Does it Matter if God Exists?

It matters enormously whether or not God exists. Those who shrug their shoulders and say, "What difference does it make if God exists or not?" show merely that they haven't thought very deeply about this question. Even atheist philosophers like Sartre and Camus, who have thought deeply about this question, recognize that it makes an enormous difference whether or not God exists.

"Man," writes Loren Eiseley, "is the cosmic orphan." He's 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?" he asks. "Why am I here? Where am I going?" Ever since the Enlightenment, when modern man threw off the shackles of religion, he's tried to answer those questions without reference to God. But the answers that came back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible: "You are the accidental byproduct of nature, the result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death."

Modern man thought that once 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 only succeeded in orphaning himself. As one atheist philosopher has put it, “human life is mounted upon a subhuman pedestal and must shift for itself alone in the heart of a silent and mindless universe.”

If God does not exist, then both man and the universe are inevitably doomed to death. Man, like all biological organisms, must die, and the universe, too, faces the death of its own. Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding, and as it does so, everything in it grows further and further apart. As it expands, it grows colder and colder as its energy is used up. Eventually, all the stars will burn out, and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes. There will be no light at all; there will be no life; there will be no heat—only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space. A universe in ruins.

This is not science fiction. As unimaginable as it may be, this will happen. So not only is the life of each individual person doomed, the entire human race is destined to destruction. There is no escape. There is no hope.

On atheism, then, there is no God and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? As many atheist philosophers, from Nietzsche to Russell to Sartre, have recognized, it means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we do have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose. Let me say a word about each of these.

Ultimate Meaning and Significance

First, there is no ultimate meaning to life. If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he ever really existed at all? Of course, his life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If everything is doomed to destruction, then what does it matter that you influenced anything? Ultimately, it makes no difference.

In his poem, "The End of the World," the American poet Archibald MacLeish portrays life as an idiotic circus until one day the show is all over:

"Quite unexpectedly, as Vasquez The armless ambidextrous was lighting A match between his great and second toe, And Ralph the Lion was engaged in biting The neck of Madame Sussman, while the drum Pointed, and Tini was about to coffin Waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb.

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off: And there, there overhead, there, there hung over Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes, There in the starless dark the poise, the hover, There with vast wings across the canceled skies, There in the sudden blackness the black pall Of nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing at all."

This is the horror of modern man: because he ends in nothing, he ultimately is nothing. The contributions of the scientists to the advance of human knowledge, the researches of the doctor to alleviate human pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good people everywhere to better the lot of the human race. In the end, all these come to nothing. They make no bit of difference, not one bit. Thus, on atheism, life itself becomes ultimately meaningless. Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.

Ultimate Value

Second, there is no ultimate value in life. If there is no God, then there can be no objective standards of right and wrong. By objective standards, I mean standards which exist independently of human opinion. If God does not exist, then moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or else the byproducts of socio-biological evolution and conditioning. As the philosopher of science Michael Ruse explains:

The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than our hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an “objective something”, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says "Love thy neighbor as thyself," they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory.

Richard Dawkins puts it succinctly:

There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference. We are machines for propagating DNA.

In a world without God, who's to say whose values are right and whose are wrong? Who's to judge that one person's values are inferior to those of another? The concept of morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. All we are confronted with, in Jean-Paul Sartre's words, is “the bare, valueless fact of existence.” In a world without God, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. That means that it's impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can you praise brotherhood, equality, tolerance, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist; there is only the bare, valueless fact of existence, and there is nobody to say that you are right and I am wrong.

Ultimate Purpose

Third, there is no ultimate purpose of life. If death stands with open arms at the end of life's trail, then what is the goal of life? Is it all for nothing? Is there no reason for life? And what of the universe? Is it utterly pointless? If its destiny is a cold grave in the recesses of outer space, then the answer must be yes, it is pointless. There is no goal, no purpose for the universe. The litter of a dead universe will just go on expanding and expanding forever.

And what of man? Is there no purpose at all for the human race? Or will it simply peter out someday, lost in the oblivion of an indifferent universe? The English writer H.G. Wells foresaw such a prospect in his novel The Time Machine. Wells' time traveler journeys far into the distant future to discover the destiny of man. All he finds is a dead Earth, except for a few lichens and moss orbiting a gigantic red sun. The only sounds are the rush of the wind and the gentle ripple of the sea. Beyond these lifeless sounds, writes Wells:

"The world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it all. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our live. All that was over."

And so Wells' time traveler returned. But to what? To an earlier point on the same purposeless rush towards oblivion.

When as a non-Christian I first read Wells' book, I thought to myself, "No, no, it can't end that way!" But this is reality in a universe without God. If there is no God, it will end that way, like it or not. There is no hope, there is no purpose.

In a famous passage, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell lamented:

"Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labor of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

Thus, as all these atheist philosophers bear witness, if God does not exist, then life is without ultimate meaning, value, or purpose.

I hope that you understand the gravity of the alternatives before us. If God exists, then there is hope for man. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair. That's why the question of the existence of God is so vital to man. As one writer has aptly put it, "If God is dead, then man is dead too."

Unfortunately, most people do not realize this fact. They continue on as though nothing had changed. I'm reminded of Nietzsche's story of the madman who, in the early morning hours, burst into the marketplace, lantern in hand, crying, "I seek God! I seek God!" Since many of those standing about did not believe in God, he provoked much laughter. "Did God get lost?" they taunted him. "Or is he hiding? Or maybe he's gone on a voyage or emigrated?" And thus they yelled and laughed.

Then, writes Nietzsche, the madman turned in their midst and pierced them with his eyes:

"Whither is God?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and tomorrow night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? God is dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?"

The crowd stared at the madman in astonishment and silence. At last, he dashed his lantern to the ground. "I have come too early," he said. "This tremendous event is still on its way. It has not yet reached the ears of man."

People did not truly comprehend what the consequences were of killing God. But Nietzsche predicted that someday people would draw the implications of their atheism, and this realization would usher in an age of nihilism. That is, the destruction of all meaning and value in life.

I find that most people still do not reflect upon the consequences of atheism, and so, like the crowd in Nietzsche's marketplace, go unknowingly on their way. I recently read, for example, that a Toronto-based freethought organization wants to buy bus ads that proclaim, "There probably is no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your day." According to the spokesman for the group, they're still working on the layout. They want “something happy, something bright," she said. I wonder what real Nietzsche would have thought of those ads.

Few contemporary atheists have Nietzsche's courage to look atheism squarely in the face without blinking. But when we realize, as did Nietzsche, the nihilism that atheism implies, then his question presses hard upon us: "How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?" Confronted with the human predicament, the only solution the atheist can offer is that we simply face the absurdity of life and live bravely. But the fundamental problem with this solution is that it's impossible to live consistently and happily within the framework of such a worldview. If you live consistently, you will not be happy. If you live happily, it is only because you are not consistent.

Francis Schaeffer has explained this point well. Modern man, says Schaeffer, resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God. Here, life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world, and therefore he continually makes leaps of faith to the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. While giving lip service to atheism, the atheist lives as though life were important, as though it really mattered what he thinks or does, as though certain things really were right or wrong, and so is outraged at the injustices of this world and acts as though his petty plans and projects really were significant.

The dilemma of modern man is thus truly terrible. The atheistic world is insufficient to maintain a happy and consistent life. But if atheism fails in this regard, what about biblical theism? According to the biblical worldview, God does exist, and man's life does not end at the grave. Biblical theism, therefore, provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily within the framework of such a worldview. And thus, biblical theism succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.

Now, I would be the first to say none of this proves that God exists. Even if atheism is unlivable, it may still be true.

Does God Matter?

The question of whether God exists is often treated as a question for theologians or philosophers, but it has much broader implications. If God exists, then reality has a purpose, human life has an ultimate meaning, and questions of morality, value, and destiny cannot be reduced merely to personal preference. If God does not exist, however, we are left to ask what becomes of those things, and ultimately, what human life means in a universe without God.

So before asking whether God exists, it is worth asking a more fundamental question: Does it actually matter whether God exists?

The answer is far more significant than it might initially appear. The following article is adapted from the opening speech of the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig in the debate "Does God Matter? against the Canadian philosopher of science and ethics Dr. Christopher DiCarlo. Rather than beginning with a traditional argument for God's existence, Craig begins by examining what the world would look like if there were no God. By considering the implications of a godless universe for meaning, value, morality, and human existence, he presents a case for why the question of God's existence is not merely abstract or academic. It reaches to the heart of what it means to be human.

What follows is a helpful introduction to the question of why God matters, and to the profound consequences that follow from the answer.

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