Ravi at Princeton University - Why I'm Not an Atheist

many of you are familiar with this story but there's always somebody for whom it is new the old story of Holmes and Watson on a camping trip remember and they were sound asleep and after some excessive amount of liquid refreshment woke up in the middle of the night and Holmes looks at Watson nudges him and says what's and look up what do you see and Watson says I see stars and stars and more stars Holmes says what does that tell you Watson he said well astronomically it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets astrologically tells me that Saturn isn't Leo or illogically tells me that it's about quarter to 3:00 in the morning meteor logically tells me that tomorrow will probably be a beautiful day theologically tells me that this is a vast universe and we are just a tiny part of the great whole why Holmes what does it tell you he says what's a new idiot somebody has stolen our tent you know you can be very profound in an answer and miss the larger point and I think what happens with this whole flirtation that I call messing so much with the ideas of atheism and not thinking of the ramifications we really fail to understand where life ultimately goes if you choose to live out live it and define it without God years ago somebody penned these words that I'd like to read for you it goes like this first dentistry was painless then bicycles were chained 'less and carriages were horseless and many laws and force lists next cookery was fireless telegraphy was wireless cigars were nicotine 'less and coffee caffeine 'less soon oranges were seedless the putting green was weedless the college boy was headless the proper diet feckless new motor roads are dustless the latest dealers rustlers are tennis courts are solderless our new religion godless that struggle of trying to explain life having lost all points of reference is really the struggle one has to deal with if we choose to live our existence without any transcendent antic point of reference either we go inwards or we go laterally we find no point of testing what really defines the most critical questions of life and to the credit of Frederick Nietzsche when he wrestled with the idea of the madman running into the marketplace and looking for God in His thus spake Zarathustra one has to at least credit Nietzsche with the fact that he was dealing with the entailments of that kind of conclusion his metaphors are poignant and you'll begin to see what it is he's really asking once he himself philosophically is coming to that conclusion here's what he says about the madman have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly I'm looking for God I'm looking for God as many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there he excited considerable laughter have you lost him then said one did he lose his way like a child said another or maybe he's hiding is he afraid of us has he gone on a voyage or emigrated so they shouted and shouted and laughed him to scorn but the madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances where is God he cried I'll tell you we have killed him you and I we're all his murderers but how have we done this how were we able to drink up the sea who gave us a sponge to wipe away the entire horizon what did we do when we Unchained this earth from its Sun whither is it moving now whither are we moving now away from all suns are we not perpetually falling backwards forwards sidewards in all directions is there any up or down left are we not straying to an infinite nothing do we not feel the breath of empty space has it not suddenly become colder is not more and more night coming on us all the time must not lanterns now have to be lit in the morning hours do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are bearing God do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition God is God's dead and he decomposes to you you know God remains dead and we've killed him how shall we the murder of all murderers now compose ourselves because that which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives who will wipe this blood from us with what water can be purify ourselves what festivals of atonement what sacred games will we need to invent is not this the greatest of Deeds do great for us must we not ourselves now have to become God simply to seem worthy of what we have done there's never been a greater deeds you know and whoever shall be born after us for the sake of this deed shall be part of a higher than all history hitherto here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners they too were silent and they stared at him in astonishment last he threw his lantern to the ground and broke and went out I come too early maybe my time has not yet come this tremendous event is still on his way still traveling and has not yet reached the years of men lightning and thunder require time the light of the stars requires time deeds require time even after they are done before they can be seen and heard this deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars and yet they have done it themselves it has been related further on the same day that the mad man entered Davos churches and there sang a Requiem eternam Dale let out and quieted he said to have retorted each time what are these sepulchre x' now if they are not the tombs and sepulchre x' of a dead god i recall some years ago and it's still during the cold war in the 1980s having to speak at the center for geopolitical strategy in moscow and followed immediately after that at the Lenin military academy it was as ice-cold a situation emotionally speaking as you could imagine I was literally put at a table and a and a front of a table and a chair all by myself and the entire faculty circled the room there in their uniforms and were going to quiz me for about three hours on this whole issue of theism vs of a atheism it was a nerve-racking situation to be in but they're ice cold stares and they're pointed questions coming obviously in a very hostile way giving all kinds of illustrations on their string and I remember making the defense of theism there and I'll never forget the statement made by the head of the institution all of their great leaders if you walked in it's it's 8 storeys above ground and 4 storeys below ground from Peter the Great all the way to Curtis solve the general and to their modern leaders their pictures were on the wall and my wife was with me and one of my colleagues and as we were walking out the head of the institution grabbed my hand and he looked at me and I quote and tell you exactly what he said he says mr. Zacharias I'm afraid I think you are right but it's very difficult to change after 70 years of believing a lie I didn't put those words into his mouth but he knew he knew the ramifications of what happened when Stalin moved from a study in a Seminary preparing for the ministry to an avowed disbelief in God and after hillier having eliminated 15 million of his own people svetlana testified sustained by two or three historians since and svetlana before the BBC in an interview said this moguri Malcolm Muggeridge the journalist to an interview dur personally told me this story while I was visiting him he said hunched over as an old man he said I'll never forget what Svetlana described in the death of her father as she stood by his bedside the last thing that Joseph Stalin did the last physical act was to clench his fist towards the heavens one more time threw his head back on the pillow and he was gone he'd lived a life with the ramifications of having wiped away the horizon needing a lantern to be lit in the morning hours sacred games that he tried to invent who gave us such power to do this who will wipe the blood from the knives that we have used philosophically speaking atheism is flirting with the same dangers to his credit and I quote David Berlinski a skeptic himself who quoted Richard Dawkins in an interview and gave him credit for an answer when Dawkins was asked if he would really want to live with the metaphysical moral ramifications of the Darwinian worldview Dawkins was Austin's most and Berlinski quotes him Dawkins says no and he was asked why he said the end result could be fascism this was Dawkins now Dawkins doesn't necessarily of course believe that there's no point of reference for good and bad and whatever but when pushed on the whole issue of a Darwinian metaphysic extrapolated into the value system he said no the logical outworking could be fascism itself but here's what I want to do I want to start off by defining what atheism is because sometimes there's a softer version that is treated as atheism but which is really not it is it is an agnosticism somebody saying I don't know I don't claim to know if I have enough evidence I would believe but I'm not going to come hardline down and say in a category denial of the absolute the existence of a personal moral first cause Etienne born the French philosopher says this atheism is the deliberate definite dogmatic denial of the existence of God it is not satisfied with appropriate truth or relative truth but claims to see the ins and outs of the game quite clearly being the absolute denial of the absolute Paul Edwards volume 1 page 175 in his multiple volume encyclopedia philosophy here's what he says an atheist is a person who maintains who maintains that there is no God that is that the sentence God exists expresses a false proposition is a person who rejects belief in God so there you have both imagined born and from Paul Edwards how the definitions actually fall out in a philosophical dictionary on what atheism Evers and what it ultimately clings to now if I you know I came sometimes when I describe myself as having come from an atheistic backgrounds probably a strong term I was more non-theistic never gave the idea of a personal God any any credence in my life growing up in the city of now I was born in the South in the city of Chennai and raised in the north my parents one came from Kerala one came from Chennai my dad was from Kerala mothers from Chennai Kerala has produced some of the greatest Hindu philosophers in India and some of the biggest names in in Hindu philosophy come from Kerala sort of the intellectual philosophical capital of the land of India itself my dad descended directly from the mudras which was the highest caste of the hindu priesthood so all that going back for century four decades into my heritage but somewhere along the line the conversion had taken place but it became very nominal the christianity in my home was completely nominal I had no personal interest I don't think in my all of the way up to my late teens that ever crap to cracked open a Bible on my own frankly I don't know if we had one in our house but that's the way I lived in thought and actually when I finally encountered these struggles and these claims it had a dramatic impact upon my life I probably saved that for later the struggle I've had since then in my teens as I struggled and thought of the ramifications of a naturalistic materialistic world word world of ours with no transcendent no personal moral first cause where does one go with definitions how do we define the most essential things in life do you realize right now even in this most sophisticated part of the world in higher education go to the United Kingdom I come here and you ask an average student two or three questions and those questions are almost unanswerable what does it mean to be human ask an average student today what does it really mean to be human I was asked to contribute to that subject at Johns Hopkins University some years ago and most of the contributors were from a completely non theistic viewpoint Francis Collins and I represented the theistic viewpoint they're questions of sexuality what does it all really mean these questions have become almost undefinable and we go through this quicksand and walk through it trying to find our way by changing all the definitions but we don't know how to define it except by self referencing so for ramifications follow when you deny a personal God moral force cause the first one is very difficult to anchor an absolute moral law very difficult to pin that anywhere does one actually arrive at moral reasoning trying to find the explanation for good and bad now to be sure natural ists have made every effort in fact sam Harris's latest book as a student of neuroscience as sanford he's made a valiant effort to explain all of this as he sees it nothing new in the argumentation nothing new has come because if you take his presuppositions it still holds true that there are at least seven forms of humanism that can develop in their ethical theories there's the evolutionary humanism of Huxley the behavioral humanism of Skinner the existential humanism of jean-paul Sartre the pragmatic humanism of doing the Marxist humanism of Marx and fair Bach the egocentric humanism of Ayn Rand and the cultural humanism of Corliss Lamont just take two of them the the materialistic humanism of Marx or Lenin and so on and of the egocentric you know humanism of Ayn Rand two completely different political theories emerging from both of their pens both from a starting point of no God so it does doesn't hold true when they tell you we can find the logical outworking to this we can reasonably arrive at this you know we are all ultimately framed and shaped in ways that truly force us to rethink our whole worldview at some point in life where something very difficult transpires I was invited when I was still in in my 30s and 40s I was invited to lecture in the Krakov Poland and in Warsaw the Cold War was still raging and I arrived in Warsaw finished my talks and a man who had invited me asked me if I'd ever been to a death camp and I told him yes I'd been to booked involved and Dachau and so on he said no no their concentration camps have you been to a death camp I said not I think the way you're now been pointing it he said tomorrow we got a free day I'm going to drive you I'm going to drive you to Auschwitz I said really said yeah it's a bit of a drive but we'll go and Hendrick vieja my polish host put me into a scar on a old foggy day and we drove and drove and drove I did not realize what awaited me that day as a young you know in my 20s I'd been to Vietnam I was invited by the chaplains with a military to come there and covered the length and length of the country from one town in the south all the way to cointreau had seen warfare firsthand as a younger man and it really rattled me to my boots of it but nothing like what I was going to see in Auschwitz if you have never ever been there you ought to make at some point to journey in your life to visit it and just sit there for an hour or so thinking about what it is you're witnessing as we arrive there and walk from room to room I saw some Polish teenagers I assumed they were polish but at one point they had to flee from one of the rooms and burst out sobbing when I left the building I still saw them sitting on the front steps with their face in their hands and in one room where they left behind glass was 12,000 pounds of women's hair as the women had been scalped before being putting into put into the gas ovens and those with that hair was then taken and woven and sold as sacks in the marketplace little boys experimented upon by Joseph Mengele twins the pictures of those little boys will be ingrained in your memory when you see it men lonely not to more recently passed away after never have never have been caught hiding somewhere in Argentina standing like this totally emaciated staring glassy eyed into the camera as they were photographed castrated by Mengele for his experiments and then I walked finally to the room where they were told they were getting their showers but where they were get to gassed to death in this camp alone at the rate of 12,000 every day and outside the room with the words of a Dolf Hitler I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of a conscience imperious relentless and cruel hard to myself what happened in the mind of a man who swayed one of the most brilliant nations into either coming along with him or paid dearly with their own lives if they did not come to send him some way while so many knew what was happening and dared speak lest they be part of the whole gas oven episode in today's newspaper in the Daily Mail in London there's a critique given of a new book by a professor from King's College who has written a book called the dictators and he is covered in one chapter Hitler another chapter Stalin and he is clearly delineated so forget all this stuff that you'll sometimes hear from atheistic philosophers Crysta hate Christopher Hitchens was one of them and with this writer refers to Hitchens and Dawkins and some of the others are sort of doing cartwheels on the pinna on the head of a pin trying to prove their point that Hitler was a Christian that Hitler was a god-fearing man read the specific statements in this latest book called The Dictator of what Hitler's goal was all about what his view was on the Christian faith in fact Hannah arrant who describes the last walk of Adolf Eichmann as he was going to his execution an errant if I'm not mistaken was I think wedded to or certainly the mistress of Martin Heidegger the German philosopher did not know how to exactly come down on the Holocaust himself but here's an Hannah Arendt writing in her in a book on Adolphe Eichmann listen to this last paragraph Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity he had asked for a bottle of red wine and drunk half of it he refused the help of the Protestant minister the Reverend William Hall who offered to read the Bible with him he had only two more hours to live and therefore quote no time to waste for me he said he walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect with his hands bound behind him when the guards tied his ankles and knees he asked him to loosen the bonds so that he could stand more straight I don't need that he said when the black hood was offered him he was in complete command of himself nay he was more he was really completely himself nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words he began emphatically by stating there was no believer in God 2x to express the common phrase that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death but then he proceeded after short while gentlemen we shall all meet again such as the fate of all men long live Germany long live Argentina long live Austria I shall not forget them in the face of death he had found the cliche used in funeral oratory under the gallows his memory played in the last drink he was elated and he forgot that really this was his own funeral it was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness has taught us the lesson of the fearsome word and thought defying banality of evil the trivialization of evil that's exactly what happens when you do away with a moral point of reference and the sacred definition of human essence ud sacral eyes life and all of this becomes nothing more than political game playing and that's why Richard Rorty who had no critique to offer the Holocaust except that I find it revolting says this if moral imperatives are not commanded by God's will and if they are not in some sense absolute then what ought to be is a matter simply of what any one of us decides should be there is no other source of individuals no other source of judgment kindness and the Canadian atheist the thing that troubles me is this we have not been able to show that reason notice what he's saying that reason requires the moral point of view is not talking about pragmatism Stockmar trashin ality now requires the moral point of view or that really rational person's unhooded wink by MIT or ideology need not be individual egos of classical a moralist reason really doesn't decide here the picture I've painted for you is not a pleasant one reflection on this depresses me pure practical reason even with a good knowledge of the facts will not take you to morality and then a footnote by Bertrand Russell he says you know I cannot live as though ethical values are simply a matter of my personal tastes and therefore I have found my own views actually quite incredible I don't know what the answer is pretty grim stuff and so if you ask me what happens when we abandoned God and move away to self-referencing moral reasoning I like reading the poet's I like listening to the lyrics of songwriters because they are sometimes much more poignant and admitting reality than abstract philosophers might do here's one of the rock groups K King Crimson years ago cat's foot iron claw neurosurgeons scream for more from paranoia's poisoned or 21st century schizoid man blood rock barbed wire politicians funeral pyre innocence record napalm fire 21st century schizoid man death seed blind man's greed poets starving children bleed nothing he's got he really needs 21st century schizoid man the walls on which the prophets wrote is cracking at the seams upon the instruments of death the Sun light brightly gleams where no one lay the laurel wreath as silence drowns the screams between the iron gates of fate the seeds of timer sown and watered by the deeds of those who know and who are known knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules the fate of all mankind I see is in the hands of fools confusion will be my epitaph as I crawl a cracked and broken path if we make it we can all sit back and laugh but I'm afraid tomorrow I'll be crying songwriters my study of the Romantic poets lyricist poets you saw what they were saying in reality because they connected this with this the head with the heart and the entailments that follow why am I not an atheist I simply cannot find a rationally defensible way for moral reasoning and the fact of the matter is we are at our core moral beings those who deny God's existence what did they invoke too much of evil and suffering on what basis how do they even arrive at that moral reasoning number two the question of meaning how do we arrive at the reality of meaning what meaning do we really attribute to life are we entitled to our own definition of meaning or like the myth of sisyphus do we roll the stone up the hill and watch that roll stone rolling down again monotony and do this each day you know I live in a in a condominium in Atlanta and just opposite our apartment there is is a play a little playground for dogs and there every morning 6:00 or 6:30 they're all out with their dogs and somebody comes throws the ball the dog runs picks it up brings it back and one morning I was sitting there in a rather cynical state of mind and I think to myself they bring the dogs up throw the ball the ball goes no dog brings us back about 20 times the dogs that is fill for the morning they take it back and feed it I sit in a little way in a little way in a purely naturalistic sense that's what we are too we get into our car with the dog chasing the ball go and do our thing from 9:00 to 5:00 and come back home it's that repetitive monotony again and again and again and we often assume that meaninglessness in our lives ultimately comes from becoming weary of pain suffering evil struggle angst or what the Muslim might call the jihad the struggle for existence and so on that this what we face you know what the worst kind of meaninglessness is not the ones who have become weary of pain but the ones who have become weary of pleasure that is the ultimate kind of meaninglessness that is most painful I did a series of books on imaginary conversations the first one I did was the Lord is on the cross Jesus talks to Buddha the second one I did was sensing sensuality Jesus talks to Oscar Wilde and did about half a dozen in that series but I remember going to Paris going to England do some research on Oscar Wilde went and visiting the hotel where he ultimately passed away in his 40s and Oscar Wilde this father of dandyism as it were enjoying that unfettered life I find fascinating two things that he really can factually with three when you think about it when he wrote the Picture of Dorian Gray you almost wonder there's something autobiographical in the emptiness that he himself found towards the middle years of his life but he is lying in bed in the hotel in Paris and he asks an incredible question of his lover Rabi Ross he looks at Rabi Ross and he says to him did you ever love any one of those young boys for their own sake how does a hedonist come out with a question like that on love being defined as of merit for its own sake Rabi Ross looked at him and he said no I never loved any one of them for their own sake I loved them for my sake he said Robbie neither did I get me a priest and when you read his book The Ballad of reading jail it's a brilliant piece of poetry with multiple stanzas and in the heart of that poetry talks about the woman with the alabaster Whiteman who had made her living probably by prostituting herself who comes and falls at the feet of Jesus and he makes reference to that and said maybe only Christ is big enough now to forgive and to heal the soul of mine and if you go to see his grave at that big Cemetery in Paris there's a giant Phoenix in that ground that in that cemetery of Oscar Wilde's name and the verse he selected for his epitaph was from the book of Job a pleasure driven man going to the book on suffering to describe his own life loneliness is a terrible thing when you have exhausted pleasure and find you have come away empty-handed and to you young students I tell you the world is yours out there with all kinds of pleasure and the most beautiful state to reach is when you have exhausted it and find out that it really didn't take you anywhere it didn't bring you what you thought it would so meaning what really brings meaning what brings purpose in life how do we find this in this in this in the sense of finding not just existential fulfillment but a definitive purpose by which to measure where you are on this journey of life's meaning I've traveled metaphor for decades and I was raised with almost no money in my pocket ever in fact something very sad happened today and some of you may know my story and I came to know Christ when I was on a bit of suicide at the age of 17 in the city of Delhi tried to take my own life totally empty when a man walked into my hospital room and brought me a Bible and led me and gave that Bible he couldn't stay because he wasn't allowed in a pretty depleted State my body dihybrid where you gave it to my mother who struggled through the English and that and read it for me whatever but I made my commitment to Christ at the age of 17 on a bed of suicide this morning I got the word that my friend who had come into that hospital room is he was in his late 70s passed away last night so I spoke to his daughter where she she calls me uncle Ravi now and it she said uncle Ravi the last three weeks he spent every day watching you on YouTube I said that's terrible he could have got a better picture than that but you know last week when I spoke to him on the phone he said Ravi sometimes I think my whole purpose in this world was to bring you to Christ and he says I draw such great joy from that and he the reason I mentioned that I told Tammy's daughter I said 10 when I phoned your dad last week don't I found out how he was doing he asked me how I was doing financially he said can I send you something I said no Fred I'm I'm fine I said I'm calling to just chat found out how you are and I said you know Tammy when I was a young teenager he drive us to the place where we were doing our Bible study and sit in the front of the car closes wallet back into my hand so let's go and get some cokes and samosas and have some fun this evening and we'd go and get ourselves some coke six or seven of us in the car I said and your dad hardly had any income at that stage that was the generosity with which he lived so I was raised with very little not making a sob story I'm just telling you that now it's my privilege to see people with a lot I had dinner one night with the seventh wealthiest man in the world I asked him whatever brought you to inviting me to come and speak to your stuff he said along to his little while ago I phoned my wife from the 70th floor or something of my building and I told her I'm a very lonely man she said so my he said what do we do she said I don't know but there's a church opposite one of the apartment buildings we maybe we should go there then we won't have to pay for parking you know what he told me when he could buy everything he wanted he had never reached such a lonely moment as that it's true so think about it what really brings life meaning no moral point of reference no meaning thirdly quickly there is no hope death becomes the end and for all of those who want moral reasoning I ask you if death is the end when that moment comes as ultimately no difference between a mother Teresa and an adult Hitler if there's no justice there's no judgement ultimately there is really no comma a punctuation mark it's a full stop how does one really evolve hold to a worldview where such are the ramifications of huge differences in lifestyles and values and ethics I stood behind mother Teresa on two or three occasions in fact I was of his hospital and the leading televisions to come and anchor her funeral like I couldn't do that but I remember this diminutive woman with all of her limited physical capacity living with this little white sari around her sure when she died only three saris in her trunk that's all she had and yet the home she built one is called Nirmal her day which is a 10 which Tim each tender heart watching how she rescued the masses in Auckland Calcutta and many other parts of the globe a woman who gave herself to such incredible sacrifice and what does Hitchens do with a life like that writes a vulgar Li titled book called the missionary position that's all he had to say about a woman like that where Hindus Muslims Sikhs Buddhists all of them were at her funeral to recognize her as one of the great luminaries of our time who lived with such sacrifice in such selflessness do we not see the difference do we not see the difference on what basis no moral law no meaning no hope you know it's amazing what death does to a human life when you have lost somebody near and dear I was in my 20s when I lost my mom she was in her 50s you look at life for the different paradigm at that moment the great philosopher of theologian Nicolas water store taught at Yale he's in his 80s water store made this comment after he lost his son in a mountain climbing accident he says you know when we have finished conquering absence with a cellphone conquering heat with our air conditioners conquering our wingless nests with airplanes Conkling conquering distances with transportation we'll still end up having to deal with the evil in our heart and death the whole hope of the Resurrection we've just celebrated Easter regardless of what you think about it there's a logical flow to it and I ask you this question it was Thomas Aquinas who said the thing that intrigued him most of all the disciples who were willing to pay with their lives is that they weren't in a herd mentality all of them sitting in one room Saila Bravo let's let's die for this they all died alone in different settings Thomas Aquinas came to my country and preached the gospel there and paid with his own life and that's why the oldest church in India is named after him the Mar Thoma Church Peter Paul they didn't do this for some kind of a hallucination experience in their background they came to the realization that there isn't Christ had redefined all of history for them and that's why carried his message everywhere hope hope beyond the grave hope for now without God I find no point of reference for morality except self referencing no ultimate point of reference for meaning except whatever you choose to give to yourself no ultimate hope beyond the grave and finally if one is wrong in all of these choices if one is wrong in all of these choices then you say to yourself what is the recovery line where do I turn now for recourse when everything else I lived for was contrary to what I now think I must face that's why John Paul Sartre found himself literally on his deathbed saying I found my philosophy unlivable and his mistress standing by his bedside said he's losing his mind maybe for the first time then he really found it some of you may know the name the great name of Francis Schaeffer he was a great philosopher in the Christian world in the 60s 70s and 80s I had the privilege of just meeting him once his son who went as Franky Schaeffer now as Frank Schaeffer turned his back upon all this belief turned his back upon it and wrote some pretty bitter books against Christian the Christian faith the evangelical faith and all of his father a pretty nasty stuff that he got into by his own recognition his mother at the age of 98 passed away this week in the Huffington Post he's written a tribute to his mother he haven't read it read it he talks about his mom who loved him unconditionally even in the days where he was writing profane stuff got into a relationship had an illegitimate child he said my mother was always there loving me unconditionally she introduced me to the great musicians to the great artists to the great writers and he goes through the list many times there and he said I spoke to her last week and he goes through his relationship how she loved him he said now I'm a grandfather married with my children and their children and he ends this tribute to his mother with these incredible words he says mom you won I believe mom you won I believe there's just enough of a human in me to say you know Frankie should have loved it if you told her that minutes before she's gone Shira just had a smile on her face but she had enough of confidence that her son would ultimately come through I don't know where you're at in your life but I want to say to you the abandoning of God leaves you with some extraordinarily tough questions moral law hope meaning and if all goes wrong as you're coming to the end and you say I've got to change my mind what then I think in my graduate work studying some of the great philosopher is especially Anthony flew in his atheism having to respond to flu during my days at Cambridge there and then of course all of a sudden a few years later years ago flu says he's no longer an atheist I thought I wasted all my time and all these years and the boys but he described himself as best a deist but he did go on to say if there is some if there is a truth it'll have to be in the person of Jesus Christ and so I say to you when you're thinking of all that it costs think of that swot Pascal meant existentially not as a last-minute wager he said the existentialist challenges me and asked me what if I'm wrong he said well existentially I'm fulfilled I have nothing to lose I'm a happy man and at the end of my life of it's wrong then I have no point no way to regret what I found my happiness and but how inestimable is the loss of one who rejects God and finds out he or she was wrong that was what the Pascal Ian wager was all about and so I leave you with the challenge to ask you to think about the truth of what I have just said to you and I leave you with two quotes and then I end Viktor Frankl somebody was talking to me about Ernest Gordon who was your chaplain some years ago I remember reading a his book there just a brilliant brilliant writer and Ernest Gordon - had been concentration camp Rasmus Viktor Frankl Frankel says this if we present man with a concept of man which is not true we may well corrupt him when we present him as an automaton of reflexes as a mind machine as a bundle of instincts as a pawn of drives and reactions as a mere product of instincts heredity and environment we will then feed the nihilism to which modern man is in any case prone I became acquainted with the last stage of corruption in my second concentration camp Auschwitz the gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment or as the Nazis like to say of blood and soil I'm absolutely convinced but the gas chambers of Auschwitz Treblinka and my Zdenek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry of Defence other other in Berlin but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers so an Academy like this has an immense responsibility on what it does behind its selector ability had electors lecterns and its lecture halls and what it imparts to you Matthew Paris is a prominent journalist in the United Kingdom an atheist and with a lifestyle that would be very contrary to the theistic framework he was raised in Malawi and he went to Malawi two Christmases ago and he came back and he wrote a stunning article in The Times he said I find myself shocked that I'm about to say what I'm going to say he said because it challenges every philosophical bone in my body he said as one who has lived disavowing God had as an atheist I'm staggered by the fact of what I'm seeing and about to state in this article he said Africa is in serious trouble and he goes on to describe all that is going on there he says and if something doesn't happen it'll end up with the sinister mix of Nike and the machete at the same time and he says what I've concluded is this Africa doesn't just need another ethical theory he said what I saw with my own eyes was what the Christian gospel did for the people how that new birth changed their hearts he said I'm amazed that I'm saying things like this he said and yet I'm convinced an ethical theory is not what the African continent needs it needs the gospel of regeneration and the gospel of redemption I would have just added one footnote to mr. Parris's words mr. Paris not just Africa the whole world that's what the whole world needs why am I not an atheist I simply cannot build a life coherently with life's deepest questions that continue to haunt when you're running from God I leave that with you for thought and will respond to your questions along with vincit Ali thank you very much you

Channel: Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

Views: 979,048

Rating: 4.7881298 out of 5

Keywords: Ravi, princeton, princeton university, Ravi Zacharias, Vince Vitale, open forum, campus, Why I'm Not an Athiest, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Gospel, Christianity, Atheism (Religion), Religion (album), RZIM, University, College, Student

Id: d6aDoOzYN-U

Length: 44min 57sec (2697 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2013