Human life, it turns out, is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. We're one way and the world is another, and the world is incompatible with our deepest longings, perhaps chief among which is the longing for meaning.
"Man can't live without meaning," wrote Holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankel. This need for meaning explains why so many in the 20th century committed themselves unreservedly to causes like naziism and communism which have inflicted so much suffering on the world. It explains why so many were so willing to perpetrate unimaginable horrors on their fellow man in service to a "Cause." The Cause, whatever it is, gives their lives purpose and fulfillment.
At least they believe it does, and it's the need to find this fulfillment in the promotion of a Cause that animates so many today to behave so zealously and often so brutally toward those who disagree with them.
However, as Ben Shapiro writes in The Right Side of History (which I discussed in a post here):
After WWII the West "got freer, richer, more prosperous than ever. Human wealth expanded exponentially. Life spans increased. But there remained a hole at the center of Western civilization: a meaning-shaped hole. That hole has grown larger and larger in the decades since - a cancer, eating away at our heart. We tried to fill it with action; we tried to fill it with science; we tried to fill it with world-changing political activism. None of it provides the meaning we seek.Shapiro could've added that we sought also to fill the emptiness with pleasure, fame, power, drugs and alcohol, but none of these kept their promise to satisfy us either.
The fact is that if we're here simply as a result of some cosmic accident, a flukish perturbation in the vast quantum flux, then there can be no meaning to our existence. We can only have purpose if we were somehow intended by a mind, and even then we can only have meaning if our existence is permanent.
If, though, our lives are like the light of a firefly, random and ephemeral, then there's no sense to any of it, the slaughter and suffering of millions is neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad. As Richard Dawkins suggests, there is in the universe "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."
Thus, our lives, our strivings, our sufferings and our pleasures are all a grand absurdity. In the words of Shakespeare they are "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
This is the bleak, inescapable consequence of the Enlightenment's rejection of the Judeo-Christian worldview. It leaves us with nothing to hope for, nothing to believe in, nothing to fill the emptiness, nothing to satisfy our existential longings. It leaves us with nothing except inevitable death.
Yet for many, existential emptiness and despair is a burden they seem willing, even happy, to bear if the alternative is to place one's trust in a God. Maybe, as a friend of mine says on his blog, it's "not that atheists have a distorted concept of meaning, but that they have a distorted concept of atheism. They don't understand the implications of their own beliefs."
Perhaps so.
