Why does deism lead to nihilism

It posits God as the clock-maker, who makes this universe, winds it up, and lets it go. And it operates along the course of the laws which He has set in place, but He has very little interaction with this world. And deism was very compelling to many for a number of years.

We now know so much more about the natural order than we did even in the opening days of Deism, why do we need to posit a God who started all of this? Why do we need to posit a first cause? Doesn't nature explain itself?

And so, there was a progression from Theism, Deism, to Naturalism. But there's a tremendous problem with Naturalism, and that is Naturalism cannot sustain itself. It cannot sustain ethics; it cannot sustain meaning; it cannot sustain society; it cannot answer its own internal contradictions. And so, in the wake of Naturalism there came a philosophy called Nihilism.

And so Nihilism is, as it were, a worldview, an anti-philosophy, that says there is no meaning, there is no purpose, there is no rhyme or reason. Let me give you a little taste of how Nihilism rejects Naturalism. Many of you in college or elsewhere have perhaps read some of the stories of Kurt Vonnegut. And here he is parroting Genesis, chapter one. Now you might think upon first listen that he's attacking Christians; but actually, he's attacking naturalists for not being consistent with their own thinking.

Here's what he says:. Mud, as Man, alone could speak. God leaned close as Mud as Man sat up, looked around and spoke. Man blinked. Now, that may first appear to be a satire of Christianity, but in fact it is something quite to the contrary. It is a satire of the naturalist worldview, because it shows you the dilemma of Naturalism. Naturalism says that there is no need to posit a God, a first cause, a transcendent personal being.

What's the meaning of all of this? Because that universe, he says by his own philosophy, is impersonal. It doesn't even know that he's there. You remember we quoted that Stephen Crane quote—it's a bleak quote. See, the universe, if it's impersonal, has no capacity to answer man, to give him that answer to the ultimate question of why, and what are we here for. Now Nihilists are able to make a great deal of fun out of this very truth, as bleak as it is.

Well, he addresses this very question in the first and second of these series of novels. And here's how he tells it:. Sadly, however, just before the critical moment of read-out, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished by the Vogons, to make way, so they claimed, for a new hyper-space by-pass.

And so all hope of discovering the meaning of life was lost forever, or so it would seem; but, by the end of the second novel Adams has the time travelers discover that the question itself, the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, is ….. Six times nine…..

And that is a fundamental premise of Nihilism. Neither the question nor the answer makes sense. The universe is a uniform closed system. Humans are complex machines. At death, personality and individuality ceases. The idea of true knowledge is meaningless. Ethics are utterly elusive. There is no meaning. Now, Nihilism first arose, especially in Russia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, and you can see how convenient it would have been for an anarchist philosophy that wanted to bring down the czar-dom of Russia.

It was a group of revolutionary nihilists who actually killed Czar Alexander the Second. Bakunin, in fact, was a good friend of a composer named Richard Wagner. Great influence on him. But you know, there are nihilists still today. I was just on a nihilist website this afternoon, looking for quotes. Here's one I found.

Here's The Nihilist Creed :. I have no heroes. I have no faith. I bow before no one. I am a nihilist. Death to God. Death to government. Death to ideology. Death to money. Death to love. Death to morality. Beyond right and left, beyond right and wrong: nihilism. Do you see? That kind of thinking is just the logical consequence of naturalism.

Lewis, someone we've already studied in this series, puts it this way:. Our convictions are simply a fact of us, like the color of our hair. If naturalism is true, then we have no reason to trust our conviction that nature is uniform.

You know, it's interesting that Charles Darwin himself saw this problem. What if even our understanding of the inexorable sequence of evolutionary process is just a figment of our imagination? You see, the nihilist takes that and throws it in the naturalist's face.

Have you noticed a pattern here? An idolatry is set up; another idolatry comes along and sees the holes in the first idolatry; another idolatry comes along and sees the holes in the new idolatry…and so we go on. But Nihilism is real. And those of you who have college students, they will face some Nihilism somewhere in the course of their training, whether from their co-students or from their professors.

Nihilism has had a pervasive effect. It was a favorite philosophy of the 60a and 70s. And those of you who are educated in 60s and 70s probably ran into some of the new nihilists. And they are now very high-ranking in the educational system—in the universities and in the various aspects of educational administration in society today. One former nihilist, J. Budziszewski 5 , has written about his Nihilism and his transformation from it, and I think it's very instructive.

I think this may help you as you talk to your young people who face this kind of thing in the classroom. And here were his two fundamental points in his lecture: First, that we human beings just make up the difference between good and evil.

There is no difference between good and evil, we just make it up. That was his first big point. His second big point was that we are not responsible for what we do, anyway. And in his lecture he laid out a ten-year plan for rebuilding all of ethical and political theory around those two propositions. Now my friends, the scary thing is, they hired him.

And he had tenure before he was converted. Now, don't think that this isn't happening at your favorite state university. It is. It's everywhere. Well, there were quite a few. And as I got further and further from God, I also got further and further from common sense about a lot of other things, including moral law and personal responsibility.

Now he says, secondly , that first reason led him to a second reason for his Nihilism. And that was he had committed certain sins of which he did not want to repent. In fact, he makes a very telling comment. I was a nihilist looking for an excuse to be a nihilist. It's a funny thing about human beings: not many of us doubt God's existence and then start sinning. Most of us sin and then start doubting God's existence. Moral depravity leads to intellectual corruption and spiritual vacuity.

And so when someone is having a moral crisis, it is often expressed in intellectual terms. Paul Johnson's book on modern philosophers, E. I was raised by Christian parents, but I'd heard it all through school, that even the most basic ideas about good and evil are different in every society.

They may disagree about which actions are most courageous, but none of them rank cowardice as a virtue. And then my college social science teachers were equally determined to teach me the difference between what they called facts and values. The atomic weight of sodium was a fact; the wrong of murder was not.

It was a value. I thought that to speak in that fashion was logical. Of course, it had nothing to do with logic. It was merely Nihilism in disguise. That's one of the very, very peculiar and sad things about nihilism.

James Sire records this little story that comes from Catch Twenty-Two , which I'm actually going to tone down a little bit because …. The new convert forsook his former nihilism. The word nihilism is a noun.

It is a philosophical term meaning extreme skepticism. Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that nothing is intrinsically moral or immoral.

The cast of Nihilism - includes: Aurora Grabill. A belief that nature is evidence of a creator is Deism. The difference between a Mereological and Existential nihilism is that someone who believes in mereological nihilism would think that life has a meaning but only as building blocks for the future, while on the other hand, an existential nihilism believer would think that human life is insignificant and has no meaning to it.

The word "deism" has its roots in the word "god". Deism refers to the belief that based on observation, the natural world has "reason" and this is sufficient to justify the existence of God. In short, deism refers to the belief that there is God. Nihilism - was released on: USA: 15 June Moralistic therapeutic deism was created in From the point of view of nihilism, any behavior is acceptable since no rules of ethics exist.

Deism has no holy book as that would require divine revelation. Conor Cunningham has written: 'A genealogy of nihilism' -- subject s : Nihilism Philosophy , Philosophical theology. Definition of NihilismNihilists believe in Nihilism. Generating a definition of nihilism is difficult since the scope of this term is very large.

Generally speaking however, nihilism is regarded as the notion that since there is no predetermined meaning of life, life then has no meaning. Because of this meaninglessness, live ultimately becomes worthless as well. Deism: reason. Yes Deism is the belief of God s through reason as opposed to divine revelation.

Nihilism claims that there is no meaning or purpose in life. Existentialism claims that there is meaning and purpose in your life inso far as you determine it for yourself. Pessimistic philosophy. Most of the people on this site might not understand that Deism is still a very active and thriving ideology. This can be corrected by people that are aware of the aforementioned fact and by answering questions or revising inaccurate answers relating to deism on this site.

The ideology that is Deism has not yet ended. To this day there are still many people who identify as Deists. Log in. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Study guides. Chemistry 20 cards. How does a buffer work. What happens in a neutralization reaction. What is a conjugate acid-base pair. Why is water considered to be neutral.

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