The Existentialist Option

…if God is dead, everything is permitted.

—Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Atheistic Scientific Naturalism had undermined the foundations that previous western cultures had been built upon. The Nihilist option had proclaimed God to be dead, or at least completely irrelevant. By the time World War I had dealt the first death blow to any sense of “progress through evolution and technology,” the main question became, “Is it possible to transcend meaninglessness and the insanity of reality?”

The Existentialist option says, “Yes!”

As Sire observes, Existentialism is not a fully developed Worldview on its own. In fact, there are two basic flavors: 1) Atheistic Existentialism which developed as a response to Naturalism leading to Nihilism, and 2) Theistic Existentialism which was a response to culturally lifeless Theism.

Atheistic Existentialism

Atheistic Existentialism holds many of the core ideas and beliefs of Naturalism. The material world is all there is; there is no god/God, etc. Where Existentialism creates meaning is in distinguishing the OBJECTIVE world from the SUBJECTIVE world.

The Objective World is what is and there is nothing we can do about that. But the way we perceive that world and interact with that world is something that we have control over. How we choose to see the world and create our mental perception of the world in our subjective experience is where we have the power to overcome meaninglessness. In short, the individual has the ability to make themselves into who they want to be.

Jean Paul Sartre, one of the key Existentialist writers of the 20th Century, states the core of this philosophy bluntly:

If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and …. this being is man.

First of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards, defines himself.

–Jean Paul Sartre, “Existentialism” in A Casebook on Existentialism

We define ourselves and we define reality for ourselves. Through our choices, we do what we want to be. Or to say it another way, action defines essence.

The external, objective world is absurd, meaningless in itself. Albert Camus said that this absurdity was created by the tension of loving life in the certainty of death. Or to put it more plainly, one day I will die and I will be gone, completely gone. But I love living, so what can I do knowing that at some point all I love will be gone, forever?

So the Existentialist rebels against this absurdity by choosing to create reality through bold choices that define his or her willfully chosen values. The Existentialist rages against the Machine Universe of Naturalism by saying, “I am here, I am alive, and I consciously choose to….” it doesn’t matter what comes next, as the long as the choice is owned as one’s own.

Theistic Existentialism

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is considered to be the father of theistic Existentialism. Kierkegaard saw the dead orthodoxy of his Danish homeland and the threat of nihilism already festering in Europe. Kierkegaard knew that something must be done to revitalize Christianity. His writing set the stage for Existentialism to take root in some forms of Christianity, particularly during the early 20th Century.

During the 1800s, the fundamental truths of Biblical Christian Theism had been torn down. Scholars and academics used many newly developed tools of higher critical scholarship which ultimately denied: 1) the trustworthiness of the recorded history of the Bible, and so 2) even though the Bible is not historically trustworthy, it does record valuable mythology – timeless truths of morality. The teachings of the Bible became so watered down that God had been reduced to the man Jesus who was only a good, moral teacher – nothing more. In other words, God himself had been stripped of His “godness” by the modernists.

It is interesting to note that during this time, many of these scholars wanted to discover the true identity of Jesus. It as assumed that the Bible had not given us an accurate picture of Him and so it was important to figure out who He actually was. This search culminated in Albert Schweitzer’s landmark work: The Quest for The Historical Jesus first published German, then in English in 1910. In evaluating all those who had composed a Life of Christ before him, Schweitzer noted, “Each individual created Him (Jesus) in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of the life of Jesus.”  Schweitzer then went on to characterize Jesus as mentally unstable! To quote Budziszewski again, “there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve.”

Theistic Existentialism at first sought to restore the validity of the Christian worldview in the absurdity of reality. Although Theistic Existentialism sounds like it shares much with Biblical Theism, it is are very different view. Whereas Biblical theism starts with the existence of God as the foundation of reality, Theistic Existentialism begins with the self-awareness of the individual.

Theistic Existentialism is most famous for the summary statement, “a leap of faith.” Whereas reason and reasoning had led the Naturalists to Atheism – the rejection of the idea of God – because the world is absurd, Theistic Existentialism argued that getting past this absurdity required “leaping” back to a belief in God even though there is no logical reason to do so.

The radical, self-determined act for the Theistic Existentialist is to choose to believe in God in spite of not being able to know for sure if He is even there. It is an intellectual leap into the void. The Atheistic Existentialist chooses to act; the Theistic Existentialist chooses to believe.

Because Theistic Existentialism affirms that reality is absurd and ultimately not fully knowable, emphasis is given to accepting the “both/and” nature of our apprehension of truth. Traditional flavors of the Theistic view tend to focus on the “either/or” of truth – it is either this or that. Theistic Existentialism tends to embrace the mystery or paradox of knowing – truth is not as clear as we originally thought. Transcendent, absolute truth might be clearly apprehended in the mind of God, but for us mere mortals with limited mental capacity, truth and reality can appear to be more nebulous and paradoxical.

It might not be fair to analyze this position in this way, but it seems that transcendent truth is often rejected because people don’t like or desire what that truth says. Atheists reject even the idea of “god” because they hate God. Theistic Existentialists often affirm God, but hate His Word – His Truth.

The Scriptures then become a collection of stories which have mythological, symbolic significance for the human race. Whether are not the narratives of the Bible actually happened in history – real space-time – is irrelevant. What is important is that we believe that these stories teach us something about navigating reality – the desert of the ultimately unknowable.

But questions must be raised about the helpfulness of such a view. If Jesus was not actually raised from the dead but is only a symbol or a myth, how then does this story actually help us? How can we actually have hope, which is what the Resurrection promises. If the “mythological” story of Abraham and his family seems to teach us that God is faithful to keep his promises, how can we be assured that He will be faithful even though there was no actual Abraham that God was faithful to in the first place?

How can a non-event [a resurrection which did not occur] be regarded a symbol of hope or indeed anything else? If something has happened we try to see what it means. If it has not happened the question cannot arise. We are driven back on the need for an Easter event.

— from a review of Resurrection: A Symbol of Hope in Times Literary Supplement, 1971.

By the mid-20th century and in the aftermath of World War II, the philosophical suspicions that history is going nowhere and life is savagely brutal and meaningless seemed to be largely confirmed.