Travel broadens the mind. Whether it’s moving from the UK to Canada, as I did last year, or even travelling within Canada, it’s always a privilege to see new places. I’ve been very fortunate these last few years: from sunset on Everest, to the crazy streets of Kathmandu, from the crumbling remnants of communism in Budapest to the spires of Oxford, it feels like I’ve seen a lot. But the main thing you realise as you travel and experience more and more cultures is that whilst cultures are very different, human beings are fundamentally much the same wherever you go. Not least, many of the basic questions that we ask about “life, the universe and everything”, to borrow Douglas Adams’ phrase, remain the same.
Questions like “who are we?”, “where are we?”, “what’s life all about?” Questions like these are common to all of us and are expressed in a range of ways in our culture. And how you answer those questions about life are governed by something called your worldview. Your worldview is the set of spectacles, as it were, through which you view the world. It’s not what you see but what you see with — the assumptions, beliefs, ideas you bring to the questions of life, the decisions you make, the opinions you form, the conclusions that you draw. And everybody has one. It’s impossible to live without a worldview, for all of us have to address a number of quite deep and profound questions about life and reality. Questions of origin, meaning, morality and destiny. Whether you’re a Christian or atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or New Ager, you have to face these questions. Origin — where did I come from and what does it mean to be human? Meaning — is there purpose to life, or is everything simply random? Morality — how should I live? How do I respond to the difficult ethical choices? And destiny — where, ultimately am I headed?
The origins question is a fascinating one. Where do we come from? Where does our universe come from? Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing. Different worldviews answer this in different ways. My atheist friends would say whatever the answer is, God had nothing to do with it. Rather the universe began several billion years ago — we don’t yet know why or how. Perhaps we’re one of a near-infinite series of other universes (the multiverse) or maybe, as Stephen Hawking recently claimed, making headlines around the world, gravity caused the universe to spontaneously emerge from nothing. Hawking wrote: “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” Eventually, our galaxy formed, and our solar system and then, four billion or so years ago, life developed from the primordial chemical soup and slowly evolved into more and more complex forms, until finally human beings emerged. Humans are just another animal — as atheist Ingrid Newkirk put it: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all mammals.”
But a question arises. Can we live like this? If we can see each other as just animals, why not treat each other that way? Journalist Tanya Gold expressed the angst this kind of view can generate when she wrote: “The complex human race has been reduced in my mind to a group of little apes, running around, rutting and squeaking … I am not sure if I feel empowered or dismayed … [am I] really just a monkey trying to survive[?]” And if everything, as Hawking would claim, has a physical origin, why are all the things that we care about most non-physical? — beauty and art, morality and music, truth and justice, mind and soul and personality. Somehow Richard Dawkins’ comment that we’re just “throw away survival machines” for our selfish genes doesn’t really ring true.
What about the second worldview question — “meaning”. Is there meaning to life? Is there a purpose to our existence? A consistent atheist would say “no”, period. Indeed, the very question is bizarre. There is no meaning, no purpose, no reason for our existence. Your life is just a brief spark in the infinite blackness and when you wink out, that’s it, you’re gone. Ultimately human beings will go the way of every species and when we’re gone, life on earth will roll on without us. Until one day the sun expands and swallows the earth and our solar system becomes just a cold, dead ember. One day, too, the universe itself will end, one day — dark and cold and empty. There is no escape. There is meaning. There is no hope. Again, we might ask: does this answer really satisfy? Bertrand Russell famously said that we must bravely live in the face of this meaningless and build our lives “upon the firm foundation of unyielding despair”. But can we? Just a few months ago I read the tragic story of 21 year old Vicky Harrison, who took her own life after two years of failure to find a job left her feeling her humiliated. Her suicide note read: “I don’t want to be me any more.” We all need meaning. We all need purpose.
What about the third worldview question — “morality”. Is there such a thing as “right” and “wrong”? Do “good” and “evil” exist, or do we simply make it up as we go along? My atheist friends would tend towards saying that “no”, there is no such thing. Richard Dawkins puts it very bluntly:
The universe 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.
Other atheists, such as Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson would say that ethics is merely an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to make us cooperate. But again, is this liveable? Most of us want to say there is such a thing as a right and wrong, good and evil. Last November I was at a fundraising evening for an amazing charity, Ratanak International. Ratanak was set up by Brian McConaghy, who for twenty years served with the RCMP in Vancouver. Brian visited Cambodia in 1989 and encountered the refugee camps there and was moved to do something to alleviate the suffering. Through that work, he discovered the terrible tragedy of human trafficking that is going on in Cambodia, with the sexual exploitation of thousands of girls as young as 12. Ratanak is doing a phenomenal work in Cambodia to rescue women from this terrifying industry. As I watched the presentation and heard some of the stories it struck me again: there is such a thing as “evil”. There is something objectively, quantifiably wrong about human trafficking. And there is something tangibly “good” we see in those, like Brian McConaghy, who are willing to dedicate their lives to tackling it. Any worldview that cannot properly and intelligently talk about “good” and “evil” is a non-starter.
And, finally, our last worldview question — destiny. Where, ultimately, are we headed? My atheist friends would say our final destiny is death and non-existence. There is no afterlife, no heaven, no hell. All of us, saint or sinner, face oblivion. And the same holds true for the universe — in a few billion years time, the universe will cool and die. No survivors. Nothing. So what’s the best we can hope for? Perhaps to live on in the memories of our friends when we’re gone. Last year, I was at a funeral of a cousin, my age, who had tragically taken his own life. I still remember the words said at the end of the funeral: “He will live on in our memories”. But as Woody Allen remarked: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I would rather live on in my apartment!” And this is not just a question of comfort —if ultimately the destiny of all of us is exactly the same, then you might as well live exactly as you choose, now. It makes no difference. None. Saint or sinner, all end up the same. As Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist and insightful describer of the human condition put it: “if there is no God, everything is permissible.”
These are big questions: origin, meaning, morality, destiny. Questions that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we all have to face — or push away and pretend don’t exist. They’re also questions, I put it to you, that lead directly to the “God question” — because without God, there are no satisfactory answers to any of them. We cannot live as if everything is random and we’re just another animal. We cannot live without meaning and purpose. As if good and evil are clever fictions. As if, ultimately, it doesn’t matter because all end up the same.
There is another worldview, vastly different from the atheist one, however, that does perhaps offer us some clues. And that’s the Christian worldview. The Christian looks at these questions and says that if you want to know the answer to some of the most profound questions about humankind, you need to start with God, because any worldview that starts from us is ultimately going to remain circular. Eugene Peterson put it this way:
Our lives are not puzzles to be figured out. Rather, we come to God, who knows us and reveals to us the truth of our lives. The fundamental mistake is to begin with ourselves and not God. God is the center from which all life develops. If we use the ego as the center from which to plot the geometry of our lives, we will live eccentrically.
And the exciting thing about the Christian worldview is that we don’t have to search too hard for God, because he came looking for us. Many people think religions work a bit like this: when it comes to God, they say, everything is foggy and clouded in mist. We just cannot know. At best, religions are like signposts, pointing into the mist, saying “look in that direction”. Yet that is not the Christian claim at all. The Christian claim is that somebody has come to us out of the mist, claiming not to point vaguely towards God, but to be God. That was the claim of Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus is a fascinating figure. One of the things I find most fascinating is how many people respect him, even people who aren’t Christians. Muslims revere Jesus as a prophet. Hindus consider him a wise and holy teacher. Even many atheists, quick as they are to deny God, are very willing to say they admire Jesus. The well-known atheist and novelist, Philip Pullman, remarked that he admires Jesus for his strength and his courage whilst another, Christopher Hitchens, said that he respects “the virtue of his teachings”. There is something fascinating, enigmatic, attractive about Jesus that many have found who have read the pages of the New Testament Gospels, be they searcher or sceptic.
Yet that Jesus whose life is laid out there said some pretty radical stuff. In particular, he made some startling claims. For example, in the Gospel according to John, Jesus said: “I am the way, the truth and the life. Nobody can come to God the Father except through me”. Our first reaction may well be: how startlingly arrogant! What about other religious belief systems other than Christianity? But then a moment’s reflection reveals something interesting. Whatever you make of him, Jesus was vastly different from any other religious teacher. All other religions and religious teachers have something in common — they claim that they offer a set of rules, a mystical experience, a body of knowledge that, if you master it, can change your life. Christianity is the one exception. Jesus didn’t come claiming to give us new information, a new experience, a new list of things to do. Rather Jesus came claiming to be God himself. Not a way, not a vague signpost into the mist, but the way. The Christian worldview is not faith or belief in some list of propositions — it’s trust in a person.
Second, Jesus claimed to be “the truth”. That’s a fascinating statement.. Not, “I know the truth” but “I am the truth”. The Greek word for truth used in John’s Gospel is the word “aÓlh/qeia” and it literally means to reveal, or to un-hide something. Jesus is the one who unhides, who takes that which is hidden and brings it out into the daylight, the one who reveals.
Jesus claimed to reveal the truth — the real truth about who we are, to ourselves. Unless we grapple with that, we’re never going to find the really deep answers. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose writings smuggled from his imprisonment in the Russian gulags changed a generation, once remarked that “the line between good and evil runs right through the middle of every human heart.” Every human heart. Jesus claimed to be truth itself and to be able to identify and deal with that dividing line in each of us. The Gospel isn’t about some massive guilt trip. It’s not about pointing the finger and being holier than thou. It’s about a person, Jesus, who claimed to be truth itself, the one who reveals all secrets. The claim of Christianity is uniquely this: that the whole purpose of Jesus’ ministry and mission was not to provide a self-help programme but rather to transform our very hearts. That’s a very different take.
And finally, Jesus claimed to be “life”, to offer us a whole new way of being, of meaning and purpose and to shed light upon those profound questions we touched on earlier. The question all of us have to answer is this one: what basis are we really going to found our lives upon? Meaninglessness? Materialism? A hope that “it all will work out okay in the end”? Atheism and nihilism? Jesus once told a story about two builders who each set out to build a house. One erected his home on foundations of sand — the other, on rock. Both looked fine, both were wonderful homes — until the waters rose. As with houses, so with worldviews; it’s only when the tide comes in — when life gets tough, when you ask your friends more searching questions, that you can see who has built their life on sand.
Reflecting on this can change you profoundly. I’d like to leave you with the stories of two quite different men as we draw this to a close. First, A. N. Wilson. Wilson was, for many years, a leading European atheist. He wrote widely — history, novels, and regular attacks on Christianity. But then, in his 50s, a profound change struck him. He began to realise that all the things that mattered to him most — art and music, culture and meaning and morality, truth and justice — were all groundless, foundation-less, on his atheism. In a brave move, he followed this search where it led and became a Christian. He wrote his story in a British newspaper where he commented that:
When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion – prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.
The second story concerns another writer and journalist, who is still, to the best of my knowledge, an atheist. Matthew Parris, who writes for The Times newspaper. Matthew was raised in Africa, in Malawi, and in 2008 returned to the country of his youth. He was struck by the very real difference that Christianity made to the lives of the people he encountered. Matthew writes:
Travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my worldview, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God. Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa … In Africa, Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
I’d agree with Matthew but I would widen the view, pull the camera back. What is true for Africa is true for all of us. Christianity can change people’s hearts. The English literary critic, novelist and author, C S Lewis, put it beautifully: “I believe in Christianity in the same way that I believe the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.” In other words: only by first making sense of God, can we make sense of everything else, including ourselves.
