God's purpose as irrelevant to life's meaning: Reply to affolter
Religious Studies 43 (4):457-464 (2007)
| Abstract | Elsewhere I have contended that if a God-centred account of meaning in life were true, it would not be because meaning comes from fulfilling God’s purpose for us. Specifically, I have argued that this ‘purpose theory’ of life’s meaning cannot be the correct God-based view since God would have to be atemporal, immutable, and simple for meaning to logically depend on His existence, and since such a being lacking extension could not be purposive. Jacob Affolter has developed a fresh account of the kind of purpose that is necessary for meaning in life, has argued that a God without extension could ground it, and has also provided some tentative reason to believe that only such a God could do so. I respond in three ways: by questioning whether the sort of purpose Affolter thinks is necessary for meaning in fact is; by arguing that an extensionless God could not ground it; and by indicating the way that a purely physical world could. | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesE. D. Klemke (ed.) (2000). The Meaning of Life. Oxford University Press.
James Sutherland Thomson (1964). God and His Purpose [the Meaning of Life]. Toronto, United Church Pub. House.
Thaddeus Metz (2003). The Immortality Requirement for Life's Meaning. Ratio 16 (2):161–177.
Thaddeus Metz (2008). God, Morality and the Meaning of Life. In Samantha Vice & Nafsika Athanassoulis (eds.), The Moral Life. Palgrave Macmillan.
Jacob Affolter (2007). Human Nature as God's Purpose. Religious Studies 43 (4):443-455.
Carlo Cellucci, Knowledge and the Meaning of Human Life. naturalism.org.
Thaddeus Metz (2000). Could God's Purpose Be the Source of Life's Meaning? Religious Studies 36 (3):293-313.
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