Do we choose God or lunacy?

The shiny secular future we were promised is pretty lame

In Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, the character Dmitri ponders the idea that God is just an idea made up by men. He comments, "Then if He doesn't exist, man is the chief of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent!"

That may seem sensical, but as a natural scientist, I would say it's far more reasonable to claim that if God doesn't exist, nature rules the universe.

In fact, you can really boil it all down to two options for chief of the universe: God (a supreme, transcendent Creator of the universe) or nature (its blind physical forces).

But do we really act like we believe either?

I've been Christian for 18 years now. Initially, I naively believed that the more secular some parts of the world became, the more people would defer to the cold rule of nature. But the reality has turned out to be the opposite. The more secular people have become, the less they act like they believe nature is in charge.

People who believe in the rule of nature would likely be somewhat hard and cruel, like the Spartans and Romans. Think of the way animals in nature ruthlessly deal with the unfit and those not of their bloodline. They would be oriented toward perpetuation of the species and not much else. But that's not how the modern world has turned out, which is more like a devolution into anti-existence absurdity.

The full quote by the character of Dmitri is often misattributed to the character of Ivan, and is summarized as this: "If there is no God, then everything is permitted." The actual quote is Dmitri's follow-up to his observation that man is the chief of the universe. He asks, "...what is goodness? ... Is it not relative? A treacherous question! ... Then everything is lawful, if it is so?”

His questions aren't necessarily meant to imply that man needs the fear of a powerful, punishing God to force morality on him, although there is an element of that. Rather, the question mostly gets to the root of what is good without an objective definer of goodness.

Look at the state of the world in the last 100 years and ask yourself whether we're up to the task of being chiefs of the universe. Or whether it's even possible. After all, as Dmitri points out in that passage, we're all our own little moral microcosms. At best, if we could unite people within each country about what’s good, we’d still have over a hundred competing moralities on just one planet.

But we’ve managed to muck things up so badly that it’s become fashionable to suggest that we haven’t been greeted by extra-terrestrials, because they took one look at us and decided to avoid the Earth. In the sci-fi comedy series, Red Dwarf, one character suggested that ETs think of us as a planetary disease: “Oh, don’t go near Earth! It’s got human beings on it, they’re contagious!” It’s hard not to look around at the state of the world today and disagree with that.

As much as I love Star Trek, its creator, Gene Roddenberry, could not have been more delusionally optimistic about a secular future where hundreds of planets, led by Earth, mostly agree on basic morality. The pitiful inhabitants of Earth can't even agree on questions of basic biology, let alone get it together enough to invent warp drive.

Roddenberry may have viewed religion as repressive, but as God’s outward influence wanes in the West, we’re not really any closer to his vision of cashless prosperity and star bases. In fact, we’re facing several existential crises, including one of reproduction, because we’re too demoralized to perpetuate ourselves. At least religion focuses people on the one thing nature supposedly selects for: survival.

In terms of society at large, the options are clear to me: we either choose God or lunacy.