What is the meaning of life? This question has been asked so many times that it's become a cliché. But what does the question actually mean? According to the Oxford Dictionary, meaning is "what is meant by a word, text, concept or action". When you ask what the meaning of a word is, you are asking about what it is intended to communicate. There is an irreducible aspect of purpose in the questions "what is meant by..." or "what is the meaning of..." And so to ask "what is the meaning of life?" is to ask about the purpose of life. What were we meant for? What is our purpose? This is the heart of the age old question "what is the meaning of life?" which philosophers have been asking for millennia.
In a recent blog: A Meaning to Life without God, James Fodor argues that "the reason or purpose for which humanity exists or was created" may be what the meaning of life is for theists, but as a naturalist he does not accept this as the only possible conception of what is meant by 'the meaning of life'. Fodor goes so far as to say: "I deny the premise that the meaning of life need bear any relation at all to the reason for which humanity was created". While this is a typical move for atheists to make, it is one that essentially tries to argue that what we're 'meant for' bears no relation to what we're meant for - a contradiction in terms. If you start with the premise that there is no God, then it follows that we weren't created for a purpose. And if we were not 'meant for' anything, then life has no meaning by definition.
However, many are unsatisfied with this conclusion, and unwilling to question their premise which leads to it (that there is no god), and so they prefer not to think about it. In the presumed absence of God the search for meaning "is a request for which no answer exists" and so some argue that it's not a question worth thinking about. Fodor quotes the following explanation for the apparent "disinterest in the question of life's meaning":
"Within the analytic philosophical community, the disinterest in the question of life’s meaning, and in some cases outright logical suspicion, is likely partly a result of the question’s inherent lack of clarity and partly a result of the suspicion that it is a request for which no answer exists because it is built on suspect assumptions about what would have to be the case in order for life to have a meaning."
I too think that this is an accurate assessment. Compared with other times and cultures throughout history, people are thinking less and less about the question of life's meaning because of "the suspicion that it is a request for which no answer exists because it is built on suspect assumptions about what would have to be the case in order for life to have a meaning", namely that we were created for a purpose. In many places today, theism is treated as a suspect assumption, and so we are forced to conclude that there is no objective meaning to life because of our assumption that there is no god, which we're unwilling to suspect as false. In short, if there is a God who created us for a purpose then there is objective meaning to life (we're 'meant for' something), but if there is no God then there is no objective meaning to life (we're not 'meant for' anything).
However, not many people are willing to concede that life is without meaning, and so in the presumed absence of God we often construct our own meaning/purpose for our lives. This is a very common move to make. If there is no objective meaning or point to life, and if we stop doing things when we discover that they are pointless, then we need to create some sort of meaning or reason to live. This is precisely what Fodor does in constructing the following definition for what he calls an inter-subjective meaning: An action or mode of living is meaningful to the degree those affected by the action or mode of living would hold it in a certain sort of ‘positive regard’ if they were considering the matter with access to all relevant information and in an appropriately uncompromised mental state.
Fodor argues that this has the potential to create 'real meaning' as opposed to 'made up' meaning because it isn't purely subjective but rather inter-subjective, meaning that it's not based on the feelings and opinions of one person, but on the feelings and opinions of several people. However, it is difficult to see how convincing others of your subjective meaning in life, elevates it from 'made up' to 'real meaning'. How many people do you need for it to be 'real meaning'? If a few people agree that the meaning of life is to wear pink shirts everyday, does that make it real? Moreover, what happens when two different groups have inter-subjective meanings for life that are in conflict with each other? If one group of people decide that their meaning in life is to destroy a particular insect because they consider it a pest, and a different group decides that their meaning in life is to protect the same insect because they consider it an endangered species, which meaning is real and which is made up?
Fodor goes on to make a much more substantial critique of the position that if death is the ultimate end of all life, then life is ultimately meaningless. This appears to be the force of the objection that he makes, and so it's worth quoting at length:
"I would ask people how, exactly, the eventual heat death of the universe in any way takes away from the meaningfulness of great acts of courage or kindness, deep and meaningful relationships one forges with friends and family, the awe inspiring beauty of nature and some of mankind’s greatest accomplishments in art and science. I think these things (and many others) are meaningful precisely because they have great emotional and cognitive significance to us here and now, and in many cases will continue to hold great meaning for generations to come. We may wish that such things could last forever – perhaps if they did, they would be even more meaningful. We may wish that such things could last forever – perhaps if they did, they would be even more meaningful. But why should we suppose that their eventual extinction undermines their meaning completely? Why does the temporality of our existence, our finite extension along the dimension of time, somehow undo or negate the positive attitudes and reactions that hold towards such things for that duration of time for which we do exist."
Fodor makes a very strong point. Our temporality doesn't "somehow undo or negate the positive attitudes and reactions that hold towards such things for that duration of time for which we do exist." Courage, kindness, relationships and accomplishments can be (and I would argue, should be) very meaningful to us. However, if there is no God, then they are only meaningful "from the inside" of our perspective in time and space. Thomas Nagal, an atheist philosopher at NYU makes the point very powerfully in his book, What Does it All Mean: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy:
"Even if you produce a great work of literature which continues to be read thousands of years from now, eventually the solar system will cool, or the universe will wind down and collapse and all traces of your effort will vanish. If your life is going to matter, it can only matter from the inside. From the outside it wouldn't matter if you never existed, and after you have gone out of existence it won't matter that you did exist... If nothing you do makes any difference at all, we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously, and we should stop thinking about meaning in life."
This is a very common way of thinking today, and it ties in perfectly with the apparent "disinterest in the question of life's meaning" above. If there is no God then there's no objective meaning to life from the "outside". As Nagal puts it, "if you're life is going to matter, it can only matter from the inside". The question of life's meaning from the outside is a question which a consistent atheist cannot answer, and so in the presumed absence of God, it becomes an unimportant question, or at least a question "we should stop thinking about". You can live a perfectly happy life, creating your own meaning/purpose from the inside, as long as you don't think about the big picture, or at least, as long as you don't remember it very often. C.S. Lewis puts it like this:
"If nature is all that exists, if there's no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside of nature, then all of our stories will end in the same way in a universe in which all life is banished without possibility of return. All of human civilization will have been an accidental flicker, there will be no one even to remember it. No doubt atomic bombs might cut human civilization short, shorter than it might have been. But the whole of human civilization, even if it lasted for a billion years, would be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time which precede and follow it. Why should we get upset about it being a little shortened? You might decide to simply have as good a time as possible. But it's hard, except in the lowest animal sense to be in love with a girl if you know and keep on remembering that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms and that your own response to them is nothing but a physic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. You can't go on getting serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that it's air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still in the lowest sense also have a good time, but just insofar as anything in life becomes very good, just insofar as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far will you be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you think you really live."
If you're willing to think about it (and most people aren't), this can be very unsettling. Lewis is pushing us to see that in the presumed absence of God, the only way you can escape the conclusion of nihilism is by not thinking. In my experience, this is what most atheists do. Some, like Dawkins, say it's not an important question until it can be answered by science. Some become disinterested because theism has to be a 'suspect assumption' while atheism can't be. Some, like Nagal, simply say that "we should stop thinking about meaning in life." But for some reason we refuse to bit the bullet with Nietzsche, and take naturalism to its logical conclusion of nihilism. We genuinely believe that life is more than a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. As Fodor himself says: "I believe that life does have meaning, even when it often seems like it does not."
If you start with a premise that leads you to a conclusion that you know is wrong, you have to re-examine your premise. In mathematics this is called a proof by contradiction: if your assumption x leads you to a conclusion y that you know is wrong, you've just disproved your assumption x. Of course, there are many people who stop short and say "we should stop thinking about meaning in life". But for some, the question of life's meaning keeps breaking in on us, especially as we get older. This was the case for the Russian writer Tolstoy, who describes his conversion to Christianity as follows:
"At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest in life as though I did not know what to do or how to live. Sometimes I felt lost and became dejected. All of this befell me at a time when all around me I had what is considered a completely good fortune. I was not yet 50, I had a wife who loved me and whom I loved, I had children. I had a large estate which without much effort on my part improved and increased. I was respected more than any previous time, my name was famous, and yet I could give no rational meaning to any single action or to my whole life. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come to those I love or to me. Nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten and I will not exist. So why go on making any effort? How can we fail to see this? That's what's surprising. One can only live without God while one is intoxicated with life. As soon as one is sober it's impossible not to see that it's all a mere fraud. There's nothing either amusing or witty about it, it's simply cruel and stupid. My question, which at the age of 50 brought me to the very verge of suicide was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man. A question, without an answer to which one cannot live. It was this: What will come of what I'm doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, and why wish for anything or do anything? It can be expressed in this way: is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?"
Where Nagal says "we should stop thinking about meaning in life", Tolstoy says "How can we fail to see this? That's what's surprising. One can only live without God while one is intoxicated with life. As soon as one is sober it's impossible not to see that it's all a mere fraud." Stated this starkly, I think Christian theism has an inherent strength that atheistic worldviews like naturalism and nihilism lack. Tim Keller puts it like this:
"If a Christian is discouraged and truly believes the Christian faith, here's what the Christian faith teaches, it teaches, that you're loved right now and forgiven. It teaches that if you die right now your life will only get better. It teaches that someday God's going to come to earth and resurrect us and make the new heavens and new earth and wipe away every tear and create a material world in which there's no suffering, pain or death. Now you may not believe that, but I'm just trying to say, look, if you believe that and you're having a bad day, how do you feel better? By thinking out the implications of what you think about the reality of the universe. How does a Christian feel better? By thinking out the implications! But how does a person with an understanding, not of discovered meaning but self-created meaning deal with it? Don't think too much. I think that's a weakness."
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