Check Your Premises

“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
Ayn Rand

At our bible study lesson, we are watching a video to our Song of Solomon. The minister who is doing the video series makes a comment denouncing existentialism, stating it caused the sexual immorality that we see in our culture. His claim is that existentialism would have us believe that truth is subjective, and without absolutes, we lose self control.

I wonder if this is true. The problem is, to determine if it is true, you have to take it apart. You have to define the parameters.

Let's start by defining existenialism. The problem with that is that there is no clear definition. There have many interpretations and representations of this school of thought, and even among the more famous representatives, there is wide deviation in explanations. Here is what the dictionary has to say about it:



Existentialism: A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one’s acts.

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Another source1 states, "Existentialism cannot be precisely defined. In fact, an exact definition is usually avoided by existential philosophers, since to define it would be to lose it in the bondage of too restricted confinement...Existentialism, as the name suggests, relates the destiny of the individual thinker to the ideas that engage and can be understood by his own mind."

In order to disprove the preacher's point, I set out to answer the following questions:

Does believe in existentialism negate belief in God?
Does it take away the absolute of moral authority?

Does existentialism represent a threat to Christianity?

In doing some research on existentialism to prove my hypothesis, my clarity begins to bend and finally disappears altogether in face of the different metaphysical viewpoints presented by various "existenialists". I try re-reading Nietzsche's "Beyond God and Evil", including commentary by philosophical researchers, for clues about how existenialism juxtaposed with Christianity, but I end up just getting a headache. Learning more about Nietzche, I come to see that he believed that, "even though Christian morality is nihilistic, without God humanity is left with no epistemological or moral base from which we can derive absolute beliefs."1

In that sense, then, perhaps the preacher and Nietchze would have been of the same mind.

What is bothering me is the idea that because one believes in existentialism, one has no absolute believe in a moral framework, AND that having no moral framework leads one to sexual immorality.It just seems like flawed logic to me.

So I did a little deeper....

TO BE CONTINUED

http://www.adventistbiblicalresearch.org/documents/existentialism.htm