In chapter two, The Absurdity of Life without God, Craig grapples with “the human predicament” or the significance of human life in a post-theistic universe. One of the early apologetists dealing with the human predicament was Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). He emphasized both the miserableness and greatness of man. Man is miserable without God for he has no significance or even certainty as to why he exists. Yet man does not seek to know God and thus the meaning of life. Man is also great in that he can recognize his misery and do something about it. This led to Pascal's Wager argument. When the odds that God exists are even, then the prudent man will wager that God exists. “For if you win, you win all; if you lose, you lose nothing” (Pensees, 343).
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), a Russian apologist dealt with the human predicament by answering the problem of evil in his novels. In Crime and Punishment, a young atheist, convinced of moral relativism, brutally murders an old woman. Though he knows that on his presuppositions he should not feel guilty, nevertheless he is consumed with guilt until he confesses his crime and gives his life to God.
Fransic Schaeffer (1912-1984) believed the root of the problem of what he called a “line of despair” is the result of Hegel’s famous thesis-antithesis-synthesis which denies absolutes. Hegel’s system undermined the notion of particular absolute truths such as “That act is morally wrong” by synthesizing it into the whole.
If there is no God and no immortality then there is no ultimate meaning. Life is absurd. French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre believed that man is adrift in a boat without a rudder on an endless sea. Sartre’s solution is to create a meaning for life which for him was Marxism. Craig says that Sartre is really saying, “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.”
If there is no God and no immortality then there is no value in life. If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as Stalin or a saint. If there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist, because He has set the standard of right and wrong. If there is no God then the evil acts of men go unpunished and the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded.
If there is no God and no immortality then there is no purpose in life. Craig quotes Ecclesiastes 3:19-20 and says the book reads more like a piece of modern existentialist than a book of the Bible. “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” in 1:2 means just the opposite, life has no purpose with out God. But if we “fear God and keep his commandments” (12:13) there is purpose. The atheist has to create God-substitutes for life to have purpose. For Carl Sagan the “Cosmos,” which he always spelled with a capital letter, obviously fills the role of a God-substitute.
Dr. L. D. Rue in an address “The Saving Grace of Noble Lies” presented to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, February 1991 advocated the “Noble Lie.” He stated that since for two centuries intellectual and moral relativism has been the case and that “there is no final, objective reading on the world or the self” we must believe some Noble Lie that we and the universe have value. In other words, we must deceive ourselves that we have purpose.
Craig argues that 95% of university students only give lip service to moral relativism. Sometimes, however, you run into hardliners. Craig attended a panel discussion where all the panelist believed in relativism. A man stood up and said, “I’m a pastor and people are always coming to me, asking if something they have done is wrong and if they need forgiveness. For example, isn’t it always wrong to abuse a child?” I couldn’t believe the panelist’s response. She replied: “What counts as abuse differs from society to society, so we can’t really use the word ‘abuse’ without tying it to a historical context.” “Call it whatever you like,” the pastor insisted, “but child abuse is damaging to children. Isn’t it wrong to damage children?” And still she wouldn’t admit it! This sort of hardness of heart ultimately backfires on the moral relativist and exposes in the minds of most people the bankruptcy of such a worldview.