Why I am not a Nihilist: First Thoughts

Last updated on: April 6, 2015 at 9:10 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Why I am not a Nihilist: First Thoughts 2015-04-06T09:10:56-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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I want the truth even if the truth hurts. Oedipus was told by the prophet that he could not handle the truth, but asked for it in any case. He could not handle it and ended up blinding himself. And yet the truth was the truth and Oedipus was right to learn it.

Being a Christian comforts some people and that is a good reason to hope it is true, but not good enough by itself. Good news by itself is not good enough. There is a brave and rare person I meet who looks at the cosmos and decides that there is reason in it, but no goodness. He sees nature red in fang and claw. He sees that only the fit survive and that in the long march of deep time, all is lost and forgotten.

If there are gods, then they are not good. If they are good, they are not worthy of a free man’s worship.

This story of nature and the world is dinned into our heads from Fantasia forward. I shan’t attack Darwinism or the age of the cosmos, (though I don’t think the evidence is good for evolution and am interested in seeing scientists study alternatives to the old earth as a research project).

But one can be a Christian and accept the standard evolutionary account and the age of the earth as many of my colleagues do. This is not the central issue for rejecting nihilism.

The nihilist is not honest enough about the world. He looks at a slice of it and ignores most of it . . . as do many a sunshine and lollypops person. Just knowing that sin has messed up the cosmos is enough to tell the Pollyanna Christian to wipe the stupid grin off his face.

Instead, I challenge the idea that the world I see is “red in tooth and claw.” This Victorian picture of evolution is dated and deserves to be resisted. Nor do I think deep time or the fact that humans will forget what I have done (and everyone else and their deeds) counts for very much. I would have to ignore too much of reality that I see to believe both things.

First, nature is about cooperation as much as (or more than?) survival of the fittest. Nature is less red in tooth and claw and more about teaching organisms to cooperate with each other the way things are. When we learn to go with the flow, to fit into the scheme, only a huge anomaly (like an asteroid) breaks up the pattern of life. Not to go all Hakuna Matata, but the circle of life is real.

For every ugly fact of nature, there are numerous facts that attest to the gratuitous beauty all around us. Evolution could not teach us to think deep space beautiful or the bottom of the seas, but when we went there, so they were. We see a thing and cry “gross,” but then we study it and learn that it too unlocks to show us beauty, order, and the circle of life.

Nature is red, but red in the context of life can be beautiful if we assume nothing that dies is lost and forgotten. And how do my friends the nihilists know anything is lost?

There is more to time than the arrow of time on which we now live. I think there is good evidence from philosophy and revelation to accept a time deeper than the deepest age of the cosmos. We are enfolded in Eternity. In the timeless Eternal present, there is no past or future. All is now. Nothing that is done or has been in this arrow of time is lost or forgotten because it is enfolded in Eternity.

I am convinced by Plato that this world of Being exists and that if it exists, then meaning is possible in this life. We have nothing to fear and do not have to see resolution or justice in the short term (even if the short term is one hundred years). The cruel gods, if they exist and I am convinced they do, are fighting this deep goodness, truth, and beauty. It will work out in eternity and surely as we look from the past to the present, we can see this good Providence.

Augustine was right that we cannot see Providence in any particular act of history. It rains for now on the just and the unjust. Libertines may squash liberty in our nation in the next few years, but the arc of history is toward chastity and charity. Nothing can stop the reign of the Good and nothing will. Where I am wrong about what the Good is, then Eternity when I enter it will correct me.

And so I am not a nihilist. Thank God.

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