Can Man Live Without God

CAN MAN LIVE WITHOUT GOD
by
Ravi Zacharias

 
One of the most telling examples is our view of truth. In the 1960s, 65 percent of Americans said they believed the Bible is true; today that figure has dropped to 32 percent. Even more dramatically, today 67 percent of all Americans deny that there’s any such thing as truth. Seventy percent say there are no moral absolutes. (p. ix)

If young, fertile minds could be programmed into believing that truth as a category does not exist and that skepticism is sophisticated, then it would be only a matter of time before every social institution could be wrested to advantage in the fight against the absolute. (p. xiv)

Much of what has passed for the Christian message has been nothing more than frothy God-talk – mindless, thoughtless, and in its exploitation of people, heartless. … so also much religious verbiage, seeped in emotional drivel and bereft of reason, can be tossed at unsuspecting audiences in the name of orthodoxy. (p. xvi)

But the masses just ignore such gloating, intellectual posturing because they are well aware that these “expects” are woefully unable to force-fit life’s mental furniture by restructuring reality. (p. 7)

Should we fall victim to such a posture, the appropriate word to describe that self-exaltation is hubris, translated into English from the Greek as “pride.” But the connotation of the original word is much deeper, implying a wanton self-aggrandizement that looks down its sympathetic nose at the hol polloi, seeing them as bereft of any intellectual strength and as plagued by confusion from which the educated, successful self is exempted. (p. 8)

History has shown that crimes of logic can be more catastrophic for humanity than crimes of passion. (p. 11)

As a sloganeering culture, we have unblushingly trivialized the serious and exalted the trivial because we have bypassed the rudimentary and necessary steps of logical argument. (p. 11)

Nietzsche classified the Christian message as the nadit, or lowest point, of human progress because it elevated such concepts as morality, repentance, and humility. (p. 20)

The infrastructure of our society has become mindless and senseless because the foundation upon which we have built cannot support any other kind of structure.(p. 21)

A Stalinistic-type choice is one that the philanthropic atheist is hard pressed to rail against once he or she has, by virtue of atheism, automatically forfeited the right to a moral law. (p. 27)

Antitheism provides every reason to be immoral and is bereft of any objective point of reference with which to condemn any choice. (p. 32)

In fact, some of the most impressive thinking ever done on the subject of ethics was done by the watershed thinker of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, who sought to establish a moral impetus within man and to postulate a system of right and wrong from reason alone. (p. 35)

Time and again it was proven that it is not possible to establish a reasonable and coherent ethical theory without first establishing the telos, i.e. the purpose and destiny of human life. (p. 39)

We continue to talk of values and ethics; we persist in establishing moral boundaries for others while erasing the lines that are drawn for life itself. (p. 39)

The skeptic generally presents four options that God could have exercised in creation (if,in fact, He does exist): first, to create no world at all; second, to create a world in which there are no such categories as good and evil – an amoral world; third, to create a world in which one could only choose good – a kind of robotic world; fourth, to create the world the world as we know it, with the possibility of both good and evil. Why, the skeptic also, would God choos this model, knowing that evil would ensue? (p. 46)

Alternatively, if it is a moral universe, could not the whole experience of pain and suffering indeed be God’s megaphone to draw mankind’s attention to a moral reality? (p. 48)

The very sharp edge of pain and death is felt universally, and every religion or philosophy of life has to deal with it. A philosophy that espouses no belief in God cannot even justify the question, let alone provide an answer except for the hope for extinction. (p. 52)

The search for fulfillment never ends because the cure for boredom requires something loftier. (p. 57)

Are we held hostage to a physical determinism thrust forward by the pre-biotic soup, or are we here by the fashioning will of a Grand Designer.

Living without God and espousing the first option presents another insurmountable obstacle. Lee Iacocca stated this human malady well in his book Straight Talk: “Here I am in the twilight years of my life, still wondering what it’s all about …. I can tell you this, fame and fortune is for the birds.” (p. 58)

Intent is prior to content. The most provocative statement Jesus made during that penetrating conversation was that the truthfulness or falsity of an individual’s heart was revealed by that person’s response to Him. (p. 98)

The loss of truth, like the loss of wonder, filters down into our day-to-day lives and takes its toll upon society. (p. 100)

It is not merely that He has the answers to life’s questions as much as that He is the answer. (p. 100)
John 14: 6: Two very obvious deductions follow from this assertion that Jesus made: first, that truth is absolute, and second, that truth is knowable. (p. 101)

Do yourself a favor and get your eyes off the shortcomings of institutions and people and history’s dark spots. Level your scrutiny at the person of Christ, and you will see the One who wears His Father’s coast very well.  (p. 102)

We talk of love’s making the world go around when in reality it is the search for a faithful, cherished love that sends one traveling the world over. (p. 106)

The issue, then, is not whether the belief system you espouse – monotheistic, atheistic, pantheistic, or otherwise – is exclusive. The issue is whether the answers to the four basic questions of life pertaining to origin, meaning, morality, and destiny within the context of each of those world-views meet the tests of truth. (p. 126)

Even in a land like India, where tolerance is a key word, antipathy between the north and the south runs very deep, and color is a vital component in that prejudice. (p. 139)

Only God humbles us without humiliating us and elevates us without flattering us. (p. 143)

G.K. Chesterton correctly remarked that the problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting but that it has been found difficult and left untried. (p. 145)

There is no coherence left in education. Modern-day university graduates are really graduating from pluraversity, where the various disciples do not connect. (p. 148)

The Trinity provides us with a model for a community of love and essential dignity without mitigating personality, individuality, and diversity. (p. 148)

The famed Archbishop William Temple defined worship in these terms:

Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, nourishment of mind by His truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose. All this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of all expressions of which we are capable. (p. 151)