In yesterday’s study we were talking about the Western world’s change from an “open system,” which acknowledged God’s existence, to a “closed system,” which holds that the only things that exist are what can be seen. In the past, there was an established order in the universe because it went back to the God who both made it and sustained it.
Then, over time, as God began to be removed from humanity’s intellectual pursuit, people fell back on the idea of the laws of nature. But because there was no absolute anymore, since God was denied, even the laws of nature became questionable. So instead of talking about the laws of nature or natural law, which at least implies a degree of acknowledgement that there are some rules to which people are bound, people instead began simply to reflect upon nature. No longer is there the attempt to examine things to find out what the eternal and abiding principles are. Now we have only the desire to reflect upon things as we think they are, and it is those reflections that become the norm, which of course are themselves subject to change.
The second area is in regard to how people view themselves. Before these revolutionary changes, even in countries where most certainly not everyone was a Christian, there was at least something of a Christian ethos. Within that ethos, mankind was seen as the creation of God made in God’s image—and therefore responsible to God and unable to exist and function properly without some relationship to this God who had made him. But when God got pushed out of the picture, people asserted their self-sufficiency, believing that they are a law unto themselves and therefore able to establish their own righteousness without reference to anybody else. Moreover, the evolutionary theory that sought to dethrone God from His position of absolute Creator influenced human morality. In this new world, mankind was now infinitely perfectible. Quite contrary to the Scriptures, human beings were no longer seen as those who have fallen from what God made them to be; rather, they were now seen as those who are on their way to becoming all that they were meant to be, according to the human definition of what that genuine meaning is.
The third change was in the area of autonomy, which also has to do with people and how they see themselves. When human thinking still retained a biblical conception of God in His universe, the law of this God was the law of mankind as well. We may not like it. We may fight against it. Nevertheless, that law stood, and showed that we are not our own autonomous law in the universe. But when you push God out, you not only have a different view of man; you also have a different view of man in relationship to law. Now the standard for law comes, not from God or even from nature, but from within man himself. Whatever I want to do becomes the standard for my own thinking and conduct. Consequently, we used to talk about the “Me” generation, which is just a way of saying in popular language what has happened philosophically. Mankind has made himself the center of all things. And perhaps even to go further than that, man is all things. Or to go even further than that, I am all things, and I am responsible to nobody else. That is the exact expression of that secular spirit.
