In chapter one, Introduction: Hope, Despair, and Knowing Reality, Groothuis states that “the very concept of objective truth is under fire today.” Yet without a belief in objective truth men die in despair. The late psychiatrist Victor Frankl who was a prisoner in Hitler’s death camps wrote “The gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinda, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared….at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosopher.” Frankl noted that those captives with a sense of meaning that reached beyond their immediate experiences maintained hope and dignity, even in the Nazi hell. Those without the benefit of this conviction tended to atrophy and die in the pressure cooker of evil, even if they were spared the gas chambers.
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