Why Life is Meaningless Without God

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today I want to explore the idea that life without God is meaningless. And I know that might sound like I’m just being insulting or something, but what you’re going to see is that it’s actually philosophically, logically true. And this is actually a point many atheist philosophers agree on. So if you’re just tuning in for the first time or you want a little update as to where we are, I’ve been doing this, this is the second week of a five-week series. Exploring some arguments for the existence of God, coming from the writings of Joseph Ratzinger who then became Benedict XVI. And he often engages with these brilliant thinkers, many of whom profoundly disagree with him. And really fascinatingly here, he’s going to basically agree with the famous 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. And Nietzsche is pretty famously an atheist, he’s the guy who says God is dead.

But they’re going to agree on the question of the meaning of life, that without God there is no such thing as a meaning to life, nor can there be. So what do we have to learn from Ratzinger and Nietzsche, these two brilliant German minds who agree on very little? Well, Benedict puts it like this, he says, “At first sight, it seems as if we do not need God or indeed, that without God we’d be freer and the world would be grander.” That doesn’t take a lot of explanation, it seems like, God’s here with all these rules about how I got to live and not live. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were no rules? Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just do anything? But he says, “After a certain time, we see in young people, what happens when God disappears, that when you actually lose sight of God, you don’t experience this sense of being freer. Instead,” he then as Pope, he quotes Friedrich Nietzsche, he says, “The great light has been extinguished, the sun has gone out.”

And he explains, “Life is in a chance event. It becomes a thing that I must seek to do the best I can with and use life as though it were a thing that serves my own immediate, tangible and achievable happiness.” That is, there’s no real meaning to life. So I’ve got to invent meaning myself. But he says, “The problem with this is that were God not to exist and were he not also the creator of my life, life would actually be a mere cog in evolution, nothing more.” Now I want to pause here and say Benedict is not saying evolution is false and not making some big argument on evolution. Whether you agree with, disagree with, quibble with, evolution is just not at all the point of what he’s saying here. He actually goes on to defend the idea of evolution in this same talk. But what’s striking here is he’s saying if it’s just evolution, if you’re just the result of biological processes and that’s it, your life has no meaning in itself.

That’s what he’s trying to say, that if that’s all there is, if it’s just evolution, life is meaningless in itself. Instead, he says, “I must seek to give meaning to this component of being.” In other words, there’s no objective meaning of life, so I kind of create subjective meaning. I sort of invent some sort of meaning for myself and kind of throw it on there. Now we’re going to see that doesn’t really work. You can’t just give a meaningless life meaning, and I’ll explain more for why that doesn’t work as we go. But before we get there, I want to spell out the meaning of life argument. So the point on which Nietzsche and Benedict agree is the first premise, that if God does not exist, then life has no objective meaning. Where they disagree is Benedict says life does have objective meaning, your life does have meaning and value. And so the conclusion then is God exists.

Now, when we talk about meaning, this is closely connected to the idea of morality. So meaning and morality are different, obviously, but they’re related in some ways. So let me put it like this. Morality tells us whether we’re moving in the right or wrong direction. But there can be no right or wrong direction unless there’s some kind of goal. And so meaning is the question of “Where am I meant to be headed?” And if I’m meant to be headed to New York, and I’m going west, I’m going in the wrong direction. But if I’m just out traveling, if I’m just driving around, you can’t really say I’m going the wrong way because any way is the way I want to go. So you can see that the question of meaning, “What am I meant to be doing?” Is really closely connected with the idea of morality. So when we talk about meaning in life, we’re also asking a question about morality. Now I have a second kind of caveat I want to make clear here.

Oftentimes when you bring up this question of morality without God, you get atheists who get offended by this and they say, “Hey, I live a moral life even though I don’t believe in God.” And as a Christian I’d say, “Great, wonderful.” That doesn’t really disprove the argument actually being made though. When we say you can’t be moral without God, we don’t mean you can’t be moral without knowledge of God. We mean that the whole idea of objective morality is grounded in the existence of God. And so the example I’d give is Newton with the apple and gravity. Isaac Newton has this theory of gravity, and someone could come along and say, “You know what? That’s just a theory, I don’t agree with it.” And they could say, “Well, look at me, I drop stuff and it still false even though I don’t believe in gravity.” And we’d say, “Yeah, of course you do,” because gravity is true whether you believe in it or not.

And so likewise, you still feel a sense of right and wrong. You still have a moral code because objective morality is true whether you believe in it or not. So by all means, we would say yes, it is possible for an atheist to say be just, you owe $20 and you pay $20, that’s an act of justice, good job. You pay at a restaurant even though you know you’re never coming back and could probably get away with running out. You’ve done your basic duty and justice. Absolutely. In that sense of morality you can be just, you can be moral, you can have prudence and temperance and fortitude and justice. No one is denying that, and if they are, they shouldn’t be. The question is whether that sense of objective morality, you ought to be just and not unjust, can be really defended coherently without recourse to a creator.

And so the argument for meaning says, no, no, I should explain here. This is not primarily, Benedict and Nietzsche are not primarily making an argument about morality, but morality is where a lot of the subsequent argument is gone. And so I want to address the moral arguments. But remember the question here isn’t primarily, is there an objective moral code? The question here primarily is, does life have meaning or not? But those two questions are so tied up together that I want to kind of explore both of them. So again, the first premise is if God does not exist, life would have no objective meaning. You can’t talk about objective meaning, and therefore you can’t really talk about objective morality without the existence of God. And as we’re going to see, you’ll find atheists who reject this first part and say, “No, no, even without God, life still has meaning.” And then you’ll have atheists at the other end of the spectrum saying, “No, without God, life is meaningless.” True, but life actually is meaningless. And they’re going to reject the second premise, that life has meaning.

But we’re going to look at those two categories of objection, one after another. So first, those who object to the first premise, which say can’t we find objective meaning somewhere else? Now you’ll find a lot of variations of this argument, I’m going to just take a couple because time reasons. But three major sources, when you ask non-believing people, where does morality come from? Where does the meaning to your life come from? You’ll get the first category are kind of sciencey answers, from evolution, from biology, from my genes, from science in some abstract kind of way. The second are cultural or social kind of answers. “Well, I know what right and wrong is because society tells me so, or my family tells me so.” And the third are individual, personal, “I just think I ought to live this way and not that way.” Now you’ll notice the problem with that third one is it is definitionally subjective, not objective meaning, but we’ll get into all three of those.

I’m going to spend most of the time looking at the first of these three because I think it’s the one that’s the most plausible and is the least obviously wrong. I think the last two, it’s much easier to see why those don’t work. But for evolution, biology, sciences, a lot of different theories that sometimes conflict with each other, but I want to look at a couple of them. So the first is Dr. Ralph Lewis who has a book called Finding Purpose in a Godless World, Why We Care Even If The Universe Doesn’t. And I’m actually going to use a shorter… He has an essay for Psychology Today, which I think does a nice job of truncating his major points. He says, “Biological evolution enabled purposive,” meaning that you have purpose, “Purposive meaning oriented human behavior and morality. Culture evolution refined them.” So your basic building blocks of having a sense of right and wrong and a sense of purpose, that’s coming from evolution, the particulars may be coming from the culture.

So you’ll see he’s giving both answers to science and culture. I’m going to focus on the science part. We’ll get into the culture part after this. But Lewis says, “The universe may not be purposeful, but humans are.” Right? He’s got to hold the premise both that the world around us has no point, has no meaning in it, and yet humans have purpose and meaning. That’s a strange position to stake out. But he says, “Well, our sense of purpose is not dependent on the universe having a purpose. All living creatures are purposive in a basic sense, even a bacterium or a plant is purpose driven.” Now, as a Christian I hear that and think, “Okay, man, if you’re going to say every living thing has a purpose and a drive, it does certainly seem like that supports the idea that the universe itself would also have a purpose or drive.” It doesn’t maybe necessarily automatically prove it, but it’s at least kind of a strange argument. But notice when he says purpose or drive here, he doesn’t mean there’s a deep-seated meaning to life.

He says, “Human purposive is behavior,” that sense of purpose, a sense of drive, “Has evolved to become much more embellished, elaborated by conscious intention. But it is fundamentally driven by the same basic instinctual goals of all living things, survival and reproduction.” So when he says purpose, he doesn’t mean you’re a beautiful bit of stardust that’s beloved by the cosmos. No, he just means as a living being you have hardwired in your genes this desire to procreate, pass the genes on. Because if you didn’t have that, you would die out. And so natural selection favors genes that want to reproduce over genes that don’t. So you have purpose in the same sense that the flu virus has a purpose, and that purpose is let’s spread a lot. But he says, “Meaning too derives from the physical world. It is simply the value and significance, something has to a living organism, whether it is good or bad for the organism’s survival and flourishing.” So he’s going into distinguishing purpose and meaning. “Your purpose is just to procreate, to survive and procreate. Meaning is whether something helps you flourish or not.”

So meaning is, “Well, does this help me have increased survival and procreative chances?” Now hopefully you see this is a pretty shabby theory of meaning, a pretty shabby theory of purpose. This might work for something like bacterium, but it’d be hard to look at the realm of human existence and say, “Oh yeah, definitely the reason that symphony was created was to increase reproductive chances.” At the surface level should immediately strike us as, this seems like a very weak explanation for human behavior and human existence. But he’s going to say, “Humans with our extravagantly embellished evolution of consciousness have evolved to be a highly complex, meaning-seeking species.” The meaning we attach to events and our sense of self is as richly layered and interconnected as our complex neural network. So he’s going to say, this is the basic mechanism, but it gets really complicated. You’ve got these birds that have these elaborate mating ritual dances, and we’re actually going to talk about that in a couple of weeks, but it’s this idea that sure, this basic evolutionary drive gets really complicated in some species. We’re really complicated, so our sense of purpose is really complex.

I actually think one of the best answers to Dr. Lewis’s arguments come from another atheist trying to defend a similar version, which is Sam Harris. Sam Harrison, in his book the Moral Landscape How Science Can Determine Human Values, he’s going to also argue that science can explain this stuff, but in the process he’s going to actually point out that just pointing to evolution is a really bad argument for a really simple reason. We can and do regularly ignore these kind of genetic urges. So he says, as a psychologist, Steven Pinker has observed, “If conforming to the dictates of evolution where the foundation of subjective wellbeing, most men would discover no higher calling in life than to make daily contributions to their local sperm bank.” Apologies for the kind of graphic image, but he’s making a point that from the perspective of a man’s genes, nothing can be more fulfilling than spawning thousands of children without incurring any associated costs or responsibilities.

If all of morality and all of purpose comes down to survive and reproduce, this would seemingly be the most moral and most meaningful thing you could do, have as many children as humanly possible. The mass rapist would be the saint of this kind of system. The person who impregnates a lot of people has spread their genes really effectively. Something is obviously wrong with that kind of idea. And Harris says, “Our minds do not merely conform to the logic of natural selection.” We know that’s not true. And he says, “Look, if you wear eyeglasses or use sunscreen, you’re showing you’re not content to just accept the life your genes are going to give you.” Some people are genetically inclined towards skin cancer. Some people are genetically inclined towards bad eyesight, but we don’t say, “Eh, well my genes dealt the cards. I’m just going to play.”

No, we consciously work against things like our genetic disposition towards cancer. And so just making the appeal to the genes is a profoundly bad argument. Making an appeal to just evolution, natural selection is a profoundly bad argument. So Harris is going to defend a modified view. He says, “While we’ve inherited a multitude of yearnings that probably helped our ancestors survive and reproduce the small bands of hunter-gatherers, much of our inner life is frankly incompatible with our finding happiness in today’s world.” I’ll give you an example of what he is talking about. He said, “You’re tempted to have several glazed donuts or have an extramarital affair. That might be difficult temptations to resist for evolutionary reasons, but there are surely better ways to maximize one’s long-term well-being.” In other words, don’t just do everything you might find yourself biologically, genetically, evolutionarily inclined to do. And so Harris says, “I hope it’s clear that the view of good and bad I’m advocating while fully constrained by our current biology, as well as by its future possibilities, cannot be directly reduced to instinctual drives and evolutionary imperatives.”

So he’s going to, like I said, he’s going to defend a modified view, but he’s showing why the basic view is wrong. As with mathematics, science, art, and almost everything else that interests us, our modern concerns about meaning and morality have flown the perch built by evolution. So I’m inclined to say all of those are really good arguments against viewing genes and evolution as kind of a defense of morality. For the simple reason that you can say someone is genetically inclined to behavior X but that doesn’t mean behavior X is a good behavior. You could even say someone is genetically inclined to find a certain behavior morally right or morally wrong. So for instance, there are people who say there are genes for homophobia, meaning that some people genetically seem to be more prone to disgust at homosexual behavior. That doesn’t automatically mean disgust at homosexual behavior is morally right.

I’m not trying to get into a whole debate about homosexuality, trying to say the same people making the genes and evolution argument don’t believe the genes and evolution argument in practice. They would never say, “I have this desire to procreate, so I cheated on my spouse. I guess that’s okay.” No, they would say resist and ignore your genes. So if morality comes from the genes, why not resist and ignore it? How do we know when we should listen to our genes and when we should resist them? That’s one set of arguments. I think Harris does a good job of showing the weakness of that view.

Now, Francis Collins who is science advisor to the president, and he was the head of the NIH, I believe, for the former president or I think President Bush, perhaps maybe President Obama. He was the head of the human genome Project, massively influential, well-respected scientist, I don’t remember all of his accolades, but he’s well respected in the field. He’s also a Christian. He believes in God and he believes that science points to the existence of God. And one of the things he points to, that you can’t explain away in just an evolutionary or genetic kind of way, is human altruism. The idea that sometimes you do things for other people expecting nothing in return, sometimes you even give up your life for other people.

Now, if morality is based in I need to survive and reproduce, behavior like celibacy, self-sacrifice, martyrdom doesn’t really make sense of that survive and reproduce impulse. Seems to go directly contrary to it. So Collins considers three possible explanations. He says, one proposal is that repeated altruistic behavior is recognized, of an individual, is recognized as a positive attribute in mate selection. The person who’s constantly doing nice things, maybe this is ultimately a romantically adaptive behavior. You’re more likely to get a mate or a spouse if you’re someone who’s really self-sacrificing.

I get that theory. It makes sense. Problem with it is it is directly in contrast to everything we see in the non-human world with primates. You actually see things like infanticide. Now this is really grim, but in the primate world, dominant male monkeys will kill the children of other male monkeys. Then the moms, who also have this desire to survive and procreate and have living offspring, will be more likely to want to reproduce with them. And so something like infanticide makes sense from the survive and reproduce kind of standpoint, because you get rid of rivals genetically, and you make the women more likely, or the females of the species, more likely to want to reproduce. This is unfortunately not unheard of in a number of different species. So that doesn’t really make sense. If it’s just an evolutionary advantage for reproductive reasons, it seems like the opposite would work better than self-sacrificial behavior.

The second possible theory is that there are indirect reciprocal benefits from altruism that have provided advantages to the practitioner over evolutionary time. But he says that doesn’t account for human motivation to practice small acts of conscience no one else knows about it. In other words, if you’re doing good things to be noticed, because that means people are more likely to do nice things for you, doesn’t really explain that voice you have telling you “Do that nice thing and don’t make a big show of it. Do that nice thing and don’t tell anybody.” And so that might explain the kind of ostentatious morality probably does sometimes. Right? The person who says, “I’m writing a giant check for charity,” that is probably a social move rather than an altruistic move. But genuine altruism that isn’t trumpeting its own horn, this doesn’t really explain it. So then the third argument he considers is that altruistic behavior by members of a group provide benefits to the whole group.

And so for instance, you have ants and ant colonies. The sterile workers work incessantly to create an environment where the mothers can have more children, even though the worker ants are sterile, they’re not reproducing offspring. So how does it help them? It looks altruistic, but it’s actually not. And so Collins explains, “In the case of ants, they have the exact same genes. And so what looks like altruism is really just them carrying on their genes in this kind of strange and direct way by the mother ant giving birth to siblings. And obviously that doesn’t apply here. So you might say altruism is found all over the animal world. It’s like, no, no. What we see in humans, it doesn’t appear to be the same thing we see in ants, and this is because of our more complex genetic population. We don’t all just have the same genes.

The you passing on your genes doesn’t scratch my evolutionary itch to survive and reproduce because we’re not siblings or we’re not genetically the same. So he says, The hardwired behavior of the worker ant is thus fundamentally different from the inner voice it causes me to feel compelled to jump into the river to try to save a drowning stranger even if I’m not a good swimmer and might myself die in the effort.” So that’s Collins’ argument. I think his argument is pretty good. It’s worth considering Harris’s response to it. And so Harris in the Moral Landscape is going to kind of dismiss this argument. He doesn’t really handle it in a thoughtful or nuanced way. He says, “Collins’s case for the supernatural origins of morality rests on the further assertion that there can be no evolutionary explanation for genuine altruism, but it’s not really an assertion.”

He considers the three most prominent views and explains why they don’t work. But he says, “Because self-sacrifice cannot increase the likelihood that an individual creature will survive and reproduce, truly self-sacrificing behavior stands as a primordial rejoiner to any biological account of morality. In Collins’s view, therefore, the mere existence altruism offers compelling evidence of a personal God.” Now, I think again, he’s really kind taking a strong man of Collins, but neither here nor there. A moment’s thought reveals. Now, I want to agree with Harris on one thing. I feel like he’s given this problem a moment’s thought. That if we were to accept this neutered biology, almost everything about us would be bathed in the warm glow of religious mystery. Gives an example.

He says, “Smoking cigarettes isn’t a healthy habit and is unlikely to offer an adaptive advantage, and there were no cigarettes in the Paleolithic. But this habit is very widespread and compelling. Is God a tobacco farmer? In case that argument isn’t clear, I want to explain it.” He’s saying, genetically, you are inclined to get addicted to nicotine. This is not as a result of some brilliant divine intervention, Harris would say. God’s not actually a tobacco farmer trying to get you hooked. That rather the basic genetic wiring you have has this kind of unintended side effect, that your desire to survive and reproduce this desire for nutrition, all of this stuff, gets kind of hijacked by certain behaviors, so you can have things like addiction.

And so Harris says, “Collins can’t seem to see the human morality and selfless love may arise from more basic biological and psychological traits, which were themselves products of evolution.” So here’s the problem with that argument and even Harris’s treatment of it. Let’s assume for a minute that that’s right, that evolution makes us moral or gives us that moral impulse, altruism and everything else is just related to our genes, like the way having an addiction to smoking might be. But remember Harris has already answered that. Well, if that’s the case, you’ve got no reason to listen to your genes. Right? It’s fine and even good to ignore the biological desire to procreate sometimes. It’s fine and even good to ignore the biological desire to smoke. Fine and even good to ignore the biological desire to eat a bunch of glazed donuts or to have an affair.

All of these things you can say, “Yeah, my genes are telling me to do X, Y, Z, but I’m not going to do that.” So whether it’s wearing eyeglasses or sunscreen, any of these things, why would morality be binding if it’s just another of these things. If I have this genetic inclination to throw myself in the river to save that drowning child, but I also have a genetic inclination to eat a bunch of donuts and I know that both of those behaviors could get me killed, why should I listen to the one and not the other? Genes are not going to be the answer to that question. Now, Harris for his part, is going to appeal to human flourishing and he argues science can reveal which behaviors are better or worse for human flourishing. Even if you take all of that as true, and there’s I think a lot of problems with Harris’s argument.

Why should I do the thing that leads to human flourishing instead of the thing that leads to my own personal flourishing? Why should I allow myself to suffer loss for the broader greater good? Well, if you say, “Well, it’s good for the greater good, well yes, it’s begging the question, why should I care about that instead of my own personal benefit?” And Harris doesn’t really have an answer for that. He writes an entire book about how science can determine value, and can’t answer the most basic kind of critique of the question. Doesn’t even seem to understand it. Argues that if you’re not trying to do this, you’re not trying to do morality. So he’s committed to what’s called consequentialism, where you just look at the consequences of actions. And his entire moral theory assumes you agree with him, and consequentialism is the way to go.

But consequentialism is highly controversial. It’s one of only many different modes of morality, and it is wrong in some pretty obvious ways. Because a consequentialist would say there are no hard and fast moral rules of just what you can never do or what you must always do, because a situation might be such that it would be beneficial to lie or torture or do any number of things that you would otherwise find morally repellent. So that’s Harris’s… I’m doing a simplified version. Again, because this isn’t primarily an argument about how Harris is wrong. It’s about how you can’t look to genes, you can’t look to science, you can’t look to evolution, you can’t look to whatever you want to say there. At the basic biological level, it comes down to why can’t I ignore my genes? I ignore my genes in any number of other areas, so why would that be binding morality or why would that give my life any objective meaning?

And it just doesn’t. So that’s the first of the three. As I said, the one I’m spending the most time on. The second is I think more obviously wrong. Culture. Remember Dr. Lewis’s claim, that whereas biological evolution enabled the purposive meaning-oriented human behavior and morality, cultural evolution refined those things. You might have a general sense that you ought to do the right thing biologically, but culturally, you know what the right and wrong thing is. What’s the problem with this view? Well, frequently we know that our culture is wrong. Take an example like the Civil Rights movement. People of every race and ethnic background said, “You know what? The overwhelming culture of Jim Crow is evil. It’s wrong. It needs to be confronted.” That morality can’t just be explained as cultural evolution because they were fighting against the culture. This is true of any religious or ethical or social movement you might think of.

It challenges the status quo. So if morality comes from the cultural status quo, why do we find these appeals to a higher morality challenging the status quo, saying society could be better, the culture could be better. That can’t be an appeal to the culture itself. It is totally circular to imagine that that’s the case. It would be like saying, look at all these attacks on the government. This must be coming from state-owned media. Why would the state be attacking itself? Cultural evolution likewise doesn’t work because it would have to explain why is the culture attacking itself morally. So hopefully that’s clear. Like I said, I think it’s kind of self-evidently wrong, and so I’m not spending a lot of time on that one. And the third one, personal choice says I have meaning in my life because I give it to myself. Okay, we’re going to get into that more in a second.

Just realize now that’s not objective meaning, that’s subjective meaning, if you are giving it to yourself. The question at the outset here was the argument that if God does not exist, life has no objective meaning. If you think, well, it doesn’t have objective meaning but has subjective meaning, then you’re not actually disagreeing with the first premise, you’re agreeing if God does not exist, life has no objective meaning. Now why would it be a problem for subjective meaning? Hold on to that thought because we’re going to address that in the next half. Because the second premise is life does in fact have objective meaning, that there is such thing as objective morality because there is objective meaning to life. You’re going to find objectors to this who say “No, life actually does not have meaning.” The first thing I note here is just recognize, as I sort of mentioned before, these are atheists on the opposite side of Sam Harris and Dr. Lewis.

These are atheists saying, “No, you’re not going to get meaning from your genes or your culture. There’s no such thing as objective meaning.” They’re just going to bite the bullet and say, “Nope, there is none.” And so that’s the second premise that they’re going to attack. And Benedict acknowledges this, right? I already quoted this, but he says “The big problem is that if God didn’t exist, you’d just be a cog in evolution, your life would have no meaning in itself.” When I say objective meaning, I mean meaning in itself. If you’re watching a movie and it’s really badly directed, it doesn’t make any kind of point, you can imagine a world in which it did make a point. You could reinvent the sort of thing and say, “Ah, okay, there’s the meaning.” Or if you spill paint on the ground and someone says, “Oh, what’s the meaning of that?”

You say, “This is a work of art I’ve created.” Well, that’s not objective meaning. You’re subjectively building in meaning after the fact to explain away an accident. That’s the issue we’re dealing with here. So Benedict points to Nietzsche is saying, without God, you don’t have any meaning. And I think this is really fascinating because I think my first exposure to Nietzsche was internet atheists being really into him because he says God is dead. And it’s one of those lines that’s just taken radically out of context, and it’s true. Nietzsche does say that, kind of. He has a character who says that. The character, he describes him as a madman, he agrees with him, but still views the guy as crazy. And what’s more incredible is if you actually read the line, he’s not saying God is dead, hooray, we’re free. He’s saying God is dead and this is the worst thing that’s ever happened.

So I’m just going to quote, at a little bit of length here, Friedrich Nietzsche, from it’s called the Gay science or the Joyous science. He says, “The madman jumped into their midst and pierced him with his eyes. Wither is God. He cried. I will tell you, we have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. How did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Wither is it moving now? Wither are we moving away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually backwards, sideward, forward in all directions? Is there still any up or down? We not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?”

And then he concludes, “God is dead. God remains dead and we have killed him.” So all he is saying there is that, he’s not saying hooray. He’s saying life is meaningless now that we’ve realized God does not exist. This is absolutely despair. This is not triumph. But Nietzsche is solidly then on the side that says life doesn’t have meaning. A really fascinating modern example of this, someone who’s been upheld as if he’s got a positive vision of humanity is the Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari. And his book Sapiens was a huge hit in 2016, 2017. In 2016, then President Barack Obama recommended people read it, calling it a sweeping history of the human race from 40,000 feet. And what’s striking about it is Harari’s point, in no small part, is life is meaningless. Your life doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have any meaning because no human life has any meaning.

And he explains this very explicitly. He uses the example of the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. And if you’re not familiar with Brave New World, everybody is basically on almost like antidepressants. So they’re artificially happy all the time. And Harari says, “Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it’s hard to explain why. Everybody’s happy all the time. What could be wrong with that?” Well, he answers. “A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.” Now, if you want a more recent maybe middle brow example of this, if you’ve ever seen the Pixar movie, Wall-E, where all of the humans in the future are overweight, sitting in chairs, watching screens all day, they’re content in a way, but their life is meaningless. They do nothing.

They can’t even get out of the chairs because they’re so out of shape. And there’s something incredibly bleak, incredibly dismal about that. That’s the since we have in response to Brave New World, and Harari is saying the reason is because this is meaningless. That it doesn’t matter that they’re not in physical pain, their life has no meaning. Whereas on the flip side, someone who has great meaning and purpose in their life may have a tremendous amount of pain, but their life is still rich and meaningful. And he gives the example of people in the Middle Ages. He says, “Assessing life minute by minute, medieval people certainly had it rough. However, they believed the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife.” If they did, excuse me, they may well have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people who in the long-term can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion.

Now, that’s a pretty stark way of putting it. Harari is not actually defending religion here. He’s just acknowledging that if you’re religious, your life has meaning in a way that it doesn’t if you are an atheist who believes your life will amount to nothing and will go back to nothing. Harari actually argues this is delusional on the religious people’s side. Yes. So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life and collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes, that’s his argument. Yes. People in the Middle Ages were actually happier even though they had less stuff, because they believe their life has meaning, whereas modern people don’t believe their life has meaning because they’re nonbelievers. But those happy medieval people are just delusionally happy. Then he says, “As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning.” I do find it funny that Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari are both invoking science to settle this obviously not scientific question, but whatever. He says, “Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose.”

Again, he’s just staking out the opposite position. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan. And if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence, any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. That’s the argument, that from evolution alone, you can’t get any kind of meaning. The universe would continue to tick on if you weren’t here, if we all the species weren’t here, if the earth were exploded. And therefore we can’t speak from a scientific standpoint of anything like meaning. I actually think Harari makes a stronger point from just science. If there’s no God, it’s hard to see how Harari is wrong or how Harris is right. Harris can say, look, we could do all these things and increase human well-being. Who cares?

And then in 80 years everybody dies and they go back to dust. It’s like saying, well, I could invest all this time and money and make my video game last longer and I get extra lives. Well, who cares? You’re wasting your time. Don’t waste your time doing that. That’s junk. Well, apply that to all of human existence. From a merely evolutionary atheistic view, it’s hard to see why investing in the human project makes any more sense than investing in say, throwing money down the drain in a video game. So Harari’s point, any meaning you ascribe is just a delusion. Whatever it is you’re telling yourself to make you feel like you have a meaningful life, whatever subjective meaning you’re giving, is just self-delusion. And he says, it’s not just true of people in the Middle Ages. He says, the otherworldly meanings medieval people found in their lives were no more diluted than the modern humanist nationalist capitalist meanings modern people find.

He gives several examples, the scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge. The soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland. The entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company, are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures going on a crusade or building a new cathedral. That if it was delusional for people to think their life mattered because they were serving God, it is no less delusional to imagine that your life matters because you’re serving science or capitalism or knowledge of some kind or your country. These are just abstractions. You are not actually doing anything else. This is just self-delusion. The example I’d give is if you’re familiar with the game Calvin Ball from the old comic Calvin and Hobbes, the idea of Calvin Ball was that there were no rules to the game, or rather that the rules were constantly in a state of arbitrary flux.

So points were very random. There was impossible to say one game to the next. And it is kind of a personification, in some way, of kids’ games in a lot of ways where they’re often rule laden, but the kids are off so really arbitrary capricious creatures who will change the rules on a moment’s notice. Well, if life is like that, where you are giving it meaning and purpose, but you can change the rules at will, we can kind of step back and say, “Yeah, that’s obviously delusional.” You’re not actually the Calvin ball champ of the world. You’ve just created a system by which you’re winning, or a system by which you’re losing because you’re trying to push yourself further. That’s the argument, that if you’re going to commit to the idea that life has no meaning, don’t delude yourself into thinking you can give it subjective meaning, because that’s just willful delusion.

So then what’s the problem with just biting the bullet? What’s wrong with Nietzsche and Harari’s argument that no life is meaningless? And here I would turn… I’ve mentioned video games a weird amount of times today, but the game of Assassin’s Creed, I’ve never actually played it. I thought it was an interesting title. I did not realize until reading Nietzsche that the Assassin’s Creed was literally a thing that existed in the 12th century, but Nietzsche, on the genealogy of morals, he seems to be right about this, talks about how when the crusaders discover the order of assassins in where the word assassinate comes from, it was a group of killers. He calls them the order of free spirits par excellence. They, the crusaders, received an inkling of that symbol and watchword that was reserved for the highest ranks alone as their secretum. So what is the Assassin’s Creed?

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” And Nietzsche loves this. He says, certainly that was freedom of the mind. And then germinated on like freedom of spirit. With that, the termination of the belief and truth was announced. And that’s it in a nutshell, because if there is no objective truth, if there’s no objective meaning, if we’re not going anywhere, there is no such thing as a wrong way. Every solution to the problem of life is as good, as bad, as delusional as every other solution to the problem of the meaning of life. And that’s true even of the most abhorrent things like the final solution. Now, I get it, people throw out Hitler all the time and people roll their eyes, but Hitler was a devoted Nietzschean. So if you’re watching the video version, you’re actually looking at Hitler gazing lovingly at a bust of Nietzsche. Because if you take seriously the idea that life doesn’t have an objective, meaning you have to give it meaning yourself, some people are going to choose really horrible and horrific meanings.

But if objective morality is rooted in objective meaning, by what standard can we say that any one of those answers is wrong? What makes the medieval answer or the scientist’s answer the capitalist’s answer or the Nazi’s answer any better or worse than any other one? And you can’t say, “Well, according to my code by which we ought to increase human well-being.” Why should we listen to your code? That gets back to Sam Harris problem. So if morality is rooted in nothing, if human existence and purpose is rooted in nothing and there is no real purpose, there is no real meaning, there is no real foundation to morality, then we have that problem. But viscerally, I think almost everyone realizes that can’t be right. That if you follow Harari and Nietzsche’s thinking to its logical conclusion, the Nazi is no better or worse than Mother Teresa. Most people would say something is clearly wrong there. There is a widespread recognition that there is in fact something like an objective moral code, even if we don’t agree on all the details. And this is true because there’s something like objective meaning to life.

The person who spends their life improving a lot of their fellow man is actually better than the person who spends their life in their basement playing video games. Just to use one more video game reference. So circling back to that basic argument, the first premise, if God does not exist, life has no objective meaning. We’ve already seen that. The second that life does have an objective meaning, it’s not just whatever I might choose for myself, there is something richer and deeper, and it is a standard by which we can judge people’s lifestyle choices. So the conclusion then is that God therefore exists. That’s what logically follows from those two premises. So I hope that was clear.

It can get really muddled talking about meaning of life compared to morality, because as I said, they are distinct, but they’re so interconnected. I wanted to address both of them. But if you are a Christian using this argument, you should realize that you have a powerful tool on your side, which is that most people have a sense that there is a purpose to their life. Even if they’re like, “Oh, the universe revealed my purpose.” They might have some ridiculous explanation for it, but there is often a sense, because the alternative is to just take something pretty bleak. And in the face of this Christianity or theism more broadly really is gospel. It really is good news, that you are presenting the good news that life has meaning, and that it’s not just purposeless.

All of that is to say, as Benedict said at the outset, at first glance, it might seem like a world without God is great, because there’s no rules and you can do anything, but there’s only no rules because there’s no direction, and there’s only no direction because there’s no meaning or purpose. And that’s actually really terrifying and horrible. So that’s the argument in a nutshell. Hopefully that was clear. Hopefully it makes sense. I’d love to hear your thoughts below in the comments. I try to read them when I get a chance. Next week, the argument is going to be looking at why is there anything at all rather than nothing. So we’re going to go from looking at morality to going to looking at what’s called metaphysics. And we’ll be looking at the thought of Martin Heidegger as we go. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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