Abstract
We raise various puzzles about the relationship between God (if God exists) and the meaning of life (if life has meaning). These difficulties suggest that, even if we assume that God exists, and even if (as we argue) God’s existence would entail that our lives have meaning, God is not and could not be the source of the meaning of life. We conclude by discussing implications of our arguments: (i) these claims can be used in a novel argument for atheism; (ii) these claims undermine an extant argument for God’s existence; and (iii) they suggest that atheism is consistent with our lives having meaning.
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Notes
See (Metz 2013a) for a discussion of the meaning of life literature and these conventions (which Metz endorses).
And God-based approaches to the meaning of life have been endorsed by many non-philosophically oriented theists. The view has also been held by some philosophically oriented non-theists. Kahane (2013, p. 2) claims that “Russell thought that, in the absence of God, we must build our lives on ‘a foundation of unyielding despair.'” Albert Camus (1955) is arguably another example.
To be precise, there are numerous possibilities: it might be that only some lives have meaning. Or perhaps all lives have meaning, though what gives life meaning might vary across individuals; i.e., why assume that there is only one meaning that life can have? Perhaps the meaning of one life is not the same as the meaning of another life? Or maybe a given life has meaning at some times but not others? Or perhaps the meaning that a given life has might change over time? To be clear, when we say that God could not be the source of the meaning of life, we mean that any time a particular life has meaning, whatever that meaning might be, God is not the reason.
See, e.g., Wainwright (2012, Introduction), “The object of attitudes valorized in the major religious traditions is typically regarded as maximally great. Conceptions of maximal greatness differ but theists believe that a maximally great reality must be a maximally great person or God. Theists largely agree that a maximally great person would be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and all good. They do not agree on a number of God's other attributes, however”.
While a large majority of philosophers of religion—whether they are theist, atheist, or agnostic—agree that the existence of God is inconsistent with the existence of gratuitous evil, it should at least be noted that there are some dissenters. For example, Peterson (2008), Hasker (1992), and van Inwagen (1995) argue that God and gratuitous evil are compossible. Kraay (2014) discusses some extant responses to van Inwagen’s view and offers a novel objection to it.
There are several extant objections to skeptical theism. Ordinarily, theists say we are justified in trusting propositional information known only through divine revelation because God would not lie to us; yet, because skeptical theism leaves open the possibility that God might have morally obligatory reasons to lie to us, we are rendered unable to say how likely or unlikely God's lying would be (Wielenberg (2010); Hudson (2014)). There are further skeptical implications: Descartes ruled out the possibility that God would deceive us about the external world and the reliability of our senses, yet skeptical theism suggests that God could have a moral obligation, one beyond our comprehension, to globally deceive us (Wilks (2014)). Others have argued that skeptical theism destroys the possibility of moral deliberation (Piper 2007; Sehon 2010) or of inductive inference (Hasker 2010).
Someone might object that if God exists, God exists necessarily. So there cannot be a possible world—like NG—in which God does not exist. But this objection conflates metaphysical and epistemological possibility. God’s existence or non-existence might be metaphysically necessary, but that is a separate issue from our knowledge of God’s existence, and so from epistemic possibility. Another way that we could have constructed the argument, which we do not pursue here, would be in terms of counterpossibles.
A theist might object that even if our lives have intrinsic meaning, this does not imply that this meaning is independent of God. God creates us, so in a sense, this meaning that lives intrinsically have still depends upon God for its existence (in a causal sense). But we suggest that if lives can have meaning intrinsically, then these lives could have been caused by something aside from God (say, some purely naturalistic process) and still retain their meaning. In which case God is not necessary for life to have meaning.
We would like to thank an anonymous referee for immensely helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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Megill, J., Linford, D. God, the meaning of life, and a new argument for atheism. Int J Philos Relig 79, 31–47 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9538-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9538-x