Can Life Have Meaning Without God?

One long-running discussion between Christians and Atheists has to do with the meaning of our lives.  It is common for Christians to assert that in absence of God, life is ultimately meaningless and absurd.  And, in fact, there are certain Atheists philosophers (such as Bertrand Russell) who would agree.

These claims are usually not well-received by Atheist audiences.  They retort that they can lead happy, meaningful, purpose-filled lives without God.  This is typically coupled with a certain amount of indignance because – let’s face it – no one likes to be told their life is meaningless.

So today I wanted to take a look at this discussion.  Can life have meaning without God?


What’s the Meaning of This?

The first question to ask is:  What does it mean for life to have meaning?

Well, we can start by looking at other things which have meaning.  How about the words you’re reading right now?  These words have meaning because they are the intentional creation of a mind.  They are written for a purpose – to convey something.

We can use that as an analogy for understanding how life can have meaning.  It can be understood as the ability to say of yourself:

• I am the intentional creation of a mind.
• I was created for a reason and purpose.
• My life is intelligible and expresses something.

As a Christian you can have this sort of meaning.  Your soul is hand-made by the creator of the universe.  You are meant to express something unique and true.  And your life – no matter how brief and hidden – is part of a larger plan.

But can an Atheist have these convictions?


Self-Made Man

“Absolutely!” replies the Atheist.

He’d say we need not look to some divine, exterior agency for meaning.  We make ourselves day by day with the way we live.  We create our own purposes.   We decide what we wish to express by how we interact with others.   In other words, the mind which gives your life meaning is your own.

On first blush this can seem to fully answer the question.  But there are some limitations here… ones which reveal we’re talking about two categorically different things.


Since When?

First, that sort of self-made meaning is dependent on the complexity of one’s mind.  To have it, you first need to be able to reflect on your life, your motivations, and goals.  And that is only possible after a certain point of intellectual development.

That is to say, an adult can create his own meaning, but a newborn baby is not capable of these sorts of concepts.  So before a certain point of mental maturity we cannot say life has meaning in the sense described above.

This fact leads to questions like … does the life of an abandoned baby have meaning or purpose?   It is difficult to see how it could.

So that’s the first problem.  An adult can insist his life has meaning, but he cannot say his life has always  had meaning.

This points us to the bigger issue…



Mind Games:

The Christian and Atheist are actually talking about two very different types of meaning which answer two different questions.

The first type is with you from the beginning.  Its existence is an objective fact to be discovered over your lifetime.  We’ll call this Intrinsic Meaning.  And it answers the question, “Why was I created?  Why do I exist?”

The other type – let’s call it Subjective Meaning – answers the question, “What am I doing with my life?”  It is not a fact you discover, but a product of your own mind.   To put it more bluntly, this sense of meaning and purpose is a figment of your imagination.  You don’t always have it, and when you die – it goes too.

While it is an important self-reflection, having an answer to the second question does not scratch every itch.  Under the worldview of an Atheist, the question of “Why was I created?” ultimately boils down to a physics problem.  As the aforementioned Bertrand Russell said:

“Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.” – Russell, A Free Man’s Worship

Thus, looking for intrinsic meaning to your life in an Atheistic world is like searching in the dark for an object which isn’t there.

Restless Hearts:

That is why Christians and Atheists seem to talk past one another when discussing the meaning of life.  The Christian is speaking of intrinsic meaning and the Atheist of subjective meaning.   The Christian is trying to say that in the absence of God, human life has no intrinsic meaning or purpose.  And he is right.

Subjective meaning is necessary too, but I don’t think it can satisfy the human heart.  The human existential quest is really the search beyond Russell’s universe for one with intrinsic meaning and purpose.  We want to find our place in the story written by the author of the universe.  We want to find the truth of what was so beautifully stated by Pope Benedict XVI:

“Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”