Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari is a high-demand speaker at conferences worldwide and the author of several books that have sold tens of millions of copies. His work on questions of human consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the future of civilizations is fascinating and often feeds conspiracy theories. From his starkly materialist worldview, Harari argues that human beings are not unique or special, and he predicts science will soon overtake nature as the driving force of human development. Thus, he argues, people should “hack” themselves with biotech to secure a better future.

And yet, Harari misses some of the most basic implications of his philosophical assumptions, such as denying any basis for morality while also insisting that oppression is wrong. In a recently posted video, Harari referred to Charles Darwin as a prophet of sexual liberation. Though this was almost certainly not Darwin’s intent, by showing that there is no purpose guiding biology, Darwin freed what is now called the LGBTQ community from fear that they were sinning against God.

Harari’s right. If there is no Creator with specific intentions for humanity and their behavior, people are free to live as they wish. His post read, “Nothing in nature has a purpose and nothing that exists is unnatural. Happy International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia.”

However, as Derek Rishmawy replied:

Just to point out the obvious, if there is no God, no teleology, no intrinsic shape or dignity to the person or the sexual act, then, while nothing is unnatural and permitted, neither is prejudice against or persecution of such things.

What Harari missed was that if humanity has no purpose and, as he put it “nothing that exists is unnatural,” why would prejudice or persecution be wrong when sexual deviancy is not? His moral judgment on such things becomes just as meaningless as the sexual ethics he rejects. By removing the very concept of evil, Harari has no way to call anything evil.

Francis Schaeffer articulated this line of thought in his 1972 book, He Is There and He Is Not Silent. Schaeffer argued that a world without God is left empty. It’s not just that a physical world can never self-create. It’s that without God, those things that make life worth living become meaningless. Beauty, knowledge, and truth are meaningless in a universe that is merely matter in motion. In such a world, a sunset is not beautiful, a fact is not known, and our deepest loves are an illusion of chemistry.

Atheists often quip that if you need a God or the fear of Hell to be a good person, then you’re not a good person. This misses the point. When Christians say that there’s no morality without God, we don’t mean that without punishment we cannot be good. We mean that without God, there’s no such thing as good.

When Harari and his fellow materialists insist that humans are just random interactions of subatomic particles, all claims about justice and oppression are reduced to personal preference. The most heinous crimes are unfortunate and inconvenient, but nothing more. In this view, slavery, the Holocaust, the Gulags, and all the other horrors of history are of no more moral significance than when a high school kid mixes chemicals in the lab. It’s all just matter in motion.

In his 1887 parable The Madman, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “God is dead ...And we have killed him.” This was not written as a celebration. Rather in this piece, Nietzsche warned the smug nineteenth century elites about the world they dreamed of, free from God: “Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?”

In other words, losing God doesn’t just mean losing our religion. It means losing our morality. It means losing our meaning. Ultimately, it means losing our humanity.

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