William Lane Craig: Is there meaning to life?
| June 24, 2018 | Posted by Denyse OLeary under Atheism, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, theism |
William Lane Craig offers some thoughts at YouTube:
Man, writes Loren Eiseley, is the Cosmic Orphan. He is the only creature in the universe who asks, “Why?” Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions. “Who am I?” man asks. “Why am I here? Where am I going?” Since the Enlightenment, when he threw off the shackles of religion, man has tried to answer these questions without reference to God. But the answers that came back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible. “You are the accidental by-product of nature, a result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death.”
Modern man thought that when he had gotten rid of God, he had freed himself from all that repressed and stifled him. Instead, he discovered that in killing God, he had also killed himself. For if there is no God, then man’s life becomes absurd. More.
Note: Eiseley (1907-1977) was the author of Darwin’s Century and the Men Who Discovered It
See also: William Lane Craig takes on Adam and Eve
8 Responses to William Lane Craig: Is there meaning to life?
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I was just recounting today, to a friend, the time that Richard Dawkins was challenged to debate Craig and suddenly Dawkins found better things to be doing than debating the existence of God.
If I recall correctly, the debate carried on anyway with a empty chair filling in for Dawkins. Rumor has it that the empty chair, though it still lost the debate, fared much better than Dawkins would have against Craig.
Pascal went on to say that it can only be satisfied “by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”
Atheistic naturalism/materialism provides no answers to mankind’s deepest spiritual and moral needs. It is a morally, spiritually and intellectually bankrupt world view, yet many people irrationally and absurdly cling to it. Why? They cannot give a rational explanation. They do not know but don’t even know they don’t know…
– St. Augustine, Confessions
– Blaise Pascal
The main ‘philosophical proof’ in Dr Craig’s video that our lives have meaning, purpose, and value was to point out that the Atheist himself is unable to live his life consistently as if it truly had no real meaning, purpose, and value.
And indeed, even Dawkins himself admitted that it would be ‘intolerable’ for him to live his life as if atheistic materialism were actually true
Simply put, if it is impossible for you to live as if Atheistic worldview were actually true, i.e. to live as if your life truly had no ultimate meaning, value, purpose, or significance, then your Atheistic worldview cannot possibly be true but must instead be based on a delusion.
Yet we don’t have to rely solely on this philosophical argumentation, as persuasive as it is, to derive ultimate meaning, value, purpose, and significance for our lives, but we can now appeal directly to empirical evidence.
The plain fact of the matter is that every molecule in our bodies screams that we have meaning, value, purpose, and significance for our lives. As Denis Noble noted in the following article, “it is virtually impossible to speak of living beings for any length of time without using teleological and normative language—words like “goal,” “purpose,” “meaning,” “correct/incorrect,” “success/failure,” etc.”
In the following article Stephen Talbott challenges scientists and philosophers to “pose a single topic for biological research, doing so in language that avoids all implication of agency, cognition, and purposiveness”
This working biologist agrees with Talbott’s assessment and states, ‘we biologists use words that imply intentionality, functionality, strategy, and design in biology–we simply cannot avoid them.’
Thus, since it is impossible for molecular biologists to speak of molecular biology for any length of time without using language that directly implies goal directed purposes, and/or teleology, then it is hardly fair for Darwinian atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and William Provine to falsely claim that there is no ultimate meaning for life and that we live in a universe of ‘nothing but pitiless indifference’
In fact, given the the fact that teleology, i.e. goal directed purpose, is so intricately infused into life at such a fundamental level, I would hold that it takes a rather large amount of willful intellectual blindness on the part of evolutionary biologists for them to say that life has no meaning.
The plain fact of the matter, despite what leading evolutionary biologists may say, is that every one of the billion, trillion protein molecules in our bodies screams that we have a intrinsic meaning, value, and purpose for our lives. As Talbott states in the following article entitled “How Biologists Lost Sight Of The Meaning Of Life And Are Now Staring It In The Face”, “A given cell, typically contains more than a billion protein molecules at any one time. ,,, “The human body is formed by trillions of individual cells.,,, And then we hear that all this meaningful activity is, somehow, meaningless or a product of meaninglessness. This, I believe, is the real issue troubling the majority of the American populace when they are asked about their belief in evolution. They see one thing and then are told, more or less directly, that they are really seeing its denial. Yet no one has ever explained to them how you get meaning from meaninglessness — a difficult enough task once you realize that we cannot articulate any knowledge of the world at all except in the language of meaning.,,,”
In the following article, Talbott goes even further and reveals that the meaning found in life is closely associated with there being information in life while an organism is alive. Specifically, Talbott states that at the moment of a organism’s death “Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary.”
It should also be noted that this immaterial information, that Talbott referred to, that is keeping an organism alive “precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer” also provides empirical evidence for a transcendent soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our temporal, material, bodies:
Specifically, quantum information, (which is pervasive in molecular biology and of which classical information is a subset), is ‘conserved’. Which means, unlike classical information, that it cannot be destroyed,,,
As Stuart Hameroff states in the following video, ‘But the quantum information,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul’.
Thus with ‘immaterial quantum information’, we actually do have empirical evidence strongly suggesting that we each have a immortal soul, and furthermore we can thus provide empirical evidence so as to satisfy one of Dr. Craig’s philosophical requirements, i.e. immortality, in his argument in order for us to live life as if it is truly meaningful:
Another place where Atheists try to say that our lives have no ultimate meaning, value, purpose or significance is with the Copernican Principle and/or the Principle of Mediocrity:
Stephen Hawking, via the Copernican Principle, stated “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.,,,”
And yet, despite the fact that practically everybody, including the vast majority of Christians, hold the Copernican principle to be unquestionably true, the plain fact of the matter is that the Copernican Principle has now been overturned by both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Which are two of our best, most accurately verified, theories in science:
Einstein himself stated, The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS [coordinate systems].”
Fred Hoyle and George Ellis add their considerable weight here in these following two quotes:
As Einstein himself notes, there simply is no test that can be performed that can prove the earth is not the center of the universe:
Even Stephen Hawking himself, who claimed that we are just chemical scum on an insignificant planet, stated that it is not true that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong,,, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.”
Even individual people can be considered to be central in the universe according to the four-dimensional space-time of General Relativity,,,
Whereas, on the other hand, in Quantum Mechanics it is the measurement itself that gives each observer a privileged frame of reference in the universe. As the following researcher commented, “”It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
In fact, in quantum mechanics, in the ‘instrumentalist approach’, humans are brought into the laws of physics at the most fundamental level instead of humans being a result of the laws of physics as Darwinists had falsely imagined us to be.
Needless to say, Atheists don’t like the “instrumentalist approach” of quantum mechanics since it, by letting free will into the picture, directly undermines the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, the “instrumentalist approach” is experimentally confirmed to be true by both contextuality and the Kochen-Speckter Theorem
As Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Richard Conn Henry who is Professor of Physics at John Hopkins University states “It is more than 80 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics gave us the most fundamental insight ever into our nature: the overturning of the Copernican Revolution, and the restoration of us human beings to centrality in the Universe.”
In further establishing our centrality in this vast universe, in the following video, physicist Neil Turok states that we live in the middle, or at the geometric mean, between the largest scale in physics and the smallest scale in physics:
Here is a picture that gets his point across very clearly:
Shoot, our best, most accurately verified, theories in science, Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity and General Relativity, even give us evidence that, #1, God upholds this universe in its continual existence and, #2, of a higher heavenly dimension and of a hellish dimension:
Thus in conclusion, on top of Dr. Craig’s very persuasive philosophical argument that our lives do indeed have intrinsic meaning, value, purpose and significance, we can now add a fairly abundant amount of empirical evidence that in, over the top fashion, confirms Dr. Craig’s philosophical argument.
BA77 @ 5: “It should also be noted that this immaterial information, that Talbott referred to, that is keeping an organism alive “precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer” also provides empirical evidence for a transcendent soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our temporal, material, bodies.”
Absolutely true. But a/mats seem incapable of comprehending that truth. Bizarre.