Searching for Meaning and Purpose

Gary talks about the trend among young people where Bible sales are increasing and they are obviously looking for some sort of purpose.

Imagine that you have a professor at school who holds a behavioristic view of man. He claims that our human behavior is determined by stimulus-response conditioning and that all human behavior is theoretically predictable if only we could know what the factors are that go into it. Ultimately and in principle, according to the professor, human free will is an illusion. All of us think and do only what we have been conditioned to think and do, given the variable factors of our environment. Every human action is the theoretically predictable consequence of antecedent factors, conditioned responses, heredity, genes, and things like that.

So imagine that you have a professor who holds this view. Imagine further than when you take the final exam in this course, you cheat on the examination and the professor catches you doing it. He’s indignant and insists upon imposing a strict penalty. “You’re going to flunk the course,” he says.

But if he does respond this way, he is in open conflict with his own view of human nature, isn’t he? By punishing you, he assumes that you were free to choose how to take the test and you freely chose to take the wrong route by cheating. You could have studied hard, prepared to answer all the questions on your own, but instead, you decided to ride upon the efforts of the fellow students around you.

But if his view is right and you can’t help doing what you do, then you couldn’t help making that alleged choice either. “Given my previous conditioning, professor, I couldn’t help but rely upon somebody else. It makes no sense for you to punish me.” By the way, that answer assumes that the professor has some freedom about whether he’ll punish you or not. You can’t live your life on that behaviorist assumption.

The Impossibility of the Contrary

If religious skeptics have forsaken biblical presuppositions, why is it they can think rationally, apply the scientific method, and require some semblance of morality? The answer is simple. Unbelievers are philosophically schizophrenic. They don’t often live consistently with the governing principles of their materialistic worldview. For example, “The success of modern science has been due to its ‘borrowed capital,’ because modern science is like the prodigal son. He left his father’s house and is rich, but the substance he expends is his father’s wealth.”

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Gary talks about the trend among young people where Bible sales are increasing and they are obviously looking for some sort of purpose. There is a sense where every generation rejects the views of the parents, but it also runs deeper. People say they are looking for their “true self” but how will they know when they’ve actually found it?

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American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources