“Life is meaningless. Knowledge is impossible. There is no objective truth. Human life is without any intrinsic value,” says the culture. You don’t need to know the name of the philosophy to receive the messages. They are baked into the cultural cake. Any time you are consuming content or education from this anti-truth culture you will find whispers of Nihilism. It is a philosophy that seeks to undermine the idea of absolutes, truth, meaning, and value. “It is impossible to know anything for certain,” they decree, ignoring the obvious conflict that that belief statement is itself declaring something as certain, thereby canceling its validity.
Let’s consider the ramifications of such a philosophy. If life is meaningless, then it doesn’t matter which choices I make because I, like life itself, am nothing of consequence. I have no purpose for being alive. Nothing I do is valuable. It doesn’t even matter that I’m alive. Nihilism believes life is a lot like living in a video game. It has the illusion of significance, but achievement within the game is ultimately futile. Failure is meaningless. Just restart the game.
I hope you can see the danger of treating the significant as meaningless. Think of it this way. I have a pile of leaves that have recently fallen from the oak tree in my backyard. If I compare a stack of dollar bills to my pile of leaves, they are not that different. Not in substance. One is cotton cloth. The other is a thin oak fiber. What if I believed them to be the same. I might treat the dollars with the same disregard as the leaves. If they have no value, just let the worms eat them both. I might toss the dollars away to be destroyed by weather and rot. Nihilism tries to convince us that our lives are no more valuable than dry leaves. It ignores reality.
Every store reinforces the value of money by exchanging dollars for goods and services. Nihilism wants you to ignore the observable facts. Life is a store of value, just like money. It is imbued with value by its creator, which is reinforced by its usefulness, by its productivity, by its influence, by its emotion and experience, by its intelligence, by the miracle of its existence. If I wanted people to waste their lives, I would convince them that life is no more valuable than that pile of dead leaves. Once people believe that “it doesn’t matter anyway,” they’ll discard themselves with the leaf litter, to be consumed by weather and rot. It becomes logical for a nihilist to embrace self-destructive choices as the remedy for emotional pain and depression.
Nihilism doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t match our experiences of living. It doesn’t mesh with our feelings and emotions. It contradicts the evidence of the physical world. We have an innate desire for meaning, purpose, and understanding. Every human values themselves highly as evidenced by the way we protect our bodies and are outraged when others threaten them. The Bible teaches that our lives are overflowing with purpose, significance, and value. These attributes originate from God and cannot be deleted or altered by the belief in hopeless philosophies. They are truth.
“We’re all just apes,” they might say. Nothing is right. Nothing is wrong. We’re just animals following our instincts. This is an incredibly hopeless way to live but, aside from that, it is also dangerous. It encourages humans to lower themselves, embrace their carnal, broken nature and do anything they can get away with. After all, if nothing matters in the long run, then everything is permissible. Right?
