If you’re on friendly terms with any nurses, you’ll know the career pro­vides an endless supply of vivid mem­ories. When my wife once worked as a transplant nurse at a large, bustling med­ical center in the south-eastern US, she accumulated many memorable stories.

On one occasion, a bed-ridden patient was transferred to her ward from a neigh­bouring plastic surgery unit, which was filled to capacity. Sadly, the patient was afflicted with a medical condition that caused severe disfigurement of his face. Although anyone catching a glimpse was immediately struck by his appearance, the patient was as yet unaware of his plight.

To avoid the devastating psychological impact involved, the attending physician and the man’s family devised a plan to keep him from discovering the truth. Before his arrival on the ward, the nursing staff were instructed to use tape and brown paper to cover all reflective objects in his room. All mirrors and stainless steel surfaces were covered over. They even substituted plastic cutlery for the shiny, reflective spoons and knives nor­mally used at mealtimes.

This story reminds me of the famous passage in Romans 1:18-22, where the Apostle Paul describes the intellectual conspiracy of those outside of Christ. It tells us that while they don’t know God in the manner enjoyed by Christians, unbe­lievers nevertheless “know” him via gen­eral revelation in the created order:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without any excuse. vs. 20

But, like the medical staff “conspiring” to keep the patient from learning his true condition, unbelievers actively “suppress the truth” concerning God (vs.18). In other words, a deep psychological battle rages con­tinually within the non-Chris­tian mind. On the one hand, they possess a measure of truth about God and are clearly aware of his holiness. They cannot change the fact that they are made in his image. But on the other, they actively rebel against their Creator. So, when thinking through the important issues of life, they display a distinct “chip on the shoulder” towards God.

Elsewhere in Scripture, we learn that these evasive habits of individuals are also true of the whole human race. Indeed, we might even say that humans have a bad case of Coober Pedy Syndrome! Coober Pedy of course, is a unique town in the hot South Australian desert, famous for its opal mines and the way miners avoid the heat by digging underground to build their homes. In fact, the town’s name is taken from an Aboriginal phrase meaning “White Fellow’s Burrow.”

Although he lived far from outback Australia, the prophet Isaiah used a powerful “Coober Pedy” image to describe the behaviour of the human race in its mutiny against God’s rule. Speaking as God’s mouthpiece, Isaiah conveyed his displeasure toward such conduct:

Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord, who do their work in darkness and think, Who sees us? Who will know? Is. 29:15

The image here is of humans figura­tively burrowing into the ground, attempting to escape the all-seeing gaze of a holy God. Note that the “burrowing behaviour” involves both intellectual and lifestyle aspects: the conspirators “hide their plans from the Lord” plus they “do their work in darkness”. In other words, they develop philosophical systems (“plans”) that rationalize excluding God from his creation. Simultaneously, they adopt lifestyles (“work”) that reinforce the intellectual rebellion.

This link between theory and practice is especially obvious today. As the American cultural observer E. Michael Jones noted in his book Degenerate Moderns, 20^th century intellectual life tended to display “a vicious circle, oscillat­ing between sexual and intellectual sins: sexual sin leads to bad science as a form of rationalisation, turning one’s back on the truth in the interest of ideology or self-will, which in turn leads to more dissolute behaviour, which in turn leads to ever more ludicrous theories”.

Such behaviour closely parallels the “Coober Pedy” imagery of Isaiah. It also illustrates what Old Testament commen­tator Alec Motyer calls the “impenetrable blindness” of the human race highlighted in Isaiah.

This brings us to another sad story, concerning a highly influential thinker of the 20^th century, the Paris-born novelist, playwright and philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80). Sartre came to world attention after his delivery of a lecture entitled Existentialism is a Humanism in Paris in 1945. The philosophical system he advanced, atheistic existentialism, quickly became popular on university campuses around the world. In some ways, it accel­erated the tumultuous cultural upheavals of the ’60s, including the often-violent student revolutions of that decade.

In essence, Sartre’s philosophy emphasised modern man’s perceived plight as he struggles for self-understanding and authenticity in a meaningless world emp­tied of God’s presence. In developing this system, Sartre deliberately rejected the Catholic doctrines to which he had been nominally exposed as a child.

Instead, Sartre tried to invent a belief system that was free of Christian ideas that he thought had long contaminated Western philosophy. For example, Sartre wished people would stop thinking of themselves as possessing a “human nature”. As he put it in an essay entitled Existentialism:

There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it ... Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of exis­tentialism.

Late in life, in conversations with his lifelong mistress, the feminist matriarch Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre summarised this goal:

It seemed to me that a great atheist philosophy was something that philosophy lacked. And it was in this direction that one should now endeavour to work ... (I wanted) to make a philoso­phy of man in a material world.

The resulting worldview was presented in his major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. This book was very influen­tial among philosophy students in Australia, the US and elsewhere.

Sartre’s ideology also had a strong influence outside universities, thanks to the popularity of his plays (e.g. Flies and No Exit) and novels (e.g. Nausea). His work’s appeal was largely due to its emphasis on the exercise of human free­dom — an idea that was tailor-made for the prosperous post-war era. Sartre’s intoxicating ideas were inhaled by many baby boomers, who obediently expressed the philosophy by wearing blue jeans, smoking pot, having unconventional sex, playing rock n’ roll and protesting against US and Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. Down with the Establishment! Up with freedom and the individual!

Thanks to the passage of time and the faddism of academic life, Sartre’s direct influence is much weaker today than it was three or four decades ago. The ongoing seductive appeal of French thought meant Western intellectuals fell in love with a newer generation of thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard. As a result, existentialism faced competi­tion from movements such as poststruc­turalism and postmodernism.

Of particular interest to us is a striking admission by Sartre towards the end of his above-mentioned conversations with de Beauvoir. These were published in English in 1984, entitled Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. The book comprises long, ram­bling discussions of the odd Sartre-de Beauvoir relationship, his literary works, political activism, and sexual conquests of groupie women. However, towards the end of the discussions, Sartre spoke openly of a major road-block to his goal of developing a truly atheistic philosophy.

The problem according to Sartre is that it is very difficult to rid one’s thinking of the presence of God. As he put it:

Even if one does not believe in God, there are elements of the idea of God that remain in us and that cause us to see the world with some divine aspects.

De Beauvoir inter­rupted at this point, asking Sartre to explain himself. He continued:

I don’t see myself as so much dust that has appeared in the world, but as a being that was expected, prefigured, called forth. In short, as a being that could, it seems, come only from a creator; and this idea of a cre­ating hand that created me refers me back to God. Naturally, this is not a clear, exact idea that I set in motion every time I think of myself. It contradicts many of my other ideas; but it is there, floating vaguely. And when I think of myself I often think rather in this way, for want of being able to think otherwise...

To those familiar with classic Christian theology, Sartre’s comments reveal an eerie awareness of the cognitio Dei insita — the internal knowledge of God implanted within every human heart. This is something all people possess as bearers of the image of God, and supple­ments the knowledge received by seeing God’s creative handiwork in the world around them. Sadly, instead of pursuing the implications of such knowledge, Sartre chose to suppress it. Consequently, he spent the rest of his life in a darkened Coober Pedy-style burrow, churning out his literary and philosophical works.

Reading the conversations between Sartre and de Beauvoir, one is struck by the gloomy pettiness of their shared men­tal outlook in the final stages of their lives. Although “the world was their oyster” in the ‘50s and ‘60s, this proud, brilliant cou­ple were vulnerable at the achilles’ heel possessed by all secular intellectuals: the tyranny of idolatrous ideas. For as Psalm 115 warns those who manufacture idols, that “those who make them are like them”, so Sartre and de Beauvoir came to resemble the ideas they worshipped, becoming barren, lifeless and abstract.

The Christian gospel is good news for modern man because it is perfectly designed for darkness-preferring burrow-dwellers. Lyle Dorsett’s choice of title for his biography of the life and conversion of another famous 20^th century skeptic, Joy Davidman, beautifully captured the Gospel’s essence: And God Came In.

Mercifully, God graciously takes the initiative in our salvation, entering the burrows of the impenetrably blind.

Although the gospel is precious to us as believers, how do we go about sharing it with the confused offspring of the baby boomer generation? Anyone who has tried to share their faith with friends or workmates will know that in today’s cli­mate, the skeptical legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre and his existentialist colleagues is very strong. Many efforts to discuss reli­gious truths are met by an instinctive, knee-jerk cynicism. This state of affairs illustrates what Yale professor Arthur Leff calls “the Grand ‘Sez Who’?” In other words, each person considers himself or herself entitled to believe or behave how­ever they please. They are skeptical when confronted by truth claims that question this approach to life. Jesus died to take away my sins? Sez who?

In this climate, Christians must assail the cosy belief systems with which peo­ple insulate their burrows against the knowledge of God. Writing to the Corinthian church, which was sur­rounded by a moral climate just like our own, Paul reminded his readers that the gospel is for “casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). This is a mandate for 21^st century believers too. We are called to tackle the powerful ideologies that dominate the thinking and behaviour of people in our confused, pluralistic age.

I think there are at least three ways we must do this.

First, we need to meet the prevailing skepticism head on, demanding that advo­cates of secular belief systems justify their sweeping truth claims. To borrow a phrase from Os Guiness, Christians need to cultivate skepticism concerning skepti­cism! God is dead? The Bible is out of date? The Christian faith is irrelevant? Sez who? Jean-Paul Sartre?

But why are his views — and those of many other secular intellectuals — so deserving of belief? After all, the reasons Sartre gave for rejecting God seem amazingly childish. For example, in his autobiography, Sartre tells how as a boy, his unbelief began after submitting an essay on the Easter narrative for a com­petition at his Catholic school. Dismayed that it only received second prize, Sartre revealed “this disappointment drove me to impiety”. Surely we are entitled to reply to this trivial incident: Big deal, Jean-Paul! Get over it!

Another key event occurred to the boy Sartre when he set fire to a floor rug after playing with matches: 

I was in the process of covering up my crime when God saw me. I felt his gaze inside my head and on my hands. I whirled about in the bathroom, horribly visible, a live target. Indignation saved me ... I blasphemed, I muttered like my grandfather: 'God damn it, God damn it, God damn it.' He never looked at me again. (The Words).

That one of the greatest atheist thinkers of the 20^th century could offer such normal boyhood episodes to justify rejecting God is incredible. John-Paul Sartre developed strong arguments that prove God is irrelevant? Sez who?

Second, we need to convince people that life becomes meaningless and brutish if they fail to see themselves as made in the image of God. We have already seen how Sartre hated to see himself as the handiwork of God. After all, since Darwin we prefer to see ourselves as hairless, tool­-making primates who are products of a long, unguided evolutionary history.

But, although this view is popular, there are many grounds for challenging it. Indeed, the 20^th century is littered with the debris of many failed efforts to explain human behaviour from a Darwinian per­spective. In the 1930s, for example, brutal advocates of Nazi genocide and eugenic racial doctrines justified their actions by saying they promote evolution by “weed­ing out” unwanted members of the human gene pool. In our time, Darwinian justifications for rape and sexual subjuga­tion have aroused the anger of many fem­inists and other thoughtful people (e.g. see the new collection of essays entitled Alas Poor Darwin; Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, 2001, Vintage Books).

Many rightly see that reducing humans to the levels of genetic robots ruled by their ancestral DNA strips them of their humanity, and society of its decency. But history suggests that such reductionist views may be inevitable when people con­sciously reject the biblical vision of humans made in God’s image.

Third, we need to confront people with the seriousness of the deep moral flaw that afflicts every human heart. Reading Sartre’s reminiscences with De Beauvoir, one is struck not only by his intellectual prowess, but also his extraordinary self­ishness. They convey the indelible impres­sion of a man who used people around him with impunity. His strange relation­ship with de Beauvoir is a case in point, since she clearly competed for sexual favours and affection alongside other women in Sartre’s odd harem of intellec­tual co-travellers.

Existentialism’s view of freedom boils thus down to this: mine is exercised at the expense of yours. In a famous quote from one of his plays, No Exit, Sartre has Garcin declare, “Hell is — other people!” Sartre gives us a world populated by hos­tile, warring self-deities, each trying to exert god-like freedom in the pursuit of self-authenticity and meaning. This sounds suspiciously like Genesis 3, an ideal starting point for engaging the postmod­ern mind.

To return to the story with which we began, of the poor disfigured patient trapped in his lonely hospital room. Christians need God’s help and energy in their task of removing the paper coverings and tape used by people today to obscure their knowledge of God and of them­selves. We must convince them that skep­ticism concerning God’s truth is unwar­ranted and irrational; that life is meaning­less unless we see ourselves as made in his likeness; and that the gospel is the only remedy to the deep sinfulness that ensnares every human heart. This three-pronged message is crucial if we are to ful­fil our calling as apologists and evangelists to the troubled world that is the legacy of J-P Sartre and his despairing philosophy.