Can you Find True Meaning in Life?

Strong and Courageous

March 27, 2018

Meaning and purpose in life.

We have been talking recently about aspects of a person’s worldview. What is the overarching narrative of how someone lives out his or her philosophical views? Not only in the aspect of theory, but how we actually live out the need for consistency in the laboratory of life itself.

Often times, a person will not walk in consistent tune with his underlying position. Dissonance is often present, but tends to remain undiscovered.   Dr. Ronald Nash, in his book titled Worldviews in Conflict states “It is one thing for a worldview to pass certain theoretical test such as reason and experience. It is another for the worldview also to pass an important practical test, namely, can the person who professes that worldview, live consistently in harmony with the system he or she espouses? Alternatively, do we find that one is forced to live according to the beliefs borrowed from a competing system?” Such a discovery, he suggests, should produce more than just embarrassment. If a person is honest in seeking after the truth, and be willing to go where the evidence leads, a Christian worldview is both compelling and practical.

There is a large dichotomy between a Christian out-look, when compared to an agnostic or atheistic perspective according to European Christian thinker Frances Schaeffer. He explains, “Only the presuppositions of historic Christianity both adequately explain and correspond with the environments in which every man must live; the external world with its form and complexity; and the internal world of the man’s own characteristic’s as a human being. This inner world includes such human qualities as a desire for significance, love and meaning and fear of nonbeing, among others.”

What Schaeffer talks about that I would like to emphasize is the aspect of inconsistent internal struggle.

Most people hold firmly to the belief that there are certain objective moral values that exist. Dr. William Lane Craig states in his book titled On Guard  “if there is no God, then there is no foundation for objective moral values.” The non-theist therefore must steal Christian ideas of morality and desire for significance in order to attempt to create cohesive meaning in life. If the entire universe is just molecules in motion with no intrinsic purpose, if the cosmos is just a random lucky accident that occurred for our benefit, then there is no real standard for moral behavior.  But yet we do see and need such a standard.

If you are skeptical of belief in God, if our human minds are the outcome of totally random, unguided processes, then why should we even begin to trust our own thoughts? Our minds are the outcome of a divine mind maker, who has embedded into us aspects of morality that can’t be adequately explained by a non-theistic worldview. Understanding these things strongly reinforces meaning and purpose for life. Without them, the endpoint philosophically is nothing less than total despair.

Jesus is the answer, for the world today!