation of water molecules. The second feature of the creation story is that all events that happen are due to the occurrence of earlier events plus the laws of nature, regardless of whether the laws of nature are taken to be deterministic or probabilistic. Given synchronic (at a point in time) and diachronic (over time) determinism, there simply is no room for common-sense free will, no legitimate responsibility or blame, and no genuine praise for certain acts or people. Why? Because people’s “actions” are determined by factors over which they have no control.
