Thomas Nagel, an American philosopher, once wrote a candid admission about both the nature and the source of his atheism: “It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God. It is that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God, I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition.” He’s right about the “cosmic authority problem”—it’s not a rare condition. Nor is it a new condition. Since the very beginning (see Gen. 3:17), we humans have tended to rebel against the very idea of any “cosmic authority” to which (or, better said, to whom) we might be answerable for the choices we make in our lives. We don’t tend to like someone telling us what we should or shouldn’t do. We want to be our own ultimate authority; we want to be our own god, rather than admitting that there is a God to whom we are all accountable (see Rom. 14:10–12). Hans Urs von Balthasar provided an eloquent articulation of this perennial human desire to be like God:
The deepest longing of man is to ascend to God, to become like God, indeed to become equal to God. Whereas daily life chains and constricts him, confining him to the little world of his everyday life on this earth, a pressure ignites within him to tear away the chains of this slavery and to break through to the mysterious depths that lurk behind this world, to a place where he can be free, whole, wise and immortal—free of the limitations of his narrow ego, holding dominion over the total context of events, superior to fate and to death.
We fallen human beings tend to think, “If there were no God, then I could really be free!” But such thoughts are typically based on a mistaken conception of the nature of freedom—freedom conceived in a negative sense, as freedom from: freedom from all limits, constraints, moral codes, etc.; freedom conceived as complete autonomy; freedom to do whatever I desire. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, “If there is no God, then all things are permitted.” Of course, genuine freedom is not so much freedom from as it is freedom for: freedom for the good; freedom to choose the good; freedom to pursue virtue and excellence; freedom to choose God and to choose love. Unfortunately, there are many people in our contemporary society who don’t realize that this is what genuine freedom looks like.
We want to be our own god, rather than admitting that there is a God to whom we are all accountable.
At first, the rejection of a “cosmic authority” and of any sort of absolute moral code that might accompany such an authority can, in fact, seem liberating: “There’s no such thing as right or wrong! I can do whatever I want, and I don’t have to answer to anyone, much less God!” But sooner or later (typically sooner), the rejection of God and of morality becomes disorienting; we gradually start to realize that without any sort of moral code to guide us, life becomes chaotic, lacking any solid structure or direction. Eventually, disenchantment with the vision of life as total autonomy also sets in when we begin to see that doing whatever we desire doesn’t bring us the lasting happiness we thought it would, or when we are deeply hurt by someone else doing whatever it is they desire. Disorientation and disenchantment, in turn, lead to a pervasive feeling of demoralization, even despair: Life begins to seem hopeless, pointless, without any lasting meaning or purpose.
Interestingly, this connection—the rejection of any objective, absolute moral code and the eventual experience of feeling deeply demoralized about life—has a basis in the etymology of the word “demoralize” itself. The American lexicographer Noah Webster originally coined the term “demoralize” in 1794 by tacking the prefix “de” onto the existing word “moralize.” In Webster’s first use of the term, to “demoralize” meant “to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right: to corrupt the morals of.” But gradually, the word took on a second meaning, the one more common today: “to cause (someone) to lose hope, courage, or confidence: to weaken the morale of (a person or group).” I think it could be argued that the evolution in the use of this term points to some experiential connection between its original meaning and its later meaning. Specifically, demoralization in the original sense of the word often causes demoralization in the second sense of the word. When people turn away from what is good or true or morally right, they often find themselves, sooner or later, experiencing a loss of hope, courage, and confidence in their lives and an accompanying decline in their general morale.
This connection was poignantly highlighted in a recent article written by a young woman named Freya India. Freya didn’t reject morality per se, but she was raised without much of a moral code, and the effect was similar. She describes how difficult it was for her—and how difficult it is for many young women today—to grow up in a family broken by divorce, lacking any sort of introduction to religious faith and lacking the provision of any sort of moral guidance by her parents or society at large. She refers to the high rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among young women; she points to the lack of moral demands placed upon girls and young women, and also the lack of clear moral guidance provided to them, as factors that contribute to these maladies. Freya writes about how she desperately “wanted guidance and guardrails” in her life but was denied them. As a result, it took her a while to find her way in life. Eventually, she found her way to the Christian faith. For the sake of other girls and young women, she exhorts all of us:
In a world where girls are left to make up their own morality, where all they get are empty platitudes to love themselves, give them right and wrong. . . . Give them answers.