A Godless Life: Dismal or Bright?
September 09, 2006
What is life like deep inside the hearts of those who believe the universe is empty of God and meaning? Is misery central and enduring, happiness peripheral and fleeting? Or do the godless have good reason to cling to a bright outlook on life?
Given the diversity of human experience, it is no surprise that there are many perspectives on these questions.
Take Woody Allen, for instance, a tremendous success from a material perspective: 37 movies, 21 Academy Award nominations, 3 wins, the list goes on. This summer, Allen sat for an interview with David Segal of the Washington Post, giving us a glimpse of the misery within:
“You do the best you can within the concentration camp,” he says, cutting straight to the life-as-Auschwitz metaphor. “It’s very hard to keep your spirits up. You’ve got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you.” . . .
“[The emptiness of life is] just an awful thing,” he says, shrugging a little, “and in that context you’ve got to find an answer to the question: Why go on?”
Why go on? It’s a good question, one I would have trouble answering from within a naturalistic worldview. When I read these quotes, my heart aches. May the Holy Spirit continue to strive with this man (cf. Genesis 6:3), and may he turn and face his Maker.
At the other end of the godless spectrum reside the “brights.” According to Bright’s Net, a “bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview . . . free of supernatural and mystical elements.” (Brights bristle when referred to as atheists, but it is difficult to avoid that conclusion in light of their denial of the existence of the supernatural. As leading bright evangelist Daniel Dennett says, “We brights don’t believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny — or God.”) Brights, as the name suggests, defiantly reject the notion that they dwell in darkness. Their naturalistic worldview is a point of pride, not a source of nagging despair.
The chasm between Woody Allen and the brights is amazingly deep and wide. Some would argue that the brights are only deceiving themselves, ignoring not only the logical outworking of the naturalistic worldview but the testimony of deep conscience and Creation’s design to the existence of God. I’m not going to delve into those thorny and controversial issues today.
Instead, I would like to pose a question or two: Woody Allen’s approach to avoiding the reality of his despair (as David Segal describes it) “is to make a feature film every year and try, however briefly, to distract [him]self from the darkness.” Do you ever find yourself running from distraction to distraction? Why do you think that is?
