The Unbearable Darkness of Being Without God
Author: Eric Kampmann

The news is not good. A Governor of a large state throws
everything away for a few hours of hidden pleasure with an
expensive prostitute. Common sense would suggest such behavior
is insane, but is it? Or a presidential candidate spins a tall
tale about her brush with sniper fire on an official trip to war
torn Bosnia. But TV cameras had followed her to Bosnia and the
footage reveals that she had made the whole story up. How could
she believe that she would not be found out?

History is littered with powerful people wrecking their own
lives as well as the lives of countless others. And we are not
even counting the rest of us. Why is this? What is it about
human nature that reveals a compulsion to succumb to self
destructive forces that contradict reason and common sense? Have
lying and adultery suddenly become acceptable as a new moral
norm or is something more troubling and insidious in play? Is
this a problem for our time only or has it been a problem since
the beginning of history?

At one point in his new book The Devil's Delusion, David
Berlinski addresses these questions from the perspective of Ivan
Karamazov in Dostoyevsky's famous novel The Brothers Karamazov:
In that novel the question is asked: What happens if God does
not exist? The answer: If God does not exist, then everything is
permitted. Berlinski goes on to tell a story about an elderly
Hasidic Jew who was commanded by an SS guard to dig his own
grave. When he had finished digging, the Jewish man stood up
straight and addressed his executioner: "God is watching what
you are doing," he said. And then Berlinski wrote: "And then he
was shot dead." If God does not exist, everything is permitted.

Berlinski goes on to say this: "What Hitler did not believe and
what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and
what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe
and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars,
functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist
Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts,
gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe that God
was watching what they were doing. And as far as we can tell,
very few of these carrying out the horrors of the twentieth
century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were
doing either."(The Devil's Delusion pp 26-27)

Those who would have us believe that God is a delusion, never
tell us about the downside, for there are dark potentials that
seems to reveal themselves in daily headlines with alarming
frequency. In a world where everything is permitted,
"everything" must include holocausts, mass starvation, atomic
weapons and every other instrument of crime, large and small,
known to man. If the world is godless, where are we meant to
place our bets? Surely the relevant evidence would suggest that
the innate goodness of human nature is a very thin reed to build
hope upon.

The biblical diagnosis is as bleak as Berlinski's. Unredeemed
mankind's descent into darkness has no limits, for without God,
everything is permitted: This is the way it has been from the
earliest days of liberated man restlessly wandering the earth.
"The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had
become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart
was only evil all the time."(Genesis 6:5) Jeremiah, the great
prophet of Israel tells us that "the heart is deceitful above
all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?"(Jeremiah
17:21)

Paul, in his letter to the Romans, catalogues a litany of
horrors that we can expect when godless men''futile thinking
darkens their hearts. (Romans 1:21) What is interesting is that
Paul does not exempt himself from the probability of falling
prey to the desires of a rebellious heart: "When I want to do
good, evil is right there with me…waging war against the law of
my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work in my
members." (Romans 7:21-23) But whereas the godless indulge the
dark inclinations of a corrupt heart, Paul wages war against
such inclinations through the power of the Holy Spirit.(Romans
8) Elsewhere, he says that we are to live as free men, but warns
that we should not use our "freedom to indulge the sinful
nature."(Galatians 5:13) The Bible reveals that man is utterly
and hopelessly lost because he has abandoned God in pursuit of a
lie.

When God is expelled, the heart naturally turns to indulging
itself by becoming blind to the voracious appetites of our human
nature. Everything is permitted. Who will see? Who will hear?
Who will judge? Nobody is the answer we want to hear because
then we are like God indulging ourselves in the most ungodly
ways.

"They encourage each other in evil plans; they talk about
hiding their snares; they say, 'Who will see them?' They plot
injustice and say, 'We have devised a perfect plan!' Surely the
mind and heart of man are cunning."(Psalm 64:5-6)

It is only when we know that we are known that we pause in our
pursuit of our own dark desires. This picture of the other side
of human potential is a necessary anecdote to the relentless
tide of opinion that would have us believe that a world without
God would be a better place. History is littered with the
corpses of such deluded promises, and we should resist the
temptation to fall into the first sin of believing the devils
claim that "you will be like God, knowing good and
evil."(Genesis 3:5) For we know that the devil will keep part of
that promise. "Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the
devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to
devour."(1Peter 5:8)

The psalmist says, "The fool says in his heart, 'there is no
God'" Then he says, "They are corrupt, their deeds are vile;
there is no one who does good."(Psalm 14:1) But elsewhere, a
different more hopeful picture is painted: "What is man that you
are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him. You
made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him
with glory and honor."(Psalm 8:4-5)

Man without God is a fool; man under God is capable of being
crowned with glory and honor. Take your pick. The evidence would
suggest that there is no real choice at all.


About The Author: Eric Kampmann received an undergraduate
degree from Brown University and a graduate degree in English at
Stony Brook. Eric is the author of two other books: Tree of Life
(2003) and The Book Publisher's Handbook (2007). For information
on his newest book, Trail Thoughts, visit:
http://www.trailthoughts.com/index.html.