Has Christianity Failed You? by Ravi Zacharias

Author:Ravi Zacharias
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Christian Life, Spiritual Growth
ISBN: 9780310562443
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2010-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

the law of identity: If A, then not B.

the law of noncontradiction: A and B must exclude each other unless there are qualifiers.

the law of rational inference: If A, then what necessarily follows.

the law of the undistributed middle: Just because two things have one thing in common does not mean they therefore have everything in common.

Please note that by their definition, even the laws of logic must have transcendent reality—that is, they must be based in reality and recognized as unassailably true, regardless of who believes it or doesn’t or of their cultural perspective—as their logical starting points; otherwise, the arguments that stem from them cannot be logical, and there can be no true basis or beginning point for any argument, leaving us, as the ancient philosopher Heraclitus taught, with “flux, nothing but flux.” Alfred North Whitehead, Michael Polanyi, Stanley Jaki—all philosophers of science—held to some form of theism as the assumed framework for law and order and for the predictability of cause and effect in the universe. Whitehead’s comment in which he refers to the great progress within the sciences in medieval times is worth noting:

It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking of the explicit belief of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries.8

The atheist Frederick Nietzsche, one of Price’s mentors, said that if there is no transcending reality, words are nothing more than manufactured ideas, endlessly reflecting themselves and each other within a hall of mirrors, becoming more distorted with each reflection. Recognizing this, he came to admit that he was pious enough that “even he still worships at the altar where God’s name is ‘truth.’”9

Nietzsche and the existentialists/nihilists were far more honest about where their atheism led than the doublespeak of Price and Sweeney, who want to have total finitude while granting themselves transcending privileges. It is for this very reason that the sciences have been denied any prerogative on ethics, even though some scientists desperately seek to bring it under their purview.

If the opinions and beliefs espoused in The Reason-Driven Life are evaluated against the laws of logic, the law of rational inference (that if something is true, what must necessarily follow) kills any discussion of morality other than from the perspective of its various humanistic coverings, each of which has its own “reason” and qualifiers. Here is Price on ethics and meaning:

I believe we live in a morally neutral universe, that the moral laws and grids of meaning through which we see it are artificial impositions by our various ancestors…

There is no already-determined meaning somewhere else, in the mind of some God viewed as a kind of heavenly Bureau of Weights and Standards. Where else could meaning be but in the eye of the beholder? And that is in you.

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