I was recently listening to the late great R.C. Sproul talk about a very large problem for atheists (agnostics as well because they are practical atheists). Since atheists are materialists (the material is all that exists, there is no God or spiritual reality), they must argue that meaning is possible in a purely material universe. The way Dr. Sproul put it is that atheists claim we spring from a meaning-less universe, and we are hurling toward a meaning-less oblivion, and he asks, can it be possible to find true meaning between these poles of meaning-lessness? Good question. The atheists answers blithely, of course we can! Not so quick.
Atheist Jerry Coyne recently addressed this exact question in a challenge to Eric Metaxas, who on Tucker Carlson’s show said, quite logically, “If you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning.” In other words, lucky dirt (us) has no more real meaning than plain old dirt.
Biologist and evolutionist Coyne didn’t take kindly to the implications of Metaxas’ statement, and completely answered the wrong question. On his website he thinks this is the question: “What’s your meaning and purpose?” Metaxas and Coyne are talking about two different types of meaning, the former objective, the latter subjective. Dr. Sproul wasn’t implying that atheists couldn’t have the latter, only that the latter doesn’t mean the former.
One of the response’s to Coyne came from someone who knows the difference:
No one disputes that atheists can make up a meaning for their lives … we make up stuff all the time …. fairies, unicorns, and so forth. I trust, however, that when we apply reason and rational thinking that we all realize that we just made that stuff up …. including the belief that life has meaning and purpose. Making up a meaning and purpose is quite a bit different from their actually being objective meaning and purpose.
Because the polls of our existence are literally without any meaning, according to atheists, the meaning we make up can have no meaning outside of us. Famous atheist Richard Dawkins puts the nature of these polls (life and death) this way:
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
I find this quote hilarious in its sadness. What kind of person (answer, an enemy of God) can see no good or evil or purpose or design in the universe? We see these things everywhere, but the atheist worldview allows for none of them. I’ll give Dawkins credit for being consistent with the conclusions of his premises, and in fact he makes my point; outside of whatever meaning I can scrounge together in this miserably short life of mine, there is no meaning. I’d better be a good meaning maker, or I’m in trouble!
What’s that you say? More people are killing themselves then ever before in the history of the world? I wonder why? Maybe it’s because our thoroughly secularized culture has completely absorbed the assumptions of the atheists (the material is all there is and all that matters), and as a result more than 129 people every day, close to 50,000 people a year, are checking out by taking their own lives. I don’t think this making up their own meaning is working very well for them or their families. Of course the atheist will say I can’t prove people kill themselves because of atheism, and of course they would be right; correlation is not necessarily causation. And since fewer than five percent of Americans are atheists, it’s clearly not the philosophical commitment of each one to a God-less universe that causing them to kill themselves. It’s much more subtle and pernicious than that; the secular air they breath is the cause.
This again proves my point, and Sproul’s and Metaxas’, and Christianity’s: trying to find real, lasting, satisfying meaning in this world apart from a relationship with our Creator God is really, really hard. There are even lists of people who’ve killed themselves who seem to have achieved meaning in fame and fortune, but it wasn’t enough. Rather, those who seem to have found the most meaning this life can offer apart from God (again, whether they believe in God or not isn’t the point), on the secular world’s terms, find no meaning in it. The evidence doesn’t back up the atheists’ assertion that making up our own meaning is a piece of cake. It isn’t.
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