The Meaning of the Universe

Why am I alive? Clearly, this has to be the most important question anyone could ask. But, amazingly, most people today either haven’t asked it at all or have just dismissed it as unanswerable or with the simple answer: “I have no real importance in the universe.” Now, having such a perspective may seem to be humble and, even, noble. But is it correct?



Despite the paramount importance of this question, many people today in America and the rest of the developed world today have just accepted without any critical consideration the idea that, in the end, "I have no real importance in the universe" or that there is no possible way to answer the question for certain. But, how do you know this? So, the first thing that this book does is to invite many of you to do something you have never done before. And, if you are willing to do so, your life will be transformed! The nature of the question actually guarantees this. To borrow a line from the Star Wars character, Obi Wan Kenobi, to do this will be "your first step into a much larger world".

 

Unless you were raised to be a believer in some sort of a religion and continue to be a believer, the chances are that you are a Humanist, whether you realize it or not. Perhaps the best way to summarize Humanism is that it consists mainly of these three beliefs:

1) that matter-energy and mindless forces of nature in space-time are all that exists

2) that humanity, not God, determines what is right and wrong

3) that belief in God and Christianity is outdated and incorrect.



Whether they are right or not, most people just accept the basic ideas which we are taught and don’t think critically about them mainly because we aren’t taught to do this. And we weren’t taught mainly because our teachers weren’t taught to do so. For more than 50 years public education and the popular culture in most of America and most of the developed world has simply assumed that the 3 basic ideas given above are true.



This is just the way education works. There must always be a foundation of basic ideas with any educational curriculum. And it is also true that a society in which there is disagreement over basic ideas will be a divided society. This is exactly why we are so divided today.

So, the first part of the book is a critique of Humanism. It will be shown that it is a philosophy which just doesn't hold up when examined carefully and, therefore, should be rejected. Many problems will be discussed, some of which are actually amazingly simple. Nevertheless, I am quite confident that many of us have never considered them.



The second part of the book makes the case for going back to what was previously the dominant view of the developed world: Christianity. Along the way, reasons why Christianity is superior to the other possible alternatives will also be presented. These include other non-theisti...