In a universe without God, we come from a meaningless past, and are destined for a meaningless future; we came from chance for no reason at all with no purpose at all, and are hurdling through this eye blinking thing called life toward extinction. The question arises for the atheist: Can human beings find meaning between those two polls of meaninglessness? I ask because of a comment I made at at First Things on an article titled “Auschwitz and ‘Intrinsic Evil.'” An atheist challenged me, and linked to a blog post to better explain his position: “The Meaning of Meaning & Why Theism Can’t Make Life Matter.” I decided to reply here. The article starts thus:
It comes up constantly. Without a god, without an afterlife, how can life have any meaning?
In argument this is called a straw man. Christians, or theists in general, don’t and certainly shouldn’t claim, that God is required for life to have “any meaning.” He fills out the straw man with this:
They (“hostile theists”) want to know, they demand to know how this meaning can be “justified,” implying that they possess the one unique answer themselves.
“This meaning” refers back to “any meaning.” Remember, this is the straw man saying this, not any actual flesh and blood theist. Maybe some theists declare that life without God can’t have “any meaning,” but those would be the rare exception, not the rule, yet he paints with the broadest of broad brushes, implying that all theists say this. They don’t. I won’t pick apart his argument because, well, I would be engaging a straw man, and the real man doesn’t exist! But I will try to show what theists are actually saying when we talk about meaning, and why atheists and theists must see it, ultimately, differently.
First, meaning can be defined as the end, purpose, or significance of something. As a Christian theist, I believe all human beings are made in God’s image, so they are meaning creating and receiving beings, regardless of what they believe. All human beings yearn for meaning from their earliest awareness. They seek significance and purpose that their lives have some sort of end, to others and themselves. None of this depends on them believing in God’s actual existence. So what does a Christian, like myself, say about meaning that an atheist cannot say? Let me take another quote from the post to make my point:
[T]he one fact that becomes abundantly clear is that no one can ultimately judge the meaning of your own life other than yourself. . . . . This, then, is the existential heart of the matter, the reason that theism as a doctrine cannot provide any extra or unique route to meaning that is not already present in any being capable of experiencing it.
The first sentence is a bald assertion (abundantly clear to whom?) which rests on an assumption of materialism, i.e., the material, matter, is all that exists. This can’t be proved, and there is no evidence for it. It has to be assumed. Almost all atheists refuse to recognize that they do assume it. Most of them are convinced to the bottom of their God-less little hearts that materialism is a self-evident truth that cannot be questioned. All the burden of proof is on the Christian, and when the Christian brings forth abundant evidence for the plausibility of their worldview and faith, atheists conveniently declare that the evidence is not valid!
The statement about any “extra or unique rout to meaning” suffers from the same unprovable assumption; meaning, he asserts without warrant (remember it is based on an assumption), is only ultimately subjective and self-referential. Meaning is indeed subjective and self-referential, but whether that is ultimately the only meaning depends on the assumptions one starts with. Most human beings have found that living between polls of absolute meaninglessness is intolerable, that the subjective and self-referential is not enough. The cry of the human heart has always been, there has got to be more! This, of course, the atheists are always is keen to point out, doesn’t “prove” that theism is true, but it is awfully good evidence.
Of course, to atheists no evidence of any world beyond the material is good evidence, or evidence at all, so we’ll let them play with their straw men. But in this longing for meaning, an objective meaning outside of the subjective and self referential, we can turn to the incomparable 20th century Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis. He put forth an argument for God’s existence based on desire. Human beings desire many things, and lo and behold those things exist, be it for sex, love, food, beauty, or meaning, to fulfill those desires. Why do human beings long for a meaning which this world cannot provide? Maybe because something actually exists to fulfill the longing nothing on earth can. The great 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal put it well:
There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made know through Jesus Christ.
If there is any ultimate meaning to reality and our existence, it can only be a forever meaning, grounded in the Creator and source of all meaning. Otherwise whatever meaning we find in this life, will be shortly extinguished, an illusion that never really had any meaning at all.
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