A clergy friend of mine was walking through his churchyard one evening, and caught a 12 or 13 year old boy throwing stones at the stained glass windows. As the boy was cornered, he defiantly stood his ground. "Why are you doing that?" asked my friend. "Because there ain't a god, mister - that's why!" he said, and darted off.
We have two options. Either God exists, and the Bible is his special revelation to us his creatures; or, God does not exist, and the Bible is the product of man's romantic imagination.
If there is no God and no Creator, then we are impersonal machines that evolved accidentally from primordial energy particles, through time, plus chance. Regardless whether we believed in God or not, at the end of this life we are all in the same boat - just as dead. Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. If God is dead, man is dead. Alfred Koestler couldn't live with this concept of a universe without personality (see his book "The Ghost in the Machine"). Nor can anyone who seriously thinks about it; so they drag in the idea of personality by talking about Mother Nature, instead of Father God. Or they personalise the sun, moon, stars and planets as if they were gods and goddesses. They call the earth Gaia, and thereby idolatrously worship the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25).
If there is a God, then those who accept Him on His terms will have everlasting life, pardon, peace and happiness in his presence; while for those who continue to reject him, it is quite a different story.
The philosophers Aldous and Julian Huxley were just two who could not live comfortably with their atheism. They had to find an alternative explanation as to how things were the way they are. They advocated "Optimistic Evolutionary Humanism" as their alternative to the biblical doctrine of the Creation and Providence of Almighty God.
Aldous Huxley found refuge in drugs, hoping thereby to have some sort of "First Order Experience" (a "close encounter of the nth kind"?) which would make sense out of life, and lead us into his idea of a "Brave New World". At the end of his life he wrote in the final chapter of "The Humanist Frame" (ed. Julian Huxley, Allen & Unwin, London, 1961) that healthy people should use drugs like LSD in order to have a First-Order Experience. After all, eastern mystics have taken hashish for centuries to attain an expanded awareness or enhanced state of consciousness. But this is the way of despair, not of optimism. Just look at the dead-end drug culture this has led to.
King Heroin is my shepherd: I shall always want.
He maketh me to lie down in the gutters.
He leadeth me beside the troubled waters.
He destroyeth my soul. (Anon)
Those who are not into drugs are into Transcendental Meditation and the New Age cults of Unreason, trying to contact "the god within". There is no god within; only the fallen human spirit. Jesus said "for from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these evil things come from within, and defile the man" (Mark 7:21-23).
Julian Huxley wanted to have it both ways. He could see that without a personal and infinite creator God, man was dead, personality was an illusion, and moral categories were meaningless. He took refuge in a "cake and eat it" philosophy. "There is no god, but on the whole men function better if they falsely think that there is a god". God is dead, but act as if he were alive! (P)AND(NOT-P)=TRUE! - FALSE!! Henrik Ibsen wrote in his book "The Wild Duck", "If you take away a man's lie, you take away his hope" . As Francis Schaeffer has pointed out, Huxley is saying in effect "'Man can only function as man for an extended period of time if he acts on the assumption that a lie (that the personal God of Christianity is there) is true'. You cannot find any deeper despair than this for a sensitive person. This is not an optimistic, happy, reasonable or brilliant answer. It is darkness and death" (The God who is There, London, 1968, p 89).
"Choose you this day. . . . But as for me and my house: we will serve the LORD" (Joshua 24:15). "He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him" (Hebrews 11:6). "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" (Psalms 14:1; 53:1)