Douglas Groothuis
Defending Christian Faith, October 12, 2004
GOD
AND MORAL MEANING
III. Four
Defective Views of Meaning and Morality
A.
Four naturalist
views (continued)
3. Existentialism
(escape from the void): Sartre, Camus (James Sire)
a. Individual
“creation” of value
Meaning, value,
purpose, significance (subjective)
World of science and facts (objective)
b. The
unstable metaphysics of freedom: Steven Pinker, The Blank
Slate (2002)
c. Value
has no objective roots
d. Reduces
to anarchism, chaos
For more on this topic, see also
William Lane Craig, “The Absurdity of Life Without God” in
Reasonable Faith (Crossway, 1994)
4. Immanent
purpose and transcendentalism
a. Objective
values as brute facts
b. Objections
to this odd metaphysic
5. Postmodernist
ethics (without objective reality)
a. Richard
Rorty on ethics: a freeloading atheist
b. Reification:
true and false
c. William
Wilberforce: against the
world, for the world
d. Value
creation: Richard Rorty
and Friedrich Nietzsche
e. Michel
Foucault on human nature as constructed
f. Coming
to terms with the divine Lawgiver and Judge
B. Cosmic
purpose and Christian theism (The Moral Argument)
1. The
logic of Christian metaphysics on ethics
a. God and
the good. Good based on
God’s character and the structure of creation.
b. Anthropology:
imago dei (image
of God). Conscience of the moral law
explained by this.
c. Meaning,
morality, and eschatology
2. Objections
to Christian meta-ethics
a. Arbitrariness
of the good based on God
b. Destroys
human autonomy
c. God and
eternal life don’t give meaning
d. Collapses
into theological egoism
For more on God and morality, see C.S.
Lewis, Mere Christianity, part 1; C.S. Lewis, The Abolition
of Man; C.S. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” in
Christian Reflections