(Originally written September 15, 2005 in Book 1)
Can Man Live Without God?
Ravi Zacharias
1994
Chapter Four - The Homeless Mind
Antitheism hopes to create a literal and figurative utopia where goodness is derived apart from God. Unfortunately, these goals are shattered by failure without reverting to sheer pragmatism.
Immanuel Kant tried to establish a moral impetus within man and to postulate a system of right and wrong from reason alone. Kant set the groundwork for intellectual demagogues of both the Democratic West and the totalitarian Soviet Union.
The USA is to become the USSR without God.
Kant had two theories:
1) That goodness was rational and morals were rational. Thus, all rational beings would be drawn to them.
2) Kant believed that the first theory was contained within mankind and had the capacity to perform these moral and good deeds. By our reason we therefore know what is right and by our will we can do what is right.
Kant believed that God is not essential to reveal morality since man can come to morality by reason; but, he does not deny that God has given some commands. Antitheists praise the first part of this and conveniently omit the second.
Kant's efforts to provide a rational basis for ethics and morals apart from God was unsuccesful but paved the way for existentialists like Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard proposed that rational beings don't gravitate towarads morality, but they have the choice to think of terms in ethic or not to think in terms of ethics.
This and other Enlightenment Age philosophies fail to produce coherent postulates because it leaves life meaningless. To establish morals there must first be the basis of human purpose and destiny. This can solely be arrived at through God. Dostoevsky said, "If God is dead, anything is justifiable."
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