4. Sisyphus on a Roll
SISYPHUS ON A ROLL
Young people are free to conquer the world—and they don’t want it. Material prosperity has not made life meaningful. The hunger for love and real meaning are the forces behind the psychedelic revolution.
—Allan Cohen
In 1851, Matthew Arnold penned his poem “Dover Beach.” He described the calmness of the sea and the rhythmic flow of the waves moving back and forth. The melancholy it induced in him lifted his thoughts to the tragic turn of the tide in spiritual matters in his English homeland. Once her faith had seemed strong, but that strength had waned, and the calmness was being overwhelmed by a gathering storm of skepticism. The third stanza of his poem expressed this concern on his mind.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Of the nightwind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Don Cupitt, dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and an ordained clergyman, took the sentiments of the third stanza of this poem, particularly the first line of that stanza, and produced a powerful television series for the BBC, called The Sea of Faith. Cupitt subsequently expanded the material and compiled it into a book by the same title, making an unblushing and radical attack upon orthodox Christianity. With the lines from the third stanza of Arnold’s poem as his starting point, he has attempted to drive sharp wedges into historic Christianity and the classic theistic worldview. After his eloquent endeavor at “God battering,” he had built his own system of belief, which one critic has aptly called, “faith at sea.”
I mention the title and the inspirational role the poem played in Cupitt’s book to point out something that struck me as most fascinating. There is a rather intriguing omission by Cupitt of the fourth stanza of Arnold’s poem. It does not take very long to understand why that stanza was left out. It runs counter to Cupitt’s central thesis. He is attempting to establish a life with meaning in a world without God, a possibility Matthew Arnold clearly decried in the fourth stanza.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkening plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
There is no doubt in Arnold’s mind (as we know from his other writings) that with the loss of God came the loss of joy, love, light, peace, certitude, and help for pain. We are left on a “darkening plain.”
But Cupitt can be forgiven for this volitional blind spot. He is keeping step with others, who, likewise, have sought to do away with God but have refused to deal with the legitimate consequences of meaninglessness. This is where Nietzsche deserves admiration for his candor. He did not play verbal games with abstract arguments, heavily footnoted, to deny the obvious. The great struggle for meaning, encompassed within a deep sense of alienation, is a necessary result of the atheistic worldview. The loss of a creator and the abandonment of a moral law lead to the third hurdle for atheism—the search for meaning. And the lives of millions attest to its failure.
Those who came through the 1960s will remember the spate of conferences at that time with the theme “Who Am I?” It seems rather anomalous that dogs and cats never wonder about what dogginess or cattishness entails. We humans are the only ones who raise this question, and we are supposed to be the most informed of the species.
The sarcasm of this thought notwithstanding, it is true that many of our miseries are really a reflection of our grandeur. Human beings are incurable questioners, and no matter how many of our peripheral questions are answered, unless the most fundamental of all questions is answered, we sense nothing between ourselves and the great void but our search, which gradually becomes an end in itself.
At one of my lectures on “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a student rose to his feet and shouted, “Ah, everything in life is meaningless.” I insisted that he could not possibly believe that. With an equally intense retort he countered that he did. This repetitive exchange went back and forth a few times. Then, not wanting to exacerbate the young man’s frustration and having planned for a safe departure from the campus, I decided to bring the discussion to an end. I asked him if he thought his statement was a meaningful one. There was an acute silence, and then he hesitantly answered, “Yes.” I only had to add that if his assertion was meaningful, then everything in life was not meaningless. If, on the other hand, everything was indeed meaningless, his assertion was meaningless too, and, therefore, in effect, he had said nothing.
At the risk of being simplistic, and also being keenly aware of what he was trying to say, the exchange nevertheless demonstrated the inescapability of our malady to meaningfully express our meaninglessness.
It is a most striking feature of the biblical narrative that the man who most thoroughly and unequivocally poured out his heart and mind on the pointlessness of existence was one who knew more, had more, and was renowned more than anyone else in his time—Solomon. His opening lines in the book of Ecclesiastes—“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” or, “Meaningless, meaningless! All is meaningless!”—are very familiar, but some have not followed his thinking to the end of the book. Solomon stated this observation about life out of both study and personal experience, and his sense of emptiness is a recurring theme. He described every pursuit he had taken—his range of accomplishment in wisdom, pleasure, work, material gain, and much else. But in the philosophical equivalent of a midlife crisis, he summed it up in these words in Ecclesiastes 2:10–11:
I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my work,
and this was the reward for all my labor.
Yet, when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.
Having tried everything that his mind could grasp and his wealth could afford, Solomon found that there was a monotony, a circularity, and a fatality to all human endeavor.
He is not the only one, of course, to have echoed this feeling of being disjointed from life’s ultimate purpose. One of the most popular stories from Greek mythology is the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was condemned by the gods for having betrayed the celestial ranks by revealing divine secrets to mortals. They sentenced him to roll a massive stone to the top of a hill, watch it roll down again, and repeat the exercise endlessly. His hell was in having to execute a pointless act from which nothing ever came, except a vain repetition that compounded the emptiness. Not by one step, nor by a thousand, nor by ten thousand, was he able to expiate the sin against the gods that brought on this cursed fate. He could do nothing to rescue himself from futility. As a modern rhyme put it:
A cheerful old bear at the zoo
He never lacked nothing to do.
When it bored him, you know,
to walk to and fro,
He reversed it and walked fro and to.
Poor Sisyphus couldn’t even reverse it for a temporary relief. All kinds of intriguing suggestions have been made, ranging from changing his internal outlook (“If only Sisyphus could have changed on the inside so that he enjoyed rolling stones”) to altering his external viewpoint (“If he rolled up a different stone each time, a beautiful building could be built”). Most of humanity understands Sisyphus’s plight and has felt his struggle. The repetition of a single act, or the indulgence in a diversity of acts, has not spared humanity from a sense of monotony. We do not have to read Greek mythology or be cynical to come to this conclusion. The condition is universal and cuts across cultures and age barriers. Even children repeat the theme in nursery rhymes:
The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men,
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up they were up,
And when they were down they were down,
And when they were only half way up
They were neither up nor down.
If it were not for the melody of this rhyme, its informational quotient would not exactly stir the intellect. But neither would Sisyphus’s activity. The vain repetition in both instances could produce a sense of futility in even the least of minds.
Solomon’s struggle takes us one step further than Sisyphus’s plight. He communicated a deeper concept with great pathos, couched in a more reflective mood. Even he, a man who boasted capacities of intellect and imagination that made him the envy of many, and who presided over the most pompous court of his time, was not spared from a sense of futility. Diversity of activity and the unlimited resources at his disposal still brought the inevitable monotony to weary even the best of minds.
This larger point is sorely missed by those philosophers who try to build an escape hatch for the skeptic by saying that it is meaningless to ask the questions of life’s meaning. All through the centuries, man has continued to stab away at the question, and its implications cannot be eluded. Aristotle attempted to deal with this question by looking to man’s nature. Jean Jacques Rousseau said that our predicament was the result of the artificial passions that were produced by the emotional changes within us as we moved away from nature. There are myriad options offered as a diagnosis.
Lord Byron, who lived and died tumultuously, embodied the spirit of a world with no values. He summed up his life in the second stanza of a brief poem, written on his thirty-sixth birthday, three months before his death.
My days are in the yellow leaf,
The flowers and fruits of love are gone,
The worm, the canker and the grief
Are mine alone!
This problem of meaninglessness, being as intensive and pervasive as it is, has drawn even the best of philosophers into the bidding process. It has pulled together some of the most impassioned and relevant philosophical argumentation. Hence, it is not, of course, possible within the confines of this treatment to consider every school of thought represented. But the most commonly held and defended view shall be subjected to scrutiny.
The previously stated idea—that of changing Sisyphus’s attitude toward rolling stones—does not warrant too great a response at this juncture, for it completely misses the point of the question, which has two essential strands to it. First, if naturalism is all that we have, does not life itself become a mockery of fate and open to any interpretation, including that of meaninglessness? Why, then, try to disavow it as a legitimate expression? If there is no God, it is as valid, if not more valid, than any other provisional conclusion.
Second, this approach of changing his attitude does not really mitigate Sisyphus’s malady, with its haunting perception of aimlessness. It does not put “dislocated” man back into place, it only induces a stupor to kill the pain. Is it any wonder that different stupefying theories have been attempted, each one only intensifying the problem? The monotony and pointlessness of life remain, no matter how we try to ignore them. The most articulate spokespersons on this futility are artists and poets themselves. As Joni Mitchell sang, “We’re captives on a carousel of time.”
Sisyphus and Solomon came to the same deduction, born out of their experience: monotony finds no relief in adding variety or changing our attitude about it. Activity does not create meaning; it is the other way around. If life in its existential expression has no meaning, then a change of attitude does not change the reality of meaninglessness. It only changes how one functions in a meaningless world, which was precisely Jean Paul Sartre’s point in his book No Exit. What difference does it make, when the boat is going down, if one stands on the deck and salutes or plays a last game of poker?
Yet Solomon and Sisyphus are demanding more than momentary enjoyment, or something to tranquilize their boredom. They are not asking for meaning by truncating reality, but they are seeking for an undergirding conviction that can carry them through their existence, giving overall meaning to their lives.
An Answer That Fails
The most effective philosophical argument against the question of meaning is to question the validity of the question itself. Some contend that to raise the question of meaning devalues life. Kurt Baier, a representative of this school of thought, argued that science invariably takes a cause-and-effect view of life, and that, in the view of the naturalist, purpose and meaning are invalid terms. So far, his position is acceptable, but it soon becomes evident that these terms are unacceptable not only because they are out of the range of science, but also because the naturalist does not know what to do with them. Thus, he brands them unnecessary. Baier stated that to ask a person for the meaning or purpose of his life is to diminish the value of the person by reducing his dignity to the level of a means, rather than an end in itself.
This argument has a built-in contradiction. How can one contend that something is devalued unless he knows the real value? How can one know something is counterfeit unless he also knows what is authentic? This approach is caught in a bind, as it constantly uses the words purposeful and meaningful to argue against purpose and meaning as needful in the human experience. Baier’s argument is self-defeating. It is a valiant attempt to give individual efforts of human beings value in themselves, while at the same time robbing individuals of any value in their origin and destiny. What it really suggests is that life has tiny little purposes, but no ultimate purpose. It destroys ultimate value and substitutes something artificial.
There is something very pivotal here. This is a fascinating reversal of the way the naturalist dealt with the problem as it related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We recall that in the scientific struggle with the problem of origins, the Second Law was disregarded by arguing for biological progression in the opposite direction to the laws of physics. The physical law states that things move from order to disorder, but evolution moves from disorder to order. The scientist’s response was that what applied to the whole did not apply to its parts, so that biological evolution in its parts could swim against the entropic stream as a whole. Now, on the issue of meaning, the naturalist says that what applies to the parts (rolling stones, building temples, etc.) is meaningful, but does not apply to life as a whole. Life is punctuated with tiny little purposes and no ultimate purpose: tiny little values, but no ultimate value.
The seriousness of the naturalists’ predicament is that they frequently handcuff themselves with ideas that are mutually exclusive. Their assumptions keep changing, depending on the arena of controversy; hence, the conclusions collide. The rapist rapes because he sees his victim as only a means to an end, having no ultimate value or meaning in herself. The same applies to the criminal act of murder; the murderer does not see his victim as one having value and dignity, but rather, as an object to be removed for his own purposes. Thus, the question of essential meaning and purpose in life, far from reducing the value of an individual, is indispensable to dignity, and not a denial of it. But what else can naturalists do? In attempting to reason their way through the problem, they have become unreasonable; in trying to defuse the question, they blow up the questioner.
Great thinkers have repeatedly warned over the centuries that a departure from God denudes humans and results in the death of meaning. The denial of God and the death of meaning cannot be severed from each other, though interspersed with all the learning, education, and hyperactivity of postmodern human beings. The farther we move from God, the more we devalue man. The Nobel Prize–winning T. S. Eliot summed it up in a powerful way:
[Poety not included because of rights restrictions.][1]
G. K. Chesterton warned that the insane man is not just one who has lost his reason; he may be one who has lost everything but his reason, because there is more to life than mathematical equations. C. S. Lewis would have called such a one “a man without a chest,” a person with no heart. The delights of love, the loveliness of a baby, the wonder of a mother nursing a child, the exquisite strains of majestic music—all these transcend reason yet have real meaning in our lives. What meaning do they have if life itself is meaningless? That must be answered. It is the need for an answer within an individual mind that pleadingly raises the question.
The Question Intensifies
We must not underestimate the search for meaning. There is no shortage of illustrations to demonstrate the deep distress in the mind of a serious questioner. It is very important to follow the argument here, as expressed by the French philosopher Voltaire, because it will help us to put the finger on the nerve of the issue:
I am a puny part of a great whole. Yes. But all sentient things, born of the same law, suffer like me, and like me, also die.
The vulture fastens on his timid prey, and stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs. All’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while an eagle tears the vulture into shreds. The eagle is transfixed by shafts of man. The man, prone in the dust of battlefields, mingling his blood with dying fellow man, becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds. Thus the whole world in every member groans. All born for torment and for mutual death. And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say the ills of each make up the good of all.
What blessedness! And as with quaking voice mortal and pitiful ye cry, “All’s well.” The universe belies you, and your heart refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit. What is the verdict of the vastest mind? Silence. The book of fate is closed to us. Man is a stranger to his own research. He knows not whence he comes, nor whither he goes. Tormented atoms in a bed of mud, devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
Voltaire’s lament is only one step removed from Solomon’s. While Solomon underscored the futility of effort, whether in pleasure or work, Voltaire finds that futility in existence itself; for Death, that archenemy, in a circuitous pattern, destroys each destroyer. Thus, the miseries of each are supposed to make up the good of all, a boomerang of pain and savagery that returns as natural selection.
This is the ultimate good news / bad news joke. The bad news is that there is a war on. The good news is that the undertakers need the business. Voltaire is engaged, with unsparing effort, in a titanic battle between optimism and pessimism. The best known of all his books, certainly one of his finest efforts, is Candide. It is the story of a man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, tries desperately to cling to his optimism.
As Candide journeys through life looking for happiness, he meets disappointment after disappointment, and his melancholy grows. Seeing a lighthearted Theatine monk in the market square, walking arm in arm with an apparently carefree young woman, he is convinced his search is ended. He makes a wager with his friend Martin that these, indeed, have found the happiness that had eluded him.
Martin willingly takes the bet because of his confidence that unhappiness is central to every life, without exception. (This part in the book is significant and indicative of how Voltaire viewed the church of his day—hypocritical and bankrupt, much concerned with outward regalia, but with little heartfelt concern for meeting the needs of the people.)
As the question of personal happiness is posed to the woman, the myth is very quickly dispelled.
I am forced to continue that abominable trade which seems so pleasant to you men, but which is nothing but an abyss of misery for us. I came to Venice to practice my profession. Oh Sir, if you could only imagine what it is like to be forced to caress without discrimination an old merchant, a lawyer, a monk, a gondolier or a priest, to be exposed to every kind of insult and abuse, to be often reduced to borrowing a skirt for some disgusting man to tear off, to be robbed by one man of what you’ve earned with another, to be blackmailed by magistrates, and to have nothing to look forward to except an atrocious old age, the workhouse, and the garbage dump, you’d conclude that I am one of the most wretched creatures of the world.
Surprised and disappointed, Candide looks expectantly at the monk, hoping that his response would serve as a counterpoint. Candide observes,
Father, you seem to be leading a life that anyone would envy: you’re obviously in the pink of health, your face is aglow with happiness . . . and you appear to be quite content with your lot as a Theatine monk.[2]
But the priest pours his heart out, admitting to a deathly loneliness in the monastery, and to the sheer hypocrisy that is both in him and around him. As he unfolds his tale of woe and wretchedness, Candide, in anguish, knows he has lost his bet. The two opposite symbols of society—the harlot, a dispenser of pleasure with no compunction and moral law to bind, and the monk, the recluse, supposedly celebrating the nobility in man—are equally wretched. One sees life as a dance, and the other as a dirge, but both find life to be empty. As Sartre suggested, the poker game or the salute makes no difference; the boat is still going down. Voltaire perceived what he did because with every fiber of his being he was seeking without success the answer to life’s ultimate riddle—the seeming futility of it all. Candide gives us the key to Voltaire’s conclusion of meaninglessness, the same key that unlocks what Solomon said centuries earlier about pleasure and religion.
To understand what they are saying is pivotal to finding the solution. There is a fundamental flaw in the argument of many philosophers and popular thinkers who argue that the presence of evil brings about the struggle for meaning. On the face of it, the argument sounds powerful, but it brings so much emotional baggage with it that the whole argument gets wrongheaded. The presence of pain and evil in their multifarious manifestations dents even the most robust argument attempting to square life with the purpose of love. One can ignore the problem of evil only by committing intellectual suicide. The problem of evil, however, is not the primary issue in considering the loss of meaning.
For the atheist, there are issues more fundamental than the problem of evil, which forcibly raise the question of life’s meaning. For, the fact is, life has been found to be more meaningful for many who are in pain, than for many in pleasure. Prior to the problem of pain is the frustration of meaninglessness even when every comfort we pursue comes within reach. This agony is captured well in the words of Methodist minister and scholar Paul Hoon:
Technology has freed him from the confines of space to travel at 25,000 miles an hour.
Industrialization frees him to move to a new job or a new home, or from a lower to a higher income tax bracket.
Electronics frees him to turn a dial and enter into a multitude of experiences quite foreign to his own. Education frees his mind and his conscience.
Medicine frees him from disease. Psychiatry and chemistry free his emotions.
Music and art free his imagination.
Government, at least in theory, frees him from political decision.
A thousand tyrannies, both inward and outward, have been broken, yet, he is rightly called “homo perturbatus,” restless man, intoxicated with such freedom as he has never known before.
For all his gains, the man who travels at 25,000 miles an hour has a nervous breakdown. Affluence and poverty, each in its own way, lock him in.
Television captures his sensitivities and homogenizes his tastes.
Education becomes a treadmill.
Vogues in art fasten upon the public consciousness, and 3 million people buy the same novel.
Drugs enslave.
Wars become stalemated.
Diplomatic negotiations become deadlocked.
The “system,” or “establishment,” constricts. Anarchy erupts and law answers with (what becomes branded as) repression.
“Determinism” is still a reality term in a psychologist’s lexicon, and death still lies at the end of life.[3]
It is easy to understand why apathy, fear, or emptiness is normative, and that each, in its own way, locks us in. Paul Hoon has underscored the real problem and pointed in the right direction. With all of our access to everything that is supposed to make life easier and more satisfying, humans, intoxicated with the abundance of options, find some chains unbreakable.
It is not surprising that boredom is a very modern word, with no counterpart in the ancient or medieval languages.[4] Kurt Baier can write any form of argument to repudiate the pursuit of meaning, but human beings will return to it in every generation because of the nature of the malady.
G. K. Chesterton summarized this malady in one epigram—“Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy.”[5] I would change just one word in that statement, so that it would reflect our present word usage more accurately—“Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of pleasure.”
This conclusion is not, in any way, to cast a negative connotation upon the word pleasure. It can properly describe a legitimate fulfillment, such as the sensation of winning a thrilling tennis match at the Wimbledon Finals, or the imprudent high of a drug addict. The word itself is not to be impugned, for the context determines the interpretation.
To translate Chesterton’s idea, then, despair comes not from being weary of suffering, but from being weary of pleasure. When the pleasure button is repeatedly pressed and can no longer deliver or sustain, the emptiness that results is terrifying. Surely, the loneliest moment in life is when you have just experienced what you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has let you down. Several have expressed this, either in its impassioned form or in an honest confession of the pursuit of meaning.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the founders of the Romantic movement in literature, is renowned for his poetic genius, being perhaps best known for his poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” and “Christabel.” He justifiably argued that the mind has immense creative powers and its use is not a mere mechanistic process. Yet, at a very significant juncture of his life, he wrote in his notebook:
Tomorrow my birthday, 31 years of age—O me! My very heart dies . . . Why have I not an unencumbered heart? These beloved books still before me, this noble room, the very center to which a whole world of beauty converges, the deep reservoir into which all these streams and currents of lovely forms flow—my own mind so populous, so active, so full of noble schemes, so capable of realizing them . . . O wherefore, am I not happy?[6]
As fertile a mind as he had, he knew an emptiness that led him into opium addiction. Poet William Hazlitt described Coleridge as one who had swallowed doses of oblivion.
Success and creative strength do not bring meaning to life, even if they are fulfilled to capacity. The recognition of this was the very point that led to the conversion of Dr. James Simpson, who was the discoverer of chloroform. As a surgeon, he had witnessed painful surgical procedures that sent patients into sheer delirium. This launched him into a search for an anesthetic, and when he discovered chloroform, he gave humanity a gift of enormous proportion. In fact, so grateful was his first patient when she gave birth to her baby under Dr. Simpson’s administration, that she called her daughter Anesthesia.
One would have thought that living with and being surrounded by all kinds of pain, he would have been driven to existential despair. Or, conversely, that he would have considered the alleviation of physical pain his greatest discovery. Yet, it was not that which contributed to his spiritual struggle or triumph; rather,
when benevolence shall have run its course, when there shall be no sick to heal, no disease to cure, when all I have been engaged about comes to a dead stop—WHAT is to fill this heart and thought and power of mine?[7]
A life consumed with benevolence and philanthropy had left his heart unfulfilled. Ironically, this question of his purposelessness was put to Simpson by a woman while she was an invalid under his care. And therein lies the crux of the problem—an invalid, challenging the discoverer of chloroform to seek out the true meaning of life.
I believe this deep struggle is well addressed, though in a subtle form, in the film Chariots of Fire. It portrays the great runner, Harold Abrams, as strong, motivated, cocky, intimidating, and self-confident. Asked by a friend in the early part of the story how he felt about losing, Abrams snapped back, “I don’t know. I’ve never lost.” Toward the end of the film and moments before his most important race, Abrams looked into the face of the same friend and said, “I used to be afraid to lose, now I’m afraid to win. I have 10 seconds to prove the reason for my existence, and even then, I’m not sure I will.”
The point is powerfully reinforced by his dispirited response on the heels of a gold medal victory at Paris in 1924. He had won, but the reason for his existence was no clearer.
Here, then, is the first clue to solving the dilemma of meaninglessness. Even life’s pleasures bring the feeling of pointlessness; they are here for a moment and then gone. At best they have “liftoff” power, but no “staying” power, or, to use a different analogy, they are like periodic flashes of lightning on a dark road, with no guiding power.
But there is a second clue, and it is at the heart of naturalism, defining both its predicament and poverty. Solomon gave us the key to unlock it. In his dead-end pursuits, he repeatedly used the phrase, “under the sun,” which denoted life outside of God, viewed horizontally, in a closed system. Voltaire showed us his closed system when he said, “What is the verdict of the vastest mind? Silence.” At this point Voltaire and Solomon part company, for Voltaire, in shutting out the vastest mind, remained in his misery, whereas Solomon, by allowing the vastest mind to speak, moved from meaninglessness to meaning.
The Christian contention is that God has spoken, and until he has his rightful place in our lives, neither the squandered, immoral life of a harlot, nor the rigorous, self-motivated, ritualistic life of a recluse will have purpose and meaning. The words of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) are most appropriate: “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” Or, as French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal was known to have put it, “There is a god-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, and only God can fill it.”
Atheism walks with its head down, earthbound, which is why it grasps nothing of eternal value. It must admit its predicament: without God, there is no meaning to life.
Questions for Study and Discussion