For those of you who are not familiar with the name, Yuval Noah Harari is a well-known author and commentator, famous for bestsellers such as Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. He has gained notoriety over the last decade for his controversial takes on transhumanism and human evolution.
He is also an avowed atheist.
Now, I’ve been saying this for years, but the only consistent atheist is a nihilist. And if Yuval Noah Harari is a representative of modern-day atheism, he proves that — try as they might — atheists can never be consistent; they’re too smart for their own good.
Charles Darwin to the rescue?
In a recent interview on International Day Against Homophobia, Mr. Harari said this: “Gay people were persecuted and oppressed because of this mythological idea about sex. That sex was created by God for the purpose of procreation” [emphasis mine].
Who destroyed that “mythology” according to him? None other than Charles Darwin, whom he calls a “prophet of sexual liberation.”
While the issue of sexual ethics is tangential to the larger question of worldviews, it does highlight the distinction between biblical Christianity and atheistic Humanism. Christianity teaches that God designed sex for a particular purpose. Its ultimate origin is transcendent. It is not grounded on the whims and subjective feelings of individuals. Sex is meaningful precisely because it has a telos, or an ultimate end and purpose.
But how does the atheist view it? Mr. Harari explains: “Darwin came, and Darwin said, ‘in biology there are no purposes.’ Nothing has any purpose in biology. In biology there are only causes” [emphasis mine]. And he is not alone in this. Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist and Darwinian biologist, famously echoed the same idea in his book River Out of Eden: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference” [emphasis mine].
In other words, both of these men are nihilists — at least in principle. They may deny this, but no one who expresses such views about the world can be labeled anything differently. If the shoe fits, wear it. But self-professed atheists never do. Why?
Nihilism is a fantasy
As Merriam-Webster defines it, nihilism is “a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless … a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths.” And this is hardly an exaggeration. Friedrich Nietzsche, who popularized the concept, had enough clairvoyance to admit that if “God is dead,” the total breakdown of all moral values and meaning logically follows:
“Nihilism appears … because one has come to mistrust any ‘meaning’ in suffering, indeed in existence … it now seems as if there is no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain” (The Will to Power). How’s that for honesty?
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.
Even the famous nihilist philosopher Albert Camus grappled with these contradictions. In his book The Myth of Sisyphus, the main character is tormented by the same exact conundrum: “I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.” He calls this paradox “the absurd” — that is, the idea that universal human experience is negated by the meaninglessness of reality.
But the curious thing about all this is that no modern-day atheist fully embraces the logical implications of this twisted worldview. Not one of them is consistent. Because for all their honesty, atheists like Harari and Dawkins know that their worldview is untethered from reality.
The proof is in the pudding.
If they’re consistent, and indeed there is no purpose behind anything; if human beings are nothing more than meaningless clumps of flesh that nature spat out; if concepts like “good” and “evil” are mere human inventions based on shifting cultural mores, or evolutionary impulses; if humanity is utterly devoid of inherent value … then why condemn the “persecution and oppression” of gay people? Aren’t all human beings, and existence itself, meaningless anyways?
And this is where the rubber meets the road. Atheists simply cannot live consistently within the confines of their professed worldview. They have to fight against every built-in instinct to imbue reality with a higher purpose. What they inherently know is true about reality is denied by their ultimate presuppositions. They will appeal to moral values, decry things like “oppression” and “persecution,” while denying the inherent dignity of human beings that makes such concepts possible. It’s incoherent.
“With man this is impossible…”
The only solution to this inherent contradiction is the one atheists never entertain: Man must step down from his self-made throne and hand it over to God. As we’ve seen, the materialist/nihilistic worldview simply can’t provide the foundations for meaning and morality anyway. Either reality itself is an illusion, or the atheistic worldview is. There is no other choice.So, why insist on holding on to a rickety worldview?
At the 2018 World Economic Forum, Harari quipped that science in the 21st century will soon replace “evolution by natural selection by evolution via intelligent design … not the intelligent design of some God above the clouds, but our intelligent design, and the intelligent design of our clouds.”
With such hubris, nobody will ever see the truth. And the truth is staring every atheist in the face. If there is no God — if there’s no transcendent source to our world — then as Dostoyevsky once said, “everything is permitted.” After all, “blind pitiless indifference,” as Dawkins described it, doesn’t give birth to morality. It only gives birth to chaos.
There is a way to make sense of morality. There is a way to make sense of human value. There is a way to make sense of meaning and purpose. Mr. Harari won’t find it in his man-made clouds, though.
Daniel Vaida is the Opinion Editor at The Christian Post in Washington, D.C.
