Why Life Is Absurd

My classes are discussing the view, held by both atheistic and theistic existential philosophers alike, that human existence and the world in which that existence is lived out are both fundamentally absurd.

Both theists and atheists believe, albeit for different reasons (see below), that the world is fundamentally incompatible with many of our deepest yearnings as human beings. Tragically, we are like square pegs trying to fit into a round hole.

Here are ten examples of this incompatibility:

1. We long to live, but we know we're going to die.
2. We desire answers to life's deepest questions, but they often elude us or seem to be unattainable.
3. We yearn for justice, but many evil men never pay for their deeds and many who suffer in life are never compensated.
4. We want union with those we love, but we are always alienated, separated at the deepest levels of our being from what and whom we love.
5. We hope to find meaning and purpose in our lives, but death seems to erase whatever projects and purposes we cultivate. Ultimately, there is no purpose. As Duke University philosopher Alex Rosenberg puts it, "What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto."
6. We need to ground morality and human rights in something beyond ourselves, but there is nothing which can support them.
7. We strive for happiness, but the world is filled with tragedy, grief, suffering, and pain. Individual happiness can only be achieved by ignoring the existential condition of others who are suffering.
8. We crave peace, but the world is filled with incessant conflict.
9. We want to be treated with dignity, but the cosmos tells us that we are nothing more than “dust in the wind.” We have no freedom, no dignity, no enduring self.
10. We have no reason to trust the ability of reason to lead us to truth. What we call reason evolved to enable us to survive, not to enable us to find the truth. Yale professor Steven Pinker writes that, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Or, as philosopher Patricia Churchland tells us, evolution selects for survival, and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

Theists might not agree with all ten of these, but they'd probably agree with some of them. For the theist the world is incompatible with our deepest yearnings because, she believes, it's not the world for which we were designed and intended.

For the atheist the world is absurd because there's no hope for any rescue from this awful existential predicament. The world is one way, we are another, and there's no God to make it right. Man is forlorn, to use Jean Paul Sartre's term for the haunting sense of aloneness which besets thoughtful people.

Both the theist and the atheist agree that the human story is a tragedy and that life is suffering. Most theists, however, particularly Christian theists, believe that the story will ultimately have a "happy" ending. Atheists believe there is no happy ending.

The atheist agrees with Shakespeare's Macbeth when he laments that, "Life is a passing shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Who's right?