What's your take on the title question of this Veritas Forum? Is human life significant, and in what way? If so, how does this meaning enable you to live your life with purpose?

The title, as the lawyers say, assumes a fact not in evidence. But kidding aside...

Of course, what's important to you may or may not be important, or significant, to me. To argue that "importance" resides in some Platonic ideal separate from an individual's judgment is tantamount to arguing in favor of the existence of a supreme being--another assumption of a fact not in evidence.

I would argue that those of us who think it important NOT to believe in a supreme being credit our species with more significance than those who do. When the earth is not taken for a mere anteroom to an illusory eternal bliss, our lives assume an urgency and a purpose well beyond that of those who attend to doing good essentially to bolster their interview before St. Peter. This is it, we tell ourselves, get busy.

I tend to agree. My idea in presenting to the Forum was to bring forth the importance of humanity as a life form in a rare planet. If we free ourselves from any kind of supernatural mandate, we must act here and now. Of course, for those who believe in a supernatural mandate we must still act here and now but perhaps the goals are somewhat different. When you consider that this life is the only life and this is your only time to be alive, time gains a new level of urgency. Hence the "get busy" above.

DGC, do you actually know people who see this life as "a mere anteroom to an illusory eternal bliss"? It may be worth noting, as Professor Gleiser hints at, that supernaturalists vary on this. Naturalists do, as well. While some pantheists may tend towards passivity with infinite reincarnation to fall back on, even then I would hesitate to critique them on that point. For instance, Buddhists see a need both for detachment from the world and then a consequent re-engagement.

However, I am not able to speak for or to all religious perspectives, nor do I hold to a form of Platonism. I can, however, speak to the Christian motivation for proactive life. This life is penultimate, but our ultimate existence hinges on it. "And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him"
(Hebrews 9:27-28).

As a result, we have a personal interest in how life here and now is conducted, and we believe that we will be held accountable for all that we do. Additionally, we are called to participate with God in good works of all kinds, infusing our daily lives with a transcendent urgency, a far cry from a "waiting room" perspective on life!

Perhaps "waiting room" was a bit harsh, Ryan, but reading over your note confirms my essential point, that there is an "ultimate life" for which this life is reduced to a tryout for a role in Act II. At least one Christian sect, Calvinism, would argue that our good works in this life are only performed in order to show our neighbor that we have been predestined from birth for a heavenly afterlife--a doctrinal morass which I have never been able to comprehend.

Then there are the "end times" loonies for whom life on this earth is a tedious chore soonest gotten over.

Indeed, all religions minimize our time on earth in favor of some magical afterlife--heaven, reincarnation--for which this "vale of tears" is a mere anteroom.

We, who alone on this planet know death, are desperate to avoid it. Anything, we cry, but the dark unbeing from which we came, and so we invent our myths. In doing so, however, to one degree or another, we turn ourselves away from the only thing we have--this life, this brief hour, this one corporeal embodiment of a sentience we didn't ask for, which, when we contemplate its end, scares the dickens out of us.

Yet what a paradise we could make of this world if we could shuck off our myths and understand finally that this is it. Because this is plenty. A lifetime of joys, of babies, of struggle, of kindness. Which of us wouldn't be playing the violin, running marathons, curing cancer, if we but heeded "time's wingéd chariot hurrying near."

The discussion seems to be centering on the question of whether belief in an afterlife invests this life with meaning, and if so, how.

DGC takes the view that an afterlife tends to diminish the importance we place in this life. Prof. Gleiser holds that some people who believe in an afterlife do think we should act in this world, but perhaps with somewhat different purpose. Ryan notes a few other religions that see involvement in this world as important, and speaks about how his Christian faith infuses his life with a transcendent urgency.

Let's develop the question by asking why it is that this world has meaning in the first place, whether for theists, nontheists, or believers. If "this is it," why should we then get busy? For those who do believe in an afterlife, does this world get all of its meaning from that afterlife or is it charged with meaning in some other way as well?

I don't know what it really means to ask whether this world has "meaning." I would say that for the Christian this world is good. It was created good by God, and it's goodness was affirmed by the incarnation. We celebrate that goodness by participating in creation- by making, doing, enjoying, and most of all, by giving to praise to the source of all goodness. Making, doing, and enjoying are wonderful and beautiful in themselves, and they serve also as a kind of prayer of thanksgiving to God. To ignore the goods of creation would be effectively an insult to God. All of my favorite Christian writers have also expressed this idea, a kind of "Christian Humanism."

Hilaire Belloc: "Thus one should from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark; one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food- and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go out on the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God put him in a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul. Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should do a little work with his hands"

Belloc again: "Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine/ there's always laughter and good, red wine/ At least I've always found it so/ Benedicamus Domino"

Thomas Merton: "It is a law of man's nature, written into his very essence, and just as much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their Father and Creator."

And so on.


As for social action, for love of neighbor etc. It is of course a Christian duty to love and to express that love in practical acts of service and charity. No matter how one longs for heaven, that duty remains, and I frankly don't quite see how a secularist could reason his way to a similar duty. But furthermore, it is by looking toward heaven, by contemplating and desiring the perfect kingdom of God that we are most able to do good here on Earth. William Wilberforce could free slaves because he had a vision of a heaven of God's equal children; Hitler and Stalin could only enslave their people because they had no such transcendent vision. As C.S. Lewis argued, you have to put first things first, and the second things will come. Aim for heaven and you'll probably get a pretty good earth with it. Cut off heaven and focus only on earth, and you're bound to make it a hell eventually.

If you don't believe any of what I've said above, you should contemplate the life of Blessed Pier Gorgio Frassati, a lay Catholic in 20th century Italy. Very few men have loved God or yearned for heaven more, and yet his life was full of earthly activity. He was an avid mountain climber, he loved to sing and play jokes with his friends, and when nobody was looking, we would sneak out of his rich Father's house and go to serve the poor. To look at his life is to realize that not only are Christianity and respect for this world in harmony, but they are in fact intrinsically related.

This world is good irrespective of any kind of religious belief. That different religions attach meaning to this world makes a lot of sense; without it we wouldn't be here! And this is precisely why it has meaning irrespective of religious belief. We live in a very special place indeed; just take a look at our cosmic neighbors, barren, forbidding worlds. We understand how important Earth is as an oasis of life in a hostile cosmos. Sure, other planets out there may harbor life; but for all practical purposes we are "stuck" here for a very very long time. And so, we learn that the meaning of this life, apart, of course, from being good to your neighbor and to yourself, is to cherish this very rare world of ours. This should be a truism that transcends any kind of religious belief.

In a sense I agree with you Prof. Glesier. But I have to wonder why rarity or uniqueness makes this world or human life per se meaningful or good. Perhaps one day we will make cancer a very rare disease, but would cancer thereby become meaningful or good? Does that mean we should thereby preserve it because it's rare? We need some other standard than mere rarity to call something good, meaningful, worthy to be preserved. Perhaps secularism can offer that additional standard, I don't know. I haven't heard it do so successfully yet. But theistic belief can do so.

Besides, it hasn't always been self-evident to people that the world is good. Catharism and Manichaeism were big in the Middle Ages (and before), despair and depression is pretty common today. There is a lot of evil and suffering in the world. To hold tenaciously to the goodness of the world in the face of these things requires a kind of faith or hope. Such faith and hope would be very noble but probably irrational if atheism is true, but they are fully rational if Christianity is.

I think that without God, there is no ultimate morality, and no truth to the statement that the world is ultimately good. Disregarding the shaky grounds for belief in God, it actually does make some sense for commands to be issued from god. But if there is no God, then what sense is there to the existence of moral commands of this sort? Of course, nontheists can create their own system of values – many espouse the philosophy of secular humanism, which affirms the responsibility of humans to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity, and upholding human reason, ethics, and justice in an all-natural world.

But no matter how we go about creating values in this life, we have to realize that secular humanism, just like religion, operates under a system of values that comes not from an ultimate Truth source, but from humans beings ourselves.

As conscious beings, we try to make sense out of a senseless world, and create meaning out of a world that has none. After all, we don’t see tigers or trees or insects asking whether this life has meaning or not. As Camus said, “Everything begins with consciousness…” Perhaps we should acknowledge that the universe might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous and indifferent to all suffering.

However, while I argue that there is no ultimate meaning or universal standards by which to judge something good or evil, this does not (and should not), stop humans from trying to find meaning in their lives. The cosmos is indifferent to our wars, our loves, our books, philosophy and religion, but just because these things don't matter to the universe, does not mean they are insignificant to human beings. Even though our lives are nothing in the cosmic scale of time, they hold so much weight within each individual who lives it. Even though there is no ultimate morality and the universe doesn't care about these fleeting lives of ours, we must, at the end, do the best we can.

I appreciate the admission, CiCi, that atheism really does not allow for any firm theoretical justification of morality or meaning. It is something I spend a lot of time trying to convince atheists of, and something which a lot of other atheists deny. Nevertheless, I think you still run into a problem, because it simply seems highly implausible that a universe utterly devoid of meaning should produce creatures like us that find meaning in everything and cannot help but to look at the world in moral terms. How does such an extraordinary aberration happen? Furthermore, how could we come to even have the idea of "meaning" if everything was meaningless. If there was only winter, we would never have the idea of "summer." Furthermore, where would the concept of "meaningless" have come from? If it is also winter, you wouldn't call it winter. We only call it winter because we contrast it with other seasons. If it was also winter, we wouldn't have a special name for it, we wouldn't even really recognize it as a distinct state.

As C.S. Lewis put it, "My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."

If there was no meaning in the universe, we never would have gotten the idea of "meaningless"

Peter, that's an interesting point you raise: it is true that many nontheists wish to assert an absolute morality, even in the absence of belief in a supreme “commander”. But I don’t see why more atheists can’t admit that there are no ultimate standards of morality, because personally, I don’t see what the big deal is. Just because I don’t think there are absolute truths in this world, doesn’t mean I can’t be a nice person and that society is going to hell.

You also say that it is highly implausible that “a universe utterly devoid of meaning should produce creatures like us that find meaning in everything and cannot help but to look at the world in moral terms”. But I don’t think that this is such an “extraordinary aberration”, because we are a product of evolution, and everything stems from Nature’s gift of consciousness to our species. Evolutionarily speaking, as we evolved from Australopithecus and earlier ancestors, our brains gained higher cognitive skills, increased abstract thinking, and greater functioning capabilities. With these adaptations, we developed the extraordinary ability to become consciously aware of our selves and our surroundings. Therefore, it is our very consciousness that makes us create art, philosophy, religion, and ask questions like “Is there meaning to life?” Furthermore, I don’t see why we cannot maintain a coherent sense of “meaning”, even while asserting that there is no ultimate meaning to life. Of course humans search for and find personal meaning in their lives; I am not arguing that no concept of "meaning" exists. The catch point is that no ultimate or universal meaning exists in this world, i.e. the universe is intrinsically devoid of meaning. No matter how profound the insights to “what is the meaning of life” that religion or philosophy offers us, these insights (including our discussion now) are created by our conscious minds, and matter to Homo sapiens alone.