One of the questions posed to Profs. Ian Hutchinson and Marcelo Gleiser during the Veritas Forum was this: "what could we discover that would rob you of your sense of meaning?" How would you answer this question? What keeps you up at night?

Nothing I could discover would rob me of my sense of meaning, because my sense of meaning is not supplied by external phenomena. Prof. Hutchinson said his would be robbed by being provided with incontrovertible evidence that Jesus was not resurrected. To base one's sense of meaning, one's sense of self, purpose, and significance, on the shaky grounds of 2000-year-old history is absolutely incomprehensible to me.

My dogs keep me up at night.

Well a "sense of meaning" is perhaps an unclear concept. If it means that I feel good about myself. I'm ok, you're ok. Or in other words, if it is a statement about emotion and psychology, then I can understand that DGC wants to make a bold claim that nothing can rob him of it. A wonderful thing about humanity at its best is a sometimes heroic ability to stand in the face of challenge and simply affirm a personal will. Good for you DGC. But the trouble for many thoughtful people is that such a bald self-affirmation does not seem to have much justification. People look at their lives and at the world and they ask, does it really all mean something? And for some people (not just religious people by the way) the answer is not obvious and their psychological state is not self-affirming. Some of us really want to know what is true. And some of us think we have found a deep truth in the person of Jesus, who not only makes us able to feel good about ourselves, but also brings a host of other meaningful challenges to our lives. I acknowledge the possibility that I might be mistaken, even though I don't think that I am. If Jesus really was not resurrected, then I and all the Christians of history are mistaken, and the meaning we attribute to our faith is false. We would then be left with nothing but raw self-affirmation to try to establish our self-image, which sounds as if it is what you are advocating. But we don't think that is where we stand. We think God is real. If he is, then it seems to me to follow that my real meaning is to be discovered in terms of my relationship with him.