What Does One Need To Know To Play Any Game?1
- How does it start?
- What are the rules?
- What is the goal?
- How does it end?
Could you imagine playing a game without knowing the answers to each of these four questions? Doing so appears pointless.
Similarly, in the game of life, every worldview — at least — needs to account for (1) Origins, (2) Morality, (3) Meaning, (4) Destiny2
Every worldview has to — at least — address each of these four questions.
Given an atheistic worldview, as has been previously argued (and as many prominent atheists have admitted), there is (3) no ultimate meaning or goal to life. Nor are there, logically, any (2) objective morality or rules to life. We are all just, in the words of Richard Dawkins, “happy chemical accidents”3 who are “dancing to our DNA”4
Moreover, on this view, (1) life is just the product of blind, random forces (which were somehow, “mysteriously” set in motion at the Big Bang) that ends at physical death. (4) Everything and everyone we ever work for, care for, and love will all come to nothing — even the universe will ultimately end in “heat-death.”5
If carried to their respective, logical conclusions, I contend (as does Tim Keller in ‘Making Sense of God‘), that a Christian worldview offers a much more emotionally and volitionally preferable outlook on life than a secular, atheistic worldview.
- Origins: We are created and sustained by a loving, just God who made us in His image (Gen 1:27).
- Morality: God’s commands are the rules by which we are to abide. Only the Creator who gives life has the authority to command how to live life.
- Meaning: The goal of life, simply put, is to know God (experientially, eternally) and to make God known
- Destiny: Through Christ, God graciously allows all who respond in faith(fulness) to live with Him forever (Jn 3:16, etc.).
Even if the evidence for a Christian worldview and an atheistic worldview were equal (which I would strongly argue is not the case), it appears that one should certainly prefer Christianity.
It does come with a cost, however. Contrary to the secular doctrine that is preached unceasingly in our culture, we are not the lords of our lives. The goal of life is not to “follow our dreams.” Rather, we are created for God’s glory (cf. Is 43:7), not ours. We are to pursue God’s desires, not ours. We are to live for the One who died for us, not ourselves (cf. 2 Cor 5:15).
Yes, it does come with a cost. It will cost us perhaps Americans’ most prized value: our “freedom” (i.e., autonomy). Yet, paradoxically, it will free us to be able to become who were were created to be: divine image-bearers made for everlasting communion with God.
Sources
- Illustration adapted from Ravi Zacharias https://rzim.org/ask-intro/
- Illustration adapted from Ravi Zacharias https://rzim.org/ask-intro/
- https://evo2.org/richard-dawkins/
- “Naturalistic morality is arbitrary and could have developed in opposite directions. We happen to admire the morality that evolution has passed on to us, but we could be singing the praises of the very opposite morality for the same reasons: we dance to our DNA.” Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2011), 214.
- “Eventually, the universe will reach an equilibrium temperature, sometimes called the heat death of the universe in which it will not be possible to perform any process that can do any useful work.” Michael G. Strauss, “Second Law of Thermodynamics,” ed. Paul Copan et al., Dictionary of Christianity and Science: The Definitive Reference for the Intersection of Christian Faith and Contemporary Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 624.