“For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.”

Christians can be a smug lot. Hubristically and, might I say, quite sinfully, we often pigeon-hole our atheist “enemies” as being quite incapable of even grasping the most rudimentary truths concerning the world we live in. Tagging along with this is the frequent and, what seems to be, intentional failure of Christians to carry through with the biblically ordained task of seeking rational understanding of the atheist worldview. These are no better abjectly reflected than when Christians adopt the evolutionary story as their own, a Mephistophelean barter implicitly announcing that Christians appreciate the materialist “creation myth of this age”, as Mary Midgely so aptly labelled it, more comprehensively than they.

Of course, passing these mythological elements off as genuine Christian philosophy comes with a monumental price-tag: How does one explain away all those ill-fitting components which just do not square up with the revelation that God himself has spoken to us in the Bible?

Far too many Sydney Anglicans have capitulated to philosophical materialism, adopted its faux scientific offspring, and are thus forced to ignore the internal contradictory clashes that arise when a Christian worldview is tied to a pagan one. When these are pointed out, the best its adherents offer is a stream of irrelevant platitudes that just do not take seriously this metastasis of Christian theodicy and soteriology: “This is not a salvation issue”, “God’s ways are not ours”, “My God is big enough to do it any way he pleases”, “Genesis 1 tells us who and why, but not how”.

In contradistinction to the Anglicans’ lack of comprehension, it is completely refreshing to read an atheist who has intelligently understood the ramifications of this zeitgeist. Mark Rowlands, in his The Philosopher at the end of the Universe: Philosophy Explained through Science Fiction Films, has done just that.

Like the existentialists, he thinks life absurd. Absurdity, he coherently explains, arises because there is a confrontation between how we see ourselves from the inside and the view that we understand about the external world. This philosophical absurdity is fundamentally and rationally linked to the meaning of life:

“The problem is one of explaining our ultimate significance given our place in a universe that does not seem to allow us to have any such significance. The problem derives from the thought that there are two quite different stories we tell…[On the one hand] we matter…We are…a core of significance. On the other hand [there is] our ultimate insignificance. As a species we are finite, partial creatures, inhabiting an unremarkable planet in an unremarkable galaxy. We have been around for an infinitesimally small proportion of the life of the universe, and even the best estimates for our continuation don’t give us too much longer in the cosmic scheme of things. None of us, not even the cleverest, really understands where we came from – the origin of the universe we inhabit is necessarily a mystery to us.” (pp. 4-5)

Rowlands doesn’t just end his pitch there; he goes on to make a quite unexpected and perspicacious confession. His sense of disquiet isn’t cured by invoking some anti-intellectual Hegelian synthesis of the two incompatibilities; rather he admits he has a “hard time seeing how both sorts of stories we tell about ourselves could be true.” (p. 6)

This enigma is returned to again and again with increasing clarity, nuance and despondency: “How can I be a centre of significance and purpose when I am the product of processes and forces that were in place long before I was born, and where my essential nature seems inextricably bound up with these processes and forces?” (p. 14)

And ultimately what fuels his angst, this discontent he experiences when he attempts to grasp the ‘big picture’? The very view that the Sydney Diocese has promoted from its pulpits, college and discussion groups: the evolutionary worldview:

“The philosopher Immanuel Kant once wrote that there were two things that never ceased to fill him with amazement: the starry sky above him and the moral law within him. When I look at the starry sky above me, what fills me with amazement is the idea that there could be a God who created a universe like this. A universe that is designed according to a principle – the Second Law of Thermodynamics – which means that suffering and death are built into it as one of its structural elements. A universe that, after billions and billions of years of travail, eventually produced creatures that were conscious, and then self-conscious. A universe that, through these creatures, became aware of itself, understood itself, marvelled at itself, only to realise that it was doomed; that its fate was heat death, that it was essentially ephemeral, that it was essentially futile. The darkness of unconsciousness eventually, after billions of years of struggle, gave way to the light of consciousness, only for this light to understand its own hopelessness. This is cruelty on a cosmic scale. Perhaps only a God could be capable of such cruelty.” (p. 23)

Creationists, by insisting on a young earth, non-evolutionary, 6 day creation week, are frequently accused by Sydney Anglicans of setting a major stumbling block before those seeking Christ. What is clearly apparent from reading Rowlands’ words is that it’s the Sydney Anglicans’ promulgation of the pagan evolutionary worldview that clearly hinders people opening the door to Christ. As Jesus complained, “Alas for you experts in the Law, for you have taken away the key to knowledge. You have never gone in yourselves and you have hindered everyone else who was at the door!”