The material in this book is a way of offering to readers—especially the most skeptical who may think the “good news” lacks cultural relevance—the same food for thought. We will compare the beliefs and claims of Christianity with the beliefs and claims of the secular view, asking which one makes more sense of a complex world and human experience.

In short, no one can purge him- or herself of all faith assumptions and assume an objective, belief-free, pure openness to objective evidence. There is no “view from nowhere.”

Anyone can say, “I feel this is right to do, and so that is how I will act.” The “moral source” in this case is a feeling within. However, on the secular view of reality, how can anyone ever say to anyone else, “This is right (or wrong) for you to do, whether you feel it or not”? You can never say that to someone else unless there is a moral source

We want to find meaning in things but the universe does not cooperate. We are all like Sisyphus in the Greek myth, rolling the rock up the hill only to see it inevitably roll back. We try to do good for the people we love, but what we do never lasts, nor do they. To Camus, death is not a gateway into another life but a “closed door.”

“Meaning,” it is said, is not a property of anything in the world—it’s just how we humans happen to feel about it at the moment. In this view, each of us can decide if a particular object is meaningful to us, but to ask what is the meaning of life itself is nonsensical. Life can’t have a meaning of its own.

In short, don’t try to fulfill your desires; rather, control and manage them. To avoid having our inner contentment overthrown by the inevitable loss of things, do not become too emotionally attached to anything.

we saw in an earlier chapter, Christians believe that Jesus is the Logos that the Greeks intuited—the meaning behind the universe, the reason for life. But unlike the philosophers, Christians believe that the Logos is not a concept to be learned but a person to be known. And therefore we don’t believe in a meaning we must go out and discover but in

How, then, can we tell if a human being is good or bad? Only if we know our purpose, what human life is for. If you don’t know the answer to that, then you can never determine “good” and “bad” human behavior. If, as in the secular view, we have not been made for a purpose, then it is futile to even try to talk about moral good and evil.

we all seek a cause beyond ourselves.”7