Author: Dr. Jay Forrest

The meaning crisis deals “with the decentering of human life from its cosmic significance, a decline in our sense of purpose, and a sensation of having lost the soul that gave earlier human societies their adaptiveness and vitality. It seems we are left with a feeling of having lost our place in the world along with a sense of who we are and what we ought to do with ourselves.”¹

The nihilism that Friedrich Nietzsche warned about has arrived. Society is fragmenting, authoritarian regimes are rising, and people feel lost and without purpose. Society is unraveling.

According to Viktor Frankl, “this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.”² As Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”³ We need meaning in life—a worthwhile goal to strive for. We need to find a meaning worth living for.

So what is the cause of this meaning crisis? It stems from the fact that “traditional religious worldviews are no longer viable.”⁴ Our map of reality has been destroyed, and nothing has been offered to replace it.

A worldview is like a map: it tells us what reality is like and how to navigate it. It tells us what to strive for. It gives us direction and helps us understand what is worth pursuing. But with the collapse of religious traditions, our sense of direction is lost. We are lost.

Where do we go from here? That’s the question many are struggling with. Some have returned to the past and resurrected Stoicism. Others have turned to the East and embraced Buddhism. Some are trying to construct a new worldview based on science and secular ethics, often referred to as humanism.

I’ll be honest with you: none of these solutions are entirely satisfying. All of the old traditions need to be repaired, updated, or even reinvented. We live in a new age with new problems. There simply are no easy solutions.

Endnotes

¹ John Vervaeke and Christopher Masterripietro, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Book One: Origins (Nashville: Story Grid, 2024), 1.
² Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 99.
³ As quoted in Frankl, Man’s Search, 104.
⁴ Vervaeke, Meaning Crisis, 395.

To understand our inner dialogue, we first need to understand how the mind works. Our minds are filled with pre‑programming from our past. Some of that programming is positive, and some of it is negative.

When the negative programming starts to play, people often want to label it as the devil or a demon. When the positive programming starts to play, people want to label it as God or an angel.

But the truth is that neither is the case. What we are experiencing are mental programs—thought structures, patterns, and ideas—triggered by events in our lives.

If we fail at something or make a mistake, the negative programming begins to play. Sometimes this programming comes from a parent or another authority figure who told us we were bad, evil, or worthless. And so that script replays.

Sometimes we’re looking for guidance, and positive programming begins to surface. Words from the Bible or the wisdom of someone we admire may come to mind.

But we must understand that this is not God or the devil speaking. It is simply the unconscious bringing into awareness what has been programmed into it. These programs come from many different places and many different sources.

Rather than automatically accepting or rejecting these inner voices, we should compare them to the dictates of reason. This is what cognitive behavioral therapy teaches: do the beliefs we are hearing actually line up with reality? If they don’t, we need to reject them.

The only revelation of God is nature, and the only guidance God gives is to love one another—to treat everyone with the same dignity and respect we want for ourselves. And everyone means everyone. No exceptions.

Richard Dawkins, an expert on the theory of evolution, states, “Evolution is actually a fact—as incontrovertible a fact as any in science.”¹ But it’s just a theory, right?

The word theory does not mean the same thing in science as it does in general conversation. In science, a theory is “a hypothesis that has been confirmed.”³ So no, evolution is not a theory in the sense of being a guess or mere speculation; it is an established fact.

Deistic evolution is the view that God began the process of evolution with the big bang, implementing within creation the laws that govern its development. Thus, God programmed the process and then withdrew from active involvement with the world.³

God is the Creator, the ultimate cause, but evolution is the means, the proximate cause. From a deist perspective, once creation began, we deny that there is any direct activity by God during the ongoing creative process. Deistic evolution has no difficulty with the scientific evidence.

So the only difference between Richard Dawkins and myself is that I believe God began the evolutionary process, whereas Richard Dawkins believes that nothing began the evolutionary process. It just sort of happened.

Charles Darwin was right: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”⁴

Endnotes

¹ Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (New York: Free Press, 2009), xiii.
² Oxford English Dictionary.
³ Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 504.
⁴ Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 490.

How do you know that what you believe is true? That is the question known as epistemology or the “theory of knowledge.”

I don’t think we can know very much for certain. We have to give up that search. But I do think we can discover how probable a claim to truth is.

I will make a complex issue simple. You can tell whether a claim is probably true by applying the three C’s: correspondence, consistency, and consequences.

Truth is the correspondence of a claim with reality. If what you claim matches reality then what you claim is true. If your claim doesn’t match reality then it is false.

The important question is how do you tell whether or not your belief matches reality? By the objective and verifiable evidence for or against the belief. So the correspondence is mostly about a belief matching the available evidence.

The next test of truth is the consistency of the belief with one’s whole worldview. Contraction is a sign that something is wrong, either the belief is false or part of one’s worldview is false.

The final test of truth is the consequences of accepting the claim as true. If you can live it, it may be false. You will know a claim by its fruits. You don’t get bad results from a good belief, nor do you get good results from a bad belief.

This is a very simple epistemology. It is merely the outline for a larger exploration.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

To paraphrase Charles Finney: True rational consistency does not consist in stereotyping our beliefs and views, and in refusing to make any improvements lest we be guilty of change.

True rational consistency means holding our minds open to receive the rays of truth from every source, and in changing our beliefs as often and as fast as we obtain further information. This way of life alone accords with the claim of being rational.

No one should be afraid to change their beliefs in conformity with increasing knowledge. Such a fear would keep the world, at best, at a perpetual standstill on all subjects of inquiry, including science. Such a fear would mean all improvement would be prevented. The quest for truth would be aborted.

Most people today think that science and philosophy are two different things. They are not. Science is a branch of philosophy.

Before the 19th century, this claim would have gone largely unchallenged. Before this time, what we now call science was known as natural philosophy—clearly understood as a branch of philosophy rather than something separate and distinct.

The breach came when science became more and more confident in its findings, while philosophy in general still dealt with reasonable speculation.

As natural philosophy developed its own methods and specializations, it made sense to have specialists in that branch of philosophy. Scientists are specialists in natural philosophy.

But many of these specialists were not happy being associated with philosophy, which they saw as making little or no progress, because they made the mistake of equating the scientific pursuit of knowledge about nature with the philosophical pursuit of wisdom. They’re complementary, but they’re not the same.

So the specialists in natural philosophy effectively rebranded their branch of philosophy as science, and then began to distance themselves from philosophy—even though their entire foundation remained philosophical.

The simple fact is that you cannot derive the scientific method from the scientific method. The scientific method itself arises from philosophical inquiry. It was philosophy that developed the scientific method. Once the method was developed, philosophers could arrive at a better and more secure understanding of the world.

But at no time did science cease to be a branch of philosophy. It always has been and always will be. The mere fact that a method developed within philosophy is successful in giving us reliable results does not make that branch of philosophy cease to be a branch of philosophy. It doesn’t lose its belonging to philosophy just because it succeeds. It simply means that philosophy has developed a fairly trustworthy method of studying a particular domain.

Philosophy, however, must take into consideration all of reality in order to construct its worldviews. Philosophy is about helping us live wisely in the world. To do that, we must understand the world in which we live, who and what we are, our purpose and place, and how we ought to relate to one another.

My point is that science is a branch of philosophy, and it is a branch that philosophers need to reintegrate into their philosophical systems. The success of a philosophical system depends on its correspondence with the nature of reality, and science is our best current understanding of natural reality.