Gavin Ortlund on what we lose when we lose God

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-nHx7GBGA

3:20 - 4:00

"Let's suppose there is no God. It is hard to state how dark that is. What it means for our human nature, for love, for the way that I feel about my kids – so that's one of the most important things in my life, that feeling of love I have for them. If that's reductively explained by evolutionary psychology – basically I feel this way because it helped animals survive in my animal ancestry, and that's it, and there's nothing more – if I really try to live on that basis, I do find it dehumanizing. It tears away everything that I think gives life value and meaning, and hope."

It cannot possibly be dehumanizing to find out the true nature of humans. It would be the opposite; it would be a humanization of your views about yourself to find out what it really means to be human. Really, it's Christianity that dehumanizes us and makes us out to be these 'kingly creatures' or godly spiritual beings with immortal souls – made in the 'image of God' and loved by God to the point of incarnation, sacrifice, and salvation.

Clearly, Ortlund had in mind something other than the literal meaning of dehumanizing – something more along the lines of what he says next. If there is no God and we are mere flukes of nature – the result of particles smashing together in surprisingly productive ways – then there's no real reason for our existence. We are because we can be and that's simply how the dice came up; or, in the case of necessitarianism, we are because we must be as determined by the necessary laws of nature.

In one sense I'm in full agreement with Gavin Ortlund. I think we lose a lot when we lose God; in some sense losing God is an infinite loss, or at least an infinite disappointment. I think God entails that the universe is in the best possible state of affairs, or at least in one possible configuration of a best possible state of affairs. Hence, why I defend pro-theism. The world would be so much more meaningful and beautiful if death wasn't the end, but we went on to enjoy a world where nature and humanity are in perfect harmony, where we can explore galaxies and build worlds of our own. We can imagine a world infinitely better than ours, and it's pretty crushing to start with a worldview in which everything is enchanted by God's purpose and adoration only to come to believe that death is the end and we are just another bug crawling around on a speck of dust floating in a cosmic sea of indifference. We are not kingly creatures, but machines obeying complex lines of code that so happen to include the curse of subjective consciousness.

Reality is hellish compared to what we can imagine. Gavin is right – that's dark. But it's a darkness we must face. Hiding from it doesn't make it go away.

While the naturalistic worldview invites deep cynicism and pessimism, I don't think it entails the extreme version where humans are objectively worthless and all value is subjective. On that view, anthropocide isn't wrong in any real sense; destroying all of humanity wouldn't make any real difference. That's a degree of cynicism too extreme for me. I think that view fails to appreciate the reality of value.

In another post, I'll defend my view of mitigated cynicism. We should be cynical up to a point, but I argue that human value is immense, finite, and objective. Human value is not infinite like the idealists and Christians believe or want to believe. And human value is not nothing as the cynics think. And human value is not subjective like the anti-realists say. But that's for another time.