Meaning and Atheism

Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State University who wrote a piece for the Federalist a year or so ago in which he discusses the question of whether there can be meaning in life in a world without God.

Many atheists themselves tacitly acknowledge that the answer to that question is no. Here's Weikert:

[P]rominent atheist thinkers, such as Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, have insisted that because there is no God, there is also no cosmic purpose, no objective morality, and no transcendent meaning to life. The atheistic Duke University philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg dismissed meaning and morality as an illusion in a 2003 article, “Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaninglessness of Life.”

Some atheistic thinkers insist that the question of meaning is itself meaningless:

The prominent atheistic evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has also expressed dismay that anyone would dare suggest that atheists don’t have any meaning in their lives. But if you dig deeper—for example, by actually reading the empirical study—you find that atheists who insist that non-religious people can find meaning in life have changed the meaning of the word “meaning.”

When theists talk of meaning and purpose they generally refer to an objective meaning and purpose, but atheists often take the question of meaning to refer to that which one arbitrarily invents for oneself. Weikert sees a problem with this:

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.

An invented meaning is like a child's imaginary friend. It's "real" to the child, but objectively speaking, it doesn't really exist. Nor, for that matter, do objective moral obligations:

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.

The denial of objective moral duties sometimes gets atheists mired in a bog of muddled thinking. Weikert quotes atheist scientist Nan Arney:

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.

This is a non-sequitur. If all the evidence suggests that all there is is the natural world, how does it follow that we should be gentle with each other. It reminds me of the parody of humanist thinking by Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev: "Man has descended from apes, therefore we must love one another."

The unfortunate truth is that there's not much gentleness in nature, nor, if nature is all there is, is there much warrant for humans to repress their baser instinct for aggression and be gentle with each other.

The late atheist biologist Will Provine was much more consistent when he declared,

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will….

Or as British atheist philosopher John Gray once put it, “Human life has no more meaning than that of slime mold.”

If naturalism is true it's hard to see how either Provine or Gray is wrong, which is why naturalism leads anyone who wishes to be logically consistent ultimately to embrace nihilism. That being so, the naturalist has three choices, 1) embrace nihilism, 2) pooh pooh logical consistency and simply follow one's subjective feelings, or 3) reconsider his or her naturalism.

The first puts one on a dehumanizing "highway to hell," the second is irrational and the third is psychologically wrenching, but there don't seem to be any other alternatives.