Meaning and Purpose – True Success and Significance

I have been recently studying, reflecting, and praying along two parallel streams of thought. First, I have approached the conclusion of a four-year study of the worldviews of the Western world. I have studied the writings of many of the great thinkers in the history of man. I have traced the course of western thinking from the Greeks and the Romans to the Renaissance of southern Europe to the Reformation of northern Europe to the founding of a nation on principles rooted in the absolute truths of Christianity to the rejection of those truths in favor of the arbitrary whims of naturalistic humanism. At the same time, in a second stream of thought, I have been reflecting on my calling, my purpose: how do I strive for significance in God’s eyes rather than success in man’s eyes? I believe that I am more than a collection of molecules driven by a complex, biochemical computer that is deterministically governed by fixed laws of nature; the entity I call myself is not limited to the material world that we can see, touch, and measure. I believe in the supernatural, including a good and active Creator who has created me in His image. Believing that God has a purpose for my life gives me a sense of meaning. Without that belief, I would descend into nihilism, a hopeless existence trapped by the conflict of a self-aware entity that exists by chance as the most advanced machine yet to exist in this part of the vast universe. To escape that nihilism, I would probably choose the drugs of the 21st century: fame and fortune. I would try to drown my feelings of meaningless in hyperactivity, running from one activity to the next, keeping so busy that I do not have time to ask why I am so busy. I would strive to earn more so I can buy more so I can distract myself more. In addition, I would avoid thinking about the future, because the future for that life ends with a mass of chemicals no longer driven by a complex, biochemical computer.

In light of these streams of thought, as my oldest child approaches the end of his high school career, I am reminded of the attitude I inherited from the culture of the 1980s: Why go to college? To earn a degree that will enable me to earn more money. Why earn more money? To enable my children to go to college. This circular reasoning, a significant factor in the guidance I received as a young person, is inherently flawed. While education itself is not a bad thing – it is a good thing – my personal meaning and purpose for existence can and should be so much more than striving for personal peace and affluence. The search for personal peace and affluence leads to pessimism for the thinking person or continuous entertainment and amusement for the person who chooses distraction over nihilism. What do I hope my children will answer if asked for their reason for attending college? Likewise, what drives me to continue to learn and grow and strive for something bigger than myself? “To fulfill my calling from God, a vocation in which I work because I love Him and I love others, a role wherein I feel God’s pleasure as I serve him and others using the particular gifts He has given to me.”

Theological Existentialism

I’ve been reading some of Francis Schaeffer’s writings lately, as well as a few chapters in Sire’s The Universe Next Door. These authors have helped me better understand the views of a variety of people in our culture. As I understand it, the theological existentialist builds an impenetrable barrier between the rational world, which includes science and history, and faith. The secular existentialists like Sartre, Camus, Jaspers, and Heidegger recognized that a system based solely on a naturalist worldview (i.e., the supernatural does not exist) leads to pessimism and ultimately nihilism. Unwilling to live with the depression and hopelessness of this worldview, each of these men sought optimism and hope in something removed from the rational world of logic and reason. However, because we are rational beings, none of their irrational sources of hope has proven to be effective for the masses.

Unfortunately, rather than discard the existential system, many theologians (like Karl Barth) tacked on faith as the source of optimism and hope for modern man. Consistent with the existential approach, these theologians rejected the traditional view that the Christian faith is a rational, reasonable faith. Instead, they chose to keep faith in a separate box, sheltered from the world of logic and reason. Thus, one could believe in the "Christian" God while claiming that the Holy Bible is filled with scientific and historical errors. The result is an irrational faith, one that is not based on revealed truth. In fact, such a faith denies truth as something that can be known. Rather, faith is defined at the personal level and is not founded on a set of propositions and historical events and figures. As I understand theological existentialism, Jesus Christ may have been a real person, but he was not really supernaturally raised from the dead. Miracles never happened. Rather, faith is some ill-defined hope in a God who cannot really be known other than through subjective, personal experience. I see no way to harmonize this view of God with the words of Jesus in John 14:6 (NIV): “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Hickman One

This week, I read B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, his fictional description of a utopian community based on the power and principles of experimental behavioral psychology. The author clearly holds in high esteem the power of the scientific method as applied to the study of human behavior. He sees humans as purely physical beings, complex machines that can be controlled to generate the desired behavior given the proper stimuli. His hypothesis is that a community based on these principles would lead to an overall higher overall sense of happiness and security among the total population. One example of the practical implications of his idea is the method of child-rearing that he advocates. Children would be raised by specialized community workers in age-segregated nurseries or living areas, with only occasional contact with their biological parents.

Admittedly, we have been engaged in our own little social experiment based on very different assumptions. Our presupposition has been that our family environment based on Christian principles is the best place for rearing our children, to the point that we abandoned the government school system in favor of directly providing our children's academic education at home, in addition to spiritual, physical, and social training. Skinner had his Walden Two; we have our Hickman One. The difference is that he apparently never had the opportunity to test his presuppositions fully, either because he wasn't really serious or because he didn't have a thousand friends willing to join his multi-generation experiment, although others apparently have tried. In our case, the experiment is being conducted even as I write. We're well into the second half of our experiment. While our sample size is too small to generalize for the entire population, we certainly have no major regrets and would advocate that others conduct the same experiment based on the same presuppositions and guiding principles.