Voltaire, one of France’s greatest writers, wrote: “If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary for man to invent Him.” He was arguing against the atheistic view that God doesn’t exist, showing in his essay, that God is the basis of all that is good in man and society. Without God, no absolute right or wrong exist. Right becomes whatever an individual or a group of individuals choose it to be at a moment in time. Thus there is no such thing as morality without God, and so, to have any basis for “morality,” whatever they may deem that to be, godless men must create a god.
Those of us who lived through the Cold War and were born when memories of WWII were still fresh in our parents’ and grandparents’ minds can attest to the truth of Voltaire’s statement. In Nazi Germany, “God” was relegated to an unimportant position and was largely replaced by Hitler and the Nazi Party. Morality in Germany and in the lands they conquered became one in which Jews, Gypsies, the mentally retarded and the physically handicapped were eliminated from society — murdered — in order to protect the integrity of the great Aryan race. In the absence of God they created god in the form of their dictator, and his morality became the morality of the country, even though it defied every moral teaching of Christianity which had, at least in name, controlled European thought for hundreds of years, and even though Germany was the very country in which the Protestant Reformation began with Martin Luther.
Every Communist and Socialist country has eliminated God. In the Soviet Union, Lenin called religion “opium for the people” and Stalin called for an “atheist five year plan” from 1932–1937, to eliminate any religious thoughts and practice. God would disappear as a concept in the USSR, he argued. The Communist Party would replace Him. Thus, when Stalin determined that millions of Ukrainians must be starved to death and sent millions of others to die in the gulags of Siberia, it was not an immoral judgement against which anyone dared object. Morality was what Stalin decreed it to be.
The problem with ignoring the existence of God is that we humans are so incapable of replacing Him with anything good. In the days of the prophet Jeremiah, the Israelites had abandoned God and replaced him with idols. As Voltaire warned, in the absence of worship of the real God, they of necessity created their own.
In Jeremiah 10:3-5, God chides them through the prophet, saying:
“For the customs of the peoples are futile; For one cuts a tree from the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the ax. They decorate it with silver and gold; they fasten it with nails and hammers so that it will not topple. They are upright, like a palm tree, and they cannot speak; they must be carried, because they cannot go by themselves. Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, nor can they do any good.”
In America today, as in many parts of the world, churches are nearly empty of worshippers on Sunday. Young people avoid “organized religion” and often prefer to view themselves as being “spiritual,” forgetting that to worship God is to obey His precept not to forsake the assembling together with other worshipers as warned in the book of Hebrews. Many of these “spiritual” young people, of course, only believe in God in a vague sort of sense, or don’t believe at all, rooting their “spirituality” in the earth or in Mother Nature. The political left, who are pushing the country away from capitalism and towards socialism, are of necessity also pushing the country away from God. Remember that in socialism, God does not exist, for if He did, so would absolute good and evil, right and wrong, absolute morality. For socialism, as in Nazi Germany and in its Communist branch in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (present day Russia) and other totalitarian regimes, the ruling party is the determiner of what is moral. They become god.
This explains the distressing immoral ideas being pushed incessantly by the American left and increasingly by the Democratic Party: the murder of millions of our innocent babies up until the very moment of birth and beyond; the sudden finding in the words of the Constitution the (invisibly expressed) rights for members of the same sex to be married; the punishment by the government of people who act according to their religious beliefs; the exaltation and protection of the Islamic faith and Muslim terrorists and the denigration of Christianity as being bigoted and fear-mongering; the total dismissal of the reality that in humankind as in animals we are born male or female and instead the perpetuation of the idea that we can choose our own gender after birth and change it at will in defiance of science.
The left has no god but themselves and no morality but what they choose at the moment. Thus males are bad. White males are the worst. Mathematics, the OK sign, pillow fights, even hiking are racist. Really, being white is racist. Blacks, on the other hand, cannot be racist. That is the truth of the left, again in defiance of the very definition of racism. This “morality” changes by the year, the month, even the day, and those who are the heroes of the left today become deplorable in their eyes tomorrow because nothing is absolute.
Then must we of necessity, as Voltaire suggested, create a god? Absolutely not, for God exists, has always existed, and will always exist, whether we choose to believe in Him or not. How do I know that? Many theologians over the years have argued why it is absurd to believe that God does not exist! A simple look at the world around us should give us pause if we do not believe in God. Is it really logical that one tiny piece of matter would suddenly explode in the middle of space into our universe and with it, create the earth, the planets, the first plant and animal life which then changed into trees, grass, flowers, vegetables, fruits, every kind of animal imaginable and eventually humans? Really? Can you see a dandelion suddenly sprouting acorns to grow an oak tree which in turn spawns a rose bush? Is this truly logical? Certainly I am simplifying the big bang theory and Darwin’s theory, but they are both just that. Theories. Neither has ever been proven and both are illogical in the extreme because . . . where did that one tiny piece of matter that exploded into earth come from in the first place?
Anselm of Canturbury argued in the 12th century that God must exist because it is greater to exist than not to exist and by definition God is the greatest conceivable Being. Thus it is logical that God exists. Thomas Aquinus pointed out in the 13th century that whatever depends upon something else for its existence, which is, in other words, contingent upon something else, at some point did not exist! The flowers in my yard were contingent upon me to plant them. Before that, they did not exist. I was contingent upon my parents, and before their marriage, I did not exist. Everything that is contingent upon something else for its existence cannot by definition exist by itself. Everything that has a beginning had no existence before that beginning and so that pesky little speck of matter in the Big Bang theory must have had a beginning. A beginning in what? From what could it have come? Jonathan Edwards, an American Calvinist theologian, follows that argument to its logical conclusion by arguing that God must exist because as humans we know that nothing comes from nothing, thus destroying the Big Bang Theory.
So where did the sun, the moon, the stars, and the universe itself come from? Some might argue that they have always been, but how could that be? Many scientists believe that space goes on forever, and that there is only a small part of it that is observable with our telescopes. But how do you explain that? How far is forever? Nothing in our world has always been or goes on without end. Flowers grow and die. People are born, grow old, and die. They are contingent upon something else for existence and they themselves are not eternal, so how could the solar system be, or space? Where did they come from? How could they always have been? Science cannot tell us. Every fact in science is based upon another fact which is based upon another until they arrive at the unprovable. The theory that is not a fact. Which cannot be proven. That must be taken by, (gasp!) faith!
The logical conclusion to this is that all things which are contingent must of necessity come from something which is eternal, from one Being who was not contingent upon anything or anyone else for existence. That Being exists not contingently but necessarily. Without that Being, nothing else would exist. That Being we call God.
God is also, as I have said earlier, the basis of all morality. He provided exacting rules of right and wrong which are absolute and unchanging just as He is unchanging. Without God, or without a belief in God, morality does not exist. 20thCentury French writer, John-Paul Sartre, himself an atheist, wrote that atheists mistakenly think they “will encounter the same standards of honesty, progress, and humanism upon turning God into an obsolete hypothesis that will die quietly on its own.” That, of course, as Sartre was wise enough to understand, never happens. Why? Because, contrary to the belief of Jean Jacques Rousseau, another Frenchman, humans are not inherently good. Why do we refer to “the terrible twos” in referring to the maturing of our children if not for the fact that two-year-olds have begun to exert their own will and that will is consistently selfish. Children must be taught right from wrong, they are not born knowing it.
Without God, there is also chaos, because God must be by definition eternal, perfect, all-powerful, and unchanging. That which is perfect must be orderly since chaos is never perfect. Order exists all around us, in the planets which revolve around our sun, in other solar systems, in the changing seasons, in the plants which produce after their own kind, in the intricacies of the human body. It is illogical to assume that order could have created itself out of chaos as the big bang theory would suggest. Order must be ordered. Thus order comes from an eternal God, and without a belief in God, man descends into chaos. We see that portrayed clearly by the American left as cited by Dennis Prager of Prager University. Their chaos includes:
–Open borders.
— “Nonbinary” genders.
— Nonsensical and scatological “art.”
— “Music” without tonality, melody or harmony.
— Drag Queen Story Hour for 5-year-olds.
— Rejection of the concept of better or worse civilizations.
— Rejection of the concept of better or worse art.
— Removal of Shakespeare’s picture from a university English department because he was a white male.
— The end of all use of fossil fuels — even in transportation (as per the recent recommendation by the head of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization).
— The dismantling of capitalism, the economic engine that has lifted billions of people out of abject poverty (Dennis Prager. Townhall.com)
In other words, chaos. Without God, man attempts to create a substitute, be it an idol carved of stone or a government, but the substitute is never good for mankind. Without God, there is no morality, since morality depends upon the acknowledgement of absolute good and evil which do not exist in a godless society. Without God, there is no order, only chaos, since God is by definition the creator of order. Without God, everything that exists came out of nothing and since that is impossible, God must exist. Thus it is illogical to not believe in God. But then, logic no longer seems to be a strong point of the American left and the Democrats.