Truth Unites - Existentialism: A Christian Response

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

In this video I offer a Christian response to existentialism, especially focusing on the writings of Albert Camus. Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

In this video, I'm going to share my story of engaging existentialism, especially when I was a college student reading these various existentialist philosophers and being really challenged by them in my faith, kind of getting pulled into this struggle, and then how my faith ultimately delivered me from that and kind of pulled me out of the maze, so to speak. And the reason I think this could be interesting for others or relevant for other people is I do think that studying existentialism

is one of the best ways to understand the modern, Western world and especially the emotions of the modern West and the sense of despair and loss that is present in the process of secularization. And it's really interesting to compare earlier phases of modernity to what we're going through right now. So existentialism we think of as more like a 19th century and especially 20th century European movement, especially in philosophy and other fields as well. And so we're in a little different time, but there's these curious and interesting points of similarity between what we're facing today. And I was just thinking about that. I was reading this book, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, one of my long-term dreams, or one of the things I dream about sometimes is if I could ever go back and get like a second PhD or go back to formal education in some way and study more.

And I would love to study philosophy more. And I don't, unless you all become patrons. And even then, I doubt that's going to happen. But so what I do is I just make up my own little study projects and I have little goals and I read different things. So I've been on this project of reading Pascal and existentialism and other things. And it just brought this question up for me. And I thought, wow, this is so relevant to what we're facing today. So let me just define what we're talking about when I say existentialism.

This is a movement, not just in philosophy in other fields as well. where there's this reaction against the more speculative, metaphysical questions of philosophy, and the focus is put on the individual and on the individual as existing, and the problems that come with existence. One of the recurrent themes, it's really hard to define who is in this movement and who's out, but one of the themes you almost always see is the burden of existence, the sense of dread that comes with looking for, a meaningful world, and yet it seems to be meaningless.

So the sense of dread coming from the search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. But the way I love to define existentialism, just my own personal, short kind of, it's not a definition, but just a way, it could be helpful just as a way to get into it, is to say it's what atheism feels like. To me, that's what is so interesting about existentialism. It brings the emotions and the sense of despair. and disintegration of that sort of metaphysical question of whether God exists home in the most personal way. And I think that's a valid way to think.

For one reason, Jean-Paul Sartre, who is, if there's anything that's kind of a manifesto of what existentialism is, even though it's not a representation of his own mature thought, it's his essay. existentialism is a humanism where basically he says, it's a good essay just for its clarity, it's a brief, easy read. Basically what he says is, quote, existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. So all throughout that essay, he's using this phrase, existence precedes essence. And this is reversing the traditional formula of philosophy, which says essence precedes existence. So the nature of something is more basic than the fact of its existence.

And existentialism is reversing that and saying, no, we're just here. There's nothing that we're supposed to be. There's no nature. All of that comes after. Existence is this sort of brute fact that we start with. And so the reason that he arrives upon that is because of, again, atheism. So atheism, the removal of God means that the category of essence becomes kind of destabilized. So in relation to human beings, Sartre says, there is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it.

Man simply is. And I just think that it is so poignant and it captures what it feels like for the person who genuinely contemplates a universe in which God is out of the picture. It's this sense of the wild freedom and dread of it. There's nothing that it's supposed to be. it becomes random. Randomness, that's a good word for the feeling of it. And I'm really interested in that emotion because I think a lot of people feel that way,

even subconsciously. I think a lot of people in a secular culture are walking around feeling something of that even at a more interior level, more so than people in pre-modern cultures did. So what I want to share is my own journey of working through this, and it came not from Sartra,

but from reading another existentialist thinker, though some people say he's not really, an existentialist and he didn't like that term. Albert Camus. He lived from 1913 to 1960, born in Nigeria, lived in France. He wrote several things that I read in college that are absolutely, I'll never forget, University of Georgia, the philosophy building, the library right there on the north campus, being there reading his book, The Myth of Cicephas and finding it fascinating. He starts off the whole book, basically saying, life is absurd, so should we commit suicide?

That's the question driving the whole book. It's so refreshingly practical compared to most philosophy books, you know? Most philosophy books are very impractical and kind of abstract. This is very vivid. He's saying, do you kill yourself? You know, because life is absurd.

Sometimes his whole philosophy is summarized as absurdism. And basically, what he's getting at with this term absurd is what he calls the divorce of humanity from her setting. So in my writing, I've defined the absurd as the will toward meaning in a meaningless world, the desire for life and perpetuity when death and extinguishment are inevitable, the appetite for unity and clarity in the face of total randomness. Okay, we could stack on other ways, but it's not just meaning and meaninglessness. that's one way of getting in it. But basically, the human heart longs for something that you're not going to get.

So longing for meaning in a meaningless world. It's one way of getting at it, but it's more comprehensive than that. At every level of our being, there's this divorce or this misfit. You know, now that atheism is in the picture, we just don't fit in this world. Life does not make sense fundamentally. It's really, it's hard to fully describe, but again, it gets into the emotions of, Reading through the book gets into the emotions of atheism so powerfully. At one point he says, the absurd is sin without God. That's a provocative way to put it, right? I love these older atheists because one of the things I talk about in my book,

which I'll read from to finish this video, is that the older atheists like a Camus or a Sartra or a Nietzsche, I think are more honest and consistent than a lot of the newer atheists, people like Sam Harris, who want to retain all these kind of humanitarian values. And you're like, people like Camus get it. They're seeing what happens with the loss of God. So interestingly, his answer to the question of without God, if since life is absurd,

should we kill ourselves, is no. His whole philosophy is this kind of noble despair. He calls it a revolt. He talks about becoming conscious of meaninglessness without yielding to despair. He says there's a kind of meaning in the revolt against meaning. and he talks about the meaning of life is to kiss the absurd. So it's this kind of interesting philosophy. I remember reading through the book, you must picture me in the library there,

trying to understand a good faith reader, trying to read Camus, trying to understand what is he really getting at here. And I'm getting to the final few pages of the book. And I'm wondering the whole time, kind of why does he call this book The Myth of Cisiface? Well, this is the figure in ancient Greek mythology who was bound to eternally roll a stone up a hill only to have it roll down again. And as the book sort of climaxes in the last few pages and you're realizing the shocking implications

of what he's actually saying, and you're like, oh, that's what he means. It finally dawns on me, and I'll read you the final quote of the book where he really brings it home. This universe henceforth without a master seems to Sisyphus, neither sterile nor futile,

each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Here's some other quotes that stood out to me that really, again, you'll see how relevant this is to the current moment and the feelings that are in many people's hearts these days. Early on, he's talking about how the absurd means you don't even know yourself.

You're a stranger to yourself. He says, forever I shall be a stranger to myself in psychology as well as in logic. there are truths, but no truth. It's a profound way of getting at the kind of the feeling of lostness. See, here's where you get. It's not just kind of this atheism is not just this big metaphysical idea out there. If there's no essence, if there's nothing you're supposed to be, then in a sense there's no sort of final verdict on what you are.

And so he's saying like even our self-knowledge, I'm never going to have this final view of it. I'm never going to have this clear sense of this is what it actually is. This is who I actually am. It's like you're in a maze and you're never going to fully find your way out. Or you're looking at something that's blurry and it's never going to be fully clear. Again, powerful at capturing the emotions and the despair. Here's another passage where it's interesting. He basically, he doesn't say life is meaningless.

He just says, I don't know. What good is it if it has a meaning that I can't ever access? He says, quote, I don't know whether this world has a, meaning that transcends it, but I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? So you can probably tell I have a pretty profound personal response to Camus. I find him so poignant and so interesting. I think there's, first of all, I would say that I think that as a Christian, a Christian worldview has much that it can appreciate and sympathize with Camus about.

And I say that confidently. I know that can sound weird, but honestly, we have a Bible that has the book of ecclesiastes in it. And I think it is, I think the Bible gives us the permission to be honest and say, life in a fallen world does often feel absurd. Those feelings are not necessarily non-existent. Like the feelings Camus is talking about, people can feel those things. Now, I do think there's various questions that can be raised against Camus's. particular philosophy, you know, on the one hand, he wants to say life is meaningless, but on the other hand, he does seem to say also there's a kind of meaning in the revolt against meaning. I think you can sort of press that a little bit and say, well, you know, how is that not,

can you really have it both ways there? Is it either meaningless or not meaningless, or are you kind of smuggling in your own kind of meaning in the back door? I don't know exactly how to resolve that. That's a valid question that would need to be parsed through. I, I also think it's valid to simply ask the question of why do we have this deep-seated longing for meaning? Where does that come from? That's an interesting kind of way to press the conversation. I also think it really is impossible. I really don't think anyone honestly can regard Sisyphus as happy.

If you really embrace that idea, life is nothing more than rolling the boulder up the hill, it rolls down. There's nothing ultimately meaningful about life. I do think our craving in the human heart for meaning is so strong that we really can't accept that. It really does vitiate our humanity too much. And that's another area I think we can kind of press, Camus. But let me share it. So, I don't know, there's all kinds of stuff you could, all kinds of directions you could go in with this. Let me share my personal journey.

Okay. For a while, I felt a sense of resonance with what he's describing. and this sense, and just to other things in existentialist literature, this sense of we're hurled into existence, but we're not given answers to accompany us along the way. So life seems this bizarrely unfair thing, where you don't choose to exist. Existence is thrust upon you, but now you've got to figure out what to do. And you've got to decide how to live. His question, whether to live, and then if you decide to live, how to do so, even just not thinking about it itself as a decision. But to make that decision, you need some kind of certainty, right?

And that's the one thing that we don't have. We can't figure life out. We don't have a kind of certainty. And I remember I'll share with you my journal entry in December 2005. When I was a senior in college, I think this was right after I got back from studying abroad in England. I was wrestling with these things. I wrote in my journal, the only thing worse than the pain of life is its utter randomness. We are hurled into consciousness and struggle without any explanations or answers.

to accompany them. Life is like a test we are forced to take, the answers to which are impossible for us to know. The blanks with which we fill in the questions of life are at best guesses, and usually merely unexamined prejudices. Life is like a battle which we are forced to fight, but the objective of which is unclear to us. We are hurled into the contest, but unsure of what is required of us. We sense that we must strive, but are unsure to what end we strive or by what means. The great dilemma of life is not its failure or pain, but its uncertainty and chaos. In my book, Why God Makes Sense in a World It Doesn't, I share that journal entry, and then I pose this question, I say, but there's one thing I never considered. What if that uncertainty and the existential angst that it produces exists for a

reason? What if it's doing something that's productive? And this is where Kierkegaard and Pascal have helped me so much. Kierkegaard talked a lot about the psychology of faith and its relationship to the anxiety and dread that we associate with uncertainty. And he basically is talking about how there's this kind of disproportion between what a human heart is designed to do,

namely this longing for happiness, and any kind of knowledge that you can produce through study and reflection. And he, at one point in his writings, he poses this question of, suppose you could get, because he's basically saying, no matter how much you study, even if you had all the smartest people in the world in one brain doing all their work, you'd never get a full objective system that results in certainty. But then he says, even if you could, is that what you would need? And he says, on the contrary, in this objectivity, one loses the infinite, personal, impassioned, interest, interestedness, that is the condition of faith, the everywhere and nowhere in which faith can come into being. And Blaise Pascal has a lot of passages in his famous Ponce or

thoughts where he's saying the same thing. He's basically saying uncertainty and the anxiety of that and the hiddenness of God is all playing a role. That's the context in which love develops. And love is an essential ingredient to faith. A human being is designed for faith. Faith is this infinite passion. Certainty is not what we need. Certainty is going to be down the road as the goal eventually, but it's not what we need to get there. And Pascal talks about, you know, he says, we're neither everything nor nothing. We exist, we're real, but we're finite. And so therefore, there's always this kind of slipperiness. And he says, it's like we're in the ocean floating around. We can't land on anything solid. But he says, that is that way for a reason. That's exactly how God set it up.

It's what we need to arrive at what we need to arrive at, which is faith, the infinite passion of faith, which is more like falling in love than, you know, studying and getting the answer right. Now, this is not irrationalism. It's not saying just like a blind leap, but it's certainly not, you only step into faith once you've arrived at certainty. So let me read from my book, how I end the whole book and where this all kind of landed for me. And you'll see how it landed on me by the pitch that I make to the reader of my book. Here's what I say. What all this amounts to is this.

Those who feel trapped by uncertainty, as I did in college, must ask themselves if they are quite certain about their need for certainty. For ultimately, the demand for certainty springs from the assumption that we know what we need and that we know what we want. But do we? Hasn't most happiness and truth already come to? to us through experiences that involve surprise, surrender, and risk? Perhaps certainty is overrated. In the meantime, what do we do? As Pascal emphasizes, we must choose. We must wager. We must make

the best decision we can in light of the information we do have. And why, after all, should we expect certainty before we have done this? For Pascal, it is here that the beauty of the gospel becomes most acutely relevant. One of his briefer entries simply reads thus, An heir finds the deeds to his house. Will he say, perhaps, that they are false and not bother examine them? This is our situation in relation to the gospel.

It is a message that concerns your infinite happiness and the everlasting good of the world. It claims that our world has an author, a meaning, a struggle, and a hope. If anything ever deserved to be longed for, it is this. If anything was ever important, it is this. It is as though you have confessed your secret feelings to your true love and are even now awaiting her reply. Are you almost convinced? Would you give anything as would I for it to be true? Then believe. Give yourself to that belief as you

give your heart to the one you love. In that posture, you will find certainty and you will find yourself. And that's how I end my whole book. If you're interested, you can, I'll put it in the video description. You can check it out. Hope that's interesting or relevant to someone else out there. What I would, the pastoral, sorry, the Baptist preacher coming out here, but for anyone watching this who feels lost in the darkness out there, here's the pastoral way I'd sum it all up is, in those very feelings of desperation and lostness, let those be a catalyst to cause you to fling yourself fully into God. Cast yourself fully upon him.

That is how we meet him. Faith is in the place of desperation. And you will find him. In that posture, you will find him. So that's what I would say, just sum it up. Let me know what you think in the comments. I'm curious if any of this makes sense to anyone else. I'm curious, does this resonate with anybody else?

Or am I the only one who feels like these guys like Pascal and Kierkegaard who think about the psychology of faith? what they say is very relevant to the current moment. Merry Christmas to you all. If you watch this soon after I make it, I'm making this on December 19th, a few days before Christmas. I'm going to have a Christmas devotional video

coming out later this week. I'm also going to have a Christian response to Buddhism, the Eastern Religion Buddhism, coming out probably next week. I'm doing some different kinds of videos like this lately. It's been kind of fun. I've been on a philosophy kick, reading philosophy, so it's kind of, and I thought,

oh, this could be interesting or helpful for people out there. I also got future stuff. I've mapped out 2022. Got some new ideas. I'm so excited for Truth Unites in the future and the things I've got lots of ideas. I'll share them with you in a future date. I've shared them with my patrons already, some of them. But I'm really excited to keep pushing forward with my channel.

Thank you for supporting it. Those of you who watch the videos and comment, like the videos, all that stuff. That really means a lot to me. So thank you so much for doing that. Thanks for watching this. Let me know what you think in the comments. God bless.