Apologetics 101 – Does life have meaning or purpose?

Can we have meaning or purpose if there is no God? This is often referred to as “the human predicament.” Increasingly in the West, consideration is given to the significance of human life in a post-theistic (God-less) universe.

It makes sense to address this question before the question of God’s existence. I will consider that question in my next blog in this series.

The necessity of God and immortality

Man, writes Loren Eiseley, is the Cosmic Orphan. He is the only creature in the universe who asks, “Why?” Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions.

“Who am I?” man asks. “Why am I here? Where am I going?” Since the Enlightenment, humanity has tried to answer these questions without reference to God. But the answers lead only to despair: “You are the random product of nature, a result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death.”

“Who am I?” man asks. “Why am I here? Where am I going?” Since the Enlightenment, humanity has tried to answer these questions without reference to God.

William Lane Craig, Theologian & Philosopher

Humanity thought that when they had got rid of God, they had freed themselves from all that repressed and stifled them. But could it be that, in dismissing God, we have lost ultimate meaning for our existence?

Evolution (as atheists conceive it) is entirely mindless and undirected. It has no purpose, no end, no goal. It isn’t directed anywhere. Evolution has no plan at all, never mind a plan of which we could contribute a significant part.

Evolution doesn’t make value judgments; it doesn’t select one course over another because it is more valuable or worthy. Evolution thus offers no basis for the meaningfulness of human lives. 

James N Anderson, Professor of Theology & Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

Man, like all biological organisms, is born, lives and dies. With no hope of immortality, man’s life leads only to the grave. Therefore, everyone must come face to face with what theologian Paul Tillich has called “the threat of non-being.” For though I know now that I exist, that I am alive, I also know that someday I will no longer exist, that I will die. Given the brevity of our lives (at best for most, 80 years), this thought is fairly depressing.

We all learn to live with the inevitable. But as the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre observed, several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity. One’s life is just a momentary transition out of oblivion into oblivion.

The universe, too, faces death. Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding, and everything in it is growing further and further apart. As it does so, it grows colder and its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes. There will be no light or heat, and no life; only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space—a universe in ruins.

The universe is plunging toward inevitable extinction—death is written throughout its structure. There is no escape. There is no hope.

William Lane Craig, Theologian & philosopher

If there is no God, then humanity and the universe are heading for extinction. There is no immortality. It means that the life we live is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.

No Ultimate Meaning

What does my life contribute to the universe as a whole? What does it count for in the grand scheme of things? You might argue that your life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But this only shows a relative significance to your life, not an ultimate significance. Your life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If all the events are meaningless, then what can be the ultimate meaning of influencing any of them? Ultimately, it makes no difference.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden, 1995

If mankind is a doomed race in a dying universe, it makes no ultimate difference whether it ever did exist. Continuing this logic, mankind is therefore no more significant than a herd of cows or a swarm of mosquitos. The same arbitrary cosmic process that produced them in the first place will eventually swallow them all again.

Each person’s life is therefore without ultimate significance. And because our lives are ultimately meaningless, the activities we fill our lives with are also meaningless. The long hours spent in study at university, our jobs, our interests, our friendships—all these are, in the final analysis, utterly meaningless. This is the horror of modern man: because he ends in nothing, he is nothing.

French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre portrayed life in his play No Exit as hell—the final line of the play are the words of resignation, “Well, let’s get on with it.” Sartre writes elsewhere of the “nausea” of existence. Fellow existentialist Albert Camus saw life as absurd. At the end of his novel The Stranger, Camus’s hero discovers in a moment of realisation that the universe has no meaning and there is no God to give it one.

Man finally knows he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe.

Jacques Monod, French biochemist

Thus, if there is no God, then life itself becomes meaningless. Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.

No Ultimate Value

Is my life worth anything overall? Is it better lived than not? Is the world a better place for having my life as part of it? The atheist’s answer must be no.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky said, “If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted.” It makes no difference whether one has lived as a Hitler or as a Mother Teresa. If your behaviour has no bearing on your destiny (extinction), you might as well live just as you please. Indeed, it would be foolish to do anything else. Life is too short to do anything other than live out of pure self-interest. Sacrifice for another person would be of no benefit to you and therefore stupid.

Regardless of immortality, if there is no God then there can be no objective standards of right and wrong. All we are confronted with is, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, ‘the bare, valueless fact of existence’. Morals are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of socio-biological evolution and conditioning.

The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion. 

Paul Kurtz, Humanist Philosopher

In a world without God, who is to say which values are right and which are wrong? Who is to judge that the values of Adolf Hitler are inferior to those of Mother Teresa? The concept of morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. In a world without God, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. You might condemn as evil war, oppression or crime but other might take a different view with no one able to determine who is right and who is wrong. It’s all relative. Equally, one cannot praise as good brotherhood, equality and love.

In a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong.

No Ultimate Purpose

If you cease to exist when you die, then what ultimate meaning does your life have? What were you here for? Does it really matter whether you existed at all? Is it all for nothing? And what of the universe? Is it utterly pointless? The answer must be yes—it is pointless. There is no goal or purpose for the universe.

If there is no God, then our life is not qualitatively different from that of a dog. In the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, the writer shows the futility of pleasure, wealth, education, political fame, and honor in a life doomed to end in death. His verdict? “Everything is meaningless… completely meaningless!” (1:2). If life ends at the grave, then we have no ultimate purpose for living.

For people and animals share the same fate—both breathe and both must die. So people have no real advantage over the animals. How meaningless! Both go to the same place—they came from dust and they return to dust.

Ecclesiastes 3.19,20

As individuals, we are the results of certain combinations of heredity and environment. We are victims of a kind of genetic and environmental roulette. Sociologists argue that all our choices are determined by conditioning, so that freedom is an illusion. Biologists like Francis Crick regard man as an electro-chemical machine that can be controlled by altering its genetic code. If God does not exist, then you are just a product of chance, living a purposeless life in a purposeless universe.

If God exists, then there is hope for humanity. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair. Perhaps you can see why the question of God’s existence is so vital.

If God is dead, then man is dead, too.

Anon

Unfortunately, many people don’t grasp the significance of the question about life’s meaning and significance and carry on blindly with no regard for the implications of God’s existence or non-existence.

The Difficulty of Atheism

The only solution the atheist can offer is that we face the absurdity of life and live bravely. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote that we must build our lives upon “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.” Only by recognizing that the world really is a terrible place can we successfully come to terms with life. Albert Camus said that we should honestly recognize life’s absurdity and then live in love for one another.

The fundamental problem with this solution, however, is that it is impossible to live consistently and happily with an atheistic world view. If you live it consistently, you are likely to be miserable. If you live happily, it’s probably because you are not consistently living within the atheistic world view.

Modern man, said Francis Schaeffer (theologian and social commentator), resides in a two-storey universe. In the lower storey is the finite world without God; here life is meaningless, as we have seen. In the upper storey are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower storey because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such a meaningless world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper storey to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. Modern man is totally inconsistent when he makes this leap, because these values cannot exist without God, and man in his lower storey does not have God.

Let’s look again, then, at each of the three areas in which we saw life was empty without God, to show that man cannot live consistently and happily as an atheist.

Meaning of Life

We saw that without God, life has no meaning. Yet philosophers continue to live as though life does have meaning. Since there’s nothing outside us that could ascribe meaning to our lives, any meaning must come from within us, either as individuals or as a society.

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.

Stanley Kubrick

We might find an atheist saying something like this: “I’ve chosen to commit my life to discovering a cure for cancer. It’s my personal decision, rather than the decree of some deity, that gives my life meaning and purpose. My life is significant because I’ve made it significant; it’s valuable because I myself value it.”

On the face of it, this sounds quite plausible. Why couldn’t we make our lives meaningful by choosing to live in certain ways, by choosing to embrace certain worthy goals? Unfortunately for the atheist. this idea faces two serious objections:

First, it suffers from a problem of arbitrariness. If the meaning of life is subjectively determined (slef-determination), then anything could become the meaning of life depending on one’s personal preferences and predilections. Sitting around all day eating donuts and playing video games could just as well be the meaning of life as finding cures for illnesses. A suicidal person would be entitled to make the meaning of life the destruction of his life. Worse still, a homicidal person would be entitled to make the meaning of life the destruction of other lives.

Second, it seems impossible for you to confer meaning on your own life if your life lacks meaning at the outset. If your life is meaningless to begin with, how could any of your choices be meaningful or meaning-creating? How could meaningful choices arise out of a meaningless life? If your life is ultimately meaningless, are you not simply deluding yourself by attempting to attribute meaning to it?

Value of Life

Though he was an atheist, Bertrand Russell was an outspoken social critic and denounced war. Russell admitted that he could not live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste, and that he therefore found his own views “incredible.” He confessed, “I do not know the solution.” The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist.

As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.” But he also showed that man cannot live this way. He cannot live as though it is okay for soldiers to slaughter innocent children. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictatorial regimes to follow a systematic program of physical torture of political prisoners. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictators like Stalin to exterminate millions of his own countrymen. Everything in him cries out to say these acts are wrong—really wrong. But if there is no God, he cannot. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

If God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded. But who can live with such a view? Richard Wurmbrand, who was tortured for his Christian faith in communist prisons, says:

“The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I have heard one torturer even say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.”

If I believed that all evils and injustices of life throughout history were not to be made right by God in the afterlife, why I think I should go mad.

Cardinal Newman, English Catholic & Theologian

What about acts of self-sacrifice? A number of years ago, a terrible mid-winter air disaster occurred in which a plane leaving the Washington, D.C. airport smashed into a bridge spanning the Potomac River, plunging its passengers into the icy waters. As the rescue helicopters came, attention was focused on one man who again and again pushed the dangling rope ladder to other passengers rather than be pulled to safety himself. Six times he passed the ladder by. When they came again, he was gone. He had freely given his life that others might live. The whole nation turned its eyes to this man in respect and admiration for the selfless and good act he had performed.

And yet, if the atheist is right, that man was not noble—he did the most stupid thing possible. He should have gone for the ladder first, pushed others away if necessary in order to survive. Yet the atheist, like the rest of us, instinctively reacts with praise for this man’s selfless action.

One will rarely find an atheist who lives consistently with his system. For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is truly terrible.

Purpose of Life

The only way most people who deny purpose in life can live happily is by not carrying their world view to its logical conclusions. Take the problem of death, for example. According to Ernst Bloch, the only way modern man lives in the face of death is by subconsciously borrowing the belief in immortality that his forefathers held to, even though he himself has no basis for this belief, since he does not believe in God. Bloch states that the belief that life ends in nothing is hardly, in his words, “sufficient to keep the head high and to work as if there were no end.”

By borrowing the remnants of a belief in immortality, writes Bloch, “modern man does not feel the chasm that unceasingly surrounds him and that will certainly engulf him at last. Through these remnants, he saves his sense of self-identity. Through them the impression arises that man is not perishing, but only that one day the world has the whim no longer to appear to him.” Bloch concludes, “This quite shallow courage feasts on a borrowed credit card. It lives from earlier hopes and the support that they once had provided.” Modern man no longer has any right to that support, since he rejects God. But in order to live purposefully, he makes a leap of faith to affirm a reason for living.

We often find the same inconsistency among those who say that man and the universe came to exist for no reason or purpose, but just by chance. Unable to live in an impersonal universe in which everything is the product of blind chance, these persons begin to ascribe personality and motives to the physical processes themselves. For example, Francis Crick halfway through his book The Origin of the Genetic Code begins to spell nature with a capital “N” and elsewhere speaks of natural selection as being “clever” and as “thinking” of what it will do. Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer, attributes to the universe itself the qualities of God. For Carl Sagan the “Cosmos,” which he always spells with a capital letter, obviously fills the role of a God-substitute.

Though all these men profess not to believe in God, they smuggle in a God-substitute through the back door because they cannot bear to live in a universe in which everything is the chance result of impersonal forces.

William Lane Craig, Theologian & Philosopher

It’s interesting to see many thinkers retreat from their views when they’re pushed to their logical conclusions. For example, some feminists have protested about Freudian sexual psychology because it is chauvinistic and degrading to women. Some psychologists conceded and revised their theories. But this is totally inconsistent. If Freudian psychology is really true, then it doesn’t matter if it’s degrading to women. You can’t change the truth because you don’t like what it leads to.

People simply cannot live consistently and happily in a world where other persons are devalued. Yet if God does not exist, then nobody has any value. Only if God exists can a person consistently support women’s rights. For if God does not exist, then natural selection dictates that the male of the species is the dominant and aggressive one. Women would no more have rights than a female goat or chicken have rights. But not even Freudian psychologists can live with such a view and change their theories when pushed to their logical conclusions.

The atheistic world view is insufficient to maintain a happy and consistent life. The dilemma of modern man is terrible and depressing. Man cannot live consistently and happily as though life were ultimately without meaning, value, or purpose. Trying to live consistently within the atheistic world view leads only to deep unhappiness. If we manage to live happily, it is only by not living consistently into the atheistic world view.

Christian World View

According to the Christian world view, God does exist and man’s life does not end at the grave. More on these themes in my next few blogs in this series! Humanity can enjoy fellowship with God and eternal life. Biblical Christianity therefore provides the two conditions necessary for life that is meaningful, valuable, and purposeful – God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily.

The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

Westminster Shorter Catechism

Conclusion

If God does not exist, then life is futile. But if the God of the Bible does exist, then life is meaningful. Only the second of these two alternatives enables us to live happily and consistently.

This topic demonstrates the alternatives facing the atheist, in order to create a felt need in him. When he realizes the dilemma facing him, he will hopefully see why the gospel is so important. Many will be driven by this alone to welcome God into their lives.

In sharing this material with an unbeliever, push them (firmly but politely) to the logical conclusions of their position. No atheist or agnostic really lives consistently with his world view. In some way he affirms meaning, value, or purpose without an adequate basis. Try and discover those areas and lovingly show him where those beliefs are groundless. Don’t attack his values themselves, for they are probably good! You can affirm this and then point out that he simply lacks any foundation for those values, whereas Christianity provides such a foundation.

Man cannot live as though morality were merely a matter of social convention. We believe certain acts to be genuinely wrong or right. Therefore, one ought to respond to the unbeliever on this score by saying, “You’re exactly right: if God does not exist, then values are merely social conventions. But the point I’m trying to make is that it is impossible to live consistently and happily with such a world view.” Push him on the Holocaust or some other extreme issue like ethnic cleansing, apartheid or child abuse. Bring it home to him personally. If he’s honest and you are not threatening, he is likely to admit that he does hold to some absolutes.

By taking this approach, you need not make the atheist defensive by attacking his personal values; rather you offer him a foundation for the values he already possesses and encourage him to embrace the One who authored his life and who freely offers him life in all its fullness (Acts 3.15; John 10.10; John 20.30-31).

Finally, you might enjoy this short video on the same theme…

_{This blog is based on an article by Theologian and Philosopher William Lane Craig ‘The Absurdity of Life without God’.}