Truth Really Matters

Actor Marlon Brando reached the pinnacle of Hollywood fame and success, but near the end of his life said, “Life is a mystery and an unsolvable one.  You just simply live it through, and as you draw your last breath you say, “What was that all about?’”

How pitiful, yet how reflective of a life without God, without hope, without meaning.  The Brando quote is cited by Os Guinness in his 2022 book, The Great Quest:  Invitation to an Examined Life and a Sure Path to Meaning.  Guinness calls the reader to this great quest, a search for meaning as the key to make the most of life and find “fulfillment in all you do.”  If you are not consciously on this quest, “you will always to some degree be sleepwalking through your existence.”

The stakes are infinite because each life extends into eternity and eternity’s destination depends, of course, on discovering the essence of reality, God’s reality, and http://dardogallettostudios.com/blog/2015/04/13/save-the-date-master-gabriel-misse-analia-centurion/ truth in the person of the Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Miss that . . . miss Jesus . . . and you’ve missed everything.  There is no greater tragedy.  “The quest is existential because you are staking your very existence on the outcome of what you discover.”

Some try to avoid the quest, but “man cannot live on cynicism alone,” Guinness observes.  I’ve run into some who pretend to, especially among college students.  They love to criticize, to mock, to take shots at the Christian worldview, for example.  They act as if they do not embrace a worldview of their own, that must be defended rationally if they would claim the intellectual high ground.  Typically materialists, they fail to realize that rationality itself is excluded by materialism – if matter is everything then the next thing they say is derived from random brain chemistry.

Some are cocky, living as if they were “godless self-gods” who think they’ve got it all figured out.  After our global pandemic, though, who can really believe we control our own destiny?  I’ve met some of these, too.  I ask them if they can, with their godlike powers, forego sleep and bowel movements for the next week.

Many just don’t think much at all about ultimate questions.  Most unbelievers, when I ask them if they ever think about what will become of them when they die, they reply, “All the time.”  What they mean is that thoughts of their mortality intrude on them frequently, but they refuse to dwell on it, which is so easy to do in this generation which holds the internet literally in the palm of its hand.

Life is filled with duties and chores and relationships, and whenever a moment of free time invades our consciousness, an entire world of news, entertainment, and endless distraction is a click away.  Who wants to think deep thoughts, troubling thoughts?  Blaise Pascal, the 17^th century mathematician, concluded that most prefer not to think about death and so surround themselves with distractions.  Guinness suggests that we moderns are not just surrounded by diversions; rather, “we are mesmerized by them, and we rarely lift our minds to think beyond them.”

Guinness notes that “we lose the curiosity we had as children.”  Life is astonishing, from dewdrops, dandelions, and dogs, to the sun, moon, stars, and galaxies.  So how did everything get here?  Why am I here?  To whom am I responsible?  What’s right, what’s wrong, and how do I judge the difference?  And then what?  What happens when my life is snuffed out?

There’s a legend that a London cabbie asked the famous mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell what he thought was the meaning of life.  Russell was flummoxed.  He griped, “Only precise questions deserve precise answers.”  Finally, the best he had to offer was, “The universe is just there, and that’s all.”  Pitiful.  It’s just giving up.  He should have resigned his claim to be a philosopher, which implies a love of truth, a desire to understand.  Socrates’ challenge still stands:  “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”  — Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung

“The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more biological needs.”  — Anthropologist Clifford Geertz

This has certainly been true for me.  As a young atheist I yearned for meaning, desperately, and this opened me up to the Gospel.  (You can find my testimony on this site if you want the gory details.)  Guinness is amazed that so many people are careless about pursuing and finding answers to the ultimate questions.  I am, too.  I don’t identify at all with the careless metaphysical drifter, no matter how well educated, successful, and driven in worldly ways.  Faced with the existential crisis of how to live day by day and how to face death and eternity, how is it possible to not care enough to find answers!?!

Some engage in bargaining.  We’ll deal with the question later, we promise ourselves, after we’ve graduated, or once we get a better job, or when we’ve got more time, or, worst . . . after we’ve retired.  Jesus dealt with this issue, in part, in the parable we find in Luke 12:13-21, which includes the warning, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee:  then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?”

Guinness contrasts two modes of thinking that have shaped the West – the Greek and the Jewish.  The Greeks tended to think that reason alone can be employed to investigate both the natural and supernatural realms.  The Jews believed that truth about God and His creation must be found through narratives and experience.  Both Jews and Christians saw God as personal and known through relationship.  Knowing about God and knowing God are very different things.  Both aspects are possible only if and as God reveals Himself to us.  Thus, we have the Bible and the born again experience, followed by living life led by the Spirit of God, insofar as we allow Him to lead us.

Now, Guinness is a Christian and so his thesis is that the only quest in touch with reality is the one that leads to knowing Jesus as Lord and Saviour.  The Gospel is both motivation and solution in that, realizing we are sinners, we seek the one and only Saviour, who shed His blood on a cruel cross and raised Himself from the dead . . . a demonstration and a promise that we can share.  We need forgiveness and we crave life, eternal life, and only Jesus has the technology to give us bodies that live in good health forever – resurrection bodies.

Guinness contrasts conceptual truths where you can “take it or leave it,” with existential truths on which you stake your life and your eternity.  There are useful and useless methods to find truth.  Bertrand Russell claimed that “what science cannot discover, man cannot know.”  This is scientism, and is both preposterous and self-refuting.  1^st, self refuting:  You cannot use the scientific method, for example (observing, counting, weighing, measuring, hypothesizing, testing), to prove that “what science cannot discover, man cannot know.”

2^nd, preposterous:  Try to prove your love for your wife with math, logic, and scientific instruments.  Faith, meaning, purpose, hope, love, integrity and all that is important to human life cannot be verified in test tubes or reduced to mathematical formulae.

Guinness encourages us that to embark on the examined life, we cannot outsource the work and we cannot make a lackadaisical effort.  We must do the work and the thinking and the emotional struggling.  When I was confronted with the Gospel as a teenager, it took me a few months to figure out that it was buy gabapentin online overnight true.  Once I realized that Jesus is who He said He was, it took me less than a minute to decide to act on that truth.

The author challenges us to use our reason, to be aware of our conscience, and to engage a living sense of wonder.  No matter what is true about creation, human life, and our individual life and destiny, what is true will certainly be amazing.  If we decide materialism is true and we derive from stardust, that would be amazing.  If we realize we are made in the image of God and that God loves us and offers us redemption and eternal life, that is amazing.  There is no neutral, mundane worldview that grapples with the wonder of what we see and experience.

He cautions the young who are immersed in social media.  Do not be content with the opinions of others.  Don’t go with the flow.  Don’t do a quick internet search . . . unless you find a truly insightful website, like truthreallymatters.com.

Phase 1 of the search that Os outlines is a time for questions.  Questions are vital for the quest.  Few people, he claims, keep asking questions.  I’ve experienced this in that over the many years I have engaged in 1-2-1 evangelism, oh-so-rarely do I encounter a new question.  Most of the time people don’t have any questions that are forefront in their minds.  No questions means they are content to drift along as they are.  A good question, however, presents a challenge that cannot be ducked.  When I was searching, I had to find answers.  And answers were there to be found.  God makes sure of that.

To settle on a particular answer, you must be convinced it is objectively true, not just true for you, but true whether anyone else believes it or not.  We live in a skeptical age, but also a “spiritually and intellectually stunted” age, cut off from not only the rich conversations and debates of previous generations, but also from a healthy culture that encourages or even allows open debates.  Question the orthodoxy of the woke meme of the day at your own peril!

How is it other than insane that the latest outrageous woke assertion cannot even be questioned?  Can’t I even ask someone to explain an idea that overturns thousands of years of wisdom and experience?

Immanuel Kant suggested four big questions:  “What can we know?”  “What must we do?”  “What can we hope for?”  “What is man?”  French artist Paul Gauguin summed it up in three:  “Where do we come from?”  “What are we?”  “Where are we going?”

Everyone has some answers to these questions, ergo, everyone has a faith, a personal philosophy, a worldview.  I discovered this by experience when I started knocking doors for my Sunday School bus route in the 1970s.  From the most to the least educated, from the richest to the poorest, everyone had figured out, they thought, what it was all about, whether they spent anytime thinking about it or not.  They bet their lives and eternities on faith, some faith, whether they had any good reasons or not.  On such faiths, blind or sighted, people decide on identities and morality, and whether they have any hope for the future.

Os tells the story of Charles Handy, an eminent British management guru, who was astonished as he attended his father’s funeral.  His apparently mundane, modest father had touched the lives of hundreds in profound ways.  “I had put my faith until that moment, in success, money, and family, probably in that order.  I still think these things are important, but I hanker after a bigger frame in which to put them.”  He suddenly saw the difference, as David Brooks puts it, between the “resume self” and the “eulogy self.”

The crucial years, Os states, are from eighteen to twenty-five, the Big Seven, in which people think through their biggest decisions – who they are, which career, who to marry, which worldview.  Accordingly, I find the most interesting and rewarding 121s are on or near college campuses.  Just walk up to a college student, offer him a tract, and ask him if he has figured out what the purpose of life is.  Generally, he’ll talk to you.  But a few years later he might well brush you off after his heart and mind have ossified on some false worldly philosophy.

Some people have signals that puncture their complacency or awareness.  Fyodor Dostoevsky was ecstatic after a last-minute reprieve from execution.  He reexamined his life, all the wasted time, laziness, errors, etc., and set out on a new path.  For Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti it was the death of a friend, “a hole torn in life.”  For me it was a divine encounter with a Christian when I was at the absolute nadir of my atheistic lifepath.  Even without a dramatic signal, though, everyone’s life has elements of transcendence, if they are open to them.

I had a moment about fifteen years ago that gave me a glimpse of Heaven.  Families had gathered at our house at Christmastime.  I was sitting on the living room floor with our daughter, Elizabeth, and our infant grandson Eli and . . . the moment was perfect.  Everything was just right, just as it ought to be, a glimpse of justrightness that I’m sure we’ll experience in the ages to come.

The second phase is a time for answers.  There are countless answers, but only one will be “illuminating and truly adequate.”  Now, this book by Os Guinness is not an apologetic discourse on why the Christian faith is the unique and soul-saving answer.  He admits that.  I’ve written much and reviewed many books on this site that serve that purpose.  What Os is attempting is to stir up the desire for the quest in the heart of the reader.  He (and I) are confident that God has wired every one of His image-bearers to recognize the truth if they sincerely seek it.

C.S. Lewis offers the heart of presuppositional apologetics when he writes, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” What I do not like about evidential apologetics is that is focuses on detailed evidences, and entrusts the rebel (unbeliever) to sit in the Judge’s seat to decide whether the evidence is good enough.  Alternatively, presuppositional apologetics starts with the presupposition that the Bible is true, and suggests that now you can see / understand everything important about life and creation.  You can then toss in those detailed evidences.  They will fit nicely.  But you’re confronted with the entire life-changing Gospel-centered worldview.

 “For with thee is the fountain of life:  in thy light shall we see light.”  Psalm 36:9

Using this approach we can evaluate other religions, too.  In Hinduism the universe is grounded in Atman, unchanging and impersonal.  There is no supreme worth for individuals, resulting in a Dalit or “untouchable,” for example.  Pantheism and monism exclude individual worth and dignity.  Our apparent individuality is illusion.  You aspire for “‘release’” – freedom from individuality, not freedom to be an individual.”  Does your conscience resonate with this?

Similarly, atheism is adamant against the transcendent and everything else beyond the senses and the narrowly drawn scientific method – counting, weighing, measuring.  Are you content to see your identity as merely a clump of molecules in motion?  Do you deny your own personhood?  Is morality just some odd brain chemistry?  Is murder just molecules in collision or is it wrong? How about rape or torturing babies for fun?  Do you actually live with no conscience?

Apparently, Charles Darwin, late in life, admitted that he was less able to appreciate the music of Handel’s Messiah that he had once loved.

Guinness observes that the Christian view of the world gave rise to modern science.  The Hindu did not and could not.

What about other societal impacts?  Human rights and dignity do not derive from either Eastern religions or atheism / secularism.  The huge and shocking (for the better) societal changes due to the entry of Jesus into history are well documented in a book I plan to review a few months from now, The Air We Breathe:  How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality, by Glen Scrivener.  What we take for granted in “Western values,” including individual rights, compassion, freedom, science, and progress was determinedly not characteristic of ancient cultures.

Phase three is a time for evidences.  Truth, real truth whether it feels good or not,  is despised in our postmodern culture . . . so get over it.  Truth really matters!

When someone says, “There is no such thing as absolute truth,” take them at their word and don’t believe them.  Guinness:  “Truth is all about solid facts and reality.”  The opposites of truth include lies, deceptions, delusions, mistrust, fake news, misinformation, and suspicion.  The world is filled with attacks on truth.  Your life depends on persevering against the “father of lies,” as Jesus described Satan.

“The Christian faith claims to be true in the sense that it fully aligns with reality.  It is true in the sense that, if it is true, it would still be true even if no one believed it; and if it is false, it would still be false even if everyone believed it.”  All questions are open.  When Nathanael scoffed to Philip whether or not Jesus was worth checking out, Philip replied, “Come and see.”

Biblical Christianity is tied to reality.  Real reality simply cannot go out of fashion.  Reality and trust in reality are essential for countless human endeavors such as business, science, journalism, politics, and personal relationships.  Christianity is tied to history and to human experience.  It welcomes examination.  Christians themselves may, and are, found wanting quite often, but the Bible is clear that that will be the case, too.

The big questions on which to examine the veracity of biblical truth include what we see in creation, the nanotechnology of living creatures, flood geology, fulfilled prophecy, the behavior of man (sin / virtue / morality), the logic and experiences of redemption and the new birth, and the resonance of hope in the human soul.  A Christian life philosophy welds together realism and hope, optimism and pessimism.

C.S. Lewis at first tried to read the Gospel accounts as a literary critic and was shaken to his core. “What are we to make of Jesus Christ?” he asked, including how to reconcile two aspects of His life – the “depth and sanity of His moral teaching” and “the quite appalling nature of this man’s theological remarks.”

In short, no great moral teacher ever claimed to be God and that was what Jesus claimed repeatedly, even to the point of crucifixion.

Lewis:  “Let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great moral teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.”

The fourth and final phase of the quest is “a time for commitment.”  This is a step of faith, not a leap of faith, a step fully rational and grounded on the conviction that what we see in the Bible is true.  It is a warranted belief.  If true, you must respond, all in or all out.  This is a matter of heart, will, and mind.  It’s personal.

In deciding for Christ, you necessarily repent from all other worldviews, which are demonstrably irrational, in accord with the type of examples mentioned before.

Your warranted belief naturally includes conviction, which leads to trust.  Your entire person commits to a Person, the Lord Jesus.  Now, I wish that Os was more complete in his discussion here, because the conviction and trust that produces a born again conversion necessitates a humility and an admission of sins that need forgiveness, which is why the Cross and the Resurrection occurred.  Repentance from your actual personal sins and trust in the Person of Jesus Christ are the elements that complete the quest . . . the new birth into the family of God.

Which starts a new quest.  The Christian life extends from this point, “a new creature” (2 Cor 5:17), through eternity.

Jesus had a quest, too, to search for us, pictured in Luke 15 as a shepherd searching for a lost sheep, a woman searching for a lost coin, and a father waiting for a lost son to come home.

Once we come home, once we are born again into God’s family, our new quest is to follow in Jesus’ work – to seek and to save that which was lost.  At this point in my life – I’m 70 now, easily fatigued, and have several health issues – I don’t have much ambition or the capacity to fulfill new ambitions, but it is still clear to me that as long as I can walk and talk I can share the Gospel with lost people, both verbally and by tract.  We hand out about 400 tracts per week, I knock doors with my grandsons, and I find interesting ways to reach out to people I would not normally cross paths with.

I don’t do as much as I used to, but I am very grateful that the Lord still has some service for me to perform.

I highly recommend Os Guinness’ book.  He concludes with some beautiful thoughts:  “. . . for a seeker to find Jesus is not the end of all searching, but the beginning of the greatest quest of all . . . to know God better and better, which is the climax and soul of human existence . . . It never ends, not because of the infinity of options and the impossibility of choosing, but because of the infinity and inexhaustibility of the One in whom we have found our answer.”

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com