After quoting a number of atheists who acknowledge that in a Godless world there's no ultimate meaning to anything we do, he turns his attention to other non-theists who disagree with their fellow unbelievers' bleak assessment. He cites a recent study that seems to suggest that meaning, on atheism, is not as elusive as some have thought. Here are a few highlights:
This study found that atheists and non-religious people are not nihilistic, because they claimed that they did have a purpose in life. This is an interesting finding that seems to refute the oft-repeated charge (levied by religious folks) that atheists are nihilistic.This is ironic since belief in fairy tales is a charge often leveled by atheists against theists. Atheists also accuse theists of having "imaginary friends" but what is an imaginary meaning if not something similar to an imaginary friend?
However, there is a problem with this finding. The survey admitted the meaning that atheists and non-religious people found in their lives is entirely self-invented. According to the survey, they embraced the position: “Life is only meaningful if you provide the meaning yourself.”
Thus, when religious people say non-religious people have no basis for finding meaning in life, and when non-religious people object, saying they do indeed find meaning in life, they are not talking about the same thing. If one can find meaning in life by creating one’s own meaning, then one is only “finding” the product of one’s own imagination. One has complete freedom to invent whatever meaning one wants.
This makes “meaning” on par with myths and fairy tales. It may make the non-religious person feel good, but it has no objective existence.
If death is the end of existence, then it erases meaning from life. If the universe is purposeless, if we're here as a result of a chain of freak accidents of nature, if life is a matter of passing the time until we die, then our individual lives are ultimately pointless. We have no more significance, as famous Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it, than a baboon or a grain of sand.
Philosopher Luc Ferry, in his book A Brief History of Thought, observes that the meaning of meaning - that is, the meaning of all the particular meanings in life - is lacking.
Weikert continues:
In 2015 the online periodical BuzzFeed interviewed atheists about how they found meaning. While they uniformly denied that there was any overarching meaning to life or the universe, they insisted that they find meaning and significance in their own personal lives. Many also implied that certain moral positions are objectively better than others, even though they presumably do not believe in objective morality. One example was the response of the atheistic scientist and journalist Kat Arney.There's much more by Weikert at the link, but I'd like to focus on what I think is a serious problem with the notion that meaning is just something we make up. Look at it this way. We fill our hours and days with activities that give us a reason to get out of bed in the morning, they give us what we might call proximal or particular meaning, but none of it ultimately amounts to anything. We're like a man who collects butterflies, who spends his time and resources traveling the world to find as many exotic species for his collection as he can. The pursuit of these beautiful insects is thrilling, perhaps, but when the collector dies what does it really matter how many species he's collected?
She said her rejection of religion “was an incredibly liberating moment, and made me realize that the true meaning of life is what I make with the people around me – my family, friends, colleagues, and strangers. People tell religious fairy stories to create meaning, but I’d rather face up to what all the evidence suggests is the scientific truth – all we really have is our own humanity. So let’s be gentle to each other and share the joy of simply being alive, here and now. Let’s give it our best shot.”
Even if someone spends her life in the service of others, when she dies and all those she has helped die, what's left? What did her work matter in the vast scope of geophysical history?
Only if what one does matters forever does it matter at all, a fact which, one might think, should cause atheists to hope that they're wrong about their atheism.
In an interview for Newsweek (8/20/08) filmmaker Woody Allen discussed his outlook on life. Here's an excerpt from the article:
"Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is," he says. "You see how meaningless … I don't want to depress you, but it's a meaningless little flicker." If anything, there's something refreshing in his resistance to the platitudes about simple things making life worthwhile that so often pass for philosophy. It's not that Allen is unable to enjoy himself; it's that he's convinced the moments don't add up to redemption.Sigmund Freud said pretty much the same thing though more emphatically when he wrote that, "The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick since objectively neither has any existence."
"You have a meal, or you listen to a piece of music, and it's a pleasurable thing," he says. "But it doesn't accrue to anything."
Those who say that we can find our own meaning, that we can just make it up, are playing make-believe. They're whistling past the graveyard. More perceptive, I think, was the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy who posed this series of questions to himself:
What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed—Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?All this may be depressing to contemplate, but we need to remember that ideas have consequences, and one's ideas about life after death have some very profound consequences indeed.
