What is this thing called The Meaning of Life? [1 ed.] 0415786762, 9780415786768

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“Goetz and Seachris have written an outstanding, systematic, engaging book on the meaning of life. There is no better guide to this important area of inquiry, one of great importance both within and outside academic life.” Charles Taliaferro, St. Olaf College, USA “This is a readable and stimulating introduction to life’s greatest question. It is a text book but not just a text book, for it breaks new ground in being structured around an original and impressively thorough survey of the meaning of meaning. It will appeal to both academics and general readers.” Stephen Leach, Keele University, UK

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what is this thing called the meaning of life? • What are we asking when we ask, “What is the meaning of life?”? Can there be meaning without God? Is a happy life a meaningful life? Can an immoral life be meaningful? Does our suffering have meaning? Does death threaten meaning?

What is this thing called The Meaning of Life? provides an engaging and stimulating introduction to philosophical thinking about life’s meaning. Goetz and Seachris provide the reader with accessible examples, before looking at the main theoretical approaches to meaning and key philosophers associated with them. Topics covered include: • • • • • • • •

What does the question, “What is the meaning of life?”, even mean? Does life have a purpose? What is valuable? Do we matter? Does life (or my life) make any sense? Is there any meaning in suffering? Does death threaten meaning? Would immortality be good or bad news for us?

With boxed summaries of key concepts and noteworthy examples, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading included within each chapter, this book is the ideal introduction to life’s meaning for philosophy students coming to the subject for the first time. Stewart Goetz is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Ursinus College, USA; Visiting Scholar, St. Peter’s College, Oxford, UK. Joshua W. Seachris is Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy and Program Director at the Center for Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre Dame, USA.

What is this thing called?

The Routledge Philosophy What is this thing called? series of concise textbooks have been designed for use by students coming to a core area of the discipline for the first time. Each volume explores the relevant central questions with clear explanation of complex ideas and engaging contemporary examples. Features to aid study include text boxes, chapter summaries, study questions, further reading and glossaries. Available: What is this thing called Ethics? Second edition Christopher Bennett What is this thing called Metaethics? Matthew Chrisman What is this thing called Global Justice? Kok-Chor Tan What is this thing called Metaphysics? Third edition Brian Garrett What is this thing called Philosophy of Religion? Elizabeth Burns What is this thing called Philosophy of Language? Second edition Gary Kemp What is this thing called Knowledge? Fourth edition Duncan Pritchard

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ What-is-this-thing-called/book-series/WITTC

BY STEWART GOETZ AND JOSHUA W. SEACHRIS

what is this thing called the meaning of life?

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First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Stewart Goetz and Joshua W. Seachris The right of Stewart Goetz and Joshua W. Seachris to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goetz, Stewart, author. | Seachris, Joshua W, author. Title: What is this thing called the meaning of life? / Stewart Goetz and Joshua W Seachris. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Series: What is this thing called? | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019055321 (print) | LCCN 2019055322 (ebook) | ISBN 9780415786768 (hardback) | ISBN 9780415786775 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315225852 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Life. Classification: LCC BD431 .G5155 2020 (print) | LCC BD431 (ebook) | DDC 128—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055321 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055322 ISBN: 978-0-415-78676-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-78677-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-22585-2 (ebk) Typeset in Berling and Arial Rounded by codeMantra

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CONTENTS

Preface

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The meaning of life’s meaning LONG AGO: A (VERY) BRIEF HISTORY OF LIFE’S MEANING THE MEANING OF LIFE IS . . . 42 THE MEANING TRIAD MORE TO MEANING MEANING AND GOD WHY WORRY ABOUT MEANING? CHAPTER SUMMARY

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Meaning and purpose PURPOSE: WHAT IS IT? PURPOSE AND THEISM SARTRE AND ESSENCE VERSUS EXISTENCE NATURALISM AND PURPOSES IN LIFE NATURALISM AND EVOLUTION CHAPTER SUMMARY

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Meaning and significance I: value VALUE AND ITS DIFFERENT FORMS A HEDONISTIC UNDERSTANDING OF HAPPINESS NATURALISM, VALUE, AND MEANING NATURALISM AND MORALITY BEING GOOD, RATIONALITY, AND NATURALISM VALUE AND AUTHENTICITY CHAPTER SUMMARY

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Meaning and significance II: mattering AN IMMENSE UNIVERSE WHAT IS SIGNIFICANCE? THE PROBLEM OF COSMIC SIGNIFICANCE A DROP IN THE COSMIC BUCKET: THE TIME WORRY A SPECK OF DUST IN INFINITE SPACE: THE SIZE WORRY

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1 2 5 6 11 13 15 17 19 20 22 30 31 40 41 43 44 47 52 55 57 63 67 69 70 72 74 77 79

x   ●contents LIMITED CAUSAL EFFICACY: THE IMPACT WORRY TERRESTRIAL SIGNIFICANCE: A RESPONSE TO WORRIES ABOUT COSMIC SIGNIFICANCE THE SOLITARY HUMAN CONDITION: TO WHOM DO WE MATTER? CHAPTER SUMMARY

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Meaning and sense-making WHY? MEANING AS SENSE-MAKING MAKING SENSE OF MY LIFE: MEANING IN LIFE MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL: THE MEANING OF LIFE SENSE-MAKING AND NARRATIVE CHAPTER SUMMARY

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Meaning and evil WHY DO WE EXPERIENCE EVIL? TWO PROBLEMS OF EVIL: LOGICAL AND EVIDENTIAL SKEPTICAL THEISM THEODICY NATURAL EVIL AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL FOR ANIMALS NATURALISM AND THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL SENSE-MAKING REVISITED THE AFTERLIFE, PERFECT HAPPINESS, AND JUSTICE CHAPTER SUMMARY

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Meaning, death, and immortality THE PROFOUND REALITY OF DEATH WHAT IS DEATH? DEATH IS BAD: DEPRIVATION DEATH IS NOT BAD: EPICURUS AND LUCRETIUS DEATH ENHANCES MEANING DEATH THREATENS MEANING DEATH AND FUTILITY THE IMPORTANCE OF ENDINGS IMMORTALITY AND AFTERLIFE CHAPTER SUMMARY

Appendix I: (one type of) mid- or quarter-life crisis UNSATISFIED THE PARADOX OF THE END

Appendix II: buddhism and the meaning of life Glossary of terms Bibliography Index

80 82 83 88 90 91 92 95 98 107 111 113 114 116 118 120 123 125 128 131 132 134 135 137 139 141 146 148 150 153 158 162 164 164 165 171 174 181 187

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preface Some of you may have picked up What is this thing called The Meaning of Life? out of necessity, as required reading for a college course. Others of you may have purchased it simply out of interest, to see if anyone can possibly say anything new about life’s meaning. Whether out of necessity or intrigue, we feel confident in saying that no matter what your reason for holding this book in your hands, you have, at one time or another, reflected on, wrestled with, or worried about the meaning of life. Perhaps you have reflected on the question because of a particular event or situation in your life. For example, given your desire for a fulfilling life, you might have wondered about what you can do in the years ahead to satisfy this desire. Or perhaps the thought about life’s meaning occurred in the past at an important crossroads when you were faced with a tough decision to switch careers. Maybe you have asked about life’s meaning when losing a loved one to death or when contemplating your own demise. Or possibly you have asked the question when pondering just how short-lived and small you are compared to the immense universe. Then again, your reflection on the question of the meaning of life might not have occurred because of any particular event or situation. Rather, you have thought about it simply in virtue of being human and realizing the fact that, while you exist, you also might not exist, and so you wonder about the explanation for your existence. The meaning of life encompasses vast territory that ranges across questions of acute human interest. In this book, you will encounter questions like the following: • • • • • •

What are we asking when we ask, “What is the meaning of life?” Does life have a purpose? What is valuable? More fundamentally, what is value? Are we significant? Do we matter? Does life (or my life) make any sense? Why do we suffer? Is evil evidence against God’s existence? How can we best make sense of evil? Is there any meaning in our suffering? • What does it mean to die? Does death threaten meaning? • Would immortality be good or bad news for us? This volume will serve as a guide to students, teachers, and anyone else who wants to think carefully about the meaning of life. It is an introductory philosophical text

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on life’s greatest question and consists of seven chapters and two appendices, each focusing on important ideas connected to life’s meaning. Though not exhaustive, we are confident that it covers most of the central aspects of this topic of perennial human interest. Like all other books in Routledge’s What is this thing called . . . series, this volume is designed to be engaging; user-friendly; and, for faculty who might use it, pedagogically sensitive. It includes brief vignettes at the beginning of each chapter that serve to highlight the real-world aspect of questions about meaning; callout boxes emphasizing important persons, viewpoints, and discussions; infographics; discussion questions; suggestions for further reading; a glossary; and an index. Although we avoid technical jargon when possible, we cannot avoid it entirely. You will notice that select technical terms are bolded the first time they appear in the book. These words have corresponding entries in the glossary at the end of the book. Note, though, that some bolded terms are slightly different in form than their corresponding glossary entries. For example, you will see existentialists bolded in Chapter 1, but the corresponding glossary entry is existentialism. We think it is more important to bold the first instance of a form of a technical word or concept than to wait for it to occur in its glossary form. We trust that it is understood that an existential-ist is one who advocates the philosophical position of existential-ism. You may have questions about how we have structured the book and framed the ideas contained within. For example, many readers might wonder why, given the fact that we spend so much time throughout the book discussing the views known as naturalism and theism, we do not have separate chapters devoted exclusively to each. This is a good question. Indeed, there are other strategies for organizing the content that might have allowed for stand-alone chapters like these. However, as the project began to take shape, we realized that what we call the Meaning Triad—purpose, significance, and intelligibility/sense-making—would form the organizational foundation for how we approach the topic of life’s meaning in this book. Thus, while most of those in academic circles today who write about the meaning of life do so from either a naturalistic or a theistic viewpoint (with the majority affirming naturalism), which does suggest devoting distinct chapters exclusively to each viewpoint, it seemed to us fitting to connect these two perspectives with the sides of the Triad (purpose, significance, and sense-making) over the course of the entire book. Therefore, you will find varied discussions about the ways in which both viewpoints connect with purpose, significance, and sense-making at the relevant points in the following chapters. Though this is an introductory book, we hope the way we have framed many of the topics breaks important new theoretical ground and points to fruitful directions for future research on life’s meaning. For this reason, we think it will be of interest not only to those who might be reading about the topic for the first time but also to academics already fully immersed in the literature on life’s meaning. This book is the product of years of thinking, writing, and teaching about the meaning of life. We have enjoyed and profited from our many conversations with students and colleagues about these ideas. We have learned so much from all of you, and we are grateful. Your voices are here.

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We extend a special thanks to Lauren Weldon, who designed the various infographics used throughout the book, helping us to visually illustrate important points. I (Josh) also thank Samuel Newlands and Michael Rea for their support and encouragement during my time at Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion. To our beloved families, we say thank you for your unwavering support in our lives. Surely, this is a large part of what meaning is all about. Stewart Goetz Collegeville, PA (November 2019) Josh Seachris Notre Dame, IN (November 2019)

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the meaning of life’s meaning This is the question that has caused man more anguish than any other since he became aware of his existence. It’s the question of questions, the one that makes computers blow up. (Lina Wertmuller, Italian Filmmaker, 1992, p. 135)

CHAPTER SECTIONS • • • • • • •

Long ago: A (very) brief history of life’s meaning The meaning of life is . . . 42 The meaning triad More to meaning Meaning and God Why worry about meaning? Chapter summary

Meaning in the real world Jill is a graduate student at a research university who is nearing the end of her dissertation and having second thoughts about her choice of career. Uncertainties about her vocational path coincide with her increasing preoccupation with questions about life’s meaning. Though she is having difficulty articulating her precise questions and concerns, she keeps returning to ideas like purpose (“Why am I here and what should I do with my life?”), significance (“What is valuable?” “Do I matter?” “To whom?”), sense-making (“What’s it all about?”), pain and suffering (“Is there meaning in suffering?”), and death (“What happens, if anything, after we die?”). Recently, she has spent a lot of time on Google, searching for material to read on the topic of life’s meaning, and has visited her local bookstore to see what philosophy books have to say. To her surprise, many sources either are skeptical of the question or say little to nothing at all about it. Does the question have an answer? Does it even make sense in the first place?

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LONG AGO: A (VERY) BRIEF HISTORY OF LIFE’S MEANING In one way or other, all of us have wondered about life’s meaning. Over two millennia ago (sometime between 450 and 180 bce), the wise figure in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) book of Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth (“the Teacher”) expressed his angst and bewilderment when contemplating the human predicament. He was troubled by the futility, vanity, and brevity of life “under the sun,” to use his common refrain from the book. His search for something like meaning led him and has led his readers across the ages through a consideration of the complex, painful, brief, enigmatic, and, yes, oftentimes joyful nature of life on this earth. Elsewhere, in the classical world of antiquity, the Greeks sought to understand and lead the good life—a flourishing life of virtue in relation to others and the cosmos. Their interest in issues that intersect with life’s meaning appears to have been motivated out of a more positive emotional experience than that of Qoheleth, one of wonder. Both Plato (428/427 or 424/423–348/347 bce) and Aristotle (384–322 bce) embodied this sentiment of wonder, itself an impetus for philosophy in the classical world. Wonder gave birth to the desire to understand how to flourish within this world. This desire for a life well-lived tracks some of what we seek in pursuit of life’s meaning.

Confucius and meaning In the ancient East, Confucius (551–479 bce), though not specifically concerned with questions of meaning as they have developed in the modern western world, advocated a way of living that can be viewed as offering a prescription for meaningful life. In the Confucian framework, we participate in rituals through which life events acquire social significance and families through which laudable purposes emerge. For Confucius, meaningful lives do not arise in a vacuum; they are, rather, cultivated in families, culture, and tradition, all of which allow us to develop and express basic inclinations and emotions that are central to our humanity. It is also worth noting that a Confucian “account of meaning,” if there is such a thing, might provide a nice counter-balance to some of the overly intellectual, seemingly elitist theories of meaning sometimes on offer in contemporary analytic philosophy.

Later, and in opposition to Plato and Aristotle, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) argued that life is vain and empty, one reason being that it consists largely of a wearying cycle of desire—fleeting satisfaction—boredom in which we strive to attain goals only to experience a kind of emptiness at having reached them. In this way, life is Sisyphean. Like the mythical Greek figure, Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill over and over again forever (each time near

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the hilltop, the boulder rolls back down), Schopenhauer believed we figuratively roll boulders continuously up hills. Some of those boulders are small, like the game you play on your iPhone or a workout milestone, while others are larger, like finishing college and climbing the corporate ladder. If Schopenhauer was right, life is like rolling and re-rolling boulders: Setting a goal. Attaining that goal. Boredom. Setting another goal. And on and on. From one perspective, this process can be burdensome and tiring. Around the same time Schopenhauer lived, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), despite fame and fortune, came to a crisis point in which he questioned whether anything he did or had was ultimately worthwhile, especially given the fact that death would eventually rob him of it. He feared that death, if conceived of as a permanent experiential blank, held a threatening kind of veto power over the value and worth of human life and activity.

Optimistic and pessimistic naturalism Naturalism is a view about what is real or exists. In particular, it is the belief that (1) the material universe is all that exists, (2) there are no God(s), souls, or similar beings, and (3) there is no afterlife. Naturalists, however, disagree with one another about many things, including whether naturalism is good or bad news for meaning. Broadly, naturalists divide into two viewpoints on this question: Optimistic naturalism: Meaningful life is possible even though the material universe is all that exists, there are no God(s), souls, or similar beings, and human beings will cease to exist at death. Pessimistic naturalism (Nihilism): Meaningful life is not possible because the material universe is all that exists, there are no God(s), souls, or similar beings, and human beings will cease to exist at death.

It probably would be misleading to tell the history of human questioning of life’s meaning and related ideas in such a way as to describe the modern era as one of crisis and pessimism only. Nonetheless, the modern world of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries did see the rise of the worldview (see Chapter 5 for a fuller discussion of worldviews) known as naturalism, where a worldview is our most basic framework for understanding and orienting our lives in the world. Broadly speaking (we will provide more details in subsequent chapters), naturalism is a view that in principle excludes any appeal to an afterlife and God, souls, or similar beings to explain, in terms of purposes or goals, the existence of the world and its workings. Though the historical story is complex, the development of the heliocentric astronomical theory of Copernicus (1473–1543) and Galileo (1564–1642) caused some to wonder about human significance and specialness in a vast universe in which the earth was no longer thought to be at the center. This change from geocentrism to heliocentrism is likely

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a piece of the explanatory puzzle as to why people in modernity became concerned about life’s meaning. The biological theory of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) about the long, arduous, and suffering-riddled process of evolution prompted others to worry about whether humans are the product of caring creation and providence. This, too, is probably a piece of the explanatory puzzle of the modern human preoccupation with meaning. Though neither one of these theories in and of itself need be thought of as requiring naturalism, each is most certainly important for understanding the rise of this view, and its ascendance in the modern world was itself accompanied by growing concerns over whether life has any meaning. Crises of meaning strike at two levels: emotional and theoretical. Emotionally, they grip us with a gravitas we cannot ignore, as the experience of deep existential angst will attest. Theoretically, a crisis of meaning often surfaces through fissures in one’s worldview. You can imagine all sorts of intra-worldview crises: you stress over which college to attend, which vocation to pursue, whether to get married, to have children, and so on. No doubt, these can be intense, soul-searching junctures in life. However, in none of these cases do you call into question your worldview itself, the fundamental explanatory framework through which you make sense of the world and your place within it. But what if you were to call into question your worldview? What if, for example, you were to find yourself doubting your long-held belief that God exists? Here, we can imagine a deeper kind of existential crisis. Worldviews are meaning-grounding explanatory frameworks through which we make sense of our lives and the world. In and through them we secure a place for purpose and significance. To doubt your worldview, then, would call into question meaning, insofar as meaning is closely connected with these ideas. Religious worldviews are often thought to be more hospitable to meaning, and when they are threatened, the specter of meaninglessness looms. Thus, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), writing during the rise of modernism and especially in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, spends considerable time addressing the question of meaning after the loss of belief in God (the so-called “death” of God). Significant themes in Schopenhauer’s, Tolstoy’s, and Nietzsche’s writings found their way into the twentieth century in the thought of atheist existentialists like Albert Camus (1913–1960) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). Both Camus and Sartre were acutely interested in whether and how life could be meaningful in a Godless universe. Camus advocated a kind of ironic defiance in the face of an absurd universe where our deepest desires remain unfulfilled in the face of cosmic silence. The universe does not, indeed cannot care about us. While understanding the implications for the lack of meaning that comes with God’s nonexistence, Sartre also thought the situation was in one way better for meaning if God does not exist, because in God’s absence we have the kind of autonomy necessary to lead lives with self-determined purpose and meaning. As persons whose existence precedes our essence, to use his famous phrase, it is solely up to us to choose what we will be and do. Despite Sartre’s and Camus’s atheistic existentialism, it is worth noting that they and other twentieth-century existentialists were influenced by

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nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), himself a theist (theism affirms the existence of God; “theism” comes from “theos,” which is the Greek word for God). The thematic threads tying traditions to the past are often intricately interwoven. Though questioning life’s meaning is often an angst-filled response to a certain kind of crisis, it need not be. Contemplating the good life, like the Greek philosophers of old, is not so angst-driven. It will not have the same emotional, existential hue as Tolstoy’s “arrest of life” experience as he calls it. Still, many of the questions and concerns that are associated with life’s meaning are themselves points of existential distress—wondering what to do with one’s life, worrying about whether one’s life matters, experiencing the pain of suffering and asking “Why?”, being anxious about death, and so on. Many have thought that the “death of God” and the disappearance of the transcendent accentuates such distress. Debate about whether or not this is true came to characterize some of the contemporary discussion over life’s meaning at the end of the twentieth century, after a decades-long reign of skepticism about the very meaning of the question itself.

THE MEANING OF LIFE IS . . . 42 Douglas Adams, in his widely-read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, depicts the popular, though misguided, view that the question of life’s meaning really does not make any sense. The characters in this book visit the legendary planet Magrathea and learn about a race of hyper-intelligent beings who built a computer named Deep Thought. Deep Thought’s purpose was to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. The computer’s answer to this question was a head-scratching “42.” Deep Thought explained that this answer was incomprehensible because the beings who designed the computer for the purpose of answering the question, though super-intelligent, did not really know what they were asking in the first place. When we ask about life’s meaning, perhaps our request makes no sense, in which case 42 is as good of an answer as any other. And perhaps like the characters at story’s end, we should not waste our time focusing on the question, but get on with the business of living. Many analytic philosophers in the twentieth century, in the wake of the philosophical view known as logical positivism, shared Deep Thought’s suspicion. They were especially wary of the traditional formulation of the question—What is the meaning of life? Meaning, the thinking went, belongs to the linguistic realm. Words, sentences, and other semantic constructions are the proper bearers of meaning, not objects, events, or states of affairs, and certainly not life itself. To ask what is the meaning of life might be like asking “What does the color red taste like?” or “What is smaller than the smallest of all objects?” These are nonsensical questions. Some philosophers surmise that in asking for life’s meaning, we use an ill-chosen expression to voice something real, namely, an emotional response of awe or marvel at the staggering fact that something exists at all. Experiencing these feelings and asking a meaningful question, however, are two different things altogether.

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Asking what something means, though, need not be a strictly semantic activity. We ask for the meanings of all kinds of things and employ “meaning” in a wide variety of contexts, only some of which are narrowly linguistic. We should pay careful attention to the meanings of “meaning” because doing so provides important clues about what we have in mind when we inquire into life’s meaning.

THE MEANING TRIAD “Meaning” pops up often in everyday discourse. We use it to communicate a number of different ideas, and the various ways that we use the term in everyday contexts shed light on what we mean in another, more momentous, context—life’s meaning. In surveying “meaning’s” common usage, important patterns emerge. Requests for meaning tend to cluster around three basic ideas: the triad of purpose, significance, and intelligibility or sense-making. We call this the Meaning Triad and will reference it throughout the book.

The following list of statements and questions captures the many ways in which we employ the concept of meaning on a regular basis, all of which highlight some important part of the Meaning Triad. P-Meaning (meaning as purpose) 1 What did you mean by that face? (note: sometimes purpose and sense-making closely connect) 2 The protest is meant to catch the attention of those in power. 3 What is the meaning of that book? (Why was it written?) 4 I really mean it! 5 I didn’t mean to do it. I promise! S-Meaning (meaning as significance) 6 7 8 9

That was such a meaningful conversation. This watch really means something to me. That is a meaningful finding. You mean nothing to me.

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“I really mean it” to indicate willful action. Alternatively, you might say, “I didn’t mean it, I promise” to indicate that you did not intend to drop your best friend’s iPhone in the swimming pool. When it comes to life in our world, we typically want to lead lives in which our wills are engaged, where we are doing what we want to do. When our autonomy is threatened, we worry that our lives are less meaningful than they would otherwise be. Like Walter White in Breaking Bad, what we “[w]ant, what [we] need, is a choice. Sometimes I feel like I never actually make any of my own. My entire life, it just seems I never, you know, had a real say about any of it” (Season One, Episode 5: “Gray Matter”). Given the nature of our world, we do not want to walk through life haphazardly, nor in a way that is largely determined apart from our own consent. We want to live life on purpose, to have a say-so, to have our own voice matter. Regardless of the source of purpose, purpose brings structure and value to our lives, and in so doing, brings meaning. Given our drive toward sense-making (see Chapter 5), we also might wonder how such purpose(s), especially cosmic ones if there are any, fit with other aspects of life in this world, especially pain and suffering. Let us say that the purpose of human life has something to do with being perfectly happy (see Chapter 2); how does that fit with the fact that there is so much pain and suffering in the world?

S-MEANING A second part of the Meaning Triad is significance and connotes ideas like value, mattering, importance, impact, salience, and being the object of care and concern, depending on context. We contrast trivial chitchat about the mundane with deep discussions focused on important matters, referring to the latter as meaningful or significant. Your grandmother’s watch that you wear on your wrist is valuable and matters to you. Important to you is that particular song associated with a poignant season in life, for example, your first love. We view actions and events that have far-reaching implications as significant. We think they are also meaningful in cases where that significance has positive value. It is not immediately clear that really impactful but negative actions or events are meaningful, though this is worth discussing further (see Chapter 3). Finding a cure for some disease is meaningful, partly at least, because it has such a large positive impact on human health and society. We also talk about information being salient or significant: that such a large percentage of animals living under certain conditions are dying from a particular disease may be statistically significant or statistically meaningful. Alternatively, when something matters very little or not at all to us, we might say “That means nothing to me.” It was just a meaningless conversation; it was insignificant, inconsequential. That game did not matter. It was meaningless because the playoffs were already set. The outside does not matter; what is on the inside counts. That piece of information is not meaningful. Spending your life binge-watching shows on Amazon Prime and Netflix is meaningless; you do nothing that matters, you make no positive impact, you do nothing of importance, you waste your life in triviality. In all of these above examples, our focus is squarely within the realm of meaning.

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Like purpose, significance is connected to life’s meaning, and often in ways that directly link personal and cosmic concerns. For many people, cosmic concerns about the meaning of it all are also intensely personal. Given a temporally and spatially vast cosmos, and especially one that is also uncaring and silent, many worry that their individual lives are insignificant. If the entire show is insignificant, why think that the tiny, short-lived characters upon its stage matter?

I-MEANING Social scientists argue that our human sense-making and meaning-making drives go hand-in-hand. These drives are analogous to core biological drives like hunger, thirst, and sex. Some scientists have even argued that “all accounts of meaning converge at sense making” (Markman, Proulx, and Lindberg, 2013, p. 4). We search for order, pattern, and meaning in a world that often first presents itself in chaotic, random ways. We want the puzzle pieces of life to fit together properly. These puzzle pieces bear labels like “origins,” “purpose,” “significance,” “value,” “pain and suffering,” “death and ending,” and “prospects of life after death.” The mention of “purpose,” “significance,” and “value” should alert us to the idea discussed a bit later in this chapter that I-Meaning might be about making sense of, among other things, instances of the two other sides of the Meaning Triad. Over the course of our lives, we encounter aspects of the world that spark our curiosity to understand and successfully navigate the human condition. These aspects of the world give rise to questions for which we seek an explanatory framework (perhaps even a narrative framework; more on this in Chapter 5) in order to make sense out of them. They are like a home to which its owner returns to find ransacked, and who, in exasperation, exclaims, “What is the meaning of this?!” Like the confused and anxious homeowner, we lack important parts of the larger context, in this case life’s context. We desire to fill the existentially relevant informational gaps in our understanding of the universe we inhabit. We aim to understand life’s purpose and significance, if there are such things. Meaning as sense-making is asking what all this is about. We seek to fit it all together into a coherent, existentially satisfying whole. If the puzzle pieces of the human condition do not fit together as such, we might be tempted to join Shakespeare’s Macbeth in lamenting that the tale of the world is one that is “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 2).

WHICH MEANING? WHICH VALUE? Whenever there is more than one of something, questions about if and how they are related arise. In the present context, we have more than one kind of meaning. We have P-Meaning, S-Meaning, and I-Meaning. Are they related? If so, how? To understand what is at issue here, consider an instance of S-Meaning. Let us take S-Meaning as value had by qualitative experiences of pleasure and P-Meaning as purposes that explain actions such as lying, stealing, and murdering. Could someone

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have a meaningful life in terms of S-Meaning by purposefully living immorally? Would this combination of S- and P-Meanings ultimately make any sense, which is a question about I-Meaning? And what if there were additional sources of S-Meaning? What if psychological states like being captivated by, actively or authentically engaged in, consumed by, and satisfied or fulfilled by (assuming these are different from experiences of pleasure) exemplify or have S-Meaning? Might a subject have a meaningful life in terms of concern for and being consumed by purposefully (P-Meaning) counting blades of grass or copying out addresses from an old New York City phone book? Would this combination of S- and P-Meanings ultimately make any sense (I-Meaning)? Moreover, might psychological states like those just mentioned by themselves adequately constitute a meaningful life (call this subjectivism about meaning)? Or must a meaningful life also include bodily actions (and their effects) produced by those psychological states, in which case subjectivism could never account for more than part of a meaningful life (call this hybridism about meaning)? Or does subjectivism not account for any part of a meaningful life, but psychological states in the form of pleasure, concern for, being consumed by, etc., serve at most as evidence for or indicators of a meaningful life which consists of actions and their good results? An understanding of meaningfulness that completely excludes subjectivism as part of a meaningful life might appropriately be termed objectivism. If one reads contemporary discussions about what a meaningful life is, one will discover that people on all sides of the debate appeal to intuitions about which particular lives count as meaningful: couch potatoes who are fully satisfied (subjectivism); engaged agents whose relevant psychological states lead to the performance of the right sort of bodily actions with their relevant effects (hybridism); agents whose bodily actions produce good impacts on, say, other people or the environment (objectivism). Issues about the relationships between the different kinds of meaning will surface at various points in subsequent chapters.

Varieties of life-value How would you think through the similarities and differences between the following kinds of value that a life can have? Do each of the items in the list below represent distinct kinds of value? Or, do some actually refer to the same thing, though we name them differently? Are some causally related (that is, while distinct, perhaps one reliably causes another)?                

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

The best life A good life A life worth living An ethical life A happy life A fulfilled life A physically healthy life A meaningful life

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Finally, if we think of S-Meaning as a kind of value which is distinct from other kinds of value (e.g., moral value, aesthetic value), and possession of one kind of value could only be had at the exclusion of another, then would one kind of value be preferable to the other? For example, if one could only experience pleasure from immoral activity, thus excluding the possibility of deriving pleasure from moral activity, would one choose immoral over moral activity? Could the values be ranked in any principled way that would inform a choice of one over the other? Or would any ranking and choice be no more than a personal preference? Granted, we seem to live in a world where pleasure can be had from forms of activity that are moral in nature, but it also seems to be the case that there are more than a few occasions in which more pleasure could be had by being immoral. Is there any principled way to rank the S-value and the moral value in terms of weight or importance in such cases? To say the least, the issues here are deep and important, and deserve clarification and discussion.

MORE TO MEANING In addition to being about purpose, significance, and sense-making, life’s meaning is linked with other ideas too: origins, morality, pain and suffering, boredom, destiny and afterlife, etc. (each of which intersects with the Meaning Triad in important ways). All of these ideas are, in important and interconnected ways, wrapped up in the grand question of life’s meaning. The manner in which they all connect though is a matter of debate, because interpreting the question itself is challenging.

AMALGAM VS. SINGLE-QUESTION INTERPRETATIONS The most popular way to interpret the question, “What is the meaning of life?” is the amalgam interpretation. On this pluralist view, the question is not really a single question at all, but rather an amalgam of a long list of other questions that are of either a P-, S-, or I-Meaning kind and bear some relationship to one another. The traditional formulation of the question—What is the meaning of life?—on this view is simply a place-holder for these other questions and is itself not capable of being answered in that form. Though the traditionally formed question has no answer in that form, these other questions about purpose, significance, and intelligibility might provide an answer. We at least know what we ask when we ask them, so the thought goes. The amalgam interpretation often carries with it a suspicion of the traditional formulation, since that formulation makes use of the definite article (“the”), the word “meaning,” and the word “life,” which together, in the grammatical form in which they are found, contribute to a thorny interpretive challenge. Perhaps the best strategy according to many proponents of the amalgam interpretation, then, is to jettison the traditional formulation and focus on trying to answer some among this other cluster of questions that collectively embody what we are concerned about vis-à-vis life’s meaning. Though the amalgam interpretation is the most popular view among those writing on life’s meaning, there is another interpretation—let us call it the single-question interpretation—that is worth considering. Some philosophers working in the field

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think that the best way to interpret “What is the meaning of life?” is as a single question that is answerable in its traditional form, on its own semantic and grammatical terms. They think this is possible by prioritizing the sense-making connotation of “meaning” (I-Meaning). On this interpretation, asking about the meaning of life is first about seeking a sense-making explanation (perhaps even narrative explanation) for our questions and concerns about purpose, significance, value, worth, pain and suffering, ending, and so on. Contrary to the amalgam interpretation, on this view, the question of life’s meaning is asking for a single thing—a sense-making explanation. It is, of course, an explanation squarely focused on all this other meaning of life “stuff.” This explanation can be thought of as a worldview or metanarrative (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of metanarratives and worldviews). This is an organic interpretive strategy that seeks a single answer (e.g., narrative explanation) that unifies or integrates answers to all the sub-questions. Although the amalgam- and single-question interpretations disagree on how the broad array of sub-questions and concerns relate to the traditional formulation of the meaning-of-life question and perhaps, to a certain extent, to each other, deciding between them need not concern us in this book. The interpretations agree that life’s meaning is about many related ideas, ideas captured in the Meaning Triad and beyond. We will consider each part of the Meaning Triad—purpose, significance, and sense-making—in Chapters 2–5 and will turn our attention to other important ideas like the problem of evil, death, and afterlife in the remaining chapters. The reader will notice that even those later discussions have important connections with elements of the Meaning Triad discussed earlier in the book.

THE WORD “LIFE” Understanding the idea of life’s meaning is complicated not only because of the various ideas involved in the Meaning Triad but also because of specific words used in the traditional formulation of the question. In asking for the meaning of life, we are not, of course, asking for the meaning of the word “life.” However, determining the meaning of that word in the context of this question is, in fact, important. We will not know what the question means until we know what “life” means. Our questions here do not track the discussion about how being alive is different from being non-living or being organic is different from being inorganic. Rather, the range of options tracks ideas like the following: Life1 = individual human life (meaning of my life) Life2 = humanity as a whole (meaning of human existence) Life3 = all biological life (meaning of all living organisms collectively) Life4 = rough marker for those aspects of human life that have a kind of existential gravitas and are of immense concern and the subject of intense questioning by human beings Life5 = rough marker for the entire universe (what is the meaning of it all)

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Each of these possible meanings of “life” track interpretations of the question. This fits well with a view like the amalgam interpretation. The targets of our questions and concerns about meaning are varied in scope. We have questions about our own, personal existence as well as questions about the entire show, and one might think that questions about personal meaning are connected to questions about cosmic meaning. It is worth keeping these points in mind as we consider the question and its various aspects throughout the book.

THE DEFINITE ARTICLE Another potential obstacle is the question’s use of the definite article—the. Use of this word seems to imply that there is only a single meaning of life, which violates commonplace inclinations that meaning is the sort of thing that varies from person to person. What makes your life meaningful is different from what makes mine meaningful. Pursuing your career might be most fulfilling to you, whereas enjoying gardening might be most fulfilling to me. For this reason, many are suspicious of the traditional formulation of the question’s use of the definite article. There is reason, though, to question this suspicion. It might reveal confusion about what meaning is in the first place. Often, latent and unquestioned assumptions lurk about what kind of thing meaning is. In the example in the previous paragraph, it is assumed that meaning is primarily a matter of fulfillment. This is a view worth considering, but it is also debatable. Even if meaning were solely a matter of fulfillment, notice that there are ways to say that both (1) the meaning of life is a matter of being fulfilled and (2) sources of fulfillment are exceedingly diverse. Life’s meaning in this case is about being fulfilled (which is consistent across persons), but sources of fulfillment vary across persons. One might also reasonably think that there is a single meaning of life (at the cosmic level) that itself is consistent with a rich variety of ways to lead a meaningful life (meaning in life). Thinking through possibilities like this will connect with claims about what is true about the world, for example, whether there is a God with a plan for the cosmos and whether there is an overarching meaning to it all. In a case like this, there might be a single meaning of life, but the sense of meaning (e.g., P- or I-Meaning) in which there is a single meaning could be different from the sense of meaning (e.g., S-Meaning) in which there are varied meanings. Regardless of the complexities here, the point is that we should not too quickly dismiss the definite article as contributing to intractable theoretical and practical problems for thinking about life’s meaning.

MEANING AND GOD Albert Einstein (1879–1955) once said that “to know an answer to the question ‘What is the meaning of human life?’ means to be religious” (Einstein, 1935, p. 11). Others have theorized that religion itself, theistic or otherwise (Einstein evidently used “religious” in a non-theistic way), developed as an answer to humanity’s concern over meaning, and especially anxieties over death.

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Many people think (or just assume) that questions about life’s meaning directly connect to questions about God, religion, and the transcendent more generally. It is natural to think this given the connection between God, religion, meaning, purpose, value, and significance. For a large part of human history, and for many people still today, the prospects for meaning wax or wane with the truth or falsity of religious views. This is especially true when the meaning of life (cosmically focused) is in view, since in the minds of many individuals a meaning of life requires a purposeful agent over and above the physical space-time universe to imbue our lives and the cosmos with overarching purpose and significance. Asking about life’s meaning, especially as embodied in the traditional formulation, is partly tied to a kind of loss, the loss of a sort of transcendent sense-making that secured deep purpose and significance for human existence, and provided a powerful salve for existentially-inflicted wounds like suffering and death. For a significant portion of human history, there was an expectation by many, nurtured in a way of looking at the cosmos, that the universe is the product of a powerful, benevolent, personal, transcendent mind. Such a view of the world is hospitable to getting a unique kind of purpose, significance, and sense-making—in a word meaning—as part of the deep fabric of reality. Implicit in the background is an expectation that meaning resides in and flows down from a hospitable transcendent setting. In the modern world, that expectation still lingers (after all, it is not the sort of thing that can be easily gotten rid of).

Meaning of life vs. meaning in life In general, the phrase “meaning of life” is cosmically focused, whereas “meaning in life” is terrestrially, humanly focused. Meaning of life • Cosmic meaning • The meaning of the universe and everything in it • The meaning of a person’s individual life from the perspective of the cosmos (for example, meaning in the sense that both we and cosmos are created for a purpose) Meaning in life • Personal meaning • The meaning of an individual person’s life regardless of what is true about the universe as a whole The Meaning Triad relates to both levels. Cosmically, the triad results in the following list of questions: • Sense-making: What’s it all about? How does it all fit together? • Purpose: Why are we here? Were we created for a purpose? • Significance: Do our lives really matter in the grand scheme of things?

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Terrestrially, personally, the triad results in the following list of questions: • Sense-making: What is my life about? How does it fit together? Is it coherent? • Purpose: What should I do with my life? • Significance: Does my life matter to me? To my family, friends, and community?

Not everyone is comfortable with such strong connections between meaning and God. Some think that placing a condition of cosmic purpose and significance on meaning sets the meaning bar too high. Why think that we need that kind of purpose and significance in order to have real meaning? Even if there is no meaning of life, there can still be meaning in life (see “Meaning of Life vs. Meaning in Life”). We can find meaning in human pursuits, relationships, joys, and limited impacts. Others worry that in addition to God not being necessary for meaning, the presence of a theistic God (roughly, a rational, personal being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent), for example, might actually undermine meaning by threatening human autonomy. Insofar as one thinks that meaningful life requires a large dose of personal say-so over one’s life, then one might think that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, providentially guiding God creates some problems. Naturalistic objections notwithstanding, many philosophers and non-philosophers alike think that ultimate, cosmic meaning is what most of us really want and that such meaning is hard (probably impossible) to come by if the space-time universe is all there is, that is, if there is no God, and human beings are wholly material things that cease to exist at death. Many pessimistic naturalists agree with religious believers of all stripes who insist that God is necessary for ultimate meaning. The human predicament—without God—has a salient undercurrent of tragedy if there is no cosmic purpose and significance, and especially if there is no guarantee—grounded in omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence—that the last words in the universe are life, love, full and ultimate justice, and everlasting felicity. This tragic undercurrent is enough to threaten, if not undermine, the prospects of meaningful life, so the argument goes.

WHY WORRY ABOUT MEANING? The answer to the question posed in the title of this section is simply that we already worry about meaning prior to doing philosophy. Our desire for meaningful life finds expression in our novels, movies, diaries, conversations, and our deathbed contentment or lament. According to twentieth-century Freudian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990), “our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives” (Bettelheim, 1978, p. 3). Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) said that the human will to meaning comes prior to either our will to pleasure or will to power (Frankl, 2006, p. 99), though it is not clear what kind of priority he had in mind.

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Questions and concerns about life’s meaning, unlike some philosophical issues that seem pedantic or irrelevant to life (or both), have an existential, emotional pull. Though it can be easy to criticize philosophy for being out of touch with the real world, let us not forget that philosophy began—and begins—with the urge to find answers to many of our deepest questions, especially the deepest of them all, “What is the meaning of life?”

The Russian philosopher, S. L. Frank (1877–1950), forcefully captures our human preoccupation with the question of life’s meaning. These ‘accursed’ questions, as they are usually called, or rather this one question “concerning the meaning of life,” trouble and torment every human being in the depths of his soul. For a period of time, and even for a very long period, one can completely forget about this question. It is possible to submerge oneself in the ordinary and pressing interests of the present day, in material cares directed at the preservation of life, at the attainment of riches, contentment, or earthly success. It is also possible to submerge oneself in suprapersonal passions and ‘works’ – in politics, the battle of parties, and so on. But life is arranged in such a way that not even the most obtuse, materially ‘fat,’ and spiritually asleep man can avoid this question totally and forever: The inexorable fact of the approach of death and of its inevitable precursors, of aging and sicknesses, the fact of dying, of disappearance, of submergence into the irretrievable past of our entire earthly life with all the illusory significance of its interests – this fact is for every human being a dread and persistent reminder of the unanswered question that he has been avoiding: the question concerning the meaning of life (Frank, 2010, p. 2).

We wrestle with meaning in varied ways: when struggling to make an important decision about what to do with our lives, when trapped in a job that we hate, when wondering if there is more than the daily hum-drum, when diagnosed with a terminal illness, when contemplating the loss of a loved one, when feeling small while looking at the night sky, when wondering if this universe is all there is and why it is even here at all, when questioning whether life and love will have a lasting place in the universe or whether the whole show will end in utter and everlasting desolation and silence. You yourself may have already contemplated and worried about such matters. None of us is alone in having questions and concerns about life’s meaning. And though the question is big and unwieldy, this should not dissuade us from trying to understand it. If we put in the intellectual effort, we might find that we really can make progress in understanding what this question is all about. We may even find some answers along the way.

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CHAPTER SUMMARY In this opening chapter, we offered an historical, conceptual, and practical overview to orient the reader to the wide range of issues related to the meaning of life. Though some questions and concerns broadly connected to life’s meaning have a long and venerable history, preoccupation with meaning takes on new urgency in the modern world, especially in the wake of the so-called “death of God.” While many are suspicious of the question, especially in its traditional form—What is the meaning of life?—the Meaning Triad of purpose, significance, and intelligibility/sense-making helps us understand the sorts of issues most of us have in mind and what is at stake when we ask the question.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1 What happened in the modern world to prompt increasing, angst-laden questioning of life’s meaning? 2 Why are some people, including philosophers, skeptical of the question of life’s meaning? 3 Explain the Meaning Triad: purpose, significance, and intelligibility/sense-making. How might these common connotations of “meaning” help us understand the kind of request being made in, “What is the meaning of life?” 4 What is the difference between meaning in life and the meaning of life? 5 How does meaning relate to God, religion, and the transcendent? 6 Have you ever experienced circumstances in life that caused you to ask questions about meaning? What were they? How did you frame your questions about meaning? 7 Do you distrust someone who wants to tell you the meaning of life? If so, why? 8 Why is the question of life’s meaning often the subject of jokes?

• INTRODUCTORY FURTHER READING Baggini, Julian. 2004. What’s It All About? Philosophy & the Meaning of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cottingham, John. 2003. On the Meaning of Life. London: Routledge. Eagleton, Terry. 2008. The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goetz, Stewart. 2012. “The Meaning of Life.” In The Routledge Companion to Theism. Edited by Charles Taliaferro, Victoria S. Harrison, and Stewart Goetz, pp. 698–709. New York: Routledge. Landau, Iddo. 1997. “Why Has the Question of the Meaning of Life Arisen in the Last Two and a Half Centuries?” Philosophy Today 41: 263–269. ———. 2013. “Life, Meaning of.” In The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Edited by Hugh LaFollette, pp. 3043–3047. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Leach, Stephen, and James Tartaglia, eds. 2018. The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers. New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books. Thomson, Garrett. 2003. On the Meaning of Life. London: Wadsworth. Tolstoy, Leo. 2006. “A Confession.” In Spiritual Writings. Edited by Charles E. Moore, pp. 46–59. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

• ADVANCED FURTHER READING Hepburn, R. W. 1966. “Questions about the Meaning of Life.” Religious Studies 1: 125–140. Martela, Frank, and Michael F. Steger. 2016. “The three meanings of meaning in life: Distinguishing coherence, purpose, and significance.” The Journal of Positive Psychology 11:5: 531–545. Mawson, Timothy J. 2010. “Sources of Dissatisfaction with Answers to the Question of the Meaning of Life.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2: 19–41. Metz, Thaddeus. 2007. “New Developments in the Meaning of Life.” Philosophy Compass 2: 196–217. ———. 2013. Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seachris, Joshua W. 2009. “The Meaning of Life as Narrative: A New Proposal for Interpreting Philosophy’s ‘Primary’ Question.” Philo 12: 5–23. ———. 2019. “From the Meaning Triad to Meaning Holism: Unifying Life’s Meaning.” Human Affairs 29:4: 363–378.

• FREE INTERNET

RESOURCES

“History of Philosophy without any Gaps” (https://historyofphilosophy.net/). Metz, Thaddeus. "The Meaning of Life." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/). O’Brien, Wendell. “The Meaning of Life: Early Continental and Analytic Perspectives.” In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by James Fieser and Bradley Dowden (http://www.iep.utm.edu/mean-ear/). Seachris, Joshua W. “Meaning of Life: Contemporary Analytic Perspectives.” In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by James Fieser and Bradley Dowden (http:// www.iep.utm.edu/mean-ana/). Setiya, Kieran. “Philosophers should be Keener to Talk about the Meaning of Life.” Aeon (https://aeon.co/ideas/philosophers-should-be-keener-to-talk-about-the-meaningof-life).

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meaning and purpose Isabelle: “I wonder what my purpose is . . .” Hugo Cabret: “Everything has a purpose, clocks tell you the time, trains take you to places. I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured if the entire world was one big machine . . . I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.” (Martin Scorsese, Hugo) What religious claims contain that the very idea of a hypothesis does not is something that is arguably the most central aspect of religious cosmology: its claim to meaning. The religious impulse gives the believer’s life meaning. (Crane, 2017, p. 63)

CHAPTER SECTIONS • • • • • •

Purpose: What is it? Purpose and theism Sartre and essence versus existence Naturalism and purposes in life Naturalism and evolution Chapter summary

Meaning in the real world Naya is in conversation with a friend, Tobias, about whether or not a person’s life has a meaning. Tobias is confused about what would give life meaning, if it has any. He asks Naya what she thinks would be necessary for life to have meaning and she answers that an individual would have to be created by God. Tobias queries why this is required for life to have meaning, and Naya responds that God’s creation of a person would give that individual’s life a purpose. (continued)

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(continued) It is something like this, Tobias. You built your house for a purpose, so it is a thing with meaning. I painted this picture here for a purpose, so it has meaning. For something to have meaning it must be created for a purpose.

PURPOSE: WHAT IS IT? In June of 1931, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) dictated the following to his secretary about his life: My activities continue from force of habit, and in the company of others I forget the despair which underlies my daily pursuits . . . . But when I am alone and idle, I cannot conceal for myself that my life [has] no purpose, and that I know of no new purpose to which to devote my remaining years. (Russell, 2000b, p. 395) According to the contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf, the idea of purpose is in the minds of ordinary people when they think about the meaning of life: [W]hen people . . . ask about the meaning of life, they are evidently expressing some concern or other, and it would be disingenuous to insist that the rest of us haven’t the faintest idea what that is. . . . Rather than dismiss a question with which many people have been passionately occupied as pure and simple nonsense, it seems more appropriate to try to interpret it and reformulate it in a way that can be more clearly and unambiguously understood. Though there may be many things going on when people ask, “What is the meaning of life?”, the most central among them seems to be a search to find a purpose or a point to human existence. (Wolf, 2013, pp. 304–305)

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When people think of a purpose (goal, end, or aim), it is likely they have in mind a future good which is either itself the final/ultimate end or a means to such an end. Any action we perform in daily life is seemingly done for a purpose, where the purpose is typically referred to as a reason. For example, we are writing this book in order to provide an overview of the topic known as the meaning of life. Our writing of the book is an action, and the reason that explains our action is that we provide an overview of the topic known as the meaning of life. A reason is something mental in nature because it includes what philosophers refer to as content. Thus, a choice to (that we) write this book for a purpose involves what is mental in nature in two ways. First, a choice to write this book is a mental action whose content is expressible in a “that” clause, which in this case is “that we write this book.” Second, because we choose to (that we) write this book for the purpose that we provide an overview of the meaning of life, “that we provide an overview of the meaning of life” is the purpose that explains our writing. What explains our having purposes to act? Most plausibly, our purposes for acting are typically based on our desires and beliefs, which are themselves mental in nature and ultimately concerned with what is good. For example, if you chose to read this book for the purpose that you learn more about the meaning of life, then it is not unlikely that you desired that you learn more about the meaning of life and believed that reading this book would contribute to your knowledge. Similarly, if you believe that you ought to help your neighbor’s son with his homework because you promised that you would, then even though you desire to go to a movie this evening, you might choose to help your neighbor’s son with his homework for the purpose that you do what you ought to do, which is that you keep your promise and provide him help with his homework. In all of these examples, the purpose that explains the action describes a future state of affairs which is believed to be good. While not denying that there are mental purposes which explain our actions, some philosophers believe there are also internal or immanent purposes which are not mental in nature and had by biological organisms. Probably the most well-known proponent of this view of purpose was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. He maintained (Aristotle Physics 199a20–32; cf. Metaphysics 2.994b 9; 5.1013a 33; Politics 1.1252b 28) that plants grow for the sake of their fruit (for the purpose of yielding fruit) and produce leaves for the purpose of shielding that fruit. Plants also put down roots for the purpose of providing nourishment for their fruit. According to Aristotle, human beings, like plants, have parts with their respective purposes: human beings have eyes for the purpose of seeing, hearts for the purpose of pumping blood, legs for the purpose of moving about, etc. Moreover, a human being as a whole (as opposed to its parts) has an immanent purpose. Aristotle termed this purpose eudaimonia, which is variously translated in English as flourishing, well-being, or happiness, and he claimed it consists of virtuous activity which perfects (makes perfect) the human being who exhibits it. Aristotle believed that virtue comes most broadly in two forms, practical (ethical/moral virtue) and theoretical (intellectual virtue). So the more ethical (e.g., beneficent, courageous, patient) and contemplative

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a person is, the more that individual flourishes and enhances his or her well-being. Because virtuous activity is activity (action), it is explained in terms of purposes that are mental in nature and based in desires and beliefs.

Purpose and health Recent research in the social sciences reveals that a sense of purpose in life is associated with a number of beneficial outcomes, ranging from the seemingly (though not) mundane like a decreased risk of developing a slow walk, to lower levels of inflammation. While potential causal links are harder to discern and are currently being explored, what seems clear is that mechanisms for the link between a sense of purpose and positive health outcomes include both behavioral and biological. For example, those with a higher sense of purpose are more deliberate in taking care of their health, have better impulse control, and engage in healthier activities in general. This research is important, partly because it reveals the potential to develop new intervention studies and public health education initiatives.

PURPOSE AND THEISM Given this brief treatment of the idea of purpose, what, in Wolf’s words, are people searching for when they seek to find the purpose of human existence, the meaning of life as the purpose of life (P-Meaning of life)? One alternative is they are looking for an immanent purpose like that of eudaimonia suggested by Aristotle (about which we will have a bit more to say in Chapter 3). Another alternative is they are seeking a purpose that is mental in nature and which will explain their creation. To clarify this second alternative, consider how human beings make things. For example, we are typing the chapters of this book on our computers, which are objects that were created by very clever people for the purpose that information be created, saved, and transmitted. The automobiles we drive were created by equally clever individuals for the purpose of getting us from place to place. Shoes, tables, hockey sticks, pills, etc. are all objects created by people for purposes. Objects that are created for purposes are referred to as artifacts, while the individuals who design and produce them are called artificers. Artificers cause the existence of artifacts for purposes, and because an artifact receives its purpose from its artificer, the source of its purpose is external, as opposed to internal, in nature. Wolf believes that when people wonder about the meaning of life in terms of a purpose of life, they are more often than not wondering about whether they, though not inanimate like the artifacts they create, are nevertheless artifacts in the more general sense that they are caused to exist by an artificer for a purpose. If they are artifacts in this more general sense, then “God” (or the equivalent in some other language) is the name regularly given to the artificer. As we pointed out in Chapter 1, people who believe in the existence of God are nowadays standardly referred to as theists.

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Philosophers recognize that we humans often do not choose to raise the questions we face. Questions often come unbidden to us, and the question about whether there is a purpose of life is plausibly one such question. As James Tartaglia writes, “we cannot resist looking for purposes” (Tartaglia, 2016, p. 294). We are patients with regard to the question of life’s purpose that gives rise to this search, not agents. It comes to mind, whether we like it or not. The famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, in writing about his confrontation with questions about the purpose of his life, stated that he “began to experience moments of perplexity where life “froze,” as though [he] did not know what to do or how to live . . .” Tolstoy likened the reoccurring questions about life’s purpose to a disease, and concluded that “if all these questions continued to press on [him], [he] would have to find an answer to them” (Tolstoy, 2006, pp. 46, 47). If we cannot, at least initially, resist looking for a purpose of life, why is this so? Tartaglia believes we cannot resist wondering about an overall purpose of our own lives because, as we have already made clear, we invoke purposeful (sometimes called teleological, from the Greek word “telos,” which means purpose) thinking in our lives to explain our everyday actions (Tartaglia, 2016, p. 294). While what Tartaglia says is undoubtedly true, it also seems that our interest in the question about a purpose of life is explained in part by our belief that we are contingent beings/things, where a contingent being is one that, while it exists, might not exist and, therefore, needs a cause of its existence. Given we believe the moon, trees, sidewalks, buildings, and whatever other similar objects we might consider are contingent things, we are convinced there must be causes of their existence. And because we believe our own existence is contingent, we cannot help but seek a causal explanation for it. Therefore, in asking about the purpose of life, we are typically asking about the existence of a purpose for which we are caused to exist; we are typically wondering about the existence of a purpose for which we are created.

Does God have a purpose? The unavoidable intellectual quest for a cause of our existence inevitably raises the further question about whether there is a purpose for which we are caused to exist. If we do not dismiss this question as misguided and conclude there is an artificer who causes our existence for a purpose, a yet further unbidden question arises about whether the artificer itself has a cause and purpose for its existence. If the artificer is a necessary being, where a necessary being is one which exists and cannot not exist, then it could not be caused to exist (because it never came into existence) and, therefore, could not be created for a purpose. Thus, if we think of the meaning of life as the purpose of life, a necessary being’s life would have to be without meaning in the sense that it would not, because it could not, have a purpose. (continued)

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(continued) The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) maintained that we all believe in what he called the principle of sufficient reason, which is plausibly understood as the idea that everything can ultimately (finally or in the end) be made sense of. Given that our existence is contingent, its being purposefully caused would, assuming the purpose is reasonable or good, make sense of it. But if a necessary being cannot not exist, its existence could not be made sense of in terms of an explanation that brings about or causally produces its existence. It could not have a meaning of life in the sense of a purpose of life. Therefore, assuming everything can ultimately be made sense of, a necessary being’s existence would have to be made sense of and have meaning in some other way. We will comment on this topic a bit further in Chapter 5.

One additional point about our being contingent beings is warranted. If we are contingent beings, we are so in the present moment. The idea of being contingent is, strictly speaking, not a matter of having been caused to come into existence in the past. As the philosopher Richard Taylor states, It is no answer to the question, why a thing exists, to state how long it has existed. . . . This brings out an important point with respect to the concept of creation . . . . People tend to think that creation—for example . . . creation . . . by God—means creation in time, from which it . . . follows that if [we] had no beginning in time, then [we] cannot be the creation of God. This however, is erroneous, for creation means essentially dependence. If one thing is the creation of another, then it depends for its existence on that other, and this is perfectly consistent with saying that both are eternal, that neither ever came into being, and hence, that neither was ever created at any point of time. . . . Now if [we are] the creation of God, [our] relationship to God should be thought of in this fashion; namely, that [we depend] for [our] existence upon God, and could not exist independently of God. If God is eternal, as those who believe in God generally assume, then [we] may (though [we] need not) be eternal too, without that altering in the least [our] dependence upon God for [our] existence, and hence without altering [our] being the creation of God. (Taylor, 1963, pp. 88–89) Taylor’s point is that if theism is true and we are contingent beings who are created by God for a purpose, then we are being created or sustained in existence by God in the present moment for that purpose. Our being contingent and created by God is not, strictly speaking, a matter of our having been created at some initial

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point in time in the past (though it is compatible with such a beginning). Thus, Taylor would have us be vigilant when we read presentations of theistic accounts of the purpose of life. For example, Julian Baggini rejects creationist theories because “there is no reason why looking to the past will inform us about our present state . . .” (Baggini, 2004, pp. 20–21). But Taylor’s point is that such theories are essentially not looking to the past. They are looking at the present moment and claiming that we are now contingent beings who are being causally sustained in existence for a purpose.

PURPOSE, THEISM, AND DIGNITY If we are beings created for a purpose, can this purpose be known? The literary theorist Terry Eagleton writes that “some of those with religious faith believe that God’s presence makes the world more mysteriously unfathomable. . . . [G]od tends to thicken things rather than render them self-evident” (Eagleton, 2007, p. 45). The idea here seems to be that even if God creates us for a purpose, we cannot know what it is. According to some theists, this should come as no surprise because God is omniscient (God knows everything that can be known) and, therefore, possesses knowledge that vastly surpasses and dwarfs our own. Hence, it is unreasonable for us to think that we could understand the purpose of life on our own. As will become clear in a moment, not all theists have been convinced that this huge gulf between God’s knowledge and ours entails ignorance about the purpose of life. Before considering their thoughts, however, it is important to point out that some atheists hold that the idea of people being created for a purpose is in and of itself deeply problematic, regardless of whether or not that purpose is knowable by us. For example, Kurt Baier writes that [t]o attribute to a human being a purpose in [the sense of the purpose of an artifact] is not neutral, let alone complimentary: it is offensive. It is degrading for a man to be regarded as merely serving a purpose. If, at a garden party, I ask a man in livery, “What is your purpose?” I am insulting him. I might as well have asked, “What are you for?” Such questions reduce him to the level of a gadget, a domestic animal, or perhaps a slave. I imply that we allot to him the tasks, the goals, the aims which he is to pursue; that his wishes and desires and aspirations and purposes are to count for little or nothing. (Baier, 2000, p. 120) Regardless of whether or not one is a theist, it seems fair to say that Baier’s position is not obviously compelling. Perhaps in some contexts it would be offensive or degrading to ask a person about his or her purpose. But this is not always the case. We often ask others questions like “What do you do?” or “What’s your role in the business?”, and no offense is taken (Mawson, 2016, pp. 117–120). Perhaps Baier would assume no offense is taken in cases where we ask these questions because those whom we ask had a choice about their line of employment and the purpose that comes with

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it. What Baier thinks is problematic about the case of our being artifacts created by God is that we had no choice about either being created by God or having the purpose given to us. But even here, one might wonder about the cogency of Baier’s reasoning. While it clearly would be degrading and objectionable if the purpose of one’s life were either to serve as food for intergalactic travelers or to clean up their bodily wastes, it seems just as clear that there might be an acceptable and ennobling purpose of life. Thus, the atheist philosopher David Benatar writes that [t]he theist might plausibly respond that an omnibenevolent God, who is also omniscient and omnipotent, and who loves us, would have only positive, ennobling purposes for us. . . . Because of this, the theist could say . . . better to be [the subject of] a supreme being’s beneficent purpose than [not] . . . to have any . . . purpose at all. (Benatar, 2017, p. 37) But Benatar sees a couple of problems with this response on behalf of the theist. First, he claims it is a hand-waving account of the meaning of life, by which he means that being told that people are created for a good purpose by God is not to be told what that purpose is: “‘Serving God’s purposes’ is a placeholder for details that need to be provided” (Benatar 2017, 38). We make clear in the following subsection that not all theists have been hand-wavers about the details of the purpose of life. After this somewhat extended clarification, we will turn to Benatar’s second concern.

PURPOSE, THEISM, AND PERFECT HAPPINESS While some theists, as already indicated above, might insist on our inability to know God’s purpose in creating us, many others have maintained we actually know what that purpose is. For example, Christian theists are part of a long tradition (and it is the tradition with which we are most familiar) which maintains that the purpose of life is that we experience perfect happiness, where the meaning of the word “perfect” is often either taken for granted, replaced with words like “blessed” or “eternal,” or implied by such terms as “beatitude” or “felicity.” Thus, in the early middle ages, Saint Augustine (354–430) wrote that “[w]e wish to be happy, do we not? . . . Everyone who possesses what he wants is happy . . . . Therefore . . . whoever possesses God is happy” (Augustine, 2008, pp. 52–53). Not too long after Augustine, Boethius (480–524) wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in which his interlocutor Lady Philosophy reminded him that [t]he whole concern of men, which the effort of a multitude of pursuits keeps busy, moves by different roads, yet strives to arrive at one and the same end, that of happiness. . . . In all of these things it is obviously happiness alone that is desired; for whatever a man seeks above all else, that he reckons the highest good. But we have defined the highest good as happiness; wherefore each man judges that state to be happy which he desires above all others. . . . And you

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also, earthly creatures that you are, have some image, though hazy, in your dreams of your beginning; you see, though with a far from clear imagination yet with some idea, that true end of your happiness. Your natural inclinations draw you towards that end, to the true good . . . . (Boethius, 1973, pp. 233, 235 241) And a few centuries later, Saint Anselm (1033–1109) affirmed the idea that God created us (though we have stressed the point that the concept of creation is essentially present-oriented, we will nevertheless sometimes express the concept in the past tense for readability) for the purpose that we be happy: It ought not to be doubted that the nature of rational beings was created by God . . . in order that, through rejoicing in him, it might be blessedly happy. . . . Man, being rational by nature, was created . . . for the purpose of eternal happiness. (Anselm, 1998, pp. 315–316) Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274) agreed with Augustine, Boethius, and Anselm. According to Saint Thomas, “the ultimate end of man . . . is called felicity or happiness, because this is what every intellectual substance desires as an ultimate end, and for its own sake alone” (Aquinas, 1975, p. 102). Because “all creatures . . . are ordered to God as to an ultimate end” (Aquinas, 1975, p. 97), and “the highest good for man . . . is felicity” (Aquinas, 1975, p. 113), it follows that “man’s ultimate felicity consists only in the contemplation of God” (Aquinas, 1975, p. 125). John Calvin (1509–1564) also believed we were created for the purpose that we be perfectly happy. According to him, in order that God “may encourage us in every way, he promises present blessings, as well as eternal felicity, to the obedience of those who shall have kept his commands” (Calvin, 2008, II. 8. 4). Indeed, because the “holy patriarchs expected a happy life from the hand of God (and it is indubitable that they did), they viewed and contemplated a different happiness from that of a terrestrial life” (Calvin, 2008, II. 10. 13). And, wrote Calvin, “[h]e who confesses that there is nothing solid or stable on the earth, and yet firmly retains his hope in God, undoubtedly contemplates a happiness reserved for him elsewhere” (Calvin, 2008, II. 10. 15). More recently, the author of the hugely popular Narnian stories, C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), added his voice to the vast weight of the Christian tradition when he affirmed that the purpose for which God created human beings is that they be ultimately or finally perfectly happy. In his book The Great Divorce, which is about a fantastical bus trip from hell to heaven, Lewis had one of the ghostly heavenly visitors say “I wish I’d never been born . . . . What are we born for?” To which a spirit answers, “For infinite happiness . . .” (Lewis, 2001a, p. 61). Lewis wrote elsewhere that infinite, complete, or ecstatic happiness is the life of the blessed and he stated that we must suppose “the life of the blessed to be an end in itself, indeed The End . . .” (Lewis, 1992, p. 92). He maintained that a Christian “believes that men are going to live forever, [and] that they were created by God and so built that they can find their true and lasting happiness only by being united to God . . .” (Lewis, 1970, p. 109).

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But why, one might ask, do these Christian theists settle on perfect happiness as life’s purpose? As we have already suggested and will see again in Chapter 3, purposes are directed at positive value, at what is good (this is an example of a link between P-Meaning and S-Meaning), and it has seemed to most individuals who have seriously thought about the idea of there being a purpose of life, in the sense of a purpose for which we are created, that happiness is our greatest good, in the sense that it is what perfects us (makes us perfect). The contemporary atheist Michael Ruse acknowledges this connection between happiness and goodness when he writes that according to Christianity, the purpose of life is that we should spend eternity in blissful joy with [God]. . . . God did not create just for laughs or because he was bored. . . . He wanted good for us, and he had plans that we would spend eternity with him. You cannot understand the Christian religion without . . . seizing on its end-directed vision. (Ruse, 2018, pp. 195, 196) David Benatar’s second problem concerns the theist’s idea that God creates us for a purpose, even if that purpose is a good one. He claims that something like complete (perfect) happiness is “worth aiming at if one already exists, but [it] hardly provide[s] grounds for creating people who will have such [happiness]. The sort of meaning that the afterlife provides cannot explain why God would have created us at all” (Benatar, 2017, p. 39). One might, however, find it hard to see what the problem is here. Given that God exists, it seems that happiness is a worthwhile purpose for which to create beings who might enjoy that good. True, happiness cannot be a worthwhile purpose for those beings in the sense that they already exist with that purpose prior to their creation. But it is difficult to understand why, once they do exist, their purpose could not be that they experience perfect happiness. As already stated, human beings exist and seemingly create artifacts for purposes on a regular basis. These artifacts cannot have those purposes in the sense that they already existed with them before they are created. But once they are created, they exist with those purposes. It is important to make clear that we intend not to become involved with questions about whether a particular religious text supports a theist’s claim that God created people for the purpose that they be perfectly happy. This book is a philosophical discussion of the meaning of life, and appeals to religious texts are relevant only for those who accept the authority of those texts. While claiming to write a philosophical treatment of the meaning of life, Baggini, who is an atheist, asserts that “[n]o Christian or Jew . . . can provide an adequate answer to the question of why God created us by referring to their sacred texts” (Baggini, 2004, p. 16). But theists will find this charge odd, given that Baggini, as an atheist, does not accept the authority of these texts. They will point out that even if they could point to a particular text or texts to support their claims about God’s purposes, Baggini would presumably respond that such a source is argumentatively irrelevant for him because he does not believe or trust the source. Another point to think about here is that Baggini simply assumes sacred texts were written to answer a question like “What is the purpose of life?” Perhaps they were not written with the aim of providing an answer to this question. Perhaps they

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were written for other purposes, purposes which simply assume people already know what would and would not be a reasonable answer to the question “What is the purpose of life?” Perhaps the appeals of Christian theists to the idea of happiness as the purpose of life is something that resonates with anyone who is reasonable, regardless of whether or not they believe in God. For example, Eagleton writes that “[i]f the meaning of life lies in the common goal of human beings, then there seems no doubt about what this is. What everyone strives for is happiness” (Eagleton, 2007, p. 81). And in his book The Moral Landscape, the atheist Sam Harris contrasts the bad life of a young widow, who lives her entire life in the midst of a civil war and whose young daughter is raped, with the good life of a married couple with intellectually satisfying and financially rewarding careers. Harris writes that “if you don’t see a distinction between these two lives that is worth valuing, there may be nothing I can say that will attract you to my view of the moral landscape” (Harris, 2010, pp. 29–30). Harris believes we simply know the difference between happiness (well-being) and unhappiness, and that the former is worth having. In other words, Harris believes a theist and atheist agree about the goodness of happiness. What they disagree about is whether we are created by God to experience that happiness and, if we are, about the means to achieving it. So, if we follow Harris, the claim of the Christian theists cited above that God creates us for perfect happiness will likely not, at least initially, strike a person as odd. Anyone, whether religious or not, will recognize the plausibility of the claim without the need to appeal to a religious text. We close this section with a brief treatment of the concept of faith. According to Baggini, given the assumption that theists do not know the purpose of life, they need to have faith in God’s goodness to reveal life’s purpose at some appropriate point in either this life or the next. So religious believers should . . . agree that their faith does not reveal to them what the purpose of life is . . . . But they . . . have handed over responsibility for it to the highest being of all. (Baggini, 2004, p. 44) Baggini adds that while this approach to life’s purpose is not irrational in the sense of being against reason, it is non-rational in the sense that by denying knowledge of the purpose of life it sidesteps the need to provide a rational justification for the claim to know that purpose (Baggini, 2004, pp. 45, 47). It should be evident that Baggini mischaracterizes the position of the Christian theists quoted earlier in this section insofar as they claim to know the purpose of life. Given this knowledge, they might well agree with Baggini’s additional claim that [i]t seems odd to suppose that [the purpose of life] could be a mystery in this life and yet clear in the next. If one were to imagine dying and waking up in another world, how would that in any way solve the question of life’s meaning? (Baggini, 2004, p. 54)

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However, in opposition to Baggini’s characterization of faith in God, these theists would likely insist that this faith is not about being provided with knowledge of an unknown purpose of life, but more likely concerns something like a choice to trust God to fulfill this purpose about which they are already in the know.

SARTRE AND ESSENCE VERSUS EXISTENCE Theists believe that having a purpose of life as a created being is a good thing. A criticism of their belief comes from the pen of the French existentialist philosopher JeanPaul Sartre. Sartre argued (Sartre, 1973) that there is actually a benefit that comes from not being an artifact created by God. Being an artifact implies having an essence or nature that is fixed and not open to being freely chosen by the artifact itself. Loosely speaking, Sartre’s point is that an artifact is stuck with its nature, whether it likes it or not. For example, a pencil’s nature, which includes its size, shape, weight, etc., is chosen by its artificer. In Sartre’s catchy terminology, the pencil’s essence precedes its existence: the concept of the pencil in the maker’s mind determines what the pencil is (its essence) before it exists. The pencil has no say in the matter. The same point applies to any artifact. Thus, being a person and having the essence that comes with the purpose for which a person is created is fixed in the mind of God before the person exists. The individual has no choice about the matter. Sartre believed that this is something which is deeply problematic because it limits a person’s freedom. We return to the topic of freedom later in this chapter and again in Chapter 3.

The Truman Show (1998) Sartre’s (and, earlier, Baier’s) worries about humans having a purpose given to them is reminiscent of the movie The Truman Show, a touching, thoughtprovoking film in which an insurance salesman discovers that his life is actually a reality television show. The story of his entire life, from birth on, is largely authored by the reality show’s creator, and everyone, except poor Truman, is in on what is happening. In one sense, the purpose of Truman’s life is to be entertainment for a worldwide audience, despite his own sense that he has autonomy and his life is filled with authentic relationships. An important question is whether and to what extent having an essence prior to one’s existence is like the case of Truman.

But once again one might wonder whether being an artifact and having a purpose of life is all that problematic. Whether it is problematic might very well again depend upon what the purpose of life is. As we have already pointed out, if it is that one be food for intergalactic travelers, then one would naturally be bothered by having an essence prior to one’s existence. But if one’s purpose is that one be perfectly happy, then it is not obvious why one would and/or should be bothered by the fact that one has no choice about one’s essence. If Sartre were free to choose his

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essence because, in his terminology, his existence preceded his essence, what would he choose that it be? Could one take him seriously (could he take himself seriously), if he were to respond that he wanted to be free to choose not to have the essence that he be perfectly happy or as happy as he could be? Would he choose as his essence that he be less than as happy as he might be or that he be miserable? True, people sometimes choose a course of action that they believe will make them temporarily unhappy (e.g., they sometimes choose the dentist’s chair or the operating table over losing a tooth or long-term disability). Still, they do not choose such a course of action for its own sake, but because they believe pursuing that course of action stands a good chance of making them happier in the long run. Could anyone choose to be unhappy in the long run for its own sake? Could anyone choose to have the purpose that he or she be unhappy as an end state? If not, then the fact that one lacks the freedom to choose one’s essence, which comes from being an artifact with the purpose that one be happy, might not be all that bad, if it is bad at all. Freedom of choice might be a good thing to have in some circumstances, but to regard it as a good that is superior to the good of happiness seems at least questionable.

NATURALISM AND PURPOSES IN LIFE In explaining the concept of a purpose earlier in this chapter, we drew upon the idea of acting for purposes in life. To illustrate the idea of an action’s purpose, we pointed out that we are writing this book for a purpose. At least, it certainly seems to us that this is the case, just as it seems to us that we perform many other actions in life for purposes. But might we be mistaken? Might it be the case that we do not perform any actions for purposes? Might there be no such purposes and, thus, no meaning whatsoever in the form of purposes in life (no P-Meaning in life)? The answers one gives to these questions impact how one views other issues concerning purposes. For example, it has seemed to many people that if we can be wrong about there being purposes in life, then it is likely that we could not be right about there being a purpose of, and thus a meaning of, life, whether internal or external in nature. Hence, in what follows we devote a good bit of space to the topic of purposes in life. To understand the ins-and-outs of the discussion will require some intellectual labor. Sometimes, however, there is no way to avoid a bit of hard work. To begin our discussion, it is helpful to consider a well-known passage from the dialogue entitled the Phaedo, which was written by the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. In this passage, Plato describes how Socrates once heard someone reading from a book by an earlier philosopher, Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras, to Socrates’ initial delight, claimed that mind (intelligence) is responsible for all things and orders the world and its objects in the way (for the purpose) that is best. However, Socrates subsequently discovered that Anaxagoras did not acknowledge any explanatory role for purposes. While imprisoned in Athens, Socrates shared the following thoughts with friends who were visiting him: And to me his [Anaxagoras’] condition seemed most similar to that of somebody who—after saying that Socrates does everything he does by mind and

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then venturing to assign the causes of each of the things I do—should first say that I’m now sitting here [in prison] because my body’s composed of bones and sinews, and because bones are solid and have joints keeping them separate from one another, while sinews are such as to tense and relax and also wrap the bones all around along with the flesh and skin that holds them together. Then since the bones swing in their sockets, the sinews, by relaxing and tensing, make me able, I suppose, to bend my limbs right now—and it’s through this cause that I’m sitting here with my legs bent. And again, as regards my conversing with you, he might assign other causes of this sort, holding voices and air and sounds and a thousand other such things responsible, and not taking care to assign the true causes—that since Athenians judged it better to condemn me, so I for my part have judged it better to sit here and more just to stay put and endure whatever penalty they order. Since—by the Dog—these sinews and bones of mine would, I think, long ago have been in Megara or Boeotia, swept off by an opinion about what’s best, if I didn’t think it more just and more beautiful, rather than fleeing and playing the runaway, to endure whatever penalty the city [Athens] should order. But to call such things causes is too absurd. (Plato, 1998, 98C-99A) Socrates was suggesting something like the following to his friends: When we go to explain our bodily actions like talking, walking, and running, it is misguided to think that we can ultimately explain them completely in terms of material (physical) causes alone, without any reference to purposes. Socrates said it is true that if, contrary to what was actually the case, he had fled to the city of Megara, then his bones and sinews would have been caused to move in certain ways to get him there. However, it is also true that in such a case the movements of his bones, sinews, and body to Megara would in turn have ultimately been explained by the purpose for which Socrates was fleeing his cell in Athens. This purpose would have been something like “that I save my life.” Moreover, Socrates went on to point out (Plato, 1998, 99B), there is a distinction between those things, what philosophers call necessary conditions (which in the present case are Socrates’ bones, sinews, etc. and their movements) without which this purpose could not explain the bodily actions, and the purpose itself. To maintain that the necessary conditions of the bodily actions are the explanations for them would, Socrates claimed, be a most serious mistake.

Necessary and sufficient conditions On the one hand, if X is a necessary condition of Y, then Y cannot exist or occur without the existence or occurrence of X. For example, if having earned 128 credits is a necessary condition of graduating from an American college or university, then graduating cannot occur without earning 128 credits. Or if scoring more goals is a necessary condition of defeating one’s opponent, then one cannot defeat one’s opponent without scoring more goals.

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On the other hand, if X is a sufficient condition of Y, then the existence or occurrence of X guarantees the existence or occurrence of Y. For example, if being happy is sufficient for experiencing pleasure at some point in life, then one’s being happy guarantees that one has experienced pleasure at some point in one’s life. But X being a sufficient condition of Y is not the only way for Y to exist or occur. Winning a million dollars in the lottery is sufficient for obtaining that amount of money, but you could also earn that amount of money by working. Finally, in some cases, X can be both a necessary and a sufficient condition of Y. For example, scoring more goals can not only be necessary for defeating one’s opponent, but it can also be sufficient for defeating one’s opponent.

THERE ARE NO PURPOSES IN LIFE Socrates held that we all intuitively grasp the difference between a causal and a purposeful (teleological) explanation, and he maintained we all believe, at least initially, that our actions are ultimately explained solely in terms of irreducible (cannot be broken down into or analyzed in terms of anything else) purposes. However, some philosophers, while not questioning we believe what Socrates said we believe about the purposeful explanations of our actions, deny that what we believe is true. They deny that our belief is true because they think the purposeful explanations of our actions can in principle be reduced to or replaced by physical causal explanations like those that explain the movements of our bones and sinews. Many of these philosophers make this denial on the basis of a commitment to the philosophical view known as naturalism, which, as we stated in Chapter 1, is broadly speaking a view that denies the existence of an afterlife and any appeal to God or souls to explain the existence of objects and events in the material world. Explanations in terms of God and souls are excluded because they are essentially purposeful in nature (God and souls act for purposes). While there are different versions of naturalism (Goetz and Taliaferro, 2008), the strongest form of it, which is the one we are considering in this section, holds that no object or event in the material world is ultimately explained by an irreducible purpose. While we might presently make use of purposeful explanations (because, say, we do not know the real causal explanations which, presumably, can be stated in terms of chemistry, physics, etc.), in principle at least everything is ultimately explicable without any mention of purposes. And, if ultimately there are no irreducible purposeful explanations of our actions, there is not only no P-Meaning of life but also no P-Meaning in life. Thus, as the naturalist Alex Rosenberg writes, “[w]hat naturalists really fear is . . . that much of what we cherish as meaningful in human life [including our acting for purposes] is illusory” (Rosenberg, 2011b). Because it might be difficult for readers to believe, as it was difficult for Socrates to believe, that someone would seriously embrace the ultimate exclusion of irreducible

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teleological explanation, we think it best to let proponents of this kind of naturalism speak for themselves. We begin with some thoughts of the evolutionary biologist and naturalist Richard Dawkins. According to Dawkins in The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, a supernatural explanation never provides a true explanation of anything: Indeed, to claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained. Why do I say that? Because anything “supernatural” must by definition be beyond the reach of a natural explanation. It must be beyond the reach of science and the well-established, tried and tested scientific method. To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say “We don’t understand it” but to say “We will never understand it, so don’t even try.” . . . The whole history of science shows us that things once thought to be the result of the supernatural— caused by the gods (both happy and angry), demons, witches, spirits, curses, and spells—actually do have natural explanations: explanations that we can understand and test and have confidence in. There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin . . . . (Dawkins, 2012, pp. 21–22) At this juncture, one might reasonably wonder what Dawkins believes a supernatural, as opposed to a non-supernatural or natural, explanation is. He gives us an idea of what he believes the difference is between them in the following comments: People sometimes say, “Everything happens for a reason.” In one sense this is true. Everything does happen for a reason—which is to say that events have causes, and the cause always comes before the event. . . . That is the true sense in which “everything happens for a reason”, the sense in which “reason” means “past cause”. But people sometimes use reason in a very different sense, to mean something like “purpose”. They will say something like “The tsunami was punishment for our sins” or “The reason for the tsunami was to destroy the strip clubs and discos and bars and other sinful places.” It is amazing how often people resort to this kind of nonsense. (Dawkins, 2012, p. 223) Piecing things together as best as we can, it is not implausible to think that Dawkins believes a supernatural explanation is an explanation in terms of an irreducible purpose, reason, or goal. By contrast, a natural explanation is a physical causal explanation, where a physical causal explanation is the kind of explanation typically sought by science in terms of one event producing or necessitating another. Other naturalists follow Dawkins in differentiating between causal and teleological explanations but go further than he does in explicitly addressing how the distinction

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applies to our own, as opposed to God’s, actions. The following is Rosenberg’s thought about the topic: Our conscious thoughts are very crude indicators of what is going on in our brain. We fool ourselves into treating these conscious markers as thoughts about what we want and about how to achieve it, about plans and purposes. We are even tricked into thinking they somehow bring about behavior. We are mistaken about all of these things. . . . You cannot treat the interpretation of behavior in terms of purposes and meaning as conveying real understanding. . . . [T]he individual acts of human beings [are] unguided by purpose . . . . What individuals do, alone or together, over a moment or a month or a lifetime, is really just the product of the process of blind variation and environmental filtration operating on neural circuits in their heads. (Rosenberg, 2011a, pp. 210, 213, 244, 255) What about a conversation between two or more people, which involves movements of mouths that result in spoken words? Are these movements and words purposeful in nature? Though we most certainly believe they are, Rosenberg, as a naturalist, insists they are not. He writes about the nineteenth-century French diplomat Talleyrand standing in a palace and firings in his hippocampus . . . sending sharp wave ripples out across his neocortex, where they stimulated one neural circuit after another, until combined with firings from the pre-frontal cortex and ventral striatum, and doubtless a half dozen or more other regions of Talleyrand’s brain, causing his throat, tongue, and lips to move and him to speak. No [purposeful] narrative to report here—just one damn electrochemical process after another. (Rosenberg, 2018, p. 160) Rosenberg recounts how Talleyrand spoke with others at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which followed the defeat of Napoléon at Waterloo. Though the Congress was ostensibly convened for the purpose of achieving a stable European order, according to Rosenberg [i]t had no purpose, and neither did the machinations of any of its participants. In fact, none of them—not Metternich, not Talleyrand, not Castlereagh, and not Tsar Alexander—came to the Congress with any purpose. There weren’t and indeed aren’t any purposes . . . [though there] was and is the appearance of purpose. (Rosenberg, 2018, p. 231; our emphasis) In sum, human behaviors aren’t really driven by purposes, ends, or goals. . . . Every behavior that looks like it’s driven by a purpose is just the result of physical processes, like those of blind variation and natural selection uncovered by Darwin . . . . (Rosenberg, 2018, p. 206)

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However, because the belief that we act for purposes “is bred in the bone, we have even more trouble shaking it than we do belief in God” (Rosenberg, 2018, p. 239). According to Rosenberg, real (correct) explanations of our behavior must be purposeless in nature. David Armstrong, another naturalist, agrees: Naturalism I define as the doctrine that reality consists of nothing but a single all-embracing spatio-temporal system. . . . [I]f the principles involved [in the spatio-temporal system] were completely different from the current principles of physics, in particular if they involve appeal to mental entities, such as purposes, we might then count the analysis as a falsification of Naturalism. But the Naturalist need make no more concession than this. (Armstrong, 1978, pp. 261, 262) Richard Rorty is yet another naturalist who concurs with Rosenberg and Armstrong about naturalism’s ultimate exclusion of mental explanations: Every speech, thought, theory, poem, composition and philosophy will turn out to be completely predictable in purely naturalistic terms. Some atomsand-the-void account of micro-processes within individual human beings will permit the prediction of every sound or inscription which will ever be uttered. (Rorty, 1979, p. 387) And here is what one other naturalist David Papineau has to say about explaining events in the material world: We may not know enough about physics to know exactly what a complete “physics” might include. But as long as we are confident that, whatever it includes, it will have no ineliminable need for any distinctively mental categorizations, we can be confident that mental properties must be identical with (or realized by) certain non-mentally identifiable properties. (Papineau, 2002, p. 41) When I say that a complete physics excludes psychology, and that psychological antecedents are therefore never needed to explain physical effects, the emphasis here is on “needed”. I am quite happy to allow that psychological categories can be used to explain physical effects, as when I tell you that my arm rose because I wanted to lift it. My claim is only that in all such cases an alternative specification of a sufficient antecedent, which does not mention psychological categories, will also be available. (Papineau, 1993, p. 31n. 26) A significant implication of the naturalism advocated by these philosophers is that not one of them purposefully writes his work in defense of naturalism. If they are right, their books and papers, though seemingly written for the purpose of defending

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naturalism, are ultimately explicable in terms that make no mention of purposes or anything else that is mental in nature. We leave readers to contemplate not only the implication of naturalism for their own seemingly purposeful actions of reading and thinking about the contents of this book but also the implication of naturalism more generally for meaning as purpose in life.

Summing up the strong naturalist position • In principle, there are no ultimate and irreducible purposeful (teleological) explanations. • In principle, everything that has an explanation has a non-purposeful explanation. • Our actions have explanations, so in principle they have non-purposeful explanations. • Therefore, not only is there no purpose of life, but also there are no purposes in life.

PURPOSES AND THE FUTURE As we stated earlier when we introduced the idea of purpose, on the face of it a purposeful explanation seems to be future oriented in nature in the sense that it explains an action in terms of a goal that is referred to in the content of the purpose. For example, if you are reading this book for the purpose of understanding what philosophers have thought about the meaning of life, you aim to acquire an understanding (something you believe is good) that you do not presently possess. By contrast, causal explanation is regarded as either past- or present-oriented. For example, if we look for the cause of a tree lying flat in the forest we might discover that it was struck by lightning and then fell. Or if we look for the cause of the movement of two perfectly interlocking gears, we might find that the movement of one is simultaneously producing the movement of the other. Michael Ruse, a naturalist, who unlike those just discussed, apparently concedes the existence of what is irreducibly mental in nature, maintains that purposeful explanations are nevertheless really forms of (reducible to) past-oriented causal explanations. Here is what he has to say: Causes come before effects. But do they always? Take the case of a graduate student trying to get a doctoral degree. She has to take a number of courses and examinations and then write and defend a thesis. Her aim in life is getting that degree. Here surely we could say that the future is reaching back and influencing the present. The degree that she will receive in the future is the cause of her taking courses today. Yet can this possibly be so? All too often,

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students drop out and give up. Or they fail their exams and get kicked out of the program. . . . A solution is to regroup and argue that the cause of her actions today is not the actual fact of getting the degree in the future (which may or may not come to fruition) but rather her intention or hope or desire to get that degree. These psychological motivations may make reference to an imagined future, but they exist today. . . . The desires may well be the same for both the successful and for the unsuccessful student. . . . My family and I enjoy fresh bread from the local bakery, but when we try to use a regular knife to cut a loaf that is still warm and steaming, the result is not good. The bread is much too squishy. But we have a solution, namely a serrated knife that can cut fresh loaves with a sawing motion. Here too we can see a reference to the future: I purchase a knife now in order to cut bread in the future. The knife as it exists now is to be explained or understood by reference to bread-cutting still to come. Even if the knife snaps before use, there is no missing goal object. My past and present intention, transferred to the knife, caused it to be purchased in its serrated form, and this holds true even if the knife is never used as it was intended. (Ruse, 2003, pp. 4–5) Because he (and, for the record, we) cannot understand how that which has not yet happened, and might not ever happen, can cause an event in the present to occur, Ruse asserts that what causes present actions are the occurrences of relevant past and present mental (he calls them psychological) events such as desires and beliefs to perform those actions. It is important to understand that Ruse’s assertion that beliefs and desires are the causes of actions is different from the view that beliefs and desires are, as we explained earlier, the bases (necessary conditions) of actions performed for purposes. To return to one of our earlier examples, let us assume you desire to learn more about the meaning of life and believe that reading this book will facilitate this. So you choose to read this book for the purpose that you learn more about the meaning of life. According to Ruse, what must be the case is that your desire and belief cause your choice to read this book and the reading of it. Purposeful explanation must be reducible to causal explanation. Otherwise, there is no real explanation of your action. While the explanation of your action cannot, as Socrates pointed out, be reducible to physical events like those described in chemistry and physics (as the strong naturalists maintain), it still must be, contrary to what Socrates seemingly claimed, causal in nature. We need not go any further into why Ruse believes actions must have causes (beyond noting that he is a naturalist). But what is worth thinking about in relationship to the meaning of life is the issue of human freedom: does Ruse believe we are free to make causally undetermined choices in the sense that while we chose one way for a purpose, we might have chosen some other way for a different purpose in the very same circumstance? In light of what Ruse thinks about the causation of our actions, it will probably not come as a surprise that he maintains all of our actions, including the choices we make and regard as “free,” are causally determined (see Ruse, 1987; 2018, pp. 187–194). Thus, if we assume it makes sense to talk about determined

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choices and we made a choice in a particular situation, we could not, given causal determinism, have chosen otherwise in the same situation. Ruse shares a personal illustration of his belief that actions must have causes. He explains how his daughter, Emily, decided that she would become a lawyer. She was admitted to a law school in New Orleans, Louisiana, and strongly desired to go there, but because Louisiana law is unique in the United States with its partial basis in French law, and Emily wanted to practice law in Florida, she had to make a choice. According to Ruse, there are [t]wo forces, [and] one prevails—she . . . stays in Florida. . . . [Y]ou can explain why she stayed in Florida. Given Emily’s purpose—to get a decent job as a lawyer in Florida—staying in Florida for law school was the stronger force for making her decision. (Ruse, 2018, p. 194) So Emily chose to go to law school in Florida because the desire to stay in Florida was stronger and causally determined her to choose as she did. But, one might ask, is it really necessary to maintain, as Ruse does, that futureoriented purposeful explanations are forms of past/present causal explanations in terms of beliefs and desires? Why, except for the fact that naturalism requires it, could not purposeful explanation be an irreducibly different kind of explanation than causal explanation? With a purposeful explanation, a person conceives of a future as in some way or other good, is attracted by that goodness, and chooses and/or intends to bring about that envisioned good state of affairs. As Ruse points out, the person might or might not be successful in realizing that state of affairs. But regardless of whether he or she is successful, is it necessary to maintain that a desire and/ or a belief causally determines the mental choice and ensuing action that might or might not be successful? Why could it not be the case that when a reason ultimately explains the choice or intention and ensuing action, that explanation is the end of the explanatory story, just as when a cause ultimately explains an event, that is the end of that explanatory story? There are two other issues related to purposeful explanation which we briefly present for consideration. First, just what does it mean to say, as Ruse does, that persons always choose to act for the stronger desire or belief? In what does the strength of a desire or belief consist? In its felt strength? More than a few people insist that there have been occasions in life when they felt very strongly that they wanted to do something but nevertheless chose, because of what they believed they ought to do, another activity instead (e.g., a person chose to keep the promise to help the neighbor’s son with his homework, even though she wanted more strongly to go to the movie). If Ruse were to say that this is not possible, then one might wonder about what makes one desire or belief stronger than another conflicting belief or desire. If Ruse were to insist that the stronger desire or belief is just the desire or belief on which a person acts, then his claim that we are always causally determined to act by the stronger desire or belief is true by definition (it is not, say, an empirical discovery of psychology), and there is no point in trying to present a counterexample to his position because no counterexample can possibly be given.

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Second, if one believes that one has the freedom to choose in either of two ways and one’s choice, whichever it is, is not causally determined, the explanation of one’s having this belief need not be that one believes this kind of freedom is more valuable than things being causally determined. Ruse writes that [i]f someone starts trotting out the old chestnut that God gave us the great gift of free will and this made moral evil possible, one can only stand in horror at a deity who thinks the free will of Heinrich Himmler outweighs the pain and suffering of Anne Frank, or of Sophie Scholl whose life ended on the guillotine, because she belonged to the White Rose group opposing Hitler. (Ruse, 2018, p. 204; what Ruse is describing here is the use of free will to answer the problem of evil against theism, which we will discuss in Chapter 6) But one might believe we have the kind of freedom that leaves one free to choose otherwise in the very same circumstances because of what one is aware when one chooses (e.g., one is aware that one’s choice is not causally determined). One might believe that one has this type of freedom without valuing it either highly or at all. If one believes one’s life is going and will continue to go well in terms of it being S-Meaningful, one might understandably not care at all about whether one has the freedom to choose otherwise. But if one believes things are not going and will continue not to go very well in terms of having an S-Meaningful life, unless there is a change in one’s circumstances going forward, then one might understandably desire the freedom to choose so as to change those circumstances. So whether or not one is and/or cares about being causally determined might be important to issues related to living an S-Meaningful life.

NATURALISM AND EVOLUTION There is one other issue concerning naturalism that merits attention at this point. That issue is evolution. As Baggini rightly points out, according to the “standard naturalist story about the origins of human life” (Baggini, 2004, p. 7), human beings are the culmination of an evolutionary story that leaves no explanatory room for purposes. Baggini writes that according to one such story presented by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, individual organisms are survival machines “built according to the instructions encoded in DNA . . . with the ‘purpose’ of ensuring the survival of the gene, not the organism itself” (Baggini, 2004, p. 8). Baggini goes on to say that “I needed to put ‘purpose’ in scare-quotes because . . . genes are not designed to fulfill any purpose, nor do they have desires or goals, conscious or otherwise. Genes simply survive . . .” (Baggini, 2004, p. 8). On the naturalistic evolutionary story, evolution has no purposes, so one is wrong if one thinks that the survival of genes, organisms, or anything else is evolution’s purpose. Certain changes occur for no purpose whatsoever and some of those changes prove to be adventitious for survival while others do not. Hence, the standard naturalistic evolutionary

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account of our existence is deeply at odds with an explanation of our existence in terms of God creating us for a purpose. According to naturalistic evolutionists, there is no meaning of life. Does a denial of naturalistic evolution entail a denial of evolution per se? If one understands evolution as essentially descent by modification from a common ancestor (e.g., alterations of an ancestral genome over the course of vast periods of time led to the existence of the human body), then the answer is “No.” One could be a theistic evolutionist who affirms descent by modification from a common ancestor but believes that God purposefully guided the process. When God guided the process (e.g., only at the beginning or at the beginning and subsequent points) might be something that is forever beyond one’s intellectual purview. What a theistic evolutionist would insist upon is that there is nothing philosophically or scientifically problematic with God’s purposefully causing events at one or more points in the evolutionary story, given that there is nothing philosophically or scientifically problematic with human agents purposefully causing events to occur at one or more points in the material world. In other words, if human beings can purposefully cause events to occur in their own and other material bodies, then there is no reason to think God could not purposefully cause events to occur in the evolutionary chain which ultimately resulted in the existence of the human body. It is perhaps because they understand the implications of purposeful human agency for the issue of divine agency that naturalistic evolutionists like Armstrong, Dawkins, Papineau, Rorty, and Rosenberg go to such lengths to deny the ultimate explicability of our actions in terms of irreducible purposes.

CHAPTER SUMMARY “What is the purpose of life?” is one way of understanding the question “What is the meaning of life?” We have mentioned the idea of happiness as the purpose of life at various points in this chapter. Happiness is clearly something that we regard as having value and, whether or not we believe in a perfect form of it beyond this life, it is something we hope to experience to a significant degree in this life. Therefore, not surprisingly, another way of thinking about the meaning of life is in terms of value. “What is the meaning of life?” is often understood as “What, if anything, makes life worth living?” where what makes life worth living is something that has value. Meaning as value (S-Meaning) is the subject of the next chapter.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1 What is the difference between the purpose of life and purpose in life? 2 What concerns have philosophers raised about the purpose of life? Do you find them plausible? Why or why not? 3 Do you find the thought that you have been created with and for a purpose(s) unsettling or comforting? Why or why not? 4 Is it reasonable to maintain that the purpose of life is perfect happiness? 5 How do the naturalists mentioned in this chapter define “naturalism”?

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6 Do you believe it is reasonable to maintain that a purposeful action is causally determined? Give reasons for your view. 7 If an object has a purpose, is it more reasonable to hold that the purpose has an external source or that it is internal to the object?

• INTRODUCTORY FURTHER READING Baggini, Julian. 2004. What’s It All About?: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life. Chapters 1 and 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Froese, Paul. 2016. On Purpose: How We Create the Meaning of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Landau, Iddo. 2017. Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World. Chapters 10 and 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruse, Michael. 2018. On Purpose. Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press. Stace, Walter T. 2000. “Man against Darkness.” In The Meaning of Life, 2nd Edition. Edited by E. D. Klemke. pp. 84–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• ADVANCED FURTHER READING Goetz, Stewart. 2008. Freedom, Teleology, and Evil. London: Bloomsbury. Taylor, Richard. 1996. Action and Purpose. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Woodford, Peter. 2016. “Neo-Darwinists and Neo-Aristotelians: How to Talk about Natural Purpose.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 38:4.

• FREE INTERNET RESOURCES “Does Life Have a Purpose? Evolutionary Science Would Argue Against It” Marcelo Gleiser Orbiter (https://orbitermag.com/does-life-have-a-purpose/). “Is There Purpose in Biology?” Mark Moring Orbiter (https://orbitermag.com/ is-there-purpose-in-biology/). “People Who Feel They Have a Purpose in Life Live Longer.” NPR (https://www.npr. org/sections/health-shots/2014/07/28/334447274/people-who-feel-they-havea-purpose-in-life-live-longer). “A Reason to Believe.” American Psychological Association (https://www.apa.org/ monitor/2010/12/believe). “Reason to Live: Having purpose matters. Science proves it.” Orbiter (https://orbit ermag.com/purpose/).

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meaning and significance I: value Posing the conundrum, “Is life worth living?” [William James] replied: “That depends on the liver.” This, I submit, is a profound pun. One’s sense of the worthwhileness of life—and, with that, its meaning—owes much to one’s health, physical and mental. Indeed, it has been said that someone who needs to ask such questions is already sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. (Gay, 1991, p. 126)

CHAPTER SECTIONS • • • • • • •

Value and its different forms A hedonistic understanding of happiness Naturalism, value, and meaning Naturalism and morality Being good, rationality, and naturalism Value and authenticity Chapter summary

Meaning in the real world Zack has been through a lot lately. He is trying to make ends meet at a job he really doesn’t like. He strives to be a good family member, friend, employee, and contribute in positive ways to his community. He thinks that it is important to be just and kind. He also wants to be happy, and he hasn’t been very happy lately. He wonders how much he should prioritize his own happiness. Is being happy why he (and the rest of us) is here on earth? Does the world even cooperate with his (and our) desire to be happy? He also looks around (continued)

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and sometimes sees what appear to be really happy people doing some pretty terrible things. In moments of honesty, he has wondered to himself: why should I be moral if it gets in the way of my happiness? And what about his say-so and desires, shouldn’t he be able choose his own path to happiness and meaning?

VALUE AND ITS DIFFERENT FORMS At the beginning of Chapter 2, we quoted the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s statement, made in 1931, that his life had no purpose. In the same year, the historian of ideas Will Durant wrote to Russell that “I am attempting to face, in my next book, a question that our generation . . . seems always ready to ask . . .—What is the meaning or worth of human life?” (Russell, 2000b, p. 443). Russell, without questioning the connection between meaning and worth, responded “I am so sorry to say that at the moment I am . . . convinced that life has no meaning whatever, and that being so, I do not see how I can answer your questions intelligently” (Russell, 2000b, p. 445). Recently, the philosopher Iddo Landau has written in terms of meaning as purpose that [i]t is not surprising that [people] relate meaningfulness to ends [purposes], since we commonly attribute value to things by using teleological . . . instrumental explanations that relate means to ends. . . . The teleological paradigm . . . is one that we commonly use to ascribe value to things; to understand why things are of value, we often search for their goal. (Landau, 2017, pp. 135, 136) Stated slightly differently, Landau believes that means pursued for purposes (ends) derive their value (worth) from the value of the ends to which they are the means. And the value or worth of the end gives the end meaning. So if there are real purposes in life, which we will assume there are for the sake of discussion, then P-Meaning is explained by S-Meaning.

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Because the issue of worth or value looms large in discussions of both the meaning of and in life, both of which were discussed at length in Chapter 2, it is appropriate and necessary at this time to introduce some terminology that concerns the issue of value which, while it might seem burdensome and pedantic, will prove helpful at various points going forward. Most generally for our purposes, we will think of value as coming in two fundamental forms, namely good and evil. We begin with good. According to Terry Eagleton, goods (things that are good) like power, wealth, honor, and freedom seem to many people either too trivial, or too instrumental, to count as the meaning of life. Power and wealth, for example, belong fairly obviously to the instrumental category; and anything which is instrumental cannot have the fundamental quality which the meaning of life seems to demand. (Eagleton, 2007, p. 88) The term instrumental good is standardly used to refer to something whose goodness is derived from that thing’s leading to either something else that is itself good  or the diminishment of something that is evil (where this diminishment is good). In strictest terms, an instrumental good is a species of the genus extrinsic good, where an extrinsic good is one which gets its goodness from that thing’s relationship to some other good. While some people believe there can be an extrinsic good which is not instrumental in nature (e.g., a thing might derive its goodness from being caused by another good), most individuals think of extrinsic good as exclusively instrumental in nature, and for purposes of simplicity we will do so as well. As Eagleton explains matters of value, most people think of things like power and wealth as instrumental goods because they ultimately derive their goodness from their relationship to some other good that is fundamental. Philosophers usually refer to a fundamental good as an intrinsic good, where by “intrinsic good” they mean something that is good but does not derive its goodness from its relationship to some other good. Something that is intrinsically good is good in and of itself. In Eagleton’s example of instrumental value, people ordinarily think of the instrumental goodness of power and wealth as derived from the happiness to which they lead, where the happiness is regarded as intrinsically good. The theists we discussed in Chapter 2 who maintain that the purpose of life is that we experience perfect happiness are appealing to an intrinsic good as the purpose of life. Not surprisingly, just as there can be instrumental and intrinsic goods, so also there can be instrumental (extrinsic) and intrinsic evils. An instrumental evil is something which is evil in virtue of its leading either to the occurrence of something else that is itself evil or the diminishment of something that is good (where this diminishment is evil). An intrinsic evil is something that is evil and does not derive its evilness from its relationship to something else that is evil. It is evil in and of itself. An experience of pain is typically regarded as an intrinsic evil, and a dentist’s drilling of a tooth is instrumentally evil because of the pain that it produces.

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Varieties of value Value comes in two broad, different forms, one positive (good) and one negative (evil). Within this general distinction, there are a number of other important differences between kinds of value: Intrinsic good: Goodness not derived from a relationship to something else that is good (for example, the pleasure of a loving relationship). Extrinsic good: Goodness derived from a relationship to something else that is good (for example, money used to purchase food, shelter, etc.). Intrinsic evil: Evil not derived from a relationship to something else that is evil (for example, the pain of a toothache). Extrinsic evil: Evil derived from a relationship to something else that is evil (for example, a blow to the head that produces a concussion).

Because matters can quickly become complicated, we will end our cataloging of instrumental and intrinsic goods and evils with the point that one and the same thing can be both instrumentally good and instrumentally evil. For example, while the drilling of a tooth is instrumentally evil because of the pain that it produces, it is also instrumentally good because it preserves the goods of being able to eat food without any discomfort and enjoying the pleasures that come with eating and good health. The only permutation on goods and evils that is not possible is that where one and the same thing is both intrinsically good and intrinsically evil. Nothing can be both intrinsically good and intrinsically evil. Finally, while the concept of value not infrequently suggests to people the notion of acting morally or immorally, where each kind of action is an instance of moral value, one must be careful not to think that all value has to be or is moral in nature. In Chapter 2, we discussed how many theists regard the purpose of life as perfect happiness. Some of them regard happiness as the experience of pleasure, where pleasure is a positive qualitative value. Not surprisingly, these same individuals regard pain as a negative qualitative value. Qualitative value is sometimes said to be nonmoral in nature, where “nonmoral” means “is not moral in nature.” “Nonmoral” does not mean “immoral.” Other theists think of happiness as an epistemic value that is nonmoral in nature. They believe happiness is, say, the knowledge of God. There are other points that could be made here, but we have said enough for our purposes in this chapter. That which has positive value also has worth. And if something has worth, then it is positively significant. Moreover, if something is positively significant, then it is meaningful. Thus, what has worth or makes life worth living has meaning or is meaningful. Those who think of worth, positive significance, and meaning as related in this way, and who also think that happiness is what makes life worth living, believe that happiness is what makes life meaningful (happiness is the primary bearer of S-Meaning). In this chapter, we focus both on the idea that

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happiness is the meaning of life in the sense of S-Meaning and on the relationships of happiness and S-Meaning to other kinds of value and meaning. So as to avoid unnecessary repetitiveness, we will assume that the meaningfulness had by happiness is S-Meaning.

A HEDONISTIC UNDERSTANDING OF HAPPINESS As we briefly mentioned in the previous section, some individuals think of happiness as the experience of pleasure. Though the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle did not in the end think of happiness this way (recall from Chapter 2 that he thought of it as virtuous action), he pointed out that both the common run of people and cultivated men call [the highest good attainable by action] happiness. . . . But when it comes to defining what happiness is, they disagree, and the account given by the common run [of people] differs from that of the philosophers. The former say it is some clear and obvious good, such as pleasure . . . . (Aristotle, 1962, pp. 1095a17–23) The view that happiness consists of nothing but experiences of pleasure is what philosophers refer to as the hedonistic understanding of happiness. Before proceeding, it is important to make two points. First, one can embrace a hedonistic understanding of happiness without being a hedonist. Strictly speaking, a hedonist believes not only that happiness is made up of nothing but experiences of pleasure, but also that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. But one might believe that pleasure is not the only intrinsic good (e.g., one might think that justice is also an intrinsic good), while at the same time holding that happiness is nothing but experiences of pleasure (Crisp, 1997, p. 20). Second, hedonists about happiness maintain that an experience of pleasure is really or objectively good. In philosophical terminology, an experience of pleasure exemplifies or has the property of being good intrinsically. According to hedonists about happiness, it is pleasure’s objective intrinsic goodness that explains our desire for it. Pleasure is not good because we desire it. Why think happiness consists of experiences of pleasure (to avoid needless repetition, we omit “nothing but” from here on)? Once again, hedonists about happiness appeal to the concept of intrinsic goodness. They believe the idea that happiness is intrinsically good has intuitive bite in the sense that it just seems so plausible. Equally plausible they believe is the view that an experience of pleasure is intrinsically good. So if happiness is intrinsically good and composed of experiences of a certain kind, nothing is more natural than to think that it is composed of experiences of pleasure. A hedonist about happiness, then, believes that a person who has one or more experiences of pleasure is, because of that or those experiences, to some degree happy, and to the same degree has a meaningful life.

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The philosopher Nicholas White writes that almost all theorists about happiness agree that the view that happiness consists of experiences of pleasure is so attractive that virtually every theorist who disavows the view has felt obligated to explain what is wrong with it (White, 2006, pp. 53–54). What, then, is or might be wrong with it?

OBJECTION #1: WHOLES DO NOT HAVE THE PROPERTIES OF THEIR PARTS The philosopher Owen Flanagan argues that there is a problem for the hedonistic view of happiness that arises out of the nature of the part-whole relationship. According to him, philosophers distinguish between things that have some property—for example, value—intrinsically and things that have the property derivatively [extrinsically]. Money is worthless until we make it worth something. Happiness is said to have worth in and of itself [intrinsically]. Suppose this is true. Would it follow that a life with many happy times in it was worth living? Not necessarily. Properties of parts do not confer the property on the whole. My parts are small, I am large. Happy times, even many of them, might not constitute a worthwhile life. (Flanagan, 2000, p. 199) Let us change Flanagan’s example just slightly. Instead of talking about the intrinsic goodness of happiness and asking whether many experiences of it make life worth living, let us consider many experiences of pleasure and ask whether the intrinsic goodness of each is had by the experience of happiness that is supposedly composed of them. Flanagan seemingly believes the answer is no, because the principle that a whole composed of parts has the properties of the parts is false. But a hedonist about happiness need not rely on this principle in holding that happiness is intrinsically good in virtue of the intrinsic goodness of each of the experiences of pleasure that compose it. All that need be the case for the hedonistic view of happiness to be true is that, in some cases, a property of the parts is conferred on the whole that is made up of those parts, even if in other cases this is not the case. As Flanagan claims, a whole need not have the property of being small because each of its parts are small. If one adds together enough small parts, then the whole will be big. But in a case where each of a group of tiles is red, the whole that is made up of those tiles will also be red. A hedonist about happiness believes that an experience of happiness made up of experiences of pleasure, all of which are intrinsically good, will itself be intrinsically good in virtue of the intrinsic goodness of its pleasurable parts.

OBJECTION #2: THE FLEETING NATURE OF PLEASURE According to Julian Baggini, a different problem with identifying happiness with experiences of pleasure is that pleasure is a fleeting experience, while happiness is supposedly a more enduring condition: “So the pleasure of eating a fine meal lasts

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only as long as the meal does, whereas the happiness of a contented person persists in quiet moments. . . . Happiness is thus more of a background condition” (Baggini, 2004, p. 90). In response, hedonists about happiness will claim that they find nothing odd about thinking of someone who enjoys a fine meal as momentarily happy because of the pleasure experienced from and during the time of the meal. Baggini believes the fleeting nature of pleasure raises additional concerns for the hedonistic view of happiness. He describes what he calls “pure episodics,” people who live their lives only for the pleasure of the moment (Baggini, 2004, p. 131). The problem for these individuals is that the pleasures they enjoy do not last, with the result that each new day brings with it the need to seek new pleasures and, not infrequently, the unpleasant results of indulging in too much pleasure the day before. Baggini adds that in light of the problems of the life of a pure episodic, “[t]here has in general been a suspicion about pleasure which is rooted in more than a puritanical high-mindedness” (Baggini, 2004, p. 131). In response, a hedonist about happiness would likely point out that the problems arising for the pure episodic are not about pleasure per se but about the nature of our world. Pleasure is intrinsically good, and were things about our world better suited for providing the enjoyment of pleasure without any bad or adverse effects, we would all be pure episodics. Closely related to the objection just discussed is another that is raised by Baggini. According to him, “[m]oments of pleasure are precious because they pass, because we cannot make them last any longer than they do” (Baggini, 2004, p. 133). Indeed, “unrelenting happiness is not a natural or even healthy condition for human beings” (Baggini, 2004, p. 104). A hedonist about happiness would again respond that Baggini is mistaken. Experiences of pleasure are not precious because they pass but because they are intrinsically good. They would be just as precious if they did not pass. Indeed, the world would be a better place if they did not cease. A hedonist about happiness would also say that the claim that unrelenting happiness is unhealthy is simply absurd. True, it might be unnatural in the sense that it cannot be achieved in this world. But that is a problem with our world whose nature makes impossible unrelenting happiness (we discuss these issues in further detail in Chapter 7).

OBJECTION #3: PLEASURE’S VALUE IS NO MORE THAN EXTRINSIC An additional objection to the hedonistic understanding of happiness asserts that the goodness of an experience of pleasure is extrinsic in nature because it is dependent upon the nature of the actions taken to bring about that experience. For example, with morally good actions, the accompanying or resultant pleasure is good. With morally bad actions, the accompanying pleasure is bad. The objector is concerned about a case where someone gets pleasure out of, say, stealing or murdering. Is it really plausible to hold that the pleasure gotten in this way is intrinsically good? Surely it is not intrinsically good but extrinsically bad because it leads to the performance of such actions?

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A hedonist about happiness believes the objector is confusing the goodness of the pleasure with the badness of the means to getting it. The pleasure remains intrinsically good, even if it is instrumentally evil because it leads people to act in ways that are immoral. Thus, C. S. Lewis, who was a hedonist about happiness, wrote that the expression “bad pleasures” is a loose and popular way of saying “‘pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.’ It is the stealing of the apple that is bad, not the sweetness [pleasure]” (Lewis, 1992, p. 89). And, Lewis believed, wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. . . . In order to be bad [you] must have good things to want and then to pursue in the wrong way . . .. (Lewis, 2001a, p. 44)

OBJECTION #4: THE EXPERIENCE MACHINE Undoubtedly, the most widely discussed objection to the hedonistic conception of happiness is that of the experience machine, which was introduced by the philosopher Robert Nozick (1974, pp. 42–45). Imagine there is a machine to which you can become connected and which will provide you with experiences of pleasure absent any pain for as long as you wish, which, by hypothesis, is forever. You can program the machine to provide you with pleasures whose sources in real life are friendship, food, sex, books, athletics, etc. The “beauty” of the machine is that whereas in this world one typically has to engage in activity (e.g., converse with friends, eat food, have sex, read a book, play a sport) to experience pleasure, once connected to the machine one does not have to do anything. One can simply have experiences of pleasure, with or without believing that one is engaging in the relevant activity in order to get it. Would you connect to the experience machine? We all know that at present there is no such machine. Nozick was well aware that in our world as it is presently constituted, many, if not most, of our experiences of pleasure accompany our actions. While some people try recreational drugs as a means of getting pleasure without activity, these drugs have a serious downside in that they leave users of them experiencing pain and discomfort after they wear off, which leads to the desire for additional use of the drug and, in the end, addiction. In essence, what Nozick proposed with the idea of the experience machine was a drug which produces ongoing pleasure without the deleterious side effects. Nozick believed that if you desire more than anything else perfect happiness for yourself as a source of meaning and you are a hedonist about happiness, then you would connect to the machine. Would you connect? Nozick believed we have three good reasons not to. First, we all care deeply about or desire doing things; we care about being agents as opposed to patients. Second, we all care about being persons of a certain kind. We care about being “courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, [and] loving” (Nozick, 1974, p. 43). Third, we all care about being in touch with a deeper reality than one that is made by humans. But once connected to the machine, “[t]here is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated” (Nozick, 1974, p. 43).

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Nozick concluded that what we learn from the example of the experience machine is either that we believe happiness as a source of meaning in life consists in part or in whole of something other than experiences of pleasure or, if we continue to believe that happiness just is experiences of pleasure, that we also value other sources of meaning in life more than that exemplified by happiness. As with the previous objections, a hedonist about happiness has responses. First, and assuming you do desire your happiness more than anything else as what makes your life meaningful, a hedonist about happiness will concede we also desire to do certain things, but point out that this desire can be explained by the fact that our actions are more often than not the means to our experiences of pleasure. Our desire, which is ultimately for pleasure, gets transferred to the actions which produce the pleasure. Not surprisingly, we sometimes forget the derivative nature of our desire to act. Nevertheless, it comes to our attention in situations where the activity no longer provides us with pleasure. For example, athletes sometimes “lose a love for the game.” They no longer get pleasure from the game that enriched their lives for so long. In this situation, they realize that it was not playing the game that they ultimately desired but the pleasure that came from playing it. Second, a hedonist about happiness will acknowledge that many people desire to be courageous, kind, and loving, but maintain that this desire is plausibly accounted for by a belief that their being these ways promotes the happiness of others, where that happiness is hedonistic in nature and the value which more than any other gives others’ lives meaning. Thus, these desired behaviors are not themselves components of happiness, but rather are instances of moral value and means to promoting the happiness of others.

The Matrix (1999) Nozick’s experience machine is reminiscent of the revolutionary and highly acclaimed movie The Matrix, a compelling depiction of a dystopian future in which reality as perceived by most humans is actually a simulation called “the Matrix.” This reality was created by sentient machines in order to control the human population, while their bodies’ heat and electrical activity are used as energy. The story’s protagonist, Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), discovers the truth about the matrix and is drawn into a rebellion against the machines. In one scene from the movie, a character who has been previously unplugged from the matrix (and knows the truth) is back in the matrix at a restaurant eating an expensive steak dinner. As he takes a bite of the steak, he remarks to his friend, “Ignorance is bliss.” He knows the steak is not real, but it might as well be to him. He experiences the incredible taste of fine dining. He ultimately decides that he wants to forget what he knows about the matrix, preferring instead to enjoy life inside this simulated reality. Would you climb into Nozick’s experience machine? Would you prefer life in the Matrix?

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Third, a hedonist about happiness will likely point out that Nozick just assumed there is a deeper reality than experiencing pleasure. He did not provide an argument for this position. As far as a hedonist is concerned, experiencing pleasure is the deepest reality, assuming there are degrees or levels of reality (which one might think is itself an odd notion). Given that pleasure is the deepest reality and intrinsically good, it is the value that provides meaning in life.

NATURALISM, VALUE, AND MEANING We saw in Chapter 2 that naturalists of a strong kind reject ultimate and irreducible purposeful explanations of our actions. As the naturalist philosopher Jaegwon Kim points out, these and other naturalists are just as unaccommodating toward the existence of consciousness and the irreducible reality of pleasures and pains (what philosophers refer to as qualia). In the following quote, Kim makes clear that this naturalistic philosophical perspective starkly contrasts with how ordinary people regard these experiences. The quotation is lengthy, but worth careful consideration: For most of us, there is no need to belabor the centrality of consciousness to our conception of ourselves as creatures with minds. But I want to point to the ambivalent, almost paradoxical, attitude that philosophers [i.e., naturalists] have displayed toward consciousness. . . . [C]onsciousness had been virtually banished from the philosophical and scientific scene for much of the last century, and consciousness-bashing still goes on in some quarters, with some reputable philosophers arguing that phenomenal consciousness, or “qualia,” is a fiction of bad philosophy. And there are philosophers . . . who, while they recognize phenomenal consciousness as something real do not believe that a complete science of human behavior, including cognitive psychology and neuroscience, has a place for consciousness in an explanatory/predictive theory of cognition and behavior. . . . Contrast this lowly status of consciousness in science and [naturalistic] metaphysics with its lofty standing in moral philosophy and value theory. When philosophers discuss the nature of the intrinsic good, or what is worthy of our desire and volition for its own sake, the most prominently mentioned candidates are things like pleasure, absence of pain, enjoyment, and happiness . . . . To most of us, a fulfilling life, a life worth living, is one that is rich and full in qualitative consciousness. We would regard life as impoverished and not fully satisfying if it never included experiences of things like the smell of the sea in a cool morning breeze, the lambent play of sunlight on brilliant autumn foliage, the fragrance of a field of lavender in bloom, and the vibrant, layered soundscape projected by a string quartet. . . . It is an ironic fact that the felt qualities of conscious experience, perhaps the only things that ultimately matter to us, are often relegated in the rest of philosophy to the status of “secondary qualities,” in the shadowy zone between the real and the unreal, or even jettisoned outright as artifacts of confused minds. (Kim, 2005, pp. 10, 11, 12)

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Kim, who believes he is stating the obvious, insists that all of us ordinarily think that the good value that makes life worth living and meaningful (again, we are thinking of S-Meaning) is had by conscious experiences. If he is right, most of us regard the idea of a meaningful life as one that is filled with experiences of pleasure and happiness. But many naturalists hold that we can completely explain what needs to be explained about our lives, including our beliefs about what we regard as being good and, therefore, as having value, without having to acknowledge the existence of any quale (the singular of qualia) with intrinsic value. It is helpful at this point to consider the explanation of our existence provided by the naturalistic philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett asks why it is that human beings expend so much effort to acquire things such as food and drink that are sweet. He answers that our distant ancestors discovered that a food substance such as sugar is a great source of energy, so that they, with their preference for and ability to ingest sugar, were better able to survive and reproduce than beings which did not possess this preference and ability. Dennett says it is initially plausible to think that our distant ancestors liked sugar for its sweetness (i.e., for the pleasure that it gives). However, as a naturalist who is committed to explaining anything and everything in terms of the valueless and purposeless evolutionary categories of adaptation, reproduction, and survival, he insists that what is initially plausible to believe in this case is mistaken because it gets things the wrong way around: People generally say that we like some things because they are sweet, but this really puts it backward: it is more accurate to say that some things are sweet (to us) because we like them! (And we like them because our ancestors who were wired up to like them had more energy for reproduction than their less fortunately wired-up peers). (Dennett, 2006, p. 59) So the explanation of our liking sugar’s sweetness is that this liking has been causally inherited from our ancestors who acquired it as a result of first liking sugar, where their possession of that liking, which was a result of blind (purposeless) evolutionary forces, happened to give them an advantage in terms of survival and reproduction over others who did not possess the same liking. In short, according to Dennett, our ancestors did not (and we do not) seek to survive to experience sweetness and the pleasure that comes with eating sugar. Rather, they accidentally desired sugar, where the eating of it happened to be conducive to adaptation, reproduction, and survival, which explains its tasting sweet to them and us. Dennett is a naturalistic evolutionist. The qualification “naturalistic” is important, because, as we explained in Chapter 2, one can believe in evolution in the sense of bodily descent from a common ancestor without being a naturalist (e.g., a theist can believe that the human body descends from the bodies of ancestral organisms). As a naturalistic evolutionist, what does Dennett think about intrinsic value? According to him, “intrinsic” value is the capacity of something to provoke a preference response in the brain quite directly. Pain is “intrinsically bad,” but this negative valence

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[which is the capacity to provoke the preference response of avoidance behavior toward objects which cause pain] is . . . dependent on an evolutionary rationale. (Dennett, 2006, pp. 68–69) When it comes to questions about value, Dennett says [b]iology insists on delving beneath the surface of “intrinsic” values and asking why they exist, and any answer that is supported by the facts has the effect of showing that the value in question is—or once was—really instrumental [it was a means of bringing about evolutionary advantage], not intrinsic, even if we don’t see it that way. (Dennett, 2006, p. 69) Dennett goes on to note that if something (contrary to the way things are) really had intrinsic value (e.g., if it really were intrinsically good), then there would be no explanation for it having that value beyond the nature of the thing itself (Dennett, 2006, p. 69). It would necessarily just have the value that it has. For example, what would explain pleasure’s goodness would be the nature of pleasure itself, the pleasurableness of pleasure, because that nature would necessitate the goodness of pleasure. Because, however, the naturalistic evolutionist’s explanatory story excludes any fundamental and irreducible value, any such apparent value must be explicable in terms of purposeless causation that is adaptive and leads to reproduction and survival regardless of how things seem to us. So according to Dennett, pleasure cannot be intrinsically good (and pain cannot be intrinsically evil), even though it seems to us to be so. The “intrinsic” value of pleasure (its goodness) is its being a capacity to produce behavior that is directed toward objects like sugar whose consumption our ancestors happened to desire and which proved evolutionarily adventitious. Naturalistic evolutionists like Dennett not only maintain that pleasure is not intrinsically good, but also they claim that nothing is intrinsically good. Because of this belief, one might think they would also claim that nothing is instrumentally good (even though something of no value could be instrumental for bringing about something else of no value). After all, something is instrumentally good only if it ultimately leads to the production of what is intrinsically good (or the diminishment of what is intrinsically evil). So if a naturalistic evolutionist like Dennett, who denies that anything is intrinsically good, were to talk about something being “instrumentally good,” what would he mean by saying this? Most likely, what he would mean is that this something promotes adaptation, reproduction, and survival. “Good” would mean “has adaptive, survival, and reproductive value.” For example, when the naturalistic evolutionist Richard Dawkins writes about the sweetness of sugar, he says that a “sweet taste in the mouth . . . [is] going to be ‘good’ in the sense that eating sugar . . . [is] likely to be beneficial to gene survival” (Dawkins, 1989, p. 57). Survival, however, just is or occurs. It has no value of any kind, either intrinsic or instrumental (sugar is instrumental to gene survival, but, strictly speaking, because survival has

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no value, neither has eating sugar). In the first chapter of his book The Selfish Gene entitled “Why are people?,” Dawkins maintains that Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer [“survival”] to the curious child [who has the question “Why are people?”]. We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with deep problems: Is there meaning to life? What are we for? . . . Philosophy and the subjects known as “humanities” are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. (Dawkins, 1989, p. 1) Given Darwin and naturalistic evolution, Dawkins concurs with Dennett that there is no meaning in (or of) life in the sense of there being a quale with intrinsic value that makes life worth living. There are merely purposeless changes, some of which are propitious for adaptation, survival, and reproduction, and others that are maladaptive and lead to suffering and death: The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. . . . In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. (Dawkins, 1995, pp. 131–132; 133)

NATURALISM AND MORALITY If naturalistic evolutionists deny the existence of qualitative, nonmoral value like the intrinsic goodness of pleasure and the intrinsic evilness of pain, what do they think about the idea of moral value? Is it real? Not surprisingly, many believe it is not real because it, like qualitative intrinsic value, has no explanatory power relative to the adaptation, reproduction, and survival of organisms. Consider what the naturalistic evolutionist E. O. Wilson has to say about meaning as a bridge to his views about morality. In his book The Meaning of Human Existence, Wilson acknowledges that [i]n ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. . . . This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions . . . . Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. (Wilson, 2014, p. 2)

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In terms of the Meaning Triad, ordinary usage of “meaning” implies P-Meaning. However, Wilson insists there is a broader way the word “meaning” is used and a very different worldview [naturalism] implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. . . . Humanity arose as an accident of evolution, a product of random mutation and natural selection. (Wilson, 2014, pp. 3, 174) How, one might ask, is there meaning to an individual’s life, if that life is through and through an accident? According to Wilson, “[t]o explain the human condition . . . [is] thereby to give meaning to the human condition . . .” (Wilson, 2014, p. 15). From these comments, one might think that Wilson believes any explanation of a person’s existence provides that existence with meaning just in virtue of its being an explanation of that existence. The nature of that explanation is irrelevant. Even an explanation that implies that every person exists for no purpose and has nothing in their lives that makes them worth continuing counts as one that gives their lives meaning. If this is what Wilson is claiming, then one can easily understand why Susan Wolf, in a review of Wilson’s book, writes that “the title [The Meaning of Human Existence] . . . is misleading . . .” (Wolf, 2015, pp. 137–138). However, while Wolf seems justified in saying what she does about the title of Wilson’s book, there is likely more substance to his position than one might initially think. For example, it is plausible to hold that Wilson is proposing that the meaning of life (human existence) is a matter of making sense of things, which is an issue of intelligibility (I-Meaning). But how can an explanation, the essence of which is that we exist as the result of a mindless or blind causal process that ultimately yields our irreversible death, make sense of our lives? To understand how it might, consider our belief that certain actions are morally right and others morally wrong. This belief seems to indicate a conviction that there are objective moral values that ground ways in which we ought and ought not to behave. These values and our belief in them are important parts of the explanation of human behavior and, thereby, existence. How do such values fit into the account of our lives that Wilson proposes? His answer is that they do not fit because they do not exist. While we believe that such values are real, our belief in their reality is false. According to Wilson (and his naturalistic evolutionist co-author, Michael Ruse), our belief in morality . . . is merely an adaptation put in place to further reproductive ends. . . . [E]thics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. (Ruse and Wilson, 1993, p. 310) In short, according to Wilson’s explanation of human existence, we believe in objective moral values as the result of blind causal processes that have no room for such values. Although our belief in the reality of these values is false, the belief itself makes sense and provides I-Meaning within the naturalistic evolutionist’s account of our existence

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because the accidental development of the belief proved to be evolutionarily adventitious (it resulted in adaptation, reproduction, and survival) for the beings who had it. Wilson (and Ruse) and Dawkins (the latter because he denies the existence of any value) deny the existence of any real moral value in a world that is governed by naturalistic evolution. However, other naturalists disagree with them about the reality of moral value. These naturalists maintain that moral value is objective or part of the fabric of reality. For example, the naturalist Kai Nielsen writes that there is no need to have the religious commitments of Christianity or its sister religions or any religious commitment at all to make sense of morality. Torturing human beings is vile; exploiting and degrading human beings is throughand-through evil; cruelty to human beings and animals is, morally speaking, unacceptable; and treating one’s promises lightly or being careless about the truth is wrong. If we know anything to be wrong we know these things to be wrong and they would be wrong and just as wrong in a Godless world and in a world in which personal annihilation is inevitable as in a world with God and in which there is eternal life. (Nielsen, 2000, p. 155) Another naturalist, Walter Stace, agrees with Nielsen: Of course we know that it is perfectly possible for individual men, very highly educated men, philosophers, scientists, intellectuals in general, to live moral lives without any religious convictions. . . . I remember a fellow student in my college days, an ardent Christian, who told me that if he did not believe in a future life, in heaven and hell, he would rape, murder, steal and be a drunkard. That is what I call being a sham civilized being. (Stace, 2000, pp. 91, 92) Nielsen maintains it is possible to make sense of objective moral value, whose systematic violation Stace regards as the mark of a sham civilized human being, in a naturalistic world where death is the annihilation of the self and there is no afterlife. Given the belief of these naturalists in the objective status of moral value in a naturalistic world, in the next section we consider whether it is plausible to think that being moral is itself a necessary part of being happy and having a meaningful life (by way of reminder, we will continue to assume we are considering S-Meaning, unless we indicate otherwise). Or might one be happy and have a meaningful life without being moral and, indeed, by being immoral? If the answer to this question is “Yes,” then a naturalist’s recognition of objective moral value might create its own distinctive problem for I-Meaning.

BEING GOOD, RATIONALITY, AND NATURALISM At the end of the previous section, we introduced the concept of objective moral value. If, for the sake of discussion, we assume moral value is objective, might acting in the morally right way, what is sometimes thought of as acting altruistically, be a

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value whose absence makes the life of a person who might have acted rightly but did not less meaningful? Stated slightly differently, is acting morally a necessary constituent of a meaningful life? Baggini is skeptical about an affirmative answer to these questions, for two reasons. First, while we are all interested in our own happiness, Baggini believes morality (he regularly refers to it as altruism) is primarily concerned with attempting to better the well-being of others. Hence, he thinks that to view moral action and its value as something an agent pursues for the sake of his or her own happiness and a meaningful life makes “[t]he people being helped . . . mere instruments to the end of giving purpose [that they increase their own S-Meaning] to the altruists. This would turn altruism on its head . . .” (Baggini, 2004, p. 65). Second, argues Baggini, if the process of helping others is itself our primary purpose, then we are left in the odd position that were we to help others too well [so that they no longer needed our help] we would risk leaving life with no [S-] meaning at all. Altruism, if successful, would defeat its own purpose. (Baggini, 2004, p. 66) Kieran Setiya extends Baggini’s point: Better still would be a world in which there is no need, nothing broken to repair, no injury to heal. . . . If the best we can hope for is not to suffer, to live a life that is not positively bad, why bother to live life at all? If value is always ameliorative [aiming to reduce pain and suffering], there may be things we should care about in themselves [e.g., justice], as ends not just as means, but life as a whole is not worth living. What matters is [activities that] do not turn on unfortunate features of human life. (Setiya, 2017, pp. 44, 45–46, 48) In considering Baggini’s and Setiya’s criticisms, one might wonder why someone would believe moral or altruistic value is a or the locus of S-Meaning in life for the person acting altruistically. One entry point into thinking about this question is a famous tale from Plato’s Republic that is standardly referred to as “The Ring of Gyges Story.” In the story, a shepherd named Gyges finds a gold ring on a corpse and later begins playing with its movable setting. When he turns the setting toward himself, he disappears. When he turns it away from himself, he reappears. Given this remarkable power of the ring, the shepherd begins to wonder why he should not act unjustly (immorally). That is, given the supposition that life in this world is the only one to be lived, he begins to wonder why he should not steal, lie, sleep with the king’s wife, and kill others, if, by so doing, he could increase the happiness and, by hypothesis, meaning in his own life. Why be just (act justly), he queries, when one can be happier and have a more meaningful life by acting unjustly? The story of the Ring of Gyges is roughly 2,500 years old, but the concern about a reason to act justly when one can have as much or more happiness by being unjust endures to this day. The philosopher George Mavrodes presents a contemporary

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version of the issue against the backdrop of the following naturalistic worldview described by Bertrand Russell in this lengthy quote: [P]urposeless [and] . . . void of meaning . . . is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only in the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. Shall we worship force, or shall we worship goodness? . . . The answer to this question is very momentous and affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of force . . . is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil . . . . Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realized in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of those things meets with the approval of the unconscious universe. If power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies man’s true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments. . . . Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us ascend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us. . . . To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things—this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship. (Russell, 2000a, pp. 72–76) Mavrodes points out that it certainly seems that there are many instances in life in which fulfilling an ordinary moral obligation (e.g., keeping a promise, repaying a debt, refraining from stealing) results in a diminishment of our own good: “Pleasure, happiness, esteem, contentment, self-realization, knowledge—all of these can suffer from the fulfillment of a moral obligation” (Mavrodes, 1986, p. 217). One example involving telling the truth should suffice to illustrate Mavrodes’s point: Consider whistle-blowers, individuals in organizations who inform either people higher up

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in the chain of command or outsiders about moral wrongdoing of which they have become aware in the context of doing their job within the organization. Those who “blow the whistle” are regularly harassed by other workers, ostracized, fired, experience great difficulty getting additional employment, and often cannot pay the monthly bills (See Polman, 1989). Why be moral, when one can be as happy or happier, and have an equally S-Meaningful or more S-Meaningful life, by being immoral, and one’s ultimate end will be death with no afterlife, regardless of how one has lived one’s life? This creates serious problems for I-Meaning. What might one answer in response to Mavrodes and the Ring-of-Gyges challenge?

I-Meaning and improper fit The problem for I-Meaning is one of things failing to fit together in the right way. We should be careful in distinguishing two senses in which things do not fit together in the right way. In the first sense, things do not fit together in the right way because there is no right way for them to fit together. For example, one might have pieces from several different jigsaw puzzles and understand that there is no right way for them to be put together. In the second sense, things do not fit together in the right way but not because there is no right way for them to go together. There is a right way to fit the pieces together but the actual arrangement fails to achieve it. For example, one sometimes puts one piece of a jigsaw puzzle together with another piece of the same puzzle, only to realize that they do not fit together as they should. The problem raised by Mavrodes for I-Meaning concerns this second sense in which things fail to fit together in the right way. He is assuming that there is a right way for pleasure, pain, happiness, unhappiness, and moral and immoral actions to fit together, and that if they ultimately cannot be put together in the right way in a naturalistic universe, then life in that universe is ultimately I-Meaningless.

RESPONSE #1: HAPPINESS ISN’T ALL THAT IMPORTANT One might simply deny that happiness is important or as important as being moral, so no question about which to pursue to make one’s life meaningful arises. Russell suggested something along these lines, but admitted it was hard to accept: “One has to learn to regard happiness, for others as well as for oneself, as more or less unimportant—but though I keep on telling myself this, I do not yet fully and instinctively believe it” (Russell, 2000b, p. 175). Indeed, moral injunctions such as “Do not steal,” “Do not lie,” etc., seem hard to justify if they are not ultimately concerned

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with preserving or promoting the happiness of others. And if the happiness of others is that important, it is hard to understand why one’s own happiness is not equally important.

RESPONSE #2: THOSE WHO ARE MORAL ARE HAPPIER Rather than deny the importance of happiness, one might directly challenge the idea that those who are moral end up less happy in this life than those who are immoral. For example, contrary to what might seem to be the case, the losses for whistle blowers in the form of harassment by others, ostracism, unemployment, etc. are more than made up for by the inner sense of satisfaction that comes with doing the right thing. While Mavrodes and proponents of the moral of the story of the Ring of Gyges could and would probably concede that this might be the case for some individuals, he and they would likely insist that it seems obviously false in the case of others. For example, letters written by Saint Teresa (1910–1997) and published against her wishes after her death reveal how she suffered from a decades-long “darkness of the soul” arising from her altruistic work among the destitute of Calcutta. The following excerpts are representative of her plight: Your Grace . . . please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that our Lord may show Himself—for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started “the work.” . . . Pray for me—for within me everything is icy cold.—It is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness. As long as Our Lord has all the pleasure—I really do not count. . . . I understand a little the tortures of hell—without God. I have no words to express what I want to say, and yet . . . knowingly and willingly I offered . . . to pass even eternity in this terrible suffering, if this would give Him now a little more pleasure . . .. (Mother Teresa, 2007, pp. 149, 163, 172)

RESPONSE #3: CONCEDE THE POINT Another response to Mavrodes and the Ring-of-Gyges challenge is simply to admit that he and it are right. Thus, the naturalistic philosopher John Kekes maintains that “[i]mmoral lives could have sufficient satisfaction [happiness] to make them meaningful,” and concedes that this “is hard to accept because it outrages our moral sensibility . . . . Accepting it, however, has the virtue of doing justice to the plain fact that many evil morally unconcerned people live meaningful lives” (Kekes, 2008, p. 258). If Kekes is correct, then a naturalist world in which acting immorally results in more meaningfulness in terms of the qualitative value of happiness for the person acting immorally seems to be ultimately meaningless in a different sense; in the end, such a world makes no sense (is not intelligible) because things ultimately do not fit together as they should. In other words, by obtaining S-Meaning in a certain way, one undermines I-Meaning.

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RESPONSE #4: REJECT THE HEDONISTIC CONCEPTION OF HAPPINESS A further response to the problem that happiness and meaning for the agent does not always track being moral, with the result that those who are immoral are as happy as or happier than those who are moral, is to question the conception of happiness that gives rise to the problem. The story of the Ring of Gyges presupposes (assumes) the hedonistic view that happiness is identical with experiences of pleasure. Mavrodes seems to agree with this assumption when he writes (see above) that pleasure and happiness might suffer from fulfillment of a moral obligation. And Kekes apparently concurs when he mentions the satisfaction that is had by those who lead immoral lives. However, one might respond that these philosophers are working with the wrong conception of happiness. For example, Plato, in answer to the Ring-of-Gyges story, maintained it is a mistake to hold that happiness or well-being consists of nothing but experiences of pleasure. According to him, happiness is acting virtuously or justly, which is a notion that is at the heart of the eudaimonist conception of happiness introduced in Chapter 2. The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff characterizes eudaimonism as follows: [t]he eudaimonist holds that . . . the well-lived life [is], by definition, the happy life, the eudaimōn life. . . . It is important to understand what sort of goal happiness is [according to the eudaimonist]. “Happiness” is not the name of experience of a certain sort. “Pleasure” names experiences of a certain sort; “happiness” does not. The eudaimonist is not saying that one’s sole end in itself is or should be bringing about experiences of a certain sort, everything else being a means. . . . [T]he ancient eudaimonists insisted that eudaimonia is activity. Happiness does not consist in what happens to one but in what one makes of what happens to one. (Wolterstorff, 2008, pp. 150, 151, 152) Most generally, then, eudaimonists believe that happiness just is acting virtuously or justly. Many find this conception of happiness puzzling because they believe that acting justly can sometimes leave one worse off in terms of one’s happiness. This was the main point behind Mavrodes’s argument about the strangeness of moral obligation in a naturalist world where all people end up dead, regardless of how they lived their lives. The following thoughts of Julia Annas, who is herself a eudaimonist, convey what many consider to be the counterintuitive nature of eudaimonism: [A]ncient [eudaemonistic] theories are all more or less revisionary, and some of them are highly counterintuitive. They give an account of happiness which, if baldly presented to a non-philosopher without any of the supporting arguments, sounds wrong, even absurd. . . . [A]ncient theories greatly expand and modify the ordinary non-philosophical understanding of happiness, opening themselves up to criticism from non-philosophers on this score.

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It is in fact common ground to the ancient theories that, on the one hand, we are all right to assume that our final end is happiness of some kind, and to try to achieve happiness in reflecting systematically on our final end; but that, on the other hand, we are very far astray in our initial assumptions about what happiness is. . . . So we should not be surprised that ancient theories have counter-intuitive consequences about happiness. (Annas, 1993, p. 331) We make one final point to conclude this section on the relationship between happiness, meaning, and morality in a naturalistic world. Someone like Mavrodes who is concerned with the question of whether morality ultimately makes sense in a naturalistic world (whether morality is ultimately consistent with I-Meaning) is not necessarily questioning the rationality or reasonableness of acting morally. Even when, by hypothesis, someone can be happier by acting immorally, it does not follow that this person has no reason to be moral. Given that morality is about the well-being of others, where that well-being is something good, the person who is happier by acting immorally still has a reason to be moral because the goodness of the wellbeing of others provides that reason. As the naturalist Walter Sinnott-Armstrong says, the immoral person who ends up better off by being immoral would have no reason to be moral “only if every reason [to act] had to be self-interested, selfish, or egoistic. There is [however] no basis for that assumption” (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2009, p. 114). What, then, is Mavrodes’s point? It is that in a naturalistic world, it seems to be all things considered or overall no less rational to be immoral than it is to be moral. Mavrodes thinks we all ordinarily believe that being moral is overall the more rational course of action. It is hard, therefore, to square our belief that acting morally is (all things considered) more rational with the truth that in a naturalistic world a person who is moral not only sometimes does not end up better off in terms of well-being than an immoral person but also may end up worse off. Mavrodes believes we all understand that a universe in which this is true is a meaningless universe, in the I-Meaning sense that ultimately things do not fit together in the way that they should, that ultimately things do not make sense. Given the importance of the idea of I-Meaning as making sense of things, we will return to it briefly at the end of this chapter and then again at length in Chapter 5.

VALUE AND AUTHENTICITY In Chapter 2, we introduced Sartre’s belief that our existence precedes our essence, which is the idea that given there is no God or artificer who created us, we first exist and are then free to choose our own essence. Sartre’s point is often associated with the notion of authenticity, which is roughly the idea that we are the only ones who are ultimately responsible for our choices and, therefore, own whatever it is that we choose to do and be as a result of those choices. Many believe that authenticity is itself a positive objective value in its own right—it is an intrinsic good that has S-Meaning—and, thus, important to pursue purposefully as a source of P-Meaning

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in life. If Sartre is right, P-Meaning in life is ultimately tied to how we choose to act so that we as individuals have deep control over how much S-Meaning there is in our lives.

Jean-Paul Sartre and the relationship between P-Meaning and S-Meaning At the outset of this chapter, we stated that S-Meaning is typically regarded as the source of P-Meaning: actions performed for purposes derive their value from the value of the purposes/ends to which the actions are means. Sartre seems to have believed the opposite: that because there is no objective good, P-Meaning is the source of S-Meaning in the sense that choices made for purposes guarantee that those purposes are better than any other purposes for which we might have chosen. Thus, he wrote that [t]o choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better . . . . If I regard a certain course of action as good, it is only I who choose to say that it is good and not bad. . . . There can no longer be any good a priori . . . . It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or one must not lie, since [given that God does not exist] we are now upon the plane where there are only men. . . . Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist. (Sartre, 1973, pp. 29, 31, 33–34)

The idea of authenticity raises interesting questions. For example, given, as Sartre believed, authenticity presupposes that we are able to make choices, does it require that we be free to choose? If, as in Chapter 2, we think of causal determinism as the view that we are causally determined to act as we do (so that there is only one way things can go for us as individuals), then can we be simultaneously causally determined and authentic (have authenticity)? Sartre seemingly thought not. As he understood authenticity, we have to be free to choose otherwise in the very same circumstances, if we are to be authentic. Indeed, it was because he believed being created by God entails that we are determined to act as we do that he further believed having a purpose of life undermines the possibility of having P- and S-Meaning in life. While atheists like Sartre deny the causal determinism that they believe is rooted in our being created by God, we saw in Chapter 2 that atheists who are also naturalists typically affirm a version of determinism according to which our actions are completely causally explained by goings-on in the physical world. All of the naturalistic atheists we have cited so far are causal determinists of this kind (we are assuming that Sartre is a non-naturalistic atheist). At this juncture, it is helpful to turn to some

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comments of the naturalistic atheist Sam Harris. In his book Free Will, Harris writes that “[f]ree will is an illusion” (Harris, 2012, p. 5) and claims this is deeply troubling because it touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment—most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. (Harris, 2012, p. 1) Not only are criminals nothing more than “poorly calibrated clockwork” who do not deserve any punishment for their deeds, but also “those of us who work hard and follow the rules [do] not ‘deserve’ our success in any deep sense” (Harris, 2012, p. 1). Thus, continues Harris, while our [c]hoices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior—they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no conscious control. . . . There is a regress here that always ends in darkness. (Harris, 2012, p. 39) And, according to philosophers like Sartre, this darkness extends to meaning in life because the creative self-autonomy that provides P- and S-Meaning is undermined by determinism. In opposition to Harris and other naturalists, we will assume for the sake of discussion that causal determinism is false and that on at least some occasions we are free to choose otherwise than we do, so that there is more than one possible future. In terms of I-Meaning, is the value of authenticity and its support of P-Meaning of great enough importance to explain this lack of causal determinism and our possession of the freedom to do otherwise? To understand why one might wonder about whether authenticity has this kind of positive value and supportive role, consider a situation in which you are causally determined to be perfectly happy. Being perfectly happy is the only path you have going forward in life. Do you believe your perfect happiness and its S-Meaning would not justify (outweigh) the loss of the supposed positive value and S-Meaning of authenticity and the P-Meaning it supports, because you could not choose to do otherwise than whatever you choose to do (assuming the idea of a determined choice makes sense)? To approach this topic from a slightly different angle, consider some thoughts of Baggini’s. At one point, he insists that we seem to live in a universe where every physical event has a physical cause. Furthermore, there is what is known as the “causal closure of the physical domain”, meaning that everything within the physical world is caused by physical events and nothing else. Add to this the fact that all our actions involve physical movements. Even private thoughts involve physical brain events. Put these facts together and a surprising conclusion follows: all our actions must be caused entirely by events in the physical world. And because physical

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causation is deterministic—which means that causes necessitate their effects in some way—that leaves no room for free will. . . . I think it is fair to say that all philosophers agree that it is not obvious how accepting determinism as true can or should affect our everyday conception of free will. It may not leave it exactly as it was, but it may not utterly destroy it either. (Baggini, 2004, pp. 118–119, 120) You might find it hard to believe that the truth of causal determinism does not deeply affect our everyday notion of free will. We will not pursue that issue any further here (see Goetz, 2008). What is of interest for our present purposes is that while Baggini believes or is inclined to affirm the truth of causal determinism, and fully recognizes the apparent purposelessness of much pain and suffering in our world (Baggini, 2004, p. 163), he nevertheless maintains that he prefers causally determined authenticity (assuming, contrary to what Sartre maintained, that causally determined choices can be a form of genuine authenticity) over connecting to the experience machine in which he is causally determined to experience nothing but pleasure (Baggini, 2004, pp. 98–100). Is Baggini rational to prefer the first of the two forms of determinism over the second? Or is it the case, contrary to the way the question is framed, that one simply could not be happy without the freedom to be the captain of one’s soul and the authenticity that comes with it? That is, does happiness itself require, or is it at least in part made up of, authenticity? Baggini’s position suggests one last question about freedom itself (leaving aside authenticity). We will assume for the sake of discussion that more than a few readers of this book presently value to some degree having indeterministic free will. Why is this the case? Is it because we live in an imperfect world where there is much pain and suffering, and knowing we have free will gives us hope that we, through our choices, might better the quality (and S-Meaning) of our lives? That is, we understand that if our lives were completely causally determined, then whatever courses we took would be the only ones we could take, and this knowledge would prove to be deeply depressing in light of the pain and suffering that afflicts us. Perhaps so. In contrast, what if we were to find ourselves in a world where there was no pain and suffering and, presumably, no place for hope to have things change for the better because we were already perfectly happy? Would we care at all that our lives were, by hypothesis, completely determined? Or would we be like the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, a person who maintains that “[w]hat man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead” (Dostoevsky, 1956, pp. 71–72)? In other words, if we value a freedom to choose that is indeterministic in nature, is it only because we live in a certain kind of world? Change the nature of our world, and the value of such freedom becomes reduced to zero? If one concludes that one would not care about indeterministic freedom in a world where one was perfectly happy (which is a world with no pain and suffering), then it is not implausible to

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think that one would also not care about authenticity and the P-Meaning of which it is, by hypothesis, a source. We will leave the matter there.

How God’s life might be worth living In Chapter 2, we briefly discussed how God’s existence (life) could not be meaningful in the sense of a purpose of life. This is because God, by hypothesis, is a necessary being and, therefore, cannot be caused to exist for a purpose. We left open the issue of whether God’s existence might be meaningful in some other way. If meaningfulness is understood as what makes life worth living, which is an issue of value, then assuming God exists and is like us in terms of being able to experience pleasure and choose to act freely, then perhaps God’s life is meaningful in terms of either its hedonic quality, freedom, or authenticity.

CHAPTER SUMMARY We continued our discussion of the Meaning Triad in this chapter, turning our attention towards significance and specifically in the form of value. For many, wondering and worrying about life’s meaning is connected to the question of whether or not life is valuable, and if so, in what does that value consist. We considered hedonism, which maintains that pleasure and pain are the most important forms of value for the meaning of life. We discussed the hedonistic understanding of happiness and some objections to it, followed by an extended treatment of how naturalism addresses questions of value—including moral value—and the meaning of life. We concluded by discussing questions about the relationship between authenticity and value. In the next chapter, we turn our attention to another prominent connotation of “significance”—mattering.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1 What is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value? 2 What is the hedonistic view of what makes life worth living and how does it differ from hedonism proper? 3 What are objections to the hedonistic view of happiness and which, if any, do you find plausible? Why? 4 Do you believe naturalism can provide a plausible account of what makes life worth living? Why or why not? 5 Do you believe living a moral life makes life worth living? 6 Do you think naturalism is able to make adequate sense out of morality?

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• INTRODUCTORY FURTHER READING Baggini, Julian. 2004. What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life. Chapters 4, 6, and 8. New York: Oxford University Press. Dennett, Daniel. 2006. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Chapter Three. New York: Viking. Hospers, John. 1961. Human Conduct: An Introduction to the Problems of Ethics. Chapter 3. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 42–45. New York: Basic Books. Ruse, Michael and E. O. Wilson. 1993. “The Approach of Sociobiology: The Evolution of Ethics.” In Religion and the Natural Sciences. Edited by James E. Huchingson, pp. 308–311. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Javanovich College. Stace, Walter. 2000 [1948]. “Man against Darkness.” In The Meaning of Life, 2nd Edition. Edited by Elmer Daniel Klemke, pp. 84–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• ADVANCED FURTHER READING Crisp, Roger. 1997. Mill: On Utilitarianism. New York: Routledge. Mavrodes, George. 1986. “Religion and the Queerness of Morality.” In Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment. Edited by Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright, pp. 213–226. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

• FREE INTERNET RESOURCES “God is Dead. Long Live Morality.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ belief/2010/mar/15/morality-evolution-philosophy. “Hedonism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/hedonism/. “The Meaningfulness of Lives.” https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/ the-meaningfulness-of-lives/.

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meaning and significance II: mattering . . . [we are] like a mote of dust in the morning sky. (Carl Sagan, Cosmos television series) When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after . . . the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of space of which I know nothing and which knows nothing of me, I take fright . . . . (Blaise Pascal, 1995, p. 19) When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3–4)

CHAPTER SECTIONS • • • • • • • • •

An immense universe What is significance? The problem of cosmic significance A drop in the cosmic bucket: The time worry A speck of dust in infinite space: The size worry Limited causal efficacy: The impact worry Terrestrial significance: A response to worries about cosmic significance The solitary human condition: To whom do we matter? Chapter summary

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Meaning in the real world Antwone, a 20-year-old college sophomore enrolled in astronomy, walks out of the science hall planetarium beset with a flood of emotions, thoughts, and questions. He has spent time under the stars before. He has heard about the size and age of our universe, but its utter magnitude and his infinitesimal smallness in comparison hits him in a new way after seeing the digital presentation aimed at situating the earth within ever larger contexts—first the solar system, then the Milky Way galaxy, then a larger group of galaxies, and eventually the known universe. It’s not just that he feels small and fleeting. He also feels insignificant. How can he, a mere drop in the cosmic ocean, matter against the backdrop of an unfathomably ancient, giant, and silent cosmos? He worries that neither he nor anything he does in life ultimately matters in the grand scheme of things.

AN IMMENSE UNIVERSE Over three decades after astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan introduced television audiences to the wonders of our vast cosmos, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson took a new generation on a similar tour in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. In a riveting segment during the first episode called the “Cosmic Calendar,” viewers are confronted with a stunning depiction of the immensity of time and space. On this calendar, all of space-time history, from the big bang to the present moment, is represented as a single calendar year: January 1–December 31. Every month represents roughly 1 billion years; every day represents nearly 40 million years. The Milky Way galaxy does not show up until March 15 of the cosmic year, some 11 billion years ago. Our own sun rises from the ashes of other stars, but not until August 31, 4.5 billion years ago. We have to wait until September 21—3.5 billion years ago— for life to appear on earth. Dinosaurs eventually enter the scene, but not until the final week of December. Then, on December 30, after prowling the planet for more than 100 million years, dinosaurs are gone. In the vast eons of cosmic time, humans emerge only during the last hour of the last day. In fact, all of recorded history begins at 11:59:46. Everyone and everything in the history books that you have ever heard about—leaders, wars, famines, scientific discoveries—occurs only in the last 14 seconds on December 31 of the cosmic year.

Micro-cosmos and macro-cosmos in film Modern film follows in a long lineage of the millennia-old project of attempting to reconcile the micro-cosmos, consisting of humanly-framed endeavors, with the macro-cosmos, the entire space-time universe. Humans seek to situate our

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localized lives within the frame of the grand scheme of things. Depending on what this wider frame involves, profound existential anxiety might accompany this contextualization. A recent, stunning example of this is Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. In this visually striking film, viewers are invited into the life and struggles of a family in 1950s Waco, Texas. Of note is that their plight is ultimately framed sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of the vast universe). The problems of evil and meaning, no doubt connected, loom large in the film.

As you ponder our cosmos’s nearly unfathomable age and marvel at the enormity of the night sky, have you ever wondered whether you matter in the grand scheme of things? Does the prospect trouble you that your joys, loves, relationships, and accomplishments eventually will be swallowed up and obliterated by a silent, uncaring universe (we use the terms “cosmos” and “universe” synonymously) that was here long before you were born and will, barring some apocalyptic event, most likely remain long after you are gone? Like Pascal (see the quote from Pascal at the head of the chapter), does the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frighten you? Are we, as the late theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking put it in a 1995 interview, no more than inhabitants “on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies”? Millennia before Hawking, Qoheleth, the “Teacher” in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, interrogated the significance of a human life and its potential for lasting impact when considered within a wider cosmic frame: What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, But the earth remains forever. . . . What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. . . . There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after. (Ecc. 1:3–4, 9, 11) Very few, if any of us, will ever make the history books. But even those who do will in the end be forgotten as even those history books and the last traces of memory disappear from the universe forever. More generally, our earthly lives appear to

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be insignificant when compared with the immense canvas of a 15 billion-year-old cosmos that is, by some calculations, a sphere of nearly 100 billion light years across. Add to this that the universe is ultimately silent and oblivious to human cares and concerns, and you have a potential recipe for serious worries about the significance and meaning of human life, both individually and collectively, relative to the cosmos. This is, strictly speaking, a problem of human significance in relationship to the cosmos, but in what follows we will, like others, refer to it as the problem of cosmic significance. It is not unreasonable to think that there is something to at least some of our concerns about cosmic significance, but it will take some work to get to the bottom of what these concerns actually are and whether or not we should take them seriously. Doing so is our goal in this chapter.

WHAT IS SIGNIFICANCE? Before we can understand why many people worry about their significance within an old, large, silent, and uncaring universe, we first need to get clearer about what we mean by significance. In Chapter 3, we began by explaining how hedonists believe pleasure is intrinsically good and, because it is, makes life worth living, significant and S-Meaningful. However, as Catherine Wilson points out, “[m]any . . . are apt to feel strongly from the outset that there is a distinction between a pleasant life and a meaningful life. A meaningful life is one with a number of meaningful experiences and meaningful actions” (Wilson, 2018, p. 65). Wilson is pointing out that many people, when they think of S-Meaningfulness, think of significance as something that revolves around a cluster of notions that are non-hedonic in nature. Thus, when they maintain that something is significant, they might be conveying one or more of the following ideas: • • • • • • • • • • •

Mattering (That ballgame really mattered) Specialness (My grandfather’s watch is special to me) Importance (This election is important) Impactful (The asteroid had a large impact) Counting for something (His show of remorse counts for something) Salience (That is a salient piece of information) Making a difference (What you said made a difference) Noteworthiness (The fingerprints on the weapon are noteworthy) Consequential (Her speech was of great consequence) Value (Helping others is valuable) Being the object of care and concern (Your parents care about and are concerned for you)

There probably are additional connotations of “significant” that could be added to this list, but the preceding eleven ideas capture important aspects of the concept. Though most are just different ways of conveying much the same thing, there are distinct shades represented in the list. Most important, perhaps, is the distinction

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between insignificant and significant relationships with other things. Something is insignificant if what it causally produces is of no value, whereas it is significant if what it produces is of value. For example, one atomic bomb detonating in a remote desert and another detonating over a civilian population would both make a profound difference to the environments that they disrupted. They would have large impacts. One suspects, however, that the first bomb’s detonation would be insignificant (assuming no life or anything else of value in the desert), while the second bomb’s detonation would be significant in virtue of its relationship to things of value. Additionally, in those cases where something is significant, it is also special if it produces something of positive value. A large asteroid hitting the earth would cause a great impact, both physically and societally (if it hit, say, in Detroit), but we would hesitate to think of it as special. In ordinary language, specialness and value seem to require a kind of positivity, as does meaning (most basically under the category of S-Meaning). Impactful, but negative things, while significant or important, are harder to conceive of as valuable or special. The tornado that destroyed the town of Greensburg, Kansas, on the evening of May 4, 2007, was highly significant—it was an important, impactful, extremely salient event with far-reaching implications for the life of that community. It may sound odd, however, to say that it was meaningful. Of course, the tornadic event might be crucial to I-Meaning in the sense that to understand the story of the town of Greensburg, one will need to understand how the May 4, 2007 tornado fits into that story. But if, as seen through the lens of S-Meaning, meaningful life involves something like significance + positive value, then there is reason to think that someone whose life is highly significant, but whose life is also characterized by, say, deep moral deficiency, lives a severely impoverished life from the standpoint of meaning (though, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, things get complicated if the immoral person is sufficiently happy, because happiness is most certainly of great positive value). In this way, significance might not be sufficient (even if necessary) for life to be meaningful. Impact may not be enough. In Chapter 3, we discussed a number of topics related to the idea of value, which itself is connected to significance. Here, we consider shades of significance and their implications for life’s meaning that cluster more around the idea of mattering.

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THE PROBLEM OF COSMIC SIGNIFICANCE We began this chapter by considering our place within the framework of an old, immense, and uncaring universe. Reflecting upon our place within such a cosmos prompts many to worry about whether we really matter (any more than the dirt in your yard matters). Though often initially voiced in terms of our relative size and duration in comparison to the universe, more sophisticated worries about cosmic significance likely involve additional concerns, including various combinations of the following types of claims:        

1 2 3 4

Time: Humans are short-lived compared to the universe. Size: Humans are tiny compared to the universe. Impact: Humans make negligible impacts on the universe. Silence: The universe is silent and unconcerned about us and our plight.

At this point, it is worth noting that human concerns about significance have been voiced within religious contexts. For example, the Psalmist in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures expressed the idea that human significance might initially be surprising against the backdrop of such a staggering, awe-inspiring universe: When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3–4) He does not, of course, conclude that humans are insignificant. Indeed, quite the opposite is affirmed (see the remainder of Psalm 8). The Psalmist points out that human significance is all the more noteworthy given the other marvelous stuff out there in the world. It is also interesting that the Psalmist frames the issue of significance here in terms of being the object of someone’s care, concern, and attention. Jesus picks up a similar theme in the Gospels: Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. (Matt. 10:29–31) This passage, too, speaks to human significance. Here, Jesus assures his listeners that no matter how wide you expand your perspective and no matter how many other “distractions” you add to that perspective, God focuses care, concern, and attention on individuals. Being the object of God’s loving attention partly reveals our value or something of value about us. But while there are expressions of concern about cosmic significance within religious, theological contexts, some believe such worries have become more pressing as our scientific understanding of the universe has developed, especially when

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combined with naturalism. Certain individuals maintain that particular scientific theories or discoveries motivate concerns about significance. Lists of these theories and discoveries typically include the idea that the earth is not at the center of the solar system, let alone the entire universe (Copernicus); that the universe is very old and we are extremely late arrivals upon the scene of the cosmic drama; and that the process by which we/our bodies got here is a nasty, radically contingent affair  that very easily might not have happened (Charles Darwin). The late American novelist, poet, and short-story writer, John Updike (1932–2009), once wrote: The non-scientist’s relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from disease, to give us a faster ride and a softer life, and at the same time we shrink from what it has to tell us of our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos. Not that threats to our safety and significance were absent from the pre-scientific world, or that arguments against a God-bestowed human grandeur were lacking before Darwin. But our century’s revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know. (Updike, The Atlantic Quote of the Day, February 22, 2009) Nevertheless, the naturalist Walter Stace recommends at least caution here. According to him, the fundamental explanation for the worry about a lack of significance associated with science (he expressly discusses religious faith, but his point applies to concerns about significance related to science) is not any particular theory or discovery of science but rather science’s (and, by implication, naturalism’s) exclusion of purposeful explanation for events in the external world and human life (see Chapter 2; Stace, 2000, pp. 84–93). According to Stace, provided one preserves some explanatory space for purposes and, by implication, P-Meaning, one can, and countless many do, maintain a theistic outlook on the universe in the face of the modern scientific understanding of the world. And there is seemingly no explicit contradiction in doing so. A theist can reasonably believe that a large and old universe like ours was created by a wise and powerful God, one who can, at the same time, care for humans individually. Thus, despite what some claim, God, science, and religion are not, of necessity, locked in irresolvable conflict. That said, some think that the nature of the universe around us calls into question the idea that humans occupy a special, privileged, important place in the grand scheme of things. The assumption here seems to be that if we were cosmically important, then we would have been around for longer on the cosmic timetable, occupied a more prominent place in the universe (though it is not clear what that might mean), and the process by which we arrived would not have been so fraught with pain and precarious contingency. These realities of the pre-human and human condition, according to some, put pressure on the theistic worldview, and fit better with a naturalistic understanding of the world.

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In sum, then, our treatment of cosmic significance assumes that the cosmos is silent and uncaring according to both naturalism and theism. However, as we will see later in this chapter, more than a few people believe that worries about cosmic significance are accentuated within the context of naturalism and its denial of God and an afterlife. In their minds, an old, large, silent universe becomes much less of a problem on a worldview like theism with its P-Meaning, because at the center of it all on this worldview there exists an afterlife and an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, necessarily existing, personal God who cares for us and our ultimate well-being. The universe considered by itself does not cease to be old, vast, silent and uncaring on theism. But the universe is not all there is on this worldview, and in the minds of many individuals this is important for meaning in the form of significance or S-Meaning, which, unless we explicitly state otherwise, will be the form of meaning with which we are concerned in the rest of this chapter.

SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS VERSUS SUB SPECIE HUMANITATIS PERSPECTIVES A helpful approach to clarifying the ways in which worries about cosmic significance arise is to consider our capacity to take ever-expanding perspectives on ourselves and our activities. As humans we are aware of ourselves as subjects of experience. Typically, we are actively engaged in activities without reflecting on what it is that we are doing while we are doing them. We drive cars, play instruments, throw balls, and hike without, at the same time, reflectively thinking about the fact that we are doing these things. But for each of these and other activities, we can take a reflective step back, and consider ourselves as the subject of such experiences. We can also situate these experiences within larger contexts. For example, imagine that you are writing a research paper for class. You can write the paper without simultaneously reflecting on the fact that you are writing it. You do not “step back” and think to yourself: I am a person who is alive, writing a paper, and who feels this way or that about it. You just write it. That said, you do have the capacity to reflect on the fact that you are writing and what it is like to do so—how boring or fulfilling, difficult or easy it is. You can also broaden your perspective to consider your writing within ever more expansive contexts: the course for which the paper is a requirement, the semester, your entire college experience, the decade of your twenties, your whole life, the history of the human race, even the entire sweep of cosmic history. Narrower contexts in which you reflect on your writing—within the course, the semester, your college experience—track what we can call the sub specie humanitatis perspective. This is a perspective framed by human cares and concerns. From our standpoint, writing research papers has some significance given what we and society value in terms of education, vocation, culture, and what it means to flourish as human beings. Even within this perspective, though, you might begin to see how broadening the context could lead you to question the paper’s importance. It might

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seem pretty important from the standpoint of the course, especially if you want a good grade. But does it hold the same importance from the perspective of your entire life? How important will the paper be to you when you are 50? The issue of significance comes into sharper focus as we broaden our perspective to the context of the vast universe, to the sub specie aeternitatis perspective, which literally means from the “perspective of eternity.” As we situate our human lives and the activities that fill them—writing research papers, going to class, working a job, raising a family—within the sub specie aeternitatis perspective, some question whether these activities ultimately lose their significance. Do they matter in the grand scheme of things? The graphic immediately below illustrates our capacity to take ever-expanding perspectives on our lives. The juxtaposition between the sub specie aeternitatis and various versions of the sub specie humanitatis perspectives reveals an important way in which worries about cosmic significance are generated.

With this background in hand, we can now explore several specific forms that worries about cosmic significance can take. Though each is distinct, there are connections between them.

A DROP IN THE COSMIC BUCKET: THE TIME WORRY   1 My life is exceedingly short compared to the staggeringly old cosmos.   2 Things that are exceedingly short compared to the staggeringly old cosmos are insignificant.   3 Therefore, my life is insignificant. This argument captures a worry that many people have when pondering their short lifespan. We are here today and gone tomorrow. The older we get, many of us find ourselves saying, with increasing frequency, things like, “I cannot believe how fast life goes.” Or “Enjoy life because it flies by.” Life is like a vapor; it has an ethereal, insubstantial quality to it that can make it seem insignificant. This goes against some

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deeply engrained ways of thinking about significance and staying power. Think of the phrase diamonds are forever. Diamonds have a kind of gravitas and significance, not just because of their connection with love, but because they have a beauty that endures. Similarly, if we are happy, we want our lives to go on indefinitely. As the naturalist Kai Nielsen writes, [a]s I am now in possession of the normal powers of life, with things I want to do and experience, with pleasure in life and with people I very much care for and who care for me, I certainly do not want to die. I should very much like, in such a state, to go on living forever. (Nielsen, 2000, p. 154) However, Nielsen’s naturalism entails that everyone lives for a finite period of time with no existence after death. The temporally-focused argument is not without problems. For example, you might be skeptical that something’s duration per se is relevant for whether or not it is significant or matters. An asteroid’s quick strike in a heavily-populated area will be highly significant. The shallow gouge in rural south-central Kansas made by the Little Arkansas River over the course of centuries may not matter much at all. In our own lives, life-altering events occurring in the blink of an eye can dramatically affect our futures for good or ill in indelible ways: a tragic automobile accident, winning the lottery, and so on. Such events are highly important though they last for only a short while. Their effects, of course, carry on (which is relevant; something can be short in duration in one sense but with impacts that endure for longer durations). We consider other events of short duration in our lives to be much less significant: losing a dollar bill on a walk and scoring a goal in a neighborhood soccer game, for example. Of course, perhaps we are wrong in thinking they are insignificant, but we do often think of them as being relatively unimportant when compared with other aspects of our lives. Regardless, recognizing whether or not they are important appears to be unconnected with their duration, and is, rather, a function of some other kind of consideration. Perhaps, as we suggested earlier, the question of whether something matters more or less because of its duration cannot be divorced from the issues of good or evil, which are matters of value. The lesson here might be that something’s significance (including life’s) is in the end independent of its relative length in comparison to other things, including the universe. It is also worth noting here that some people think that life is significant precisely because it is so short. This, too, closely connects significance with duration, though in the other direction. In Chapter 7, we discuss the case of the “night-blooming cereus,” a mysterious flower that blooms only at night and only one night a year. Its short-lived bloom draws plant lovers to watch this profound and profoundly fleeting spectacle. With the cereus, the combination of beauty and brevity seems to create a situation charged with significance and import. Some think that human life itself is like this. Perhaps living forever would infect life with a kind of triviality. Alternatively, what if the purpose of life is to be perfectly happy (see Chapter 2)? In that case, anything less than forever might be too short for us to experience our purpose.

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Regardless of what one thinks about these alternatives at this juncture, what they make clear is that issues of time and duration often factor into judgments of life’s significance. Whether and how they should can be challenging to understand. This is why earlier in the chapter we listed a number of important connotations of the word “significance.” Maybe there are senses of significance that imply that a short life possesses a kind of significance (the night-blooming cereus), and other senses where significance requires longevity.

A SPECK OF DUST IN INFINITE SPACE: THE SIZE WORRY   1 I am infinitesimally small compared to the vast cosmos.   2 Things that are infinitesimally small compared to the vast cosmos are insignificant.   3 Therefore, I am insignificant. This argument, too, captures an idea people have in mind when they are concerned about their significance. How can we matter given that we are so small against the backdrop of the universe? If you shrunk the Earth down to the size of a single grain of sand, and then imagined that tiny grain of sand relative to the entire Sahara Desert, you still would not even come close to comprehending how tiny a position our terrestrial habitat occupies in the cosmos. There are sometimes good reasons to connect size and significance. In many cases, the smaller a thing, the less significant it is. A speck of dust in your dorm room is pretty insignificant compared to the big piece of mud that your friend just tracked in. The speck of dust is not big enough to matter, to be important, to be salient for your cares and concerns. Larger, more noticeable things often demand our attention in ways that smaller things do not. An elephant in your room is pretty significant; a gnat is not.

Downsizing (2016) In the 2016 Sci-Fi drama, Downsizing, starring Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, and Hong Chau, humans have the ability to shrink themselves to a height of roughly five inches. Those who choose to undergo this process lead their new shrunken lives in special experimental communities. No spoilers here, but suffice it to say, the results are interesting. Of note is that in making themselves smaller, humans will have less of an impact on their environment. They and what they do will be less significant. This shows that size and significance are sometimes directly related. One take away is that there are some ways, for example, those that track value, in which significance is likely unconnected to size, whereas there are other ways in which significance is more closely connected to size.

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As with the time worry, though, the issue gets complicated. Size and significance are not always related in this way: that is, small = insignificant and large = significant. Think of all the small things, indeed microscopic things, which are significant. We have all heard something like good gifts come in small packages. Sometimes such packages when opened reveal an exceedingly significant present. A small, rare coin gifted to you can be exceedingly valuable. But bad things can also come in small packages. A microscopic bacterium could spell doom for the human race—hardly insignificant despite its small size. In many cases, then, size by itself seems irrelevant for evaluations of significance/insignificance. Rather, it is something’s causal impact or import or salience, regardless of its size, that is most relevant to deciding this issue. A speck of dust has negligible impact on us. However, a gnat that is constantly biting your neck becomes significant very quickly. This is why care, concern, and attention are so important in thinking about significance. From the perspective of what you care about, yes, a gnat biting you incessantly is significant. The idea of our caring about something once again introduces the idea of value. We typically care about things of value. However, one might wonder whether there is any important connection between value and size. Consider happiness. It seems to be something good that can be experienced regardless of a person’s size. Thus, an individual who is short can be just as happy as someone who is tall. And a person who inhabits a small planet can be as happy as an individual who dwells on a large one. Thus, when meaning as significance or what matters concerns happiness, considerations of size seem irrelevant.

LIMITED CAUSAL EFFICACY: THE IMPACT WORRY   1 My life affects only an infinitesimally small portion of the vast cosmos for such a short time.   2 Things that affect only an infinitesimally small portion of the vast cosmos for such a short time are insignificant.   3 Therefore, my life is insignificant. The impact worry, while not unconnected from both of the previous (time and size) worries, frames the concern about human significance in the universe differently. Accordingly, our duration and size might be relevant to determining human significance, but only insofar as they make our impacts on the universe negligible at best. Thus voiced, what we do upon the grand scale of cosmic history is even less than the ripple created by throwing a pebble into the Pacific Ocean. With impact in view, it is hard to imagine how we or anything we do, even collectively as a human species, makes much more than a negligible impact on the universe. We are like specks of dust in a large room. All the stuff that we take to have gravitas—birthdays, weddings, vocations, cures for diseases, wars, nations rising and falling—is cosmically inconsequential, just a largely ineffectual blip against the

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cosmic backdrop. In terms of the history of the cosmos, the human drama and our own personal dramas play out on a vast, uncaring stage.

Chemical scum: the reductionism worry We might also worry about our significance if, as some forms of naturalism claim, everything, including persons and all of their properties, are nothing more than complex arrangements of physical stuff (see infographic immediately below). Are we, as the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said, “just a chemical scum”? If all the things that we take to be preconditions for meaning—consciousness, value, purpose, love, and so on—are themselves just matter in motion, how can any of it be significant? On this view, we are no more valuable than other configurations of atoms. We are simply different, more complex arrangements. Consider the following statement by Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA: The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice may have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can be truly called astonishing. (Crick, 1995, p. 3) For many, this picture of human life is worrisome for the prospects of meaning (see Chapter 3 for more on this).

There may be reasons to be suspicious about all three of these preceding significance worries (to that shortly), but there are also reasons to take them seriously. Here is one reason. Think about how significance waxes and wanes depending on shifting contexts, frameworks, or perspectives. For example, consider the splinter you got as

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a young child. This is, no doubt, an important matter for a four-year-old. It is painful, especially when your parent has to remove it to prevent an infection. The splinter’s significance in your life, however, wanes as it is put in wider contexts. Looking back at age 50, it is not nearly as significant as it was when it happened. A noteworthy event that makes it into some town’s local lore likely will not make it into regional or state records, let alone national, international, historic, or cosmic annals. Things that are significant from some local vantage point can quickly become insignificant from a wider one. From the cosmic perspective, human life seems like this. Philosopher Nicholas Rescher captures the idea: In nature’s vast cosmic scheme of things, we humans are to all appearances cast in the role of an insignificant member of an insignificant species. On the astronomical scale, we are no more than obscure inhabitants of an obscure planet. Nothing we are or do in our tiny sphere of action within the universe’s vast reaches of space and time makes any substantial difference in the long run. The glories that were Greece and the grandeur that was Rome have pretty much melted away with the snows of yesteryear. Perhaps the proverb exaggerates in claiming that “it will all be the same 100 years hence.” But eventually, the last trace of our feeble human efforts will certainly vanish under the all-consuming ravages of time. (Rescher, 1990, p. 153)

TERRESTRIAL SIGNIFICANCE: A RESPONSE TO WORRIES ABOUT COSMIC SIGNIFICANCE If determining something’s significance is a matter of viewing it from within a particular context and also considering whether or not it is something of value and the object of care, concern, and attention, then we should ask the following questions in our attempt to assess whether or not we are significant: Context: Significant in what context? Perspective: Significant from whose perspective? Context is dynamic. Contexts can be very narrow or exceedingly broad; they can include less or more information and distractions. You can reflect on your current activity within the context of the next hour, the context of your entire life, or the context of the entire space-time universe. The context from which we view our activities and our lives will likely matter to whether or not we take them to be significant. Moreover, if it is the case that significant things are those that have value and are the objects of attention, care, and concern, then it appears to be the case that minds—those things that can have good and bad experiences and psychological states like care, concern, and attention—are prerequisites for certain important types of significance (maybe most or all types of significance). With these two ideas in hand, there is a strategy for calling into question the assumption or belief that the proper context from which to assess our significance

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is the cosmic one. One might argue that the point of view of the universe—sub specie aeternitatis—is irrelevant for appraising human significance either because of logical-conceptual problems (there is literally no point of view of the universe, no one to take up that perspective) or because even if there were a way to take up this point of view, it would not matter to human significance. What matters to human significance, it is argued, is that our lives can be significant from the terrestrial, human perspective—sub specie humanitatis. This means that while our lives are not cosmically significant, they are humanly significant at the only level that really matters, ours. The relevant context for assessing significance, then, is from the vantage point of human cares, concerns, and that upon which we focus our attention and evaluations. From the human vantage point, we and what we do are significant because we care deeply about our own lives, those of our loved ones, and the larger matrix of social relationships forming the cultures of which we are a part. Laying the earth to waste through nuclear war or other failures of stewardship is very significant . . . to us. I (Josh) am sitting here typing this chapter at a local business in my community. I watch, with interest, as people shop for groceries. Grocery shopping is a significant thing to do, even though it can often be drudgery. If we do not buy groceries or grow food, we cannot eat, and if we do not eat we will die. Our very survival depends on it. It also matters to us because eating enriches our lives via the aesthetically pleasing experience of consuming good food. Eating matters to us in varied ways. It does not matter from the perspective of the universe or in the grand scheme of things. From the perspective of the old, vast, silent cosmos, whether we grocery shop, eat, or wreck our earth through nuclear apocalypse is not important. The skepticism here, though, about concerns over cosmic significance is that this fact—from the perspective of the universe these things do not matter—does not matter for assessing the significance of human life. Perhaps we blur the lines, then, between significance and cosmic significance, calling into question the former because we lack the latter. If meaning is partly about significance and if significance is about being important, mattering, valued, and the object of attention, care, and concern, then there are versions of each available to us in an old, vast, ultimately silent—even naturalistic, in some less-than-strongest form of naturalism—universe, because we are persons with minds who value, care for, and are concerned about many things. The conditions from which significance arises are present, even in such a universe. That said, exploring this idea of the prerequisites of significance—especially the existence of minds/persons who find things significant and important—leads to another, perhaps more troublesome form that worries about cosmic significance can take.

THE SOLITARY HUMAN CONDITION: TO WHOM DO WE MATTER? Alongside, and perhaps even underneath the other worries about cosmic significance lurks another concern. To understand this worry, we should say more about what seem to be important prerequisites of significance—persons and their capacities.

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In order for something to be significant, it looks like there first must be someone to whom it is significant. It is difficult to imagine how something could be significant or important if there were no one around to whom it is such. Imagine that there were never any persons in the universe (or beyond it and responsible for its existence), no one who possesses a first-person perspective, no one who can reflect on things, consider them, and value them. Would there by anything like significance in such a universe? In such a universe, for example, would it matter whether or not an asteroid destroyed earth? Would it matter if the universe went out of existence one minute after it came into existence? Would anything at all matter in such a universe? All of this would just be. Of course, speaking loosely, it would matter to the earth (it would make a difference for it) if it were destroyed by an asteroid. Would it have been significant if cosmic evolution did not ultimately move in a direction that favored the development of intelligent life? From our perspective, looking back, of course the fortuitous turn was significant. But this is because we are intelligent creatures who exist and who find things important relative to our human cares and concerns. Significance, in many of its various connotations, has a normative, evaluative dimension, and, therefore, presupposes rational minds like ours. Rocks do not worry about significance, because they do not think. As far as we can tell, cats do not worry about significance because, while they have minds, they lack the requisite level of cognitive sophistication (e.g., it is doubtful a cat can take the self-reflective backward step that we described earlier in this chapter). Thinking about and making judgments about significance requires the ability to evaluate, to make normative assessments. We cannot here enter the debate between naturalists and theists about whether an infinite mind is needed for normativity. We need not though. All we need here is the claim that a mind (even a finite one with sufficient cognitive sophistication) is necessary for the presence of and judgments about significance. However, there is another worry that emerges from the mind-related nature of significance: it looks like a finite mind with its parochial concerns connected to a finite body and bound to a local place will get you only anthropocentric, terrestrial significance. Such a mind can make judgments about what is significant and important to itself (and there can be collective human judgments at a broader level about what is significant to humanity), but it cannot claim any sort of significance in relation to or for the entire cosmos. And if naturalism is true, there exists no infinite mind that can understand and make determinations about what is significant from the widest, sub specie aeternitatis, perspective. This is perhaps why so many worry about not mattering ultimately or in the grand scheme of things. Such concern is not assuaged if one is reminded that they are significant to themselves or to their friends and family or even to their culture or to the entire human race. Neither is it assuaged by being reminded that their traces through memory will survive for a few generations or that their contributions to society will impact the culture for years to come. Why? Because they want to matter deep down, full stop to the grand reality of which we are a part, a reality that includes more than the terrestrial happenings on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. Given naturalism, the universe does not care because it cannot care. An entire, complex matrix of little m matterings does not

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add up to a big M mattering. In this case at least, it really does look as though the whole is not greater than its individual parts. We can matter to ourselves within the vast web of human relationships, but it does not follow that the whole human show matters on the cosmic stage. And if naturalism is true, there is no supernatural audience beyond the cosmos to whom we matter. Are those who want this deeper sort of mattering, megalomaniacs? Perhaps, but let us try and get clearer on the precise form of this worry. We can state it as follows:

ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE? MATTERING-TO-GOD WORRY   1 We do not matter to someone responsible for the universe who can do something about the human condition because there is no such person.   2 If we do not matter to someone responsible for the universe who can do something about the human condition, then we lack an important kind of significance that would be worth having.   3 Therefore, we lack an important kind of significance worth having. The previous three arguments (“Time Worry,” “Space Worry,” and “Impact Worry”) capture important aspects of concerns about our significance, though there are reasons to be suspicious of each. They do not, however, capture everything going on when we worry about our significance in the universe. Many of us worry about ultimately not mattering from the widest perspective we can take on reality because, if naturalism is true, there is no infinite, personal, powerful, loving presence responsible for it all, including us, who is at the heart of that widest perspective. There is no one who can ensure that we, with our happiness, our impacts, and our loving relationships, last as part of the deep fabric of reality. We want our individual lives and the entire human saga, with all the tragedy and struggles for triumph, not to fade away into oblivion, to be forever unresolved for the best (which entails ultimate I-Meaninglessness). We want all of this to matter to more than just ourselves, to someone who can do something about the human condition, who cares about our deepest needs, longings, and hopes concerning our well-being. We want to be the objects of care and concern to a necessarily existing and morally good Someone who is the answer to the question, “Why is it all, including us, here?” Sociologist Peter Berger captures the nature of this kind of worry about not mattering to someone at a metaphysically higher pay grade than ourselves. He has us imagine a young child being comforted by his mother after awakening from a nightmare: If reality is coextensive with the “natural” reality that our empirical reason can grasp, then the experience is an illusion and the role that embodies it is a lie. For then it is perfectly obvious that everything is not in order, is not all right. The world that the child is being told to trust is the same world in which he will eventually die. If there is no other world, then the ultimate truth about this one is that eventually it will kill the child as it will kill his mother. This would not, to be sure, detract from the real presence of love and

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its very real comforts; it would even give this love a quality of tragic heroism. Nevertheless, the final truth would be not love but terror, not light but darkness. The nightmare of chaos, not the transitory safety of order, would be the final reality of the human situation. For, in the end, we must all find ourselves in darkness, alone with the night that will swallow us up. The face of reassuring love, bending over our terror, will then be nothing except an image of merciful illusion. (Berger, 1970, p. 56) If naturalism is true, in the end there is nothing but silence concerning the human condition, because the universe is the ultimate reality. The cosmos does not care because it cannot care. We cannot matter from the sub specie aeternitatis perspective because that perspective is not occupied by a mind or person to whom we could matter. At the cosmic level, there is no one who cares for us, no one who is concerned with us and our deepest joys and sorrows. Unlike naturalism, theism maintains that at the heart of reality there is a person with the attributes needed to guarantee our final well-being, a person who occupies the sub specie aeternitatis perspective. The best naturalism can do on this count is a finite mattering grounded in the cares and concerns of finite minds. We have a kind of importance, though only a kind of significance from the sub specie humanitatis perspective.

Cosmic significance on naturalism? Philosopher Guy Kahane (2013, pp. 745–772) argues that human beings, collectively, could be cosmically significant in a naturalistic universe. This cuts against the popular idea that, if there is no God, then our lives are cosmically insignificant against the backdrop of such a large, old, vast, silent universe. Kahane says that just the opposite is true since our cosmic significance is best determined, not by our relative size, duration, location, or impact in/on the universe, but rather by the following factors: • Humans are intrinsically valuable in virtue of our capacities for reason and love. • If there is no other intelligent life in the universe, then nothing else has value. • If nothing else in the universe has value, then we possess the most value. • Hence, if there is no other intelligent life in the universe, then we are cosmically significant. Kahane says that if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, this would mitigate our level of cosmic significance, for then we would no longer be the

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only thing with value. Antiques are, in part, significant because they are so rare. Another interesting implication of his argument is that the existence of God would threaten, rather than enhance, human significance because of God’s incomparable value. What might be said in response to Kahane? Perhaps, like many naturalists (see Chapters 2 and 3), you are skeptical about the existence of intrinsic value in a naturalistic universe, or of using it to secure a kind of cosmic significance— Kahane seems to think of cosmic significance as a kind of relative significance whose existence depends upon there not being anything else of intrinsic value in the universe. Related, perhaps you think his argument misses the appropriate target—that whatever kind of cosmic significance it gets us is not really the kind we really worry about in the first place, which is that involving a divine mind which eternally preserves our well-being. Finally, perhaps you believe that Kahane mistakenly thinks of significance as a zero-sum game (one big pot of cosmic significance where when someone gets some, someone else loses theirs. That may be true for some shades of significance (like salience where one thing being more noticeable means another thing in the same frame is less noticeable), but not for others like the value of happiness and being the object of care and concern (especially if the one doing the carrying and concerning is an omniscient God).

The lesson here seems to be that our lives can have a local, terrestrial kind of significance and meaning. This is noteworthy. It is good news. Our lives are not totally insignificant. Our lives matter, they are important, they are special, and they are objects of care and concern . . . to us. However, that this gets us the kind of significance that deep down many of us crave is doubted by many. For those with lingering concerns about cosmic significance, the presence of terrestrial significance will not be unmitigated good news. It will not be bad news, but it will not be the best news. In fact, it might not even be good enough news to block the conclusion that, despite some real terrestrial significance, there is a salient undercurrent of tragedy to the human condition if naturalism is true. Countless humans want to be the object of care and concern to someone who can actually do something definitive about the human condition: someone who can finally right wrongs, who can bring ultimate justice, who can guarantee a lasting place for happiness and love in the grand scheme of things. When you bury a child, is that it? In the overwhelming pain of grief, have you said goodbye for the final time? Is there anyone to whom this matters who can bring everlasting shalom and felicity to the cosmic order? Contrary to some criticisms, many continue to insist that the human desire for some sort of ultimate, cosmic significance is not the megalomaniacal craving to be the most important thing in the universe (though this can be a tendency of humans); rather it is the deep longing to be cared for and

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ultimately to matter in the universe’s story. We want to be children, not orphans in the universe. If naturalism is true, the perspective that speaks first, longest, and last (and maybe loudest) is one that does not care about us in the least. If theism is true, the perspective that speaks first, longest, and last (and certainly loudest) includes someone who both cares about us and can do something about our deepest needs, longings, and hopes. We are children, even in the vast scheme of things. As atheist philosopher Philip Kitcher said, “Mattering to others is what counts in conferring meaning” (Kitcher, 2014, p. 101). For more than just a few people, the most important other to whom we really need to matter is the being to whom the name “God” is traditionally ascribed.

CHAPTER SUMMARY At the beginning of this chapter, we saw just how incredibly small and short-lived we are when compared with the unfathomably old and vast universe. Combine that with the universe’s silence to the human condition, and the stage is set for some serious concerns about human significance and mattering in relation to the cosmos. In order to assess these concerns, we discussed the various senses of “significance” (including, for example, importance, mattering, impact, and being the object of care and concern), and canvassed some common forms that concerns over cosmic significance often take. We concluded with a discussion of what may be the most troublesome form of the worry—that there is no infinite, powerful, guiding, loving presence to whom we matter if naturalism is true. We move, in the next chapter, to a consideration of the final part of the Meaning Triad— intelligibility or sense-making.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1 Have you ever worried about whether or not you (or your life) is significant? What form did the worry take? What were the circumstances in which your worry arose? 2 What is the connection, if any, between significance and cosmic significance? 3 Do you think our relatively short lifespan matters for whether or not we are significant? 4 Do you think our relative size matters for whether or not we are significant? 5 Do you think the negligible impact that we make on the cosmos at large matters for whether or not we are significant? 6 Does whether or not there is a loving, powerful, personal presence at the heart of reality matter for whether or not we are significant? 7 Do you think it even matters whether or not we are cosmically significant? Is terrestrial significance from the perspective of human cares and concerns sufficient for meaningful life? 8 Do you think cosmic significance is possible if naturalism is true?

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• INTRODUCTORY FURTHER READING Benatar, David. 2017. The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. Chapter Three, “Meaninglessness.” New York: Oxford University Press. Landau, Iddo. 2017. Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World. Chapter Seven, “Life in the Context of the Whole Universe.” New York: Oxford University Press. Scharf, Caleb. 2015. The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities. New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• ADVANCED FURTHER READING Kahane, Guy. 2013. “Our Cosmic Insignificance.” Noûs 47:2: 745–772. Landau, Iddo. 2011. “The Meaning of Life Sub Specie Aeternitatis.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89:4: 727–734. Seachris, Joshua W. 2013. “The Sub Specie Aeternitatis Perspective and Normative Evaluations of Life’s Meaningfulness: A Closer Look.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16:3: 605–620.

• FREE INTERNET RESOURCES Hughes, Nick. “Do We Matter in the Cosmos?” Aeon (https://aeon.co/essays/ just-a-recent-blip-in-the-cosmos-are-humans-insignificant). Weinberg, Rivka. “Why Life is Absurd.” The Stone (The New York Times) (https:// opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/why-life-is-absurd/).

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meaning and sense-making [W]hen we ask, “What is the meaning of all things?” we are not asking a senseless question. In this case, of course, we have not witnessed the whole play, we have only an idea in outline of what went before and what will come after that small part of history which we witness. . . . [W]ith the words, “What is the meaning of it all?” we are trying to find the order in the drama of Time. (John Wisdom, 1970, p. 41) Meaning is what we weave with each other and with patterns passed down from the past, selecting, discarding, embroidering, twisting the threads together to draw every man and woman and child into a larger whole. (Mary Catherine Bateson, 1992, p. 149)

CHAPTER SECTIONS • • • • • •

Why? Meaning as sense-making Making sense of my life: Meaning in life Making sense of it all: The meaning of life Sense-making and narrative Chapter summary

Meaning in the real world Ashanti is a rising senior who still does not know what she wants to do with her life. Right now, her college experience feels more like a bunch of largely unconnected parts: a class here, a class there, a social event to attend on Thursday, a game to watch on Saturday, social media to check, and a thousand other things that fill her time. Ashanti is searching for a kind of coherence to her life, for thematic threads from which to weave it all together. Shifting her focus to

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the universe as a whole, she wonders if there is some larger story of the cosmos in which everything has its proper place, a kind of rhyme and reason to it all. Is there something at the heart of it all that ties everything together, including her own life, her deepest longings and hopes, and which can guide her journey in this world?

WHY? Einstein once said that The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. (Einstein, 1955, p. 64) Many of us do not have to be encouraged to continue questioning. The urge to know “why?” is in our DNA.

John Updike on human curiosity What we beyond doubt do have is our instinctive intellectual curiosity about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for being here. (Updike, 1991, p. 49)

Chances are, you have been on either one or both sides of a conversation like the following: PARENT: CHILD: PARENT: CHILD: PARENT: CHILD: PARENT: CHILD:

It’s time for bed, William. Why? It is important to get enough sleep. Why? It is good to be well rested for school. Why? So that you will be able to learn; learning is valuable. Why?

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It is doubtful that William stopped asking his mother “Why?” after she attempted to explain the value of learning. At some point in the process, though, mom probably threw up her hands in exasperation and said something like, “Because that’s just the way it is!” Her explanations came to an end, but maybe not before the exchange intersected with ideas like purpose, value, significance, and meaning. After all, situating the learning enterprise in the most fundamental context likely requires just these sorts of ideas. Sometimes, our sense-making proclivities show up in our desire to fit things together, things that initially do not seem to fit with each other. Maybe we ask why the bathtub is filled with water in the middle of the afternoon and no one is taking a bath, or why an unknown car has been parked in the driveway for two hours. Initially, these facts may not fit with our expectations, and so we seek to locate them within a larger context. We do this with life too. We want some overarching kind of framework in which to fit together existentially weighty facts and/or claims about our origins, purpose, significance, value, suffering, and destiny, all with a view towards living well or experiencing happiness. Philosophy, religion, and science are institutional embodiments of this sense-making desire. They link with and reflect our search for meaning, a search prominently anchored in the human urge to make sense of it all.

MEANING AS SENSE-MAKING Several times already, we have referenced the Meaning Triad, consisting of purpose (Chapter 2); significance (Chapters 3-Value and 4-Mattering); and, here in this chapter, intelligibility or sense-making. Life’s meaning is wrapped up in all three, even if the precise connection between them is not easy to articulate. Our focus in this chapter will be on meaning as sense-making.

Our requests for meaning in ordinary contexts often involve trying to render something intelligible. Recall the part of the Triad that we called I-Meaning (for most of this chapter, we will use sense-making for I-Meaning) as encapsulated in statements and questions like the following:   1 What you said didn’t mean a thing. It makes no sense.   2 What did you mean when you sent that text?

meaning and sense-making          

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Do you know what I mean? What did you mean by that face? What is the meaning of that poem? (What is it about?) What does it mean to be a Kansan? What is the meaning of this? (For example, when asked upon returning home to find one’s house ransacked)

In each of these cases we encounter something (series of words, facial configuration, event or situation) about which we have some information that, nonetheless, is insufficient for meaning. We do not yet know enough in order to make sense out of it. The same goes for life, our individual lives and the universe itself—we are in search of more information that then provides the larger context for understanding what it is all about. Though we are approaching life’s meaning philosophically in this book, it is worth noting that, increasingly, social scientists recognize a tri-partite structure to meaning, one component of which is something like sense-making. A quick scan of article titles in psychology on meaning in life consistently turns up the ideas of purpose, significance, and coherence (a close cousin to sense-making/intelligibility). About coherence or sense-making, psychologists make claims like: We are predisposed to see order, pattern, and meaning in the world, and we find randomness, chaos, and meaninglessness unsatisfying. Human nature abhors a lack of predictability and the absence of meaning. (Gilovich, 1991, p. 9) . . . another way to interpret meaning is as the act of making sense of one’s life as a whole. Without meaning of this kind, experiences, life and the world [are] perceived as chaotic. (Karlsson, Loewenstein and McCafferty, 2004, p. 67) A significant part of what we are after in seeking meaning is a kind of sense-making, the targets of which are our own lives (embedded within the matrix of human relationships, cares, and concerns) and everything else (embedded within the entire cosmos/all of reality). Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl devised an entire psychotherapeutic system—logotherapy—built on the view that our greatest motivational drive as humans is neither the will to pleasure (Freud) nor the will to power (Nietzsche), but rather the will to meaning. For Frankl, the will to meaning is what motivates our efforts to make sense of the events of our lives (especially pain and suffering), to bring a kind of coherence to them. In a word, to confer meaning on them. We want the parts of our lives both simultaneously and  over time to fit together properly so that our lives as a whole make sense. When this fails to occur, we are haunted by the spectre of meaninglessness. In the words of philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–1999), “we fear plurality, diffusion, senseless accident, chaos, we want to transform what we cannot dominate or understand into something reassuring and familiar, into ordinary being, into history, art, religion, science” (Murdoch, 1992, pp. 1–2).

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Social scientists, therapists, and philosophers are on to something with their claim that “meaning,” “meaningful,” and the like connote the idea of sense-making or intelligibility. Thus, while it is important to recognize that “sense-making” does at times mean no more than the understanding or comprehension of a word, expression, or idea, when people are concerned with making sense of things they are more often than not interested in the intelligibility of the relationships among a multiplicity of objects, events, etc. They are seeking a certain fit or arrangement between those things which provides coherence or makes sense. The idea of things fitting together in the right way obviously applies to logic and to semantic units like sentences. For example, asking the question, “What object is smaller than the smallest object?” does not make sense because the concept of the smallest object does not fit with asking what is smaller. While that is true, our interest from here on is in the application of this idea to non-linguistic entities and, most importantly, our lives. For example, we typically say the following do not make sense: • EARLY PITCHING SWITCH: It does not make sense for the coach to switch pitchers in the top of the first inning given that the starting pitcher has retired the first two batters and no one is on base. • THUNDERSTORM PAINTING: It makes no sense that my neighbor is trying to paint the exterior of his house during this thunderstorm. • LATE DINNER GUEST: It does not make sense that my guest has not yet arrived given that she phoned two hours ago to say she would be here in a few minutes. In each of these situations, we voice our confusion about a perceived lack of fit. None of these situations involves any sort of logical or semantic incoherence, but each fails to make sense—to fit together properly—in some other crucial way. Of course, often, perceiving this lack of fit will be a product of one’s background beliefs and one’s sense of right and wrong, for example. Therefore, determining whether something lacks fit in this broader sense often will be a messier affair than in strictly logical or semantic cases. As we briefly indicated above, sense-making via fitting things together properly sometimes involves securing a larger context or framework. If you want to make sense of the behavior of falling objects, you will need to set the phenomena within the larger context of a theory of gravity, so that the phenomena fit together with other things that we know or believe about the world. If you want to make sense of why some particular musical note was played during the concert, you will need to hear that note within the context of the entire symphony and maybe even know a little about music theory too. If you want to make sense of a particular call in a basketball game, you will need to know something about the larger framework of rules governing the sport. Context and explanatory frameworks bring intelligibility to the discrete parts of our experience by helping us fit them together with one another in that larger, sense-making context. Here is another way of thinking about sense-making in a larger framework. Consider a photograph where initially all you see are a few of its parts. Perhaps you see

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something green and textured at the top right, two eyes in the middle left, and four small fury legs at the bottom left. You have some data. You are not completely in the dark, but you do not have enough information to help you make sense of the picture. You do not know enough to render it sufficiently intelligible, to fit all its parts together into a coherent whole. Now imagine that the other portions of the photograph are illuminated, revealing the entire picture. You see a young boy walking his dog in a park full of trees. You lacked the whole context before. You lacked the big picture. Now you have it and you can make sense of what you saw only in part before. The picture now has a kind of meaning that it previously lacked. This is reminiscent of the famous blind men and an elephant parable originating in ancient India. None of the men had the entire context to make sense of what they were, in fact, touching. Life’s meaning, at both personal and cosmic levels, is similar. On the personal level, one way of attempting to make sense of one’s life is to fit its various aspects together according to, say, organizing themes like family, career, politics, etc., which form a sense-making frame or context. Similarly, one might capture the essence of what we are after at the second, cosmic level as the attempt to make sense of it all, to fit everything together within the big picture or the grand scheme of things. We see only select portions of the photograph of life (or touch only parts of the elephant), and we might want the full picture, the framework to make sense of our lives within the context of the vast universe, or all of reality if that includes more than the material universe. This sense-making big picture would bring with it meaning—life’s meaning.

MAKING SENSE OF MY LIFE: MEANING IN LIFE As we have been emphasizing, sense-making meaning, understood primarily as a kind of intelligibility that accompanies fitting things together in the right way, provides an important avenue for understanding personal meaning within the context of an individual life. There is more than one way in terms of which a life can be assessed as making (or not making) sense or exhibiting coherence. For example, a life might be meaningful insofar as it resembles a good story, one that exhibits an appropriate narrative structure in which there are a sufficient number of important guiding purposes in life that are well integrated and provide coherence to the rhythms of one’s day-to-day existence. Helping people meet their financial goals, constructing better bridges and buildings, doing important medical research, being a good parent, and many other purposes can fit together well and provide such structure to your daily activities. Another dimension of narrative sense-making concerns a life-story’s arc with respect to well-being. For example, a person’s happiness might go from bad to good or good to better. A life might begin sadly and end happily. Not inconsistent with the first two ways of thinking of a life as making sense is a third kind of fittingness between our choices and actions (the way we live) and what is true about the world in terms of moral/ethical value—what is right and wrong. Many of us want coherence between what we do and what we think is morally right about the world.

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For example, if love, understood as seeking to promote the true good and well-being of others, is a real value (where well-being is itself a non-moral value), then a life devoted to love and other genuine goods is meaningful, fits together with what is true about the world, and therefore, makes sense.

Axiology: the philosophical study of value There are additional types of value not exhausted by moral value. For example, well-being (understood as that which is ultimately good for a person, whether pleasure or something different and independent from pleasurable experiences or desire satisfaction) is a kind of value, though not moral. Well-being is good and worth having.

It is relevant to stress that because there are different ways in which a life can be assessed in terms of its making sense, a life might or might not make sense in one or more of those ways. For illustrative purposes, consider a life that lacks a purpose appropriate to a particular time or season in life, but at the same time is positive in terms of well-being. Thus, it makes no sense in terms of a purpose to spend most of one’s time playing with toys at age 45 (unless one works for Lego). The activity does not fit with the point one has reached in life. However, a midlife focused around the purpose of playing with Legos might be on a positive trajectory in terms of well-being because one is the heir of a large family fortune and is thereby well provided for. As another example, we typically think it makes no sense for one to be purposefully rude to almost everyone one meets. Living this kind of life does not fit with the moral values many of us hold. At the same time, one’s life might also not make sense because it is going from better to worse in terms of the value of well-being over the long haul. Again, one’s life need not be entirely unintelligible in terms of purpose and value, but it does fail to make sense to some degree in these ways.

MEANING IN LIFE: STALIN VERSUS SAINT TERESA OF CALCUTTA There is a world of difference between the lives of Joseph Stalin and Saint Teresa of Calcutta. One was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, the other, though not without controversy, devoted her life to caring for the most unwanted, unloved, and destitute persons in society—the homeless, hungry, and crippled. Most of us would consider both of their lives to be highly significant. Unlike our lives, theirs are recorded in the history books. Their impact and influence reached a level of mattering worth talking about long after their deaths. While this is true, most think that Saint Teresa’s life was meaningful in a way that Stalin’s was

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not. But in what sense? Stalin’s life was ordered around central purposes that had world-changing impacts, yet we certainly do not think of his life as being a morally exemplary life, and many people are therefore also reluctant to think of it as a fully meaningful one. One idea worth exploring is that Stalin’s life lacked an important kind of I-Meaning, an appropriate fittingness between his aims, actions, and what many think is true about the world at the level of moral value. It does not make sense to order the deaths of millions upon millions of people as Stalin did. Doing so fails to fit with the ethical order of the world. It cuts against the moral grain of the universe. Those who doubt the meaningfulness of Stalin’s life are inclined to think that Saint Teresa led a meaningful life in terms of moral value. Unlike with Stalin’s life, they believe Teresa’s life made sense. Devoting one’s life to ameliorating suffering in acts of charity is deeply admirable and fits with the moral order of the world. Importantly, we are not saying that Saint Teresa’s life is meaningful as moral, where being moral is itself a form of meaning. Rather, her life is meaningful because it makes sense (it is fitting) to be moral given that the object of moral activity, which is plausibly the well-being of others, is itself part of the non-moral value structure of the world. Again, meaning as sense-making is often a matter of securing proper fit. Assessing whether or not someone leads a meaningful life—whether Stalin or Saint Teresa or you or we—probably involves more than just sense-making meaning. In fact, a plausible understanding of a meaningful life (meaning in life) might include the entire Meaning Triad. Accordingly, we might define a meaningful life as follows: Meaningful Life = A life that makes sense, that fits together properly (I-Meaning) in virtue of sufficient orientation around appropriate purposes (P-Meaning), activities, and relationships that matter (S-Meaning), have positive value (for example, good impacts, not bad ones), and are reliably accompanied by a psychological profile that contains states like the following: well-being, happiness, fullness, and satisfaction. Notice in this definition that we included the idea of positive value in the form of what results from one’s purposeful activities. We think this fits with ordinary intuitions that a highly impactful, but morally deficient life (like Stalin’s) fails to be meaningful in an important way. His life is, no doubt, important and significant, but we are hesitant to think that it is fully meaningful because it fails in a crucial way that is connected to the idea of sense-making as things fitting together appropriately. In the case of Stalin, things do not make sense because he ends up being happy or enjoying well-being as a result of acting immorally. In light of recently published letters of Saint Teresa (Mother Teresa, 2007), we are also hesitant to think that her life was fully meaningful because she states that she suffered a decades-long “darkness of the soul” while aiding the helpless in Calcutta. It appears as though her life was saliently impoverished in terms of well-being or happiness. Thus, things fit together no better in her case than in Stalin’s.

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Meaningful life according to psychologists Increasingly, psychologists propose tripartite views—involving purpose, significance, and coherence—of meaningful life. Michael F. Steger proposes a definition of meaning in life that incorporates a similar triad of meaning, but that prioritizes sense-making: Meaning is the web of connections, understandings, and interpretations that help us comprehend our experience and formulate plans directing our energies to the achievement of our desired future. Meaning provides us with the sense that our lives matter, that they make sense, and that they are more than the sum of our seconds, days, and years. (Steger, 2012, pp. 165–184)

Regardless of how one fully fleshes out what it means to lead a meaningful life, an adequate definition will include the idea of sense-making as things fitting together in the right way. In the next section, we explore this concept of sense-making within the broader metaphysical and normative contours of a larger cosmic framework. Many believe this larger framework seems to be required if the lack of fit in the lives of Stalin and Saint Teresa in this world is to be resolved.

MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL: THE MEANING OF LIFE Earlier in this chapter we compared sense-making meaning to a situation where you see only part of a photograph and need to see more to render it intelligible. You want to make sense of the parts you see, and in order to do this, you need to fit them within the entire picture. The big picture brings meaning. Life’s meaning can be like this. In searching for life’s meaning, we see only parts of life’s picture and we are in search of more. We want the big picture in which the important parts fit. It is a specific kind of big picture, though, with a relatively well-defined scope. We are not really looking for the physicist’s grand theory of everything. Nor are we in search of the big picture that includes, literally, every fact that can be known about our universe, down to the migratory pattern of Canadian geese and microclimates in central Oklahoma. So what kind of big picture do we want? We want a frame through which to situate those existentially weighty experiences and deep longings that, in turn, motivate questions about meaning. We seek a big picture to help us make sense of our experiences and questions, questions like the following:   1 Why does the universe exist? Why do I exist?   2 Is there a purpose of life? Around what purpose(s) should I order my life?

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In virtue of what are our lives significant? Do they even matter at all? Are we and our lives worthwhile and valuable? Why do we suffer? How is it all, ultimately, going to end—my life and the whole show?

When we ask “What is the meaning of life?”, we are likely looking for the overarching framework through which to make sense of 1–6 above. We are trying to fit it all together—fitting together our innate sense of value and significance with other claims about the nature of the universe, fitting together our suffering with what we believe to be true about the world, fitting together our inevitable death with our deep longing to live on, and so on. Searching for life’s meaning, when sense-making meaning is in view, is about trying to make sense of our place in the universe along the axes captured by questions 1–6 above. We seek to render all of this intelligible through a wider explanatory context or framework. To use a popular form of the life’s meaning question, we seek to know what it’s all about. What is the overarching story that brings sense and significance to it all?

WORLDVIEWS AND METANARRATIVES The idea of an overarching story that confers sense and significance to life brings to mind the concept of a metanarrative or worldview. Setting aside complexities about whether or not worldviews and metanarratives always and exactly refer to the same thing, we are going to follow precedent and treat them as roughly synonymous for our purposes here. The overarching point that we want to make is that worldviews/ metanarratives (hereafter we will simplify to just “worldview(s)”) provide the kind of sense-making meaning, via fitting things together properly, that we are partly after when searching for life’s meaning. That said, it will be helpful to introduce several definitions of worldviews, especially some that use narrative language to describe them. Consider the following: In my opinion, then, a Weltanschauung [worldview] is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place. (Freud, 1989, p. 783) [People] may say that what they are looking for is an account of the “big picture” with whose aid they would be able to see not only their own individual personal lives, but the lives of everybody else, indeed of everything of a finite or limited sort, human or not. . . . The expression of such a concern involves, at bottom, the appeal to a “worldview” or “world picture.” This undertakes to give a description of the most inclusive setting within which human life is situated, a statement of the most fundamental beliefs and commitments on which a person may fall back in giving his account of “the world,” “reality,” “existence,” or “being.” (Munitz, 1993, p. 30)

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[W]orldviews provide the stories through which human beings view reality. Narrative is the most characteristic expression of worldview, going deeper than the isolated observation or fragmented remark. . . . From these stories one can in principle discover how to answer the basic questions that determine human existence: who are we, where are we, what is wrong, and what is the solution? [emphasis in original]. (Wright, 1992, pp. 124–125) [F]or all of our science, rationality, and technology, we moderns are no less the makers, tellers, and believers of narrative construals of existence, history, and purpose than were our forebears at any other time in human history. But more than that, we not only continue to be animals who make stories but also animals who are made by our stories. We tell and retell narratives that themselves come fundamentally to constitute and direct our lives. We, every bit as much as the most primitive or traditional of our ancestors, are animals who most fundamentally understand what reality is, who we are, and how we ought to live by locating ourselves within the larger narratives and metanarratives that we hear and tell, and that constitute what is for us real and significant. (Smith, 2009, p. 64) The preceding definitions support the claim that inquiring into life’s meaning is often wrapped up with sense-making, insofar as worldviews are connected with both (1) sense-making and (2) our desire for meaning. Generally known as the father of the idea of a worldview, German philosopher and historian Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) spoke of a worldview as a concept that “. . . constitutes an overall perspective on life that sums up what we know about the world, how we evaluate it emotionally, and how we respond to it volitionally” (Makkreel, 2001, p. 236). Worldviews, according to Dilthey, have three dimensions: cognitive, affective, and practical. They provide answers to important questions of the human condition and fit those answers together in conceptual proximity to one another (cognitive); they situate our emotional responses to the human condition (affective); and they act like a map to help us successfully navigate the human condition (practical). The quotes about worldviews above confirm this. You may have noticed that some of the definitions convey the idea that worldviews make sense of facts, at least some of which are known independently of the worldview. The idea here is that although worldviews serve a kind of hermeneutical function (they help us interpret existence), they do not determine “how we see” everything. On this view, your worldview spectacles do not shade or alter everything that you encounter in experience. Alternatively, there are some philosophers who seem to suggest that worldviews have even greater power, and actually “create” the facts themselves of which sense is then made. Here, our worldview spectacles really do “alter” everything that we encounter in our experience. To be more precise, our very experiences already come pre-fashioned by our worldview. On this stronger conception of a worldview’s interpretive role, it is difficult to understand how one could access facts in an attempt to rationally conclude which of two or

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more worldviews does a better job of making sense of the facts, since there are no facts independent of the different worldviews (we will return to this issue at the end of Chapter 6 when we compare the theistic and naturalistic treatments of the problem of evil). Leaving aside that debate and opting for a concept of worldviews that gives them less hermeneutical power (there are at least some facts which are not initially shaped by worldviews and which can be known independently of them), we can think of worldviews as overarching frameworks through which we fit facts together. Worldviews link meaning with sense-making by providing a larger explanatory context through which to fit together everything that existentially concerns us. In seeking to make sense of it all, we desire to makes sense of the stuff that worldviews are constructed to address: the cluster of questions and concerns encapsulated in questions 1–6 a few pages back.

COMPLEXITIES WITH SENSE-MAKING MEANING Meaning, including life’s meaning, is clearly about sense-making, and sense-making can be thought of as fitting things together properly. One way of thinking about things fitting together properly is through the concept of coherence. Coherence is about proper fit between parts; coherent things are consistent with one another. Is coherence, then, enough for sense-making meaning? Yes, often it is. Things are meaningful (they make sense) if they are coherent. Nonsensical statements, alternatively, are incoherent. They have no meaning at one level (even this is complicated, though, because one could pragmatically mean something by choosing to utter a nonsensical statement, by one’s use of the statement). Importantly, meaningful statements are meaningful, whether true or false. Lies, for example, mean something (they are intelligible) even though they are false. Truth, in this case, is not required for meaning. But sense-making is not always like this. In many cases we are not satisfied that we have made sense of something until we know the truth about it. For example, if you ask your friend, “What is the meaning of this?” in response to walking in and finding him looking through your diary, he could render the situation intelligible by telling you a coherent, but nonetheless false story about what he is doing. Though he has provided a meaningful account at one level, he has not given you the full-blown meaning that you want. You have not really made sense out of what you discovered if all you get is an intelligible, though false account. You want the meaning of your friend thumbing through your diary, nor merely a possible meaning of it. Getting the correct meaning is often the kind of meaning we want when sense-making meaning is in view—bare intelligibility is not enough. We also want the truth. This, however, leads to another problem. There are cases, especially when we are interested in life’s meaning, where we worry that the truth might be unwelcome. What if the truth is existentially unsatisfying or worse? What if it is terrible? In such cases, we will worry that things do not actually fit together properly, that they do not make sense, that life is absurd.

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C. S. Lewis on reason and the heart C. S. Lewis once said, The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest conflict. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless. (Lewis, 1955, p. 170) Lewis was having difficulty fitting what he thought was true about the world with what he genuinely loved and hoped in his heart.

One might think of Shakespeare’s Macbeth who laments that the tale of the world is one that is “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying [of note, some modern translations substitute “meaning” for “signifying”] nothing” (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 2). One way to understand Macbeth’s words is that he is lamenting that life ultimately does not make sense, that its various aspects, especially those with existential gravitas, fail in the end to fit together properly. Could it really be that no deep rhyme or reason frames the existentially profound stuff of life? Does it all unfold on a naturalistic stage with no director, producer, and audience? Are our joys, sorrows, and hopes—and all that causes them—simply the results of accidental collocations of atoms, to use Bertrand Russell’s famous words, that are here today and then quickly gone and forgotten forever? (Russell, 2000a, p. 72). Surely, this is absurd; it makes no sense. No logical norms are violated, of course, but a broader, more existentially worrisome lack of fit emerges among things that should go together in a certain way but do not. Or, take the existentialist Camus’s concept of the absurd (see Chapter 1)—what he believes to be the profound discrepancy between the intense human desires for happiness and understanding and the utter failure of the universe to quench them. For both Macbeth and Camus, life fails to make sense in some important way, a way that is ultimately existentially satisfying. Life is meaningless because its various parts do not fit together as they should. Some features of the universe appear not to fit with some other features, given what naturalism says is true about the world; namely, that we are here by accident, that our desire for felicity ultimately goes unsatisfied, that there is no cosmic purpose, that we do not matter from a cosmic perspective, that there is no ultimate meaning in our suffering, and that when we die, there will be nothing but an experiential blank forever. For both Macbeth and Camus, this grand naturalistic worldview will not suffice to render life intelligible in ways that are of concern to them, and this is deeply disconcerting. Despite providing sense-making in real (even powerful) ways, naturalism does not allow for a fittingness between deep human longings, hopes, and expectations and reality in the

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way that Macbeth, Camus, and countless others seek. For this reason, many think that a naturalistic story of the universe is, at heart, an absurd tale told by an idiot. It does not make sense. Neuroscientist Bill Newsome brings this issue into stark relief: Do we live in a universe where our highest values and intuitions about ethical behavior are in touch with the central reality of the universe and the reason the universe was built from the beginning? Or are our highest values and ethical intuitions kind of a joke—an accident—that really have nothing to do with what the universe is about? (Newsome, YouTube, April 29, 2010) The foregoing reveals that sense-making, broadly construed, admits of multiple interpretations. In some ordinary ways of talking, sense-making meaning does not require truth, just coherence of some sort. Many works of fiction are like this. In other cases, though, we do not think that we have really made sense of something until we can know the truth about it. Further complications arise once we move into the realm of life’s meaning. Many worry that the purported truth about the world (if naturalism is true) would actually be very bad news for meaning. Here, it is helpful to briefly discuss the truth about death (a topic which we consider at length in Chapter 7). Many people hope for life after death so that they can experience the perfect happiness they so deeply desire. As was pointed out in Chapter 3, it is hard to understand how someone could not desire perfect happiness per se, where the concept of perfect happiness is of a happiness that never ends. Given this deep desire for perfect happiness, many individuals want to be significant, to matter in the grand scheme of things in the sense that they want there to be a loving, good, powerful, personal presence at the center of it all who created them for the purpose that they experience perfect happiness and who can do something about death which ultimately threatens the possibility of their having that happiness. An atheist like Sartre might respond that some individuals do not want to be significant in this way because this supposed loving, good, powerful, and personal presence at the center of it all might impose restraints on how they pursue the perfect happiness they so deeply desire for itself. To this, a theist might answer back that given the personal presence at the center of it all is good and loving, it would not impose any unjust restraints on how persons pursue this happiness. Perhaps so. But naturalists who recognize the irreducible reality of what is psychological in nature (we can think of them as weak naturalists, in contrast with strong naturalists who deny the irreducible reality of anything psychological) are likely to retort that the theist’s appeal to the desire for perfect happiness still sets the bar for meaningfulness too high (see Landau, 2017, Chapters 3 and 4). Even in a world without God, humans can achieve a significant, though admittedly less than perfect, degree of happiness, and produce effects that remain after death and enable them to live on, even if only in an attenuated sense. We can also be significant to family and friends, to our communities and cultures, even if not from any ultimate perspective. In these thinner forms, versions of core human longings fit within a weak naturalistic

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worldview. Theists will likely respond that there is nothing wrong with our desires in their strong forms, but with a world where ultimately they are not satisfied. Though agreement among those involved in this discussion is hard to come by, most, but not all, acknowledge that a desire like that for perfect happiness in some way or other does not fit well within a naturalistic universe where there is no God.

How might God make sense? In Chapters 2 and 3, we briefly considered a meaningful life for God (assuming, for the sake of discussion, that God exists) in terms of a purpose of life and what makes life worth living (we considered meaningfulness for God along the purpose and significance sides of our Meaning Triad). What about a meaningful life for God in terms of the third side of the Triad? That is, what about God’s existence being meaningful in terms of its being intelligible or making sense? Here we enter deep waters indeed. Many think of God as the most perfect or greatest possible being because of God’s having perfective or great-making properties. For example, God is typically regarded as being all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), all-good (omnibenevolent), and existing necessarily. What, one might wonder, makes these properties perfective or great-making? Are they intrinsic goods so that it makes sense to hold that the most perfect or greatest possible being possesses them? Or, if we assume God is perfectly happy, does their possession make sense as requirements for and/ or sources of that happiness? This would seem to imply that the significance side of the Meaning Triad is required for making sense of things. We will leave the matter here.

AN ILLUSTRATION: C. S. LEWIS’S ARGUMENT FROM DESIRE To illustrate the role of desire in our attempt to make sense of things, consider an argument put forth by C. S. Lewis which is known as his “argument from desire” (Lewis, 2001b; 2001c). The desire of which Lewis spoke is for perfect happiness, which goes unfulfilled in this life. Lewis contended that if the desire, which he termed “Joy,” is never satisfied, then life is ultimately absurd. Hence, to avoid the conclusion that life is ultimately absurd in the sense that it ultimately makes no sense because of the lack of satisfaction of the desire for perfect happiness, Lewis concluded there must be an afterlife in which the desire can be fulfilled. While not contesting the existence of the desire, Erik Wielenberg, an advocate of weak naturalism, maintains that a naturalist is not without the resources to explain the existence of the desire for perfect happiness. As a naturalistic evolutionist, Wielenberg appeals to an evolutionary explanation of the desire to be perfectly happy. He emphasizes that evolution selects for those characteristics in

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organisms that lead to their survival and reproduction. Thus, if a desire comes to exist that is advantageous for survival and reproduction, it will, all other things being equal, be preserved. In the following quote, Wielenberg explains how Joy, the desire for perfect happiness, which cannot be satisfied in this life or the afterlife (because, according to naturalism, there is no afterlife), confers evolutionary advantage: The first important fact is that one of the main effects of Joy is that it prevents a person from deriving lasting contentment from earthly things. This fact is important because deriving lasting contentment from earthly things can be quite disadvantageous, evolutionarily speaking. Dissatisfaction can benefit us in the long run. . . . To see the evolutionary drawbacks of lasting contentment, consider a male human who is perfectly content as long as his basic needs (food, shelter, and sex) are satisfied. Once such needs are satisfied, he will have no motivation whatsoever to acquire additional wealth, power, status, or success; indeed, he will have no motivation to do anything at all, other than perhaps ensure that his basic needs continue to be satisfied. Contrast this male with a second male who has the same basic drives but who never achieves lasting contentment. . . . Everything else being equal, the second male will likely do better than the first in the competition for limited resources. . . . Evolutionarily speaking, a good strategy is never to be entirely satisfied with one’s lot in life. (Wielenberg, 2008, pp. 116–117) Wielenberg concludes that Joy, “[b]y causing us to strive for the infinite . . . prevents us from being entirely satisfied by the finite, and in this way causes us to survive and reproduce more successfully than we otherwise would” (Wielenberg, 2008, p. 117). What might Lewis have said in response to Wielenberg? As someone who believed that perfect happiness (lasting contentment) is intrinsically good, Lewis would have maintained that were this happiness experienced, it would not be disadvantageous in itself. Indeed, were one to be perfectly happy, one would not care in the least that one no longer had to compete to survive and reproduce. Lewis believed being perfectly happy is a far better state of existence than that in which there is competition and death in the struggle to survive. Moreover, Lewis believed that we are interested in surviving only if we believe we might or will be able to have a happy enough life in the future (where perfect happiness is the ultimate form of happiness). It is the goodness of happiness and the desire for it that explain our interest in survival; it is not the desire to survive that explains our desire to experience happiness. In short, Lewis believed that someone like Wielenberg gets the explanatory story backwards. However, Lewis would probably have had a few more points to make. For the sake of argument, he likely would have conceded that the desire to experience perfect happiness is selected for and preserved because of the evolutionary advantage it bestows. Given this concession, he would have pointed out that it is not possible to satisfy this desire on the naturalist’s view. Therefore, life would still be ultimately absurd,

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even given this concession to the naturalist. And as a matter of fact, Wielenberg admits this point: [T]here is something “out of kilter” about the universe in that it is part of human nature to desire something that does not exist. . . . That the universe fails to conform to our natural desires is an implication the atheist [naturalist] is unlikely to find surprising or implausible. (Wielenberg, 2008, p. 112) Lewis would likely have made clear that with these comments Wielenberg concedes his (Lewis’s) point, but would also have emphasized that Wielenberg, like the theist, is committed to making sense of things, and it is only because Wielenberg is so committed that he goes on to develop his naturalistic evolutionary explanation of how it is that we come to desire perfect happiness (here, one might compare Daniel Dennett’s and Richard Dawkins’s naturalistic evolutionary explanation of our desire for pleasure in Chapter 3). At this point, Wielenberg would probably respond that while the desire for perfect happiness and the inability to satisfy it compose an absurdity within a sub-section of our naturalistic universe, this absurdity makes sense within this overall naturalistic framework. In other words, that there are certain facts that do not make sense is something that itself ultimately makes sense, given the truth of naturalism. Wielenberg might go on to point out that the satisfaction of the desire for perfect happiness requires an afterlife, the existence of the soul, etc., and that these kinds of things are not possible, given the truth of naturalism. Of course, Lewis would want to know what reason there is to believe naturalism. Because we have gone over some of the give and take in this debate between theists and naturalists in the earlier chapters of this book and will return to it at the end of Chapter 6, there is no need to cover that ground here. Wielenberg concedes the reality of the desire for perfect happiness. Without questioning that some people have such a desire, one might be skeptical of the claim that everyone does. For example, Thaddeus Metz doubts that human beings, simply in virtue of being human, desire perfect happiness: In particular, many in the South and East Asian traditions simply do not hanker for . . . a [blissful] soul . . . . Literally billions of adherents of Hinduism and Confucianism, for example, have desires radically different from believers in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (Metz, 2019, pp. 33–34) We do not have the space to investigate Hinduism and Confucianism in depth, or any other suggested “religion” about its position on the desire for perfect happiness (though see the appendix on Buddhism). Instead, we briefly suggest how Lewis might respond to a suggestion like Metz’s. It is reasonable to suppose that he would encourage each one of us to read, say, the Bhagavad Gita. One of us has spent a good bit of time reading and thinking about the Gita, and it seems to acknowledge

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that we as human beings desire to enjoy the fruits of our actions, where the fruits represent experiences of pleasure. At the same time, the Gita warns against the pursuit of those fruits because the quest for and failure to achieve the experience of them produces much pain and suffering. The Gita goes on to advocate a renunciation of the desire for the fruits of action and the belief in the existence of a self as the subject of those desires. Lewis might have concluded that while people can debate the wisdom of a renunciation of this desire and belief, the fact that the Gita encourages a renunciation presupposes an acknowledgement that we initially desire the maximization of our happiness. And he would likely have gone on to make clear that even if there are human beings who do not desire to be as happy as they might be (it is difficult to understand, at least initially, why they would not desire this), many do so desire, and thus the issue of whether things ultimately make sense if that desire cannot be satisfied must still be addressed. At this point, we turn to one final conception of sense-making as it relates to life’s meaning.

SENSE-MAKING AND NARRATIVE Earlier in the chapter, in the section “Making sense of my life: meaning in life,” we introduced the idea of narrative as one way of thinking about how one’s life might make sense. Our sense-making capacities are diverse. We make sense of the world through philosophical reflection and scientific understanding, through careful thinking and observation. We also make sense of the world through narrative and story. Stories accompany us nearly every step of the way through life. They inform and inspire us. They show us right from wrong and motivate us to action. They help us navigate the challenges of our common human predicament. The use of narrative to describe, interpret, and flourish in the world is a unique mark of the human mind. It is not a stretch to think that our narratively-infused way of describing and participating in the world connects with our deep desire to know what it all means. Literary scholar H. Porter Abbott speaks of the pervasiveness of narrative in the human mind: We make narratives many times a day, every day of our lives. And we start doing so almost from the moment we begin putting words together. As soon as we follow a subject with a verb, there is a good chance we are engaged in narrative discourse. . . . Given the presence of narrative in almost all human discourse, there is little wonder that there are theorists who place it next to language itself as the distinctive human trait. . . . The gift of narrative is so pervasive and universal that there are those who strongly suggest that narrative is a “deep structure,” a human capacity genetically hard-wired into our minds in the same way as our capacity for grammar (according to some linguists) is something we are born with. (Abbott, 2005, pp. 1, 2–3)

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Others working in related fields echo Abbott. Historian Hayden White notes how “natural [and] inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened . . .” (White, 1980, p. 1). He goes on to add that far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a metacode, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted. (White, 1980, p. 2) There can be little doubt that we often invoke narrative in order to make sense of the world that we inhabit, and that this is part of what it means to be human. Narrative provides a way of structuring life, both our own lives and the cosmic backdrop against which we live, into something that makes sense, that fits together, that has purpose and significance, that is, in a word, meaningful. In this, it is unlike other kinds of explanation. For example, consider the case of water boiling. We might ask, “Why is the water boiling?” Scientific and narrative explanations of this event will look quite different. Scientifically, one would explain the event by saying that the water boiled because of rapid vaporization of a liquid, which typically occurs, in the case of water, when it is heated to a temperature (212 degrees Fahrenheit) such that its vapor pressure is above that of the surroundings. This is, of course, all true and is one way of answering the why question about boiling. But it is not the only way of making sense out of it. We might also say that the water is boiling because Sarah is preparing dinner for her good friends, a weekly gathering of people who have been meeting for years to share in life together. Narrative explanation appeals to ideas like purpose and significance, whereas scientific explanation focuses on mechanistic causality. You might say that narrative explanation is about why something occurs whereas scientific explanation is really more about how something occurs (compare the discussion in Chapter 2 of Plato’s passage from the Phaedo).

What is a narrative? Defining “narrative” is complicated. Understandings of what a narrative is vary widely. Such diversity notwithstanding, here is one way of thinking about what a narrative is: a sequential (though not necessarily chronological) representation of events (including intentional actions) unified around a character or set of characters, a theme or themes, and which aims toward its final outcome or resolution.

LIFE NARRATIVES: SARTRE’S SUSPICION Through the musings of the character Antoine Roquentin in his famous novel, La Nausée (Sartre, 2013) Sartre argues that life is nothing like a narrative. Narratives are infused with purpose, significance, and meaningful connections between narrative

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elements. More often than not, narrative elements are structured and linked by some final end. Life, however, says Sartre, is nothing like this, regardless of our tendency to think otherwise (at both personal and cosmic levels). In infusing life with narrative structure, we impose an ad hoc meaning onto events that possess no such structure. One thinks here of something Steve Jobs once said: “You cannot connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.” Jobs may not have had Sartre in mind here (after all, what he said is consistent with life having narrative structure that we can only see in hindsight), but the point is still instructional. Our narration of our lives, and life as a whole, might be an instance of imposing intelligibility, purpose, significance—meaning—after the fact and onto something that has no such inherent properties. Life, in this way, is not like a novel. There is no purpose or significance or narrative structure in life that comes prior to whatever fabricated structure we give it after the fact. The American lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, in an intriguing essay “Life is Not a Dramatic Narrative” agrees with Sartre. He begins his piece with a fictional account that invokes the advice of Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), the great nineteenth-century Russian author of short stories, to the writer, S. S. Schovkin: “If in the first chapter you say that a gun hung on the wall, in the second or third chapter it must without fail be discharged” (Dershowitz, 1996, p. 100). This is often known as “Chekhov’s Canon” or “Chekhov’s Gun.” The point is that, in narratives, there really are no coincidences or superfluous details. The elements of a story are all significant, none are meaningless. In Chekhov’s example, the gun on the wall means more to the story than just being a random gun on any old wall. It is on that wall in the story for a reason, one that is meaningfully connected to other elements of the story’s plot. Many think (or simply assume) that life itself is like this; that the varied elements of human experience—joys, sorrows, tribulations, triumphs—are all part of a larger personal story itself situated in some cosmic story. They all mean something and have some deeper significance in the context of a larger, purposeful whole. Dershowitz observes that “. . . many literary, biblical, and even constitutional scholars live by a rule of teleology that has little resonance in real life—namely, that every event, character, and word has a purpose” (Dershowitz, 1996, p. 100). He argues, however, that life is emphatically not like this: But life does not imitate art. Life is not a purposive narrative that follows Chekhov’s canon. Events are often simply meaningless, irrelevant to what comes next; events can be out of sequence, random, purely accidental, without purpose. If our universe and its inhabitants are governed by rules of chaos, randomness, and purposelessness, then many of the stories—if they can even be called stories— will often lack meaning. Human beings always try to impose order and meaning on random chaos, both to understand and to control the forces that determine their destiny. This desperate attempt to derive purpose from purposelessness will often distort reality, as, indeed, Chekhov’s canon does. (Dershowitz, 1996, p. 100) According to Dershowitz and many others, we have a propensity to apply Chekhov’s canon too liberally, especially when we apply it to life itself. For example, he

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observes that often in courts of law there is a tendency to craft a narrative where facts thought to be relevant to a person’s guilt are coherently (and cunningly) structured in narrative form, but where, probabilistically, those facts considered individually or as part of some non-narrative explanation provide less than compelling reason to establish a conclusion of guilt. The narrative form constructed around the individual facts illegitimately skews the perceived evidential strength of the prosecution’s case. But it is psychologically compelling. Unfortunately, we are sometimes prone to confuse something’s being psychologically compelling with truth. Events in life, however, just do not follow Chekhov’s canon. Life is neither a novella nor a novel, say Sartre, Dershowitz, and many others. There is something to this line of criticism. Chekhov’s canon is sometimes misapplied in life. Our deep-seated narrative proclivities can get the best of us (for example, we are prone to re-fashion memories as we process the past). We think that two events must be connected even though they have nothing to do with one another. But some time is not all the time, and Sartre’s narrative suspicions, especially directed at the idea of a cosmic story, cannot be assessed apart from what is true about the world. If naturalism is true, the Sartrean line makes sense. Seeing life as being held together by narrative structure involves projecting something onto life that is really not there. The right stuff out of which to generate a narrative architecture— overarching purpose, significance, and a transcendent or divine plot giver—is not present in this kind of a world. Imagine the universe differently though. What if the cosmos and our lives are ultimately the products of a personal, powerful, wise, and loving author—someone like God. The architecture in a world like this includes things like transcendence, purpose, significance, providence, divine care, and so on. Life in this kind of a universe might then relevantly resemble a narrative. In sum, if naturalism is true, our projection of plot and story onto the world is suspect. As theologian Paul Fiddes writes, we are prone to project concord-fictions onto the scene of our personal history and world history. To make sense of the mere successiveness of history (“just one damn thing after another”) we give it a plot, a story, which is unified by its ending. (Fiddes, 2000, p. 9) However, if theism is true, Fiddes adds that . . . emplotment of history has not been understood . . . as a mere projection of a concord fiction [that is, introducing plot and the unification of an ending on the mere successive events of history] but as the discovery of relations between events which have been plotted by the divine Logos into a scheme of promise and fulfillment, and which are sustained in their coherence by the presence of the Logos. (Fiddes, 2000, p. 9)

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With that in mind, an important part of answering the question of whether life, at individual and cosmic levels, has some sort of intrinsic narrative structure depends on what kind of universe we live in and why it and we exist in the first place. Whether we live in a naturalistic or theistic universe, then, will be crucial in determining the plausibility of thinking about life narratively.

CHAPTER SUMMARY We began this chapter by noting our propensity to ask why? This propensity reveals our innate human desire to make sense of our lives and the world, a desire closely connected to our search for meaning, what we refer to as I-Meaning within the Meaning Triad. We are concerned to fit the various pieces of life together in the right way on both individual (meaning in life) and cosmic (the meaning of life) levels. A particularly noteworthy route we take to make sense of our lives and the world is narrative, though important debates exists about whether and the extent to which narrative distorts the true shape of reality. In the next chapter, we turn our attention to the human attempt to make sense of the darker side of reality—evil.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1 Why do we ask “Why?” so much? 2 What are some examples of meaning or meaningful as sense-making (or I-Meaning)? 3 What are we trying to make sense of or render intelligible (or coherent) when life’s meaning is in view? 4 How is meaningful life connected to leading an intelligible, coherent life that fits together? 5 Is a meaningful life like a good story? How so? Are there some “good” stories that you would, nonetheless, not choose to live (even if you would enjoy reading them)? 6 How is theism more hospitable to viewing the universe in narrative terms? How is naturalism less hospitable (even prohibitive) to viewing the universe in narrative terms?

• INTRODUCTORY FURTHER READING Dershowitz, Alan. 1996. “Life Is Not a Dramatic Narrative.” In Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. Edited by Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, ­­ pp. 99–105. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. McGrath, Alister E. 2011. Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Morris, Thomas V. 2002. Making Sense of it All. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

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• ADVANCED FURTHER READING Goldie, Peter. 2012. The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, & the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldman, Alan H. 2018. Life’s Values: Pleasure, Happiness, Well-Being, & Meaning. Chapter Four “Meaning in Life,” pp. 116–152. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rudd, Anthony. 2013. “Narrative.” In The Routledge Companion to Theism. Edited by Charles Taliaferro, Victoria S. Harrison, and Stewart Goetz, pp. 615–626. New York: Routledge. Schechtman, Marya. 2013. “The Narrative Self.” In The Oxford Handbook of The Self. Edited by Shaun Gallagher, pp. 394–416. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seachris, Joshua W. 2009. “The Meaning of Life as Narrative: A New Proposal for Interpreting Philosophy’s ‘Primary’ Question.” Philo 12:1: 5–23. Velleman, J. David. 2003. “Narrative Explanation.” The Philosophical Review 112:1: 1–25. Williams, Bernard. 2009. “Life as Narrative.” European Journal of Philosophy 17:2: 305–314.

• FREE INTERNET RESOURCES Beck, Julie.“Life’s Stories.” The Atlantic (www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/ life-stories-narrative-psychology-redemption-mental-health/400796/). Jenson, Robert W. “How the World Lost Its Story.” First Things (www.firstthings. com/article/2010/03/how-the-world-lost-its-story). Setiya, Kieran. “Philosophers Should Be Keener to Talk about the Meaning of Life.” Aeon. (https://aeon.co/ideas/philosophers-should-be-keener-to-talk-about-the-meaningof-life). Strawson, Galen. “I Am Not a Story.” Aeon (https://aeon.co/essays/let-s-ditch-thedangerous-idea-that-life-is-a-story).

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meaning and evil What is the meaning of it, Watson? . . . What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from answering as ever. (Doyle, 1930, p. 901)

CHAPTER SECTIONS • • • • • • • • •

Why do we experience evil? Two problems of evil: Logical and evidential Skeptical theism Theodicy Natural evil and the problem of evil for animals Naturalism and the existence of evil Sense-making revisited The afterlife, perfect happiness, and justice Chapter summary

Meaning in the real world Eugene has seen a lot of suffering, misery, and evil during his life, more than most. As part of the 5th Armored Division in World War II, he witnessed horrific things in the Battle of the Bulge and in the frozen Hürtgen Forest during the harsh winter of 1944–1945 on the Western Front, where countless human lives ended in gut-wrenching fashion. As a farmer on the often brutal Kansas plains, Eugene encountered the ferocities of nature—crops lost, animal suffering, and natural disasters. In moments of quiet reflection, sometimes while on the tractor seat, other times before falling asleep at night, he wonders how to make sense of the darker side of reality, a side he experienced firsthand as a man in his early twenties during the second war to end all wars and now later in life as a farmer. No doubt, the world is filled with much beauty, joy, and love; it is also filled with a lot of evil. How does it all fit together into a coherent story? Does it? And does the story of this world have a good ending, one where all is made right?

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WHY DO WE EXPERIENCE EVIL? One way into a discussion of the question “Why is there evil?” (“For what purpose, if any, does evil exist?”) is through a consideration of an issue raised in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro. There, the inquisitive Socrates asks the following question: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved?” (Plato, 1998, p. 52). This query has become known as “Euthyphro’s Dilemma,” because Socrates presents two alternatives in his question, each of which he suggests is equally undesirable. Since Socrates first posed Euthyphro’s Dilemma (the Dilemma), concerns about good, evil, and God have supplanted the issue of piety and the gods. Hence, it is common today to find Socrates’ question framed in the following way: “Does God regard something as evil because it is evil, or is it evil because God chooses that it be such?” Consider the Dilemma’s alternative that something is evil because God chooses that it be so. Many individuals who have thought about this possibility have concluded that this means nothing is really evil. After all, if evil is no more than what someone, even God, happens to choose, then there is no good explanation for why this, and not that, is evil, or why what is deemed evil today might not be declared good tomorrow. In short, what is evil ends up being whatever God (or any other being) happens to decide, which makes the matter of what is evil completely capricious or arbitrary. And nothing being really evil is a conclusion that is not intellectually compelling for many people. Someone might respond that God is omniscient and omnibenevolent and would not arbitrarily choose that just anything be evil. God would have a reason (purpose) for making a particular choice. However, most people who have pondered the Dilemma have concluded that this response leads to at least implicitly embracing the other alternative, which is that God considers something evil because it is evil, and acts for a purpose that is informed by a recognition of this evilness. Stated slightly differently, what is evil is in the nature of things (it is part of the nature of reality—perhaps the reality of God’s own nature), and because the nature of things never changes, what is evil never changes, regardless of what anyone, including God, might choose or say. But, someone might respond, if what is evil is in the nature of things and something over which God has no say or control, then is God really omnipotent? To conclude that God is not omnipotent is also not intellectually appealing. It is not our purpose to examine in detail the intricate philosophical back-and-forth that is contained in discussions of Euthyphro’s Dilemma. Rather, we are interested in the Dilemma only in terms of its relationship to the meaning of life and what is known in philosophical thought about the existence of God as the problem of evil. The problem of evil arises from a consideration of God’s nature. Theists in the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) typically assert that God, who created us for a purpose, has at least the following three properties or characteristics that have already been mentioned: omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence. The philosophy and theology sections of libraries (or their online equivalents) are filled with books and articles that discuss the difficulties involved in precisely defining these terms. For our purposes, we need not wade into these deep waters. Rather, we will assume that each of us has an intuitive grasp of

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these concepts. Thus, to maintain that God is omniscient is roughly to assert that God knows whatever it is that can be known. To affirm that God is omnibenevolent is to claim that God never acts unjustly or immorally. And to maintain that God is omnipotent is to claim that God is all-powerful or has maximal power. And what about the purpose of life, the purpose for which God supposedly created us? For the sake of simplicity and continuity, we will continue with the standard theistic view set forth in Chapter 2 that the purpose of life is that we be perfectly happy, according to which experiences of pain are incompatible with being perfectly happy. Given an intuitive understanding of the concepts of omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence, and assuming we were created for the purpose that we be perfectly happy, here are two formulations of the problem of evil, the first by the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), and the second by C. S. Lewis: “Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” (Hume, 1963, p. 567); and “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness or power, or both” (Lewis, 2001d, p. 16). Both Hume and Lewis omit God’s supposed omniscience in their statements of the problem of evil, but it is included here in order to make the problem clearer. In terms of the meaning of life, the problem of evil is essentially a question about whether the co-existence of evil and God ultimately makes no sense (gives rise to I-Meaninglessness, because the puzzle pieces, the existence of evil and omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience do not fit together).

The problem of evil summarized Many believe that the existence of evil is a problem for the existence of God, and initially formulate their concern in some detail as follows: By definition,  

Therefore,   4 Evil does not exist. Yet,   5 Evil does exist. Therefore,   6 God is either not omniscient, or not omnibenevolent, or not omnipotent. 6 is just a complicated way of saying God does not exist.

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TWO PROBLEMS OF EVIL: LOGICAL AND EVIDENTIAL It is helpful to begin this section with the reminder that Euthyphro’s Dilemma implies the following for the problem of evil: If what is evil is no more than what someone, including God, arbitrarily chooses, then nothing is really evil. Hence, there cannot be a problem of evil for the existence of God. Any objection to God’s existence because of the existence of evil would warrant a response from God in something like the following terms: “Well you say this is evil. And someone else says that is evil. We all know that nothing is really evil. So stop complaining.” The problem of evil, then, requires that something really (objectively) be evil. The philosopher and atheist J. L. Mackie (1917–1981) assumes that pain is really evil and pleasure is really good (Mackie, 1990, p. 31), and also supposes, like many theists, that God creates persons for the purpose that they be perfectly happy. Given that God’s purpose in creating persons is the “heightening of happiness” (Mackie, 1990, p. 31), Mackie asks “Why is there evil?” Mackie’s question is a request for God’s reason for allowing evil. In response to Mackie, the contemporary Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga makes clear that if God has a good reason for permitting evil, then the existence of pain and suffering is logically compatible with God’s existence. That is, there is no contradiction, neither explicit nor implicit, in saying God and evil exist, as there is in claiming a man is both married and a bachelor, so the co-existence of evil and God is possible and does not create a logical problem for I-Meaning (see Plantinga, 1974). Plantinga adds that given God is omniscient and omnibenevolent, God must have a good reason for allowing human beings to experience pain and suffering, even though, by hypothesis, God created them for the purpose that they be perfectly happy. Most people, both theists and atheists, who have thought about the logical problem of evil, are convinced that Plantinga’s response to it is plausible. They have concluded that the existence of evil is not logically incompatible with the existence of God. Not surprisingly, people have wondered what Plantinga believes is God’s reason for allowing evil. However, as he rightly points out in his response to Mackie, one need not know what God’s reason for allowing evil is in order to answer the logical problem of evil. That problem is adequately addressed simply by making clear that the existence of evil is compatible with God’s existence, provided God has a good reason for allowing it. Fair enough, many have responded. But it does not follow from the fact that the existence of evil is logically compatible with God’s existence that God actually exists and has a good reason for allowing evil. And given that one way of plausibly understanding the meaning of life is as an issue of intelligibility in the sense of things fitting together in the right way, it is hard to adequately make sense of things if we do not know God’s reason for permitting evil. This line of thought leads to a

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second and different formulation of the problem of evil. According to this different formulation, which is sometimes referred to as the evidential argument from evil, while evil is logically compatible with God’s existence, evils like the rape and murder of a mother of five young children, or a gunman’s brutal massacre of students in a school, provide us with evidence for the lack of a good reason for permitting evil. Knowledge of these (and similar) evils make the belief that God does not exist more reasonable than the belief that God does exist. In other words, even if, despite the evidence we have, God exists and has a reason for allowing these evils, if we do not know what that reason is, then in light of this ignorance we are justified in believing that God does not exist. Evil provides evidence for the belief that the co-existence of evil and God is a form of I-Meaninglessness in the sense that while logically evil and God could co-exist and fit together in the right way, as a matter of fact they do not.

Summing up the logical versus evidential problems of evil The primary difference between these two arguments from evil is in the strength of their respective conclusions. The logical argument concludes that God cannot exist given evil because of the kind of being God purportedly is (an omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent personal being) and the kind of thing evil is. The evidential argument, on the other hand, concludes that it is likely God does not exist given the kind of being God purportedly is and given the amount, distribution, and horrendous kinds of evil we experience in this world.

Some theists might be tempted to appeal to their scriptures with the conviction that they provide God’s reason for allowing evil. We will forego pursuing this line of response, for two reasons. First, because atheists, who not infrequently are also naturalists, do not regard the scriptures of theists as authoritative. An appeal by theists to what sacred writings have to say about the evidential problem of evil— assuming they do have something to say, which is an issue about which theists themselves disagree—will likely have no argumentative force with atheists. Second, if the scriptures of theists have something to say about why God allows evil, then it seems that what is said will have to be independently evaluated by each of us for its reasonableness, so that the last court of appeal will still have to be our own reason or understanding (Nielsen, 2000, p. 156). Were we to find what the scriptures say puzzling or implausible, we would require some overriding reason for accepting the scriptures as authoritative, even with their inadequate answer to the evidential problem of evil. Because these issues would take us too far afield, we will leave them here and, going forward, treat the evidential problem of evil in strictly philosophical terms, with no appeal to religious texts.

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SKEPTICAL THEISM Even without scriptures as a court of appeal, many theists remain unpersuaded by the evidential problem of evil. More than a few of them advocate a position known as skeptical theism, according to which it should not surprise us that we do not know God’s reason(s) for allowing evils of the kind mentioned or, perhaps, any evil at all. To get a sense of the reasoning of these skeptical theists, consider the following scenarios, A1, A2, and B. In case A1, you are seated in a small, well-lit room and asked whether there is an elephant present therein. Because you have a full view of the room from where you are sitting and see no elephant (and believe there is no magician present to create visual illusions), you answer “There is no elephant here.” In case A2, you are seated in a large auditorium and asked whether there is a penny lying on the floor therein. Looking around, you answer “There is no penny on the floor in the auditorium.” Unlike what they think about your response in the first case, most people are inclined to say that your answer in the second case is unjustified (unreasonable). Why? In the first case, you have the epistemic wherewithal (you have the capacity, e.g., good eyes, to access the relevant facts) to see an elephant, and nothing is impeding the relevant sightlines to prevent you from noticing an elephant’s presence, if one were in the room. However, in the second case, while you have the epistemic wherewithal to see a penny, there are things (e.g., other seats, people) blocking your lines of sight to much of the floor space in the room. While you might be able to see the floor space around your seat and the seats nearby, your line of vision with respect to the rest of the floor space in the auditorium is obstructed. For all you know, there might be a penny lying on the floor under or in the vicinity of one of the other seats. Skeptical theists might maintain that our position with respect to knowing God’s reason(s) for allowing evil is like that found in case A2 involving the penny: we have the epistemic wherewithal to know what God’s reason for permitting evil is, but something is obstructing our intellectual “line of vision” (someone might wonder how skeptical theists can know this, assuming they are right that we cannot know God’s reason for allowing evil). What might this obstruction be? Within certain theistic traditions, moral wrongdoing (sin) is believed to have darkened (obstructed) our understanding so that we cannot “see” what we would without this obstruction. Scenario B involves a young child who needs painful medical treatment. The child is unable to understand the reason for the treatment, because either (i) he fails to grasp the goodness of the future benefits which will result from the treatment and which outweigh the present experience of pain; or (ii) he grasps the goodness of those benefits but not their true value which will outweigh the current pain; or (iii) he grasps the goodness of the benefits and their true value, but fails to apprehend that they cannot be realized without the treatment and its accompanying pain (Bayne, 2018, p. 76). In short, the child lacks the epistemic wherewithal to access the relevant facts that justify the medical treatment.

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Skeptical theists might maintain that our inability to know God’s reason for allowing evil is like that of the child in Scenario B: even if nothing (for example, moral wrongdoing, as mentioned above) has negatively affected what we might know, we still do not have the epistemic ability to know what the divine reason for allowing evil is in terms of comparable alternatives to (i), (ii), or (iii). With Scenario B, skeptical theists not infrequently remind us that God is, by hypothesis, omniscient. Hence, God’s knowledge vastly exceeds our own. Indeed, the difference between God’s knowledge and our own is so large that it should come as no surprise to us that we do not understand why God allows certain evils. Therefore, in a world where God exists, it is reasonable to assume that we would be in the dark with respect to the explanations of many, if not all, evils. Thus, the fact that we are in the dark concerning the justification of evils in our world gives us no reason (evidence) to believe that evil and God cannot co-exist. Consider the theistic position used by Mackie in his formulation of the logical problem of evil that God created us for the purpose that we be perfectly happy. Being perfectly happy most certainly seems to be something good that makes life worth living. Suppose it is the possibility of experiencing this good that justifies God’s allowance of our experience of evil. Is it plausible to think that we might fail to understand the goodness of perfect happiness that justifies our experience of evil (comparable to (i) above)? Or is it plausible to think that we might grasp the goodness of perfect happiness but not its true value (comparable to (ii) above) and, therefore, fail to understand that the possibility of experiencing it is God’s justification for permitting us to experience evil? Or is it plausible to think that we might grasp both the goodness of perfect happiness and its true value, but fail to understand that it cannot be achieved without the allowance of the evils that we experience (comparable to (iii) above)? As interesting as these questions are, there are two other issues raised by skeptical theism that deserve mention. First, can skeptical theists reasonably claim not to know God’s reason for allowing evil, while at the same time claiming to know the purpose of life (the purpose for which God creates human beings)? How could they know the latter, if they are unable to know the former? If either an obstruction (for example, moral wrongdoing) to our understanding or our natural cognitive limitations make it reasonable to hold that we cannot know God’s reason for allowing evil, how is it that we can know God’s reason for creating persons (the purpose of life)? While some might appeal to what their scriptures have to say about the purpose of life, we will forego discussing what religious texts might have to say concerning God’s purpose for creating human beings for the reasons we gave above for not discussing what religious scriptures might have to say concerning God’s justification for allowing evil. Second, what if skeptical theists were to maintain we do not know God’s reason for creating us? What if they were to maintain, in opposition to a significant part of the Christian theistic tradition, that not only do we not know that the purpose of life is that we be perfectly happy but also that we do not know the purpose of life, period? If skeptical theists were to espouse this position, but at the same time maintain God

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will not sacrifice the possibility of our being perfectly happy for the achievement of the purpose that explains our creation, then they would have the limited knowledge that the satisfaction of God’s purpose for creating us, whatever that purpose is, must be compatible with the possibility of our being perfectly happy.

THEODICY Though skeptical theism is an extremely important and interesting philosophical position that deserves the serious consideration it has received in literature on the problem of evil, we will leave it here, in part because not all theists accept the position. Some claim they know the reason for which God allows us to experience evil, so they know that evil creates no problems for God’s existence and I-Meaning. These theists are theodicists with respect to our experience of evil, where a theodicist is someone who claims to know God’s reason for permitting at least some, if not all, evil. What might such a reason be? According to the atheist William Rowe (1931–2015), [i]t is reasonable to believe that the goods for the sake of which [God] permits much intense human suffering are goods that either are or include good experiences of the humans that endure the suffering. I say this because we normally would not regard someone as morally justified in permitting intense, involuntary suffering on the part of another, if that other were not to figure significantly in the good for which that suffering was necessary. We have reason to believe, then, that the goods for the sake of which much human suffering is permitted will include conscious experiences of these humans, conscious experiences that are themselves good. . . . So if such goods do occur we are likely to know them. (Rowe, 1986, p. 244) If we take Rowe’s idea as our guiding principle, then a hypothetical theodicist might maintain that because there is no greater good for us than our experience of perfect happiness, it must be the case that if the possibility of our experiencing it cannot provide the justification of our experience of evil, then nothing can. At this point, our hypothetical theodicist might appeal to the ideas of justice and choice (free will), where the former is, as Mackie assumes is the case with pleasure, intrinsically good. Our hypothetical theodicist might argue that it is because perfect happiness is such a great good (it is our greatest good) that not just anyone should experience it regardless of how they choose to live life, whether justly or unjustly. Rather, the receiving of perfect happiness should ultimately depend upon a choice to live justly toward other persons, which includes the commitment not to deny those others the opportunity to experience the happiness for which they too were supposedly created. For example, Christianity teaches that one must renounce the pursuit of the maximization of one’s own happiness on one’s own terms (a kind of death to or renunciation of self) in order to ultimately receive perfect happiness as the gift

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that it is. Given that the just experience of perfect happiness, because of its great goodness, requires possession of the freedom to choose, one might choose a way of life in which one seeks to maximize one’s happiness on one’s own terms and in the process of pursuing it, unjustly cause evil in the form of pain and suffering to others. If, for the sake of discussion, we assume that something like the theodicy just suggested is correct, then according to our hypothetical theodicist we do have some insight into how the possible experience of perfect happiness requires that God allow for the experience of evil caused by human beings (so Scenario B in all its forms is rejected). Our hypothetical theodicist maintains that only those who choose justly (rightly) should ultimately experience perfect happiness. But if people are free to choose justly (rightly), they are also free to choose unjustly (wrongly). And it is their choosing unjustly that helps explain the experience of much pain and suffering by us. On a theodicy like this, the reason for God’s permission of evil is that people justly experience the perfect happiness for which they were created. A knowledge of P-Meaning and the value of perfect happiness (S-Meaning) makes clear the existence of evil poses no problem for the existence of God and I-Meaning. This is one possible theodicy. Other theists propose different theodicies that do not make use of the idea of justly experiencing perfect happiness. For example, Mackie discusses how some theodicies are constructed around the idea of the development of virtue or moral character (Mackie, 1990, pp. 31–32). According to one such theodicy, experiences of pleasure and pain are instances of first-order or lower-level good and evil respectively. But first-order good and evil are not the most valuable forms of good and evil. More valuable forms of goodness occur at the second or higher order, which consists of moral virtues (e.g., benevolence, courage), where the development of these forms of goodness requires the existence of first-order evil. The idea here is that people can only become benevolent and courageous in response to the painful experiences of themselves and others. So God could not create us for the purpose that we be a certain kind of being, namely, one that is benevolent, courageous, etc., without permitting the occurrence of first-order evil. Once again, a knowledge of P-Meaning and the value of a form of S-Meaning helps to explain why evil ultimately creates no problem for God’s existence and I-Meaning. At this point, the discussion in Chapter 3 of whether being moral/virtuous is a value that makes life worth living is relevant. Mackie goes on to point out that not all people develop virtues in response to first-order evil. Not a few people develop vices (e.g., malevolence, cowardice) in response to pain and suffering, and he believes it is clear that the value of virtue does not outweigh the value of vice (that the possibility of developing virtue is not worth the price of allowing for vice). Mackie claims that it is precisely because this is clear that other theists develop a third kind of theodicy. According to these theists, the development of virtue requires free will (the freedom to choose), and while free will makes possible the development of vice, it is the value of free will itself that also justifies the permission of vice and resulting experiences of pain. According to this theodicy (sometimes called the free will theodicy), free will is such a great good that our possession of it is worth the price of allowing the evil that is caused by its misuse

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(typically referred to as moral evil). Yet again, a knowledge of P-Meaning and the value of a form of S-Meaning helps explain why evil ultimately creates no problem for God’s existence and I-Meaning. Our purpose in this chapter is not to argue for or against any particular theistic perspective on the problem of evil. It is rather to explain versions of the problem and illustrate how theists have approached answering them. However, what should be clear is that all of the theists whose views we have catalogued are seeking to make sense of our experience of evil and, thereby, to make clear that our lives are ultimately meaningful in the sense of being ultimately intelligible (I-Meaningful). Skeptical theists believe we can do no more than make clear that our experience of evil does not show that our lives ultimately do not make sense in terms of evil not fitting together in the right way with other aspects of our lives. Evil does not show that God does not exist and that there cannot ultimately be I-Meaning. Theodicists hold a stronger position. They believe not only that our experience of evil does not show that our lives ultimately do not make sense, but also hold that it is possible to provide the explanation that in the end, in whole or in part, guarantees I-Meaning by making sense of our experience of evil in a reality that includes the existence of God.

The problem of evil in film Insofar as the problem of evil is part of the human condition, the human encounter with evil often finds its way into cinema. Below are poignant depictions of this encounter from two films: Signs (2002) and The Tree of Life (2011). There is no one watching out for us, Merrill. We are all on our own. (Signs) Where were You? You let a boy die. You let anything happen. Why should I be good? When You aren’t. (The Tree of Life) Lord, Why? Where were you? Did you know what happened? Do you care? (The Tree of Life) The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it, too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, when love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who

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loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you. Whatever comes. (The Tree of Life) Other films that explore this perennial problem of the human condition include: Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) Shadowlands (1993) God on Trial (2008) A Serious Man (2009)

NATURAL EVIL AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL FOR ANIMALS There is one other issue concerning the problem of evil that deserves brief mention here. This is the matter of the existence of evil that, in at least some cases, does not seem to be explicable in terms of human choices. The evil in question is standardly referred to as natural evil (which is different from and should not be confused with naturalism) because it is caused by events in nature (e.g., hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, extreme heat and cold). William Rowe raises the problem of natural evil with the following example: Suppose in some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering. So far as we can see, the fawn’s intense suffering is pointless. For there does not appear to be any greater good such that the prevention of the fawn’s suffering would require either the loss of that good or the occurrence of an evil equally bad or worse. Nor does there seem to be any equally bad or worse evil so connected to the fawn’s suffering that it would have had to occur had the fawn’s suffering been prevented. Could an omnipotent, omniscient being have prevented the fawn’s apparently pointless suffering? (Rowe, 1990, pp. 129–130) It is important to point out that natural evil is a kind of evil (pain caused by natural events) that was present in the animal world prior to the existence of human beings. An interesting question is whether some, if not all, natural evils might ultimately have been caused by the immoral choices of non-human intelligent beings. For example, some people believe there are malevolent angelic beings (e.g., Satan) whose immoral choices caused disorder in the physical world prior to the existence of human beings. If this belief is true, natural evils are really moral in nature. Many people today reject outright the belief that there are evils caused by malevolent

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angelic beings. But as Plantinga points out (Plantinga, 1974, pp. 61–62), while this rejection is interesting from a sociological point of view, it is evidentially irrelevant. While we might have no reason to think natural evil is caused by such beings, this gives us no evidence that it is not so caused. At this point, it is instructive to remember that more than a few of the individuals who reject the idea that there might be evils caused by malevolent angelic beings are naturalists. And as we have already discussed at length in Chapter 2, many naturalists either maintain that we humans do not act for purposes (reasons) or, if they acknowledge purposeful actions by us, insist that they are completely determined. In either case, it follows that there is no moral evil caused by purposeful, undetermined (free) immoral choices and, if moral evil requires the making of purposeful, undetermined immoral choices, there is no moral evil at all. As one can readily see, the issue of natural versus moral evil can be a vexed topic indeed. Whatever one thinks about the distinction between natural and moral evil, most agree that many animals do experience pain (as well as pleasure). But does their experience of pain pose problems for their having meaningful lives in the sense of their lives being worth living (having S-Meaning)? Not surprisingly, there are those who think this is not an easy question to answer. As the philosopher Catherine Wilson points out, “[p]leasure in food, drink, warmth and companionship is available to any gregarious animal, but we don’t usually think of sparrows, dogs and horses or chimpanzees as having meaningful lives” (Wilson, 2018, p. 67). Confirmation of her point is reflected in the fact that we do not typically think of the “beasts” as asking a question like “What is the meaning of life?” But if non-human animals experience pain and pleasure, why think they cannot experience their lives as more or less worth living/S-Meaningful? Some believe animals cannot have more or less meaningful lives because they lack self-consciousness. Given this lack, they have no knowledge that it is “I” who is experiencing pain (and pleasure). C. S. Lewis illustrated this point by considering three instances of sensation, A, B, and C (Lewis, 2001d, p. 135). We will let “A,” “B,” and “C” refer to experiences of pain. Self-conscious beings are aware of A occurring and passing away to be replaced by B, and the occurrence of B passing away to be replaced by the occurrence of C. In other words, self-conscious beings are aware of themselves having the experience of ABC. But what if a subject were not self-conscious? By hypothesis, it would have the experience of A, followed by the experience of B, followed by the experience of C, but have no awareness of the experience of ABC. There would be three experiences of pain, but no self with the awareness and belief that “I have had three pains.” Lewis further pointed out that the fact that we believe beasts are incapable of either morally right or morally wrong actions and, thus, are not morally responsible, is reflected in our propensity not to praise and blame beasts for their behavior (though we often cause them pain and provide them with pleasure to train them) (Lewis, 2001d, p. 132). This seems to confirm that we have doubts about whether or not animals are self-conscious. As the theistic philosopher Eleonore Stump has recently written, perhaps too pessimistically, “everything depends on the nature of the sentience of the creature suffering; and,

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for very many sentient creatures, we are only beginning to understand anything about their sentience” (Stump, 2010, p. 379). Lewis maintained that an experience of pain is intrinsically evil, and he seems to have believed that given our uncertainty about the nature of animal consciousness, we simply do not know whether they have S-Meaningful lives in the sense of their lives being more or less worth living. He also seems to have believed that our ignorance about the nature of the consciousness of animals implies animal pain poses no evidential problem of evil for belief in God’s existence. With respect to the experience of evil by animals, Lewis seems to have been an advocate of skeptical theism; he seems to have believed that our knowledge of the experience of evil by animals provides us with no reason to doubt that there can be ultimate I-Meaning in a theistic worldview. Thus, one might be a skeptical theist about certain kinds of evils, e.g.,  evils experienced by animals, but not a skeptical theist about other kinds of evils, e.g., evils experienced by human beings. In terms of Rowe’s suffering fawn, Lewis might have asked how Rowe can plausibly argue that we are rational in believing that the fawn’s suffering is without justification on the grounds that we cannot see what its point is. If none of us has adequate knowledge of the nature of a fawn’s psychology, how can we reasonably conclude that the fawn’s suffering appears to us unjustified? In line with Lewis’s apparent reasoning, it seems a theist might argue that the fawn’s suffering appears to us neither justified nor unjustified. At best, it appears to us that the fawn experiences pain and the question of the justifiability of that suffering is beyond the scope of our intellectual power. Once again, there is much food for thought, but given limitations of space we must leave the matter here.

NATURALISM AND THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL Do naturalists believe the existence of evil ultimately makes sense, that there is ultimate I-Meaning in terms of things fitting together in the right way? As we pointed out in Chapter 3, Bertrand Russell believed there is no way ultimately to make sense out of the existence and distribution of evil in a naturalistic world. Walter Stace agreed with Russell: [T]here is for modern [naturalistic] philosophy no such thing as the ancient problem of evil. For this once famous question presupposes that pain and misery, though they seem so inexplicable and irrational to us, must ultimately subserve some rational purpose, must have their places in the cosmic plan. But this is nonsense. There is no such overruling rationality in the universe. Belief in the ultimate irrationality of everything is the quintessence of what is called the modern [naturalistic] mind. (Stace, 2000, p. 87) Why think evil is ultimately unintelligible, irrational, or without any sense on a naturalist view of things? For a start, as George Mavrodes points out, on a naturalistic

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view of the universe (Mavrodes thinks of it as a Russellian understanding of the world), evil comes on the scene late in the story. “Though not stated explicitly by Russell,” writes Mavrodes, mental [psychological] phenomena . . . are comparative latecomers in the long history of the earth.Values . . . have a grip only upon surface phenomenon . . . .What is deep in a Russellian world must be such things as matter and energy, or perhaps natural law, chance, or chaos. (Mavrodes, 1986, pp. 216, 224–225) In other words, the existence of evil is something with respect to which reality at its roots or from the outset is blind; it is something the coming-to-be of which is not only not foreseen but also not even contemplated, because there is no God who created the universe. The senselessness of evil’s unforeseen appearance in a naturalistic universe is magnified by the fact that it is apparently impossible for us to understand how the interactions of fundamental, unconscious, non-qualitative, valueless “stuff” (matter, energy, chance) gave rise to conscious, qualitative experiences of pain which are intrinsically evil. As Catherine Wilson writes, perhaps with a bit of irony, “[t]he very fact of [our] having been produced by mindless atoms and yet having a mind; of having been produced by blind forces and yet having direction and purpose, can seem miraculous” (Wilson, 2018, p. 70). Whether or not the origination of pain and suffering in a naturalistic universe is intelligible, not a few naturalists remind us that within such a universe much of our experience of pain and suffering serves no purpose (has no P-Meaning). Thus, Julian Baggini writes that [w]e don’t like to think that our past suffering was in any way unnecessary or could have been avoided, for that would be to accept that life has been worse than it might otherwise have been for no further benefit. It would pain us too much to simply accept that [those who have suffered less] have been more fortunate than us . . . [and] to accept the role of chance and the purposelessness of much suffering in life. (Baggini, 2004, p. 163) However, some naturalists claim the purposeless nature of much pain and suffering is precisely what we should expect in a naturalist world and, therefore, naturalism in its own way makes sense of the existence of evil and provides ultimate I-Meaning. Stated slightly differently, naturalism makes sense at a second-order or higher level of things which, at the first-order or lower level, make no sense, including the unjust distribution of experiences of pain and suffering. Thus, given naturalism’s affirmation of a fundamentally non-psychological and purposeless “stuff” out of which the world as we know it blindly develops over time, it makes perfect sense that certain things do not make sense. As Erik Wielenberg, who accepts the reality of objective value, writes in a slightly different context, “I do not see that the mere fact that a view . . . implies that the world is [ultimately] absurd . . . constitutes a reason for thinking that the view in question is false” (Wielenberg, 2008, p. 118).

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The naturalists we are now considering believe the fact that at least some evil in our lives is I-Meaningless, insofar as it makes no sense is itself something that ultimately makes sense and is I-Meaningful within a naturalistic framework. These naturalists nevertheless affirm that our lives can proximately or in the near term be more or less S-Meaningful. This is because even though on their view we all ultimately face the same final end, namely, permanent annihilation at death, while alive we can experience to a greater or lesser degree the objective value which makes life worth living. Thus, Iddo Landau writes that the relation between meaning and value suggests that the degree of meaning in life can be decreased or increased. . . . Almost all lives should not be considered as either absolutely meaningful or absolutely meaningless; there is a continuum from the highest to the lowest degree of meaningfulness. (Landau, 2017, pp. 19, 20) Some naturalists, however, believe naturalism entails that there is no objective value. For them, the view that within a naturalistic framework there is nothing that is intrinsically evil makes sense. As we saw in Chapter 3, this position regarding objective value is espoused by the evolutionary naturalist Richard Dawkins. He maintains that there is no objective value of any kind in the world, evil or good, unjust or just. Things simply are, and that is the end of the matter. It is helpful to requote him briefly here: In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. (Dawkins, 1995, p. 133) Of course, if Dawkins is correct and there is nothing intrinsically evil, then not only is there no evil for the naturalist to make (or not make) sense of, but also there cannot be a problem of evil for the theist. As we have already explained, the problem of evil can only arise if there really is evil. Hence, concerning evil and God’s existence, a naturalist like Dawkins can at most argue that if evil were real, then God would not exist. It is important to recall here that more than a few naturalists also deny that morality is a form of objective value. Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson, and Michael Ruse believe there is no way to make sense of morality in a naturalistic universe and therefore deny its reality. At the same time, they do not deny that we have moral beliefs, but what explains our having these beliefs is not our apprehension of real moral value in the world but rather their evolutionary usefulness. Those who possess moral beliefs are better equipped in the struggle for survival and reproduction than those without moral beliefs. This naturalistic explanation of moral beliefs makes sense of them because if pains and pleasures have respectively no bad or good intrinsic value, then moral actions lack any justification in terms of their potentially making the quality

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of life for others objectively worse or better. While the actions we perform cause others pain and pleasure, it is because these pains and pleasures are respectively neither intrinsically evil nor intrinsically good that the lives of those who experience them are neither objectively worse nor objectively better (neither less nor more worth living). Not only do the naturalists who deny objective value of any kind believe that the nonexistence of objective value makes sense (is I-meaningful) within a naturalistic context, so also do such naturalists often maintain that the nonexistence of irreducible purposeful explanations makes sense within a naturalistic framework. As we discussed in Chapter 2, many naturalists deny that there can be any explanations that are irreducibly purposeful (teleological) in nature. All explanations must ultimately be irreducibly non-purposeful in nature. And as we pointed out in Chapter 3, not a few naturalists (strong naturalists) also deny the existence of irreducible phenomenal consciousness or qualia such as pains and pleasures. According to them, experiences of pains and pleasures must be identical with or reducible to events in the brain or central nervous system. They cannot be psychological occurrences that are distinct from, and in many cases caused by, these physical events, because the existence of such psychological events would be unintelligible within a naturalistic framework.

SENSE-MAKING REVISITED At several points in this and previous chapters, we have made mention of meaningfulness as the idea of making sense of things, which is the idea of things fitting together in an intelligible way. What should be clear by now is that theists and naturalists agree about the importance of the idea of making sense of things (I-Meaningfulness). What they disagree about more often than not concerns what counts as facts of which sense needs to be made. The things theists recognize as facts are quite often denied that status by naturalists. And, as we have seen, there are even cases where theists disagree with other theists about what count as facts (e.g., our ability to know God’s reason for allowing evil), and naturalists disagree with naturalists about what is a fact (e.g., whether there is real evil and good in the world). If we confine ourselves to disagreements between theists and naturalists, one wonders how these disagreements might be resolved. Indeed, one wonders whether it is even possible to resolve them. Is what a person acknowledges as a fact itself a function of or determined by that individual’s theistic or naturalistic worldview (framework beliefs)? If this is the case, one wonders why one would be a theist as opposed to a naturalist, or vice versa. Are there no non-framework facts, facts to which both theists and naturalists have shared access regardless of their overarching worldviews, which might reasonably lead an individual to be a theist or a naturalist? Or is the matter of a person being a theist or a naturalist ultimately not explicable in terms of reason but rather a matter of non-rational temperament? Here, we are once again entering deep waters. One way of thinking about these issues is to consider whether there is an initial way things appear to us, where this initial way of appearing is not shaped or influenced by the holding of any framework beliefs.

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To illustrate what we have in mind, consider a belief in the existence of a soul that is distinct from and capable of surviving the death of its physical body. The view that a human being consists of a soul and a physical body is often referred to as substance dualism, or simply dualism. All of the Christian theists we mentioned in Chapter 2 concerning their belief that the purpose of life is that we be perfectly happy also believed in the existence of the soul and its survival of death, with the possibility of it experiencing in the afterlife the perfect happiness for which it was created. These Christian theists also believed that the soul will ultimately receive a different kind of body after death in which it will experience the perfect happiness that is the purpose of life. Is a belief that the soul exists, as we are supposing here, a pre- or non-framework belief? Or is it a belief that arises only within the context of an already-believed worldview like theism? There is a general consensus among many who consider this question that a person’s initial belief in the soul’s existence (and the soul-body distinction) is a nonframework belief. Indeed, some go so far as to suggest that a naturalist might believe in the soul’s existence. For example, the philosopher Timothy Williamson writes that some of [naturalism’s] hard-nosed advocates undertake to postulate a soul . . . if doing so turns out to be part of the best explanation of our experience, for that would be an application of the scientific method. . . . In practice, however, most naturalists doubt that belief in souls . . . withstands scientific scrutiny. (Williamson, 2011) Williamson is surely right that most naturalists doubt the existence of the soul. Indeed, if there are any naturalists who believe in the soul’s existence, the number of them is miniscule at best. But Williamson is just as surely wrong when he suggests that a belief in the soul is typically the result of a successful explanatory hypothesis. The widespread and universal nature of belief in the soul’s existence suggests that it has its deepest roots in our direct experience of ourselves. Thus, the psychologist Paul Bloom writes that [w]e are dualists: it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity—a mind or soul—are genuinely distinct. We don’t feel that we are our bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them. (Bloom, 2005, p. 109) The philosopher and public intellectual Bryan Magee agrees with Bloom: [I]t is an extraordinary and consequential truth that we know ourselves from inside . . . [and] what we know is largely not material. I am not directly aware of my brain as a material object, nor of my skeleton, heart, stomach, lungs, kidneys, intestines, and all the other material things that go to make up me. Not even by an act of will can I make myself aware of most of them. Far from knowing them well, I do not know some of them at all, and have little idea how they function. I scarcely know where some of them are, still less what they

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look like. . . . I have been living in or with my body for more than eight decades now, but it has never occurred to me to think of myself as it. I own it and am in it . . . . It exerts all sorts of influences on my life, from the important to the trivial. But I am not it. At least, I have never supposed or imagined that I am. However, although I do not feel myself to be these organs, muscles, bones, etc. . . I do not feel myself to be my outside either. Yet this dominates the view of me that other people get. . . . The truth is that none of us, unless he is an identical twin, knows what he looks like. (Magee, 2016, pp. 36–37) Given the nature of our direct experience of ourselves as conscious entities that are distinct from our physical bodies, it comes as no surprise that the experimental cognitive scientist Jesse Bering affirms that we are natural believers in dualism (Bering, 2006). And the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, who claims that there is an inclination to believe in dualism, mentions in his book Soul Dust that other scholars recognize that people are typically dualists: Thus, development psychologist Paul Bloom aptly describes human beings as “natural-born dualists.” Anthropologist Alfred Gell writes: “It seems that ordinary human beings are ‘natural dualists,’ inclined more or less from day one, to believe in some kind of ‘ghost in the machine’ . . . .” Neuropsychologist Paul Broks writes: “The separateness of body and mind is a primordial intuition. . . . Human beings are natural born soul makers, adept at extracting unobservable minds from the behaviour of observable bodies, including their own.” (Humphrey, 2011, p. 195) Added to the observations of these individuals is the fact that almost any textbook one reads on the nature of the self (what philosophers refer to as the philosophy of mind) begins with a consideration of dualism because it is so commonsensical. Given that we seem disposed at the outset to affirm the existence of the soul on the basis of our experience of ourselves, it is not surprising that readers of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series of books find the idea of a dementor, which is a being that can suck the soul out of a human being, perfectly intelligible, even though they likely believe dementing never actually happens. While people like Bloom, Magee, Bering, and Humphrey acknowledge our belief in dualism, all either affirm the nonexistence of the soul or remain agnostic about its existence. In other words, they come to deny or question something that is initially believed and of which they think sense needs to be made. What is interesting to investigate is why they think the way things appear to us in terms of the soul’s existence are or might not be the way they really are. While one of us has looked into this issue elsewhere (Goetz and Taliaferro, 2008), to pursue such a topic here would take us too far afield. Our point is simply that there is evidence which suggests that some of humanity’s initial beliefs are not shaped or informed by framework convictions such as theism or naturalism. If this is the case, then there also might

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be a way of rationally arbitrating between the two framework beliefs that requires examining the reasons given by naturalists for rejecting or questioning something like the existence of the soul, which initially seems to be a fact of which sense needs to be made. However, what should be obvious by now is that when it comes to the idea of making sense of things, it is important first to become clear about just what counts as a fact. That issue must be resolved for there to be any point in seeking to fit things together in an intelligible way.

THE AFTERLIFE, PERFECT HAPPINESS, AND JUSTICE If we think of the meaning of life as a matter of making sense of things, of fitting things together in an intelligible way, then the existence of evil is one of the things that makes the achievement of intelligibility difficult. Not surprisingly, in the minds of many theists and naturalists the problem of evil is deeply intertwined with the issue of whether or not the soul exists. It has seemed to these thinkers that God’s reason for permitting evil, assuming there is a reason, requires the existence of an afterlife in which the perfect happiness for which people yearn (and many theists believe we were created to enjoy) is achievable. Thaddeus Metz, who is a naturalist and well aware of this conceptual link between the problem of evil and the existence of the soul, has recently suggested that the soul’s existence is not necessary for the survival of death because one can imagine the contents of one’s mind being uploaded into a computer and then downloaded into successive bodies forever. That appears no less promising a route to an afterlife than the contents of one’s mind being contained in a spiritual substance. (Metz, 2019, pp. 15–16) But theists (and many naturalists) will likely respond that Metz’s uploading/downloading idea concerning the contents of one’s mind is not very promising, if promising at all, as an account of the personal survival of death. This is because (using the first-person pronoun “I”) I, the same particular self, want to survive death and experience the perfect happiness that cannot be found in this life, whereas a succession of different bodies, even if they, by hypothesis, contain copies of the contents of my mind, will not be me. At best, the different bodies will have mental contents qualitatively identical with mine, but qualitative identity of mental contents is not sufficient to make any of the bodily recipients of those contents identical with me. Moreover, on Metz’s hypothesis, there is in principle no limit to how many copies of the contents of my mind might be made and simultaneously uploaded and downloaded into different bodies. The idea that there can be many of me existing at the same time conflicts with the commonsense belief that there is and can only be one of me (though there might be many other individuals like me). Thus, even if Metz’s

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uploading/downloading idea manages to capture something relevant for the survival of death, theists (and naturalists) will insist it fails to capture what is most important, which is that the same particular self that existed in this life must continue to exist in the afterlife to enjoy perfect happiness. However, theists not only insist on the need to survive death as the same particular self, but they also believe the survival of the same particular self is necessary to insure that those who choose to lead immoral lives do not end up as happy as or happier than those who choose to live morally (see Chapter 3). In short, they believe the existence of the soul is necessary for the achievement of ultimate justice in the afterlife, where justice itself is necessary for ultimate I-Meaningfulness. But is the soul’s existence after death needed to make life ultimately intelligible in terms of desired perfect happiness and justice? Some naturalists and atheists think not. Metz is one of them. He writes that it is not clear why the soul, granting its existence for the sake of discussion, must be immortal. Immortality does not seem essential to effect justice or to complete a life begun on earth. Finite deeds warrant finite responses, when it comes to justice. . . . [N]ot even torture and murder seem to warrant an infinite amount of torment. (Metz, 2019, p. 30) Theists are likely to make two points in response. First, given the desire for perfect happiness, which is a happiness that never ends, they will reiterate that things ultimately do not make sense if the soul (assuming it exists) is not immortal so as to experience that desired happiness. Second, Metz is correct when he insists that torture and murder (or any other immoral deed) do not warrant a never-ending punishment. However, the rationale for affirmation of the soul’s immortality is not the need for such punishment. Again, what explains the requirement for the soul’s immortality is the assumption that it is created for perfect happiness, and if the soul forever fails to experience that happiness it is not because it committed torture or murder but because it was unrelenting in its refusal to renounce the pursuit of its happiness on its own terms.

CHAPTER SUMMARY In this chapter, we examined what many consider to be the hardest problem for ultimate I-Meaningfulness in a theistic worldview: the existence of evil. We surveyed different versions of the problem of evil and possible theistic responses to them. We also looked at the status of evil in a naturalistic worldview. Our discussion of evil ended with a consideration of death and its bearing on ultimate I-Meaningfulness. Despite the belief of many that death with no afterlife is rationally problematic for ultimately making sense of things, many others maintain this belief is false because death is not all that bad, if bad at all. Indeed, they hold that death without an afterlife is actually necessary in order for life to ultimately make sense. Given the many issues concerned with the issue of death, we devote the final chapter to an extended consideration of it.

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STUDY QUESTIONS 1 What is Euthyphro’s Dilemma? 2 What are the logical and evidential problems of evil and the difference between them? Is one version of the problem of evil more compelling than the other? If so, why? 3 What is skeptical theism? Is it a reasonable position to embrace? 4 How does a theodicy differ from skeptical theism? Do you think it is more reasonable to believe a theodicy is needed to adequately address the problem of evil? Is one of the theodicies discussed in this chapter more reasonable than the others? 5 Does animal suffering pose a problem for belief in God? 6 Can a naturalist provide a plausible account of the existence of evil and still make sense of things? 7 Is it reasonable to think there are things/facts which are knowable as such before one embraces a worldview or interpretive framework?

• INTRODUCTORY FURTHER READING Lewis, C. S. 2001 [1940]. The Problem of Pain. New York: HarperSanFrancisco. Mackie, J. L. 1990 [1955]. “Evil and Omnipotence.” In The Problem of Evil. Edited by Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams, pp. 25–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• ADVANCED FURTHER READING Mavrodes, George. 1986. “Religion and the Queerness of Morality.” In Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment. Edited by Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright, pp. 213–226. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1974. God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Rowe, William. 1986. “The Empirical Argument from Evil.” In Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment. Edited by Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright, pp. 227–247. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

• FREE INTERNET RESOURCES “The Problem of Evil.” 1000-Word Philosophy (https://1000wordphilosophy.com/ 2014/04/07/the-problem-of-evil/). “The Problem of Evil.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/).

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meaning, death, and immortality Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you were drawn while the white faces recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt in your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unfaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars. (John Updike, 1990, pp. 123–124)

CHAPTER SECTIONS • • • • • • • • • •

The profound reality of death What is death? Death is bad: Deprivation Death is not bad: Epicurus and Lucretius Death enhances meaning Death threatens meaning Death and futility The importance of endings Immortality and afterlife Chapter summary

Meaning in the real world Collin recently attended a funeral for his close friend. In the days since he cannot seem to shake a number of thoughts accompanying his intense grief. Despite the fact that his friend is no longer suffering, he worries that death— if it is the definitive end of all conscious existence, an unending experiential

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blank—is really bad news. He fears that it ultimately renders life empty, futile, and meaningless. But then again how could it, he wonders. How can what eventually happens rob life of the real value that we experience through, for example, our vocations and relationships here and now? Must experience of those values go on forever in order for them to be valuable? And, can anything really be bad for someone who no longer exists, if non-existence follows dying? Still, death’s visceral sting is undeniable. Death certainly appears to be a very bad thing because of the pain it leaves and its acidic power to destroy the possibility of creativity, progress, and most importantly, joy and love. Wouldn’t an immortal afterlife, then, be really good news?

THE PROFOUND REALITY OF DEATH It is hard to imagine, much less believe, that in a few short years we will all be dead. It feels strange, troubling to write that sentence. We acknowledge the fact that our time is quickly ticking away, but truly coming to grips with our finitude is another matter altogether. We, authors and readers, are alive here early in the twenty-first century—working, playing, reading, eating, laughing, crying, and loving. Think of the countless others who were once alive just as we now are, and for whom the prospect of death seemed so far off, so unreal. For the living, death is often abstract, distant. For all of those who went about their daily affairs where death loomed only on a far-off horizon, their deaths have now come and gone, dozens or hundreds or thousands of years ago. Someday, we too will be the now-dead ones who have been gone for hundreds, thousands of years. Others may come after us, thinking about us in a moment of poignant reflection, as we now think about those who went before us. We are all but a flicker in the vast eons of time, eventually relegated to the ether of fading memories. Life is lived in the ever-encroaching reality of our own demise. The Teacher in Ecclesiastes puts it poetically: A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. . . . There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after. (Ecclesiastes 1: 4, 11)

Losing a child Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff lost his 25-year-old son, Eric, in a mountainclimbing accident in 1983. In a moving autobiographical lament, he poignantly captures the brutal realities and implications surrounding death. (continued)

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(continued) There’s a hole in the world now. In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing. A center, like no other, of memory and hope and knowledge and affection which once inhabited this earth is gone. Only a gap remains. A perspective on this world unique in this world which once moved about within this world has been rubbed out. Only a void is left. There’s nobody now who saw just what he saw, knows what he knew, remembers what he remembered, loves what he loved. A person, an irreplaceable person, is gone. Never again will anyone apprehend the world quite the way he did. Never again will anyone inhabit the world the way he did. Questions I have can never now get answers. The world is emptier. My son is gone. Only a hole remains, a void, a gap, never to be filled. (Wolterstorff, 1987, p. 33)

Despite this sobering reality, we often talk casually about death, sometimes when staring it squarely in the eye. How often have you said or heard such things like, “after all, we all die”; “well, it was his time to go”; “she had a good run”; or “death is natural, it is part of life.” We often joke about death: “six-feet under”; “bury me in a cardboard box because it won’t matter to me, I won’t be there”; “he’s catching all the fish he wants now”; and “she’s playing the perfect golf course with the big man upstairs.” Sometimes, though not always, such nonchalant talk masks deep-seated anxieties and uncertainties about losing loved ones and oneself to death. The thought of saying goodbye—forever—to those closest to us is exceedingly painful. Our grief at times is so great. Many people deeply fear death. Some are downright terrified of it. One psychoanalyst says of our attitude toward death that “[w]hile we routinely espouse the sensible view that death is natural, undeniable, unavoidable, we behave as if it were otherwise” (Willock, 2007, p. 3). Our attitude toward death suggests that we believe it is something which deprives life of meaning. Just as there is deep anxiety about death, so also there is an equally deep desire to live forever. A recent article documents how billionaires are trying to prolong their lives indefinitely: At least a dozen of the world’s richest men have ploughed millions into bizarre ways to live forever. . . . Jeffrey Bezos, the world’s richest man, . . . has pumped money into Unity, a California company that hopes to stop the ageing process. . . . Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk . . . has been developing the technology called Neuralink, because he thinks humans must become one with machines in order to survive being replaced by artificial intelligence. Musk’s plan to “save the human race” involves wiring computer chips into our minds

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to merge us with artificial intelligence. . . . [T]here are companies out there conducting trials into the effects of blood transfusions. Transfusing blood from young, healthy people . . . could reverse ageing. . . . PayPal mogul Peter Thiel has made headlines . . . for his rumoured interest in this process. . . . Entrepreneur Sam Altman is one of 25 people who have splashed the cash to join a waiting list at Nectome—a startup that promises to upload your brain into a computer to grant eternal life to your consciousness. (The Sun, June 2, 2019) While those individuals mentioned in the quotation desire to live forever, others maintain that death is precisely what makes life special, poignant, and profound. In their minds, living forever would rob life of meaning. It is death that ultimately makes life meaningful. Our primary goal in this chapter is to guide the reader through important issues and questions surrounding death, especially those at the intersection of death and meaning. A book on the meaning of life is not complete without wrestling with the meaning of death. Before considering a number of normative questions about whether death is good or bad, and its implications for life’s meaning, it is important to briefly discuss a question of metaphysics: what is death? It is hard to know whether something is good or bad without first knowing to some degree what it is.

WHAT IS DEATH? After the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 1981, the US adopted criteria for death in which someone who “has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead” (Defining Death, 1981, p. 2). These criteria are, of course, controversial depending on one’s views about what a person, in fact, is. Vital processes of human beings whose entire brains have ceased to function can nonetheless be sustained artificially through cardiopulmonary assistance. On some views, this is sufficient for being alive. Others, who connect being alive closely with psychological properties, note that such features of consciousness can be destroyed in human beings whose brain stems remain intact and functioning. There is, then, a fair amount of debate over questions like: What is death? When do we die? When are we dead? These are interesting questions. They are also more than pedantic philosophical curiosities. They are at the heart of some of the most pressing issues in contemporary medical ethics. Perhaps some of you have faced them in your own life. Is your close friend alive or dead who is in a coma from a tragic accident and whose relevant brain function has been irreversibly destroyed and whose respiration is artificially maintained by machines? Your answer to this metaphysical question about death has profound real-world implications. That said, we are not primarily interested in this chapter about what death is or ethical questions about end-of-life scenarios. Since this chapter is on death, however,

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it is necessary to make some distinctions and clarify the idea we have in mind when we say things like death is bad or death threatens meaning or, alternatively, death enhances meaning. Such distinctions are helpful. They get us all on the same page, talking about the same thing. They help in the process of separating plausible and implausible views. Clarifying terms is also important because the various discussions in this chapter about death’s badness all revolve around the view that death is the end. Period. When many people worry about death being bad or that death threatens meaning, their worry is based on the idea that death involves an experiential blank in which they are no longer around because they no longer exist. This view of death is a corollary of naturalism. Remember, naturalism is, roughly, the view that the physical, space-time universe is all that exists, there is no God, and human beings are wholly material creatures who cease to exist after the demise of their material bodies. On this view, at death, the person ceases to exist. There is an experiential blank. There is no afterlife; no playing golf on courses beyond your wildest imagination; no endless conversations and adventures with your family and friends. No nothing . . . forever. Most often, worries about death, then, are worries about what the implications are if this view of the world is true. Of course, quite a lot of people do not think this view of the world is true and, instead, think there is something more than the physical, space-time universe, something more to what it means to be a human being, and something more after death. This something more is a positive game-changer for meaning, it is argued. In the last section, we will briefly discuss a few interesting issues surrounding the idea of immortality and an afterlife.

DYING, DEATH, AND BEING DEAD Those who research and write about death sometimes distinguish between three ideas: dying, death, and being dead. In ordinary conversation, we often use the last two terms interchangeably. It is worth being a little more careful here. The first of the three, dying, refers to a process. It is the process during which the various bodily systems responsible for sustaining life systematically fail (in a way that is distinct from the way that our bodies are wearing down over time). That process can be halted or reversed, for example, if CPR is successfully administered. When that process passes the point of no return, death results. When one is dying one is still alive. Dying takes time. People are often conscious while dying, at least during the initial stages. Unfortunately, dying can also involve significant pain and suffering, both physically and emotionally. The famous science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, supposedly once said “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” Things get a little trickier with death. Death intervenes between dying and being dead. Death probably does not often involve a conscious episode (though neardeath experiences are worth considering here). Death is a kind of portal between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Death itself is not clearly a part of

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a person’s lifetime. In this way, death might just be the name we give to demarcate that “moment” when a person crosses over from being alive to being dead. Perhaps death is the completion of the dying process, the result of which is being dead. Being dead is a condition or state rather than a process like dying. Being dead does not involve a conscious episode, rather it is experientially empty. All vital life processes have stopped and the person no longer exists. (Remember, we are assuming a naturalistic view of death in this chapter.) Being dead is not a part of a person’s life. When you are dead, you no longer are.

Parsing death: the metaphysics of dying, death, and being dead Dying: a process during which the bodily systems responsible for sustaining life fail, and that, if not halted or reversed, results in death. Death: the intervening “moment” between dying and being dead. Being dead: the condition or state of no longer living and which involves an experiential blank. The person ceases to exist (assuming Naturalism).

Philosophical debates about whether death is bad or whether death threatens (or enhances) life’s meaning are primarily about the last idea in the above triad: being dead. They are not about whether the dying process is bad; it often is because it involves pain and suffering. It is also worth noting that even those who say that being dead is bad can still agree with the oft-expressed sentiment that it is good that the now dead are no longer suffering, say, after an extended illness (it is not clear, however, whether those who say that being dead is neither good nor bad can agree with this common sentiment). Someone can think that death is bad without thinking that death is the worst thing. In the remainder of the chapter, our focus will be on being dead and whether or not that is bad news, good news, or irrelevant news for us. That said, we generally will use the term “death” when referring to being dead to preserve our ordinary way of talking.

DEATH IS BAD: DEPRIVATION We commonly think that death is bad, which is reflected in our fear of and anguish about death. Of course, sometimes our fears are irrational and do not reliably track what is genuinely bad. Remember Gandalf’s words to Frodo’s friends in anguish as Frodo prepares to depart for the Grey Havens at the end of The Lord of the Rings? “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil” (Tolkien, 1993, p. 310). As we will see in the next section, there are those—following the ancient philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius—who not only think that death is not bad but also maintain that we should not fear it.

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Again, let us be clear about what we do not mean when we say that death is or is not bad. The target is not the dying process (which very often can be bad in virtue of the pain it causes). Neither is the target the pain and grief of those who survive, those who have lost a loving, S- and P-Meaningful relationship. Rather, the target is being dead, where that is conceived as the termination of our existence, an end from which there is no point of return. Our concern is whether or not death is bad for the one who has died and is now dead. If we are not careful (and even if we are), the prospects here are high for talking nonsense. Tom Stoppard’s absurdist, existentialist tragicomedy, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead brings into sharp relief our fears of annihilation, but also the tensions in talking about yourself or anyone being dead (see an excerpt from the play immediately below).

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it? No. Nor do I, really . . . . It’s silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead . . . which should make all the difference . . . shouldn’t it? I mean, you’d never know you were in a box, would you? It would be just like being asleep in a box. Not that I’d like to sleep in a box, mind you, not without any air—you’d wake up dead, for a start, and then where would you be? Apart from inside a box. That’s the bit I don’t like frankly. That’s why I don’t think of it . . . . Because you’d be helpless, wouldn’t you? Stuffed in a box like that, I mean you’d be in there for ever. Even taking into account the fact that you’re dead, it isn’t a pleasant thought. Especially if you’re dead, really . . . ask yourself, if I asked you straight off—I’m going to stuff you in this box now, would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally, you’d prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all. I expect. You’d have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking—well, at least I’m not dead! In a minute someone’s going to bang on the lid and tell me to come out. “Hey you, whatsyername! Come out of there!” From Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

Difficulties duly noted, probably the most important and oft-debated reason given for death’s badness is the Deprivation Argument. According to this argument, death is bad because it deprives us of a wide range of goods and values to which we would have access if we were still alive. Quite simply, death cuts one off from a whole lot of good—enjoying a fabulous meal with your friends, playing catch with your son, taking a walk with the sun on your face—that one could experience. And this is what

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makes death bad. It is what death prevents: the possession of value and S-Meaning (from here on, we will generally talk of meaning, unless we need to do otherwise). The Deprivation Argument makes sense of much of our thinking about death. It is fairly easy to see why many find it persuasive. For example, most of us think that the deaths of the young are, in general, more tragic than the deaths of the elderly. We say things like “she was still so full of life”; “he had so much life left in him”; and “she had many things left to accomplish.” About the elderly, one is more likely to hear something like “he died at a ripe old age”; “it was her time to go”; or “she lived such a full life.” The young have not yet had the same kind of access to values in life that the elderly have had. Death cuts them off prematurely from such opportunities. The Deprivation Argument also fits with what we think about cases like a coma. A coma may be bad for the one in it for a number of reasons; one reason seems to be that the person is unable to experience an important range of significant values, and this is a bad thing. This is analogous to death. Death is bad because we are unable to experience the range of values that contribute to human flourishing and meaning. The one in a coma and the one who has died lose this. Of course, the person in a coma is still alive and this is a difference from the one who is dead, but the question is whether or not this is a salient difference. Insofar as both are in a condition consisting of an experiential blank, both seem to be harmed. If we think that a coma harms the subject in this way, why not also think that death similarly harms the one who has died? The Deprivation Argument does not say that death is bad because it is painful or leads to pain. You cannot experience pain and suffering when you literally experience nothing at all. Nevertheless, the argument utilizes a notion of instrumental badness. Death is not intrinsically bad/evil, that is, bad in and of itself, but derives its badness from its relationship to something else that is bad and to which it leads. As we will see later in this chapter, obvious examples are the loss of future goods and goods presently enjoyed. Thus, while someone might be inclined to say that death is intrinsically evil, the Deprivation Argument does not require this stronger sense of evilness. We conclude this section by raising an interesting downstream question that may have crossed your mind while thinking about the Deprivation Argument: Does the Deprivation Argument commit one to the view that immortality would be good? If the badness of death is a result of being cut off from value and meaning, then would the best scenario be a situation in which you enjoy unending value and meaning? How much value and meaning is enough? Would value eventually run out? We will discuss questions like these at the end of this chapter. We turn our attention now to two ancient thinkers who were skeptical about the badness of death.

DEATH IS NOT BAD: EPICURUS AND LUCRETIUS If you are convinced by the Deprivation Argument and ready to call the case closed, a couple of ancient philosophers and their contemporary followers would ask

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you to pause and reconsider. An ancient Greek (Epicurus) and an ancient Roman (Lucretius) thought that death was not, indeed, could not be bad for someone. Their arguments, ones that many thinkers over the years have regarded as slippery pieces of sophistry, have actually persuaded more than a few that death cannot be bad for the person who died.

EPICURUS Epicurus (341–270 bce) founded a school of philosophy called Epicureanism. Epicureanism was a form of hedonistic philosophy that taught that the purpose of philosophy is to attain a happy and tranquil life which is free from fear. Epicurus thought that a primary obstacle to the tranquil life was the inordinate fear and subsequent denial of death. Fear and denial in this case stem from the mistaken view about what death involves and they cause a host of ills like unnecessary anxiety, all of which threaten a hedonistic life of peace. Why did Epicurus think that being dead is not a harm to the one who has died? Here are his own words: So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more. (Epicurus, 1983, p. 8) It is worth trying to understand what precisely is Epicurus’s argument, especially what it implies about the non-badness of death. Following others, we interpret his argument as follows: Premise 1: Something can be bad for you only if you exist. Premise 2: When you are dead you do not exist. Conclusion: Therefore, when you are dead, nothing can be bad for you, including and especially being dead itself. Having now seen the argument, you might feel like you are being tricked. Death has to be bad, but how can it be if Epicurus is right? Which premise is flawed? This seems like something straight out of the absurdist play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead from which we quoted earlier. On the surface, the argument looks quite formidable. When you are dead, you are not around to experience anything. If you are not around to experience anything, then you certainly do not experience anything bad. In order to experience something bad, you first have to be around to experience anything at all. Since death is, at least in part, the lack of experience, then death cannot be bad. The argument assumes what some have called an Existence Requirement (ER). According to ER, in order for you to experience something as bad, you must exist at the same time as that thing. This seems plausible. If you do not exist, how can you be harmed?

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Its denial seems to lead to implausible implications too. If one combines denial of ER with something like the Deprivation Argument, then it looks as though one is forced to conclude that an uncountable number of potential human beings (those who might have been conceived and born but who are not) are harmed because they are cut off from value and meaning to which they will never have access. But one might be hesitant to say this. What, then, can be said? Here are a few points that might be made in support of the idea that a person can be harmed when dead.

RESPONDING TO EPICURUS: HARM WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE One might try the route of providing examples where an individual is harmed without knowing this fact or experiencing it. Some of us might think that a person is harmed when lied to, even if at the time she is unaware of the lie (for example, a husband tells his wife he loves her while having an affair). We also might think the person suffering a coma is the recipient of harm in the form of the loss of value and meaning even though, presumably, she has no conscious experience whatsoever (and has the possibility of emerging from the coma in a reasonably normal state of mind). In both these instances, we supposedly think the subject is harmed even though she does not really experience the harm. Therefore, maybe death, too, is a harm for the person who has died. That said, the big difference between these cases and death is that an individual is still alive when lied to and when in a coma, and this fact might be thought to be sufficient to undercut the argumentative force of these cases against Epicurus’s position that a person cannot be harmed when dead. Still, maybe there is something to such cases. Perhaps, they provide important counter pressure against Epicurus’s argument.

RESPONDING TO EPICURUS: REVISING ER One might also seek to argue against Epicurus by revising the ER. Maybe existence is required in some way for real harm to be done, but perhaps not quite in the strong way that Epicurus and his followers imagine. What if we were to revise the ER to say something like: Revised ER: something can be bad for you (or you can be harmed) only if you exist at some time or another. Compare this to the original ER: Original ER: Something can be bad for you only if you exist at the same time as that thing. (cf. Kagan, 2012, p. 222) On revised ER, existence is necessary for harm, but not at the same time as the harm. Revised ER means that being dead can be bad for the one who is dead because

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the person, though no longer existing, existed at some time. The person who once existed is harmed by being cut off, through death, from access to value and meaning. This may be one way of capturing what seems to be right about the ER while also capturing what seems to be right in the deprivation argument. Epicurus and his followers, of course, will likely not be persuaded. What if one were to reject ER all together and say that existence is not required in any sense in order to be harmed? This may be incoherent, or at least lead to worrisome implications. If one jettisons ER, it looks like one is forced to say that the countless number of potential, never-to-be-born humans are harmed. This kind of consideration brings us to a famous argument against death being a harm by Epicurus’s later Roman follower, Lucretius (99–55 bce).

LUCRETIUS Like Epicurus before him, Lucretius thought that we should not fear death because death is non-existence and there is nothing to fear in non-existence. His angle, however, is different from that of Epicurus. Lucretius reminds us that death is not the only period in which we will not exist. We did not exist before we were born (at least, we are assuming we did not), and probably none of us finds it disturbing to contemplate the eons of nonexistence preceding our birth. Do you fret and worry about the fact that before you were born there was a large span of time, perhaps an eternity, preceding your existence? If not, why should you worry about post-mortem non-existence? Lucretius, then, sets a trap of inconsistency for those who fear death or think death brings harm. Either worry about pre-birth non-existence too or stop worrying about post-mortem non-existence.

RESPONDING TO LUCRETIUS: ASYMMETRY BETWEEN POST-MORTEM AND PRENATAL NON-EXISTENCE How might one respond to Lucretius’s point? First, one could agree with him and then try to stop fearing death, psychologically difficult as that might be. A postmortem experiential blank, just like a prenatal experiential blank is not worrisome. Neither is it a harm to us. Second, if one is skeptical of his argument, one might bite the bullet and say that something is bad about both periods of non-existence. Many will likely find it difficult to give reasons for why prenatal non-existence is a harm. The third and most promising option is to show a relevant asymmetry between post-mortem and prenatal non-existence, so that one can conclude that the first involves harm whereas the second does not. One possibility is to appeal to a weaker version of the ER and say that because you once existed your death deprives you of future value and meaning. Post-mortem non-existence means that life is lost unlike with prenatal non-existence where there is no life yet to lose. This is a relevant asymmetry between these forms of non-existence, and perhaps it is enough to cast serious doubt on Lucretius’s argument.

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RESPONDING TO EPICURUS AND LUCRETIUS: DEATH AND PRESENT EXPERIENCES There is another response to both Epicurus and Lucretius that appeals, not to future experiences with their value and meaning that death prevents, but to present experiences that death cuts short. The Deprivation Argument as presented so far has stressed that death is bad because it deprives one of goods to which one would have access if one were still alive; it is focused on not-presently-experienced, future value and meaning. What if, however, the Deprivation Argument is framed as being about the loss of present experiences with their value and meaning? Assume that you are happy right now. In this case, death is bad for you now because it prevents the continuation of your present happiness. It brings to an end something good that you are experiencing right now. Interestingly, this moves us closer to being able to accept something like Original ER. This also maps onto the idea that many have that death can be good—it is good right now for the person because it brings an end to the suffering she now experiences. We say things like: “It is better that she is no longer suffering.” Of course, religious assumptions often lurk in the background; in not suffering, some sort of blessed afterlife is envisioned. But not always. Sometimes people have annihilation in mind. The consummate pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer spoke of “the bliss of nonexistence” or, translated differently, “the blessed calm of nothingness” (Schopenhauer, 1970, p. 47). But on the present modification of the Deprivation Argument and its implications, death is not good for this person later insofar as it prevents her future experience of pain and suffering, because, as Epicurus and Lucretius recognize, she will not be around then. If death is good for her, it must be good for her now, while she is suffering, because it brings an end to that suffering. Similarly, if death is bad for you, it must be bad for you now, while you are happy, because it now brings an end to that happiness.

A Poet’s take on Epicurus Poet Philip Larkin (1922–1985) wrote a poem explicitly critiquing the Epicurean position by saying that it is: …specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anesthetic from which none come round. (Larkin, 1997, pp. 40–41)

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We close this section with a few more reasons for why being dead might be a harm to the person who is dead. Taking a cue from ordinary language, we often talk about being able to “harm” the dead. People often make promises to loved ones near death: looking after surviving family members, finishing a beloved’s important project, and so on, after they have died. If ordinary language is our guide, breaking such promises results in harm to the deceased. In fact, we often hold such promises in especially high regard. They might feel even more important somehow. Is this just a manner of speaking though? Are the dead really harmed? One might respond that they are because they continue to exist in the afterlife and are aware of what is done after they are gone. But we are presupposing the truth of naturalism according to which no one survives death. Perhaps, then, one might simply say that while people do not actually harm the dead, they do something wrong when they break their promises to the dead, which was to provide what is good to the living. Moreover, if others came to know about the breaking of these promises, they might become reluctant to leave anything in trust to the living upon their death. Nevertheless, if the dead are somehow harmed by broken promises (after all, the promises were to them), then maybe being dead itself can be a harm to them too. Perhaps we have here an admittedly difficult case, a difficulty caused by the rupture of death, where the dead are actually harmed, even if we cannot quite articulate why. Finally, we should reflect on the possibility that things coming in the future can affect how we think and feel about things right now. A bad ending can ruin a story, just as a good ending can redeem a story. Many people think that death, as conceived by naturalism, is a bad ending, partly because it places an unbridgeable chasm between us and a rich array of value and meaning. Death involves a real loss. As importantly, it is a real loss that we know about ahead of time. If naturalism is true, then we know that death will bring with it the loss of all those things we love, especially other people and the relationships we enjoy with them. Endings are pivotal, and can be especially critical when known in advance. We will say more about this later in the chapter.

DEATH ENHANCES MEANING If death is no harm to us, that is really good news. Even better news would be that death actually enhances the meaning in our lives. Some might even go so far as to say that we need death in order for our lives to have certain kinds of meaning. Hence, naturalism, with its claim that death is the absolute end of a person’s existence, is very good news because it makes for a more meaningful life. In this section, we investigate some reasons to think that death enhances meaning or even that meaning needs death. Though people sometimes say that without death life cannot have meaning, it is not always clear what they mean. Recall the Meaning Triad—purpose, significance, and sense-making. These ordinary ways of thinking about meaning are familiar to us and shed light on what we have in mind when talking about life’s meaning. Life’s meaning is about sense-making (I-Meaning), about trying to fit together all the existentially weighty stuff in life that

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concerns us: how we got here, why we are here, what we should do while we are here, whether we are valuable and significant, why we suffer, what eventually will happen to us. Life’s meaning is about purpose (P-Meaning), about the purpose or point of it all and our purpose(s). Life’s meaning is about significance (S-Meaning), about what makes our lives worth living, whether we matter, what kinds of impacts we make, the marks we leave behind.

The most common way that death has been said to enhance or give life meaning is when significance is in view. Life, it is sometimes thought, is significant, special, and matters, precisely because it is fragile and fleeting. We often think that something really matters since it lasts only a short while or represents a fleeting opportunity. We say things like, “You better make this count, because it is the only shot you have.” One attempt at making a basketball goal for a million dollars. One last experimental drug to find the cure. These are charged with extra significance because you only get one (or one last) crack at it. A mysterious flower called the “night-blooming Cereus,” known for its ethereal, starlike blossoms, blooms only at night and only one night a year. Plant lovers gather to watch, captivated by its short-lived unfurling. Once in full bloom, the flower wilts in just a few short hours. Though one might be disappointed about the brevity of the bloom, one might take a more positive view—it is precisely the flower’s brevity that imbues it with a special, poignant, significant quality. Other examples abound: the once-a-year meteor shower, summer break from university, the rare coin, and so on. Brevity or scarcity deeply move us. Some view life itself like this: it is profound and significant precisely because of its striking brevity compared with the eons of our universe. Living forever, in this case, only serves to infect life with a kind of triviality. Another argument in support of the idea that death enhances meaning claims that death is needed in order to make action possible. If we could always put off until tomorrow what we could do today (now), then there would be no point in doing it today. We would not act. The result would be a loss of both P-Meaning in the form of purposeful activity and S-Meaning that comes with and follows from that activity (two sides of the Meaning Triad). A final way to illustrate how someone might think that death is good news for meaning is by considering immortality. We will discuss this issue later in the chapter, but it is worth briefly introducing the idea here. Some people think that living forever

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would threaten meaning because they believe that living forever would inevitably result in irredeemable boredom, and such boredom undermines S-Meaning. If you are one who thinks that immortality would be a bad thing, then death ends up being a very good thing as it prevents one from suffering a tedious immortal existence.

DEATH THREATENS MEANING Though some individuals believe, as we have just seen, that death enhances meaning in a naturalistic world, many people nevertheless worry that death is the great acid that ultimately devours everything that gives our lives S-Meaning. Or consider P-Meaning. One straightforward way that death can threaten it is by preventing us from attaining important goals (purposes) by which we structure our lives (assuming for the sake of discussion that at least strong naturalism is false). A meaningful life is in part one that involves setting and achieving goals of various levels of importance/value. Such goals give meaning to our day-to-day existence. They give us actions to perform that have a point. They provide a reason to get out of bed and face the day. Death can and does prevent us from reaching some of these goals, often really important ones central to our identity. Since some of the P-Meaning in the purpose meaning-cycle comes from the process of striving for goals (the value of the goal confers value on the means to it), death cannot threaten all such meaning, but if we never reach the goal, the meaning-cycle remains incomplete. P-Meaning in life is lost. And there might be another sense in which death threatens meaning when purpose is in view and naturalism is true. If, in addition to various purposes in life, there is P-Meaning in the form of a purpose of life, and if that purpose is something like perfect happiness, then death threatens meaningful life because it threatens our purpose of life.

Two types of P-Meaninglessness It is helpful to distinguish two senses of meaninglessness when the issue is P-Meaning. In one sense, there is meaninglessness if there is no purpose. Thus, life is meaningless if there is no purpose of life, which is the case if naturalism is true. In another sense, there is meaninglessness if there is a purpose but it is not achieved. Thus, there is meaninglessness of life if there is a purpose of life that is not fulfilled, and there is meaninglessness in life if there is a purpose in life that is not satisfied.

As we saw in the previous section, those who believe death enhances P-Meaning maintain that it is death itself that makes action possible. If we could always put off until tomorrow what we could do today, then there would be no purpose in doing it today. We would fail to achieve goals, but this would be because there would

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be no goals to achieve. However, those who maintain death undermines meaning believe this argument neglects to consider how the belief that there is something good to be had in life gives rise to action. They maintain that when we believe there is something good (S-Meaning) to be had, we need a reason not to act to get it. As philosopher Iddo Landau writes, [i]f we find what is meaningful to be of value, and we want value, we will opt for it even in an eternal life, simply because it is valuable. . . . [V]alue has its own motivating force: it is attractive. (Landau, 2017, pp. 83–84) So according to Landau and others, death is not necessary to make action possible and enhance P-Meaning. Does death threaten meaning in some other way when significance is in view? In the last section, we noted that some things might seem significant precisely because of their infrequency and brevity. Recall the beautiful, once-a-year blooming, Cereus. If beauty is intrinsically good, then the blooming of the Cereus is significant because of the intrinsic goodness of its beauty and not because of its infrequency and brevity. Moreover, it is because of the intrinsic goodness of the beauty of the flowering Cereus that the world would be a better place were there additional instances of such beauty. Were there to be additional instances of such beauty with their intrinsic goodness, then this particular and brief instance of beauty would lose its distinction as a singular instance of this intrinsic goodness. But it and all the other instances of this goodness would make the world a better place. Thus, a naturalistic universe, insofar as it would permanently prevent any further instances of beauty with their intrinsic goodness, would ultimately threaten, not enhance, S-Meaning. But what if the pleasure that comes from an awareness of beauty, and not beauty itself, is the intrinsic good, and one got more pleasure out of an awareness of beauty because awareness of that kind did not occur very often? Here again, many believe it would be the intrinsic goodness of the pleasure that is significant. Rather than hope that there would be no additional experiences of such pleasure, one would desire an unlimited number of subsequent experiences of equal (or more) pleasure, and if one either had other such experiences or believed that there were other such experiences in the offing, then this experience would lose its distinctive singularity. But it and all other experiences of pleasure would remain intrinsically good, and an unending life filled with them would not trivialize or undermine that value in any way. Thus death, which has the final word in a naturalistic universe, would ultimately undermine, not supply or accentuate, S-Meaning because it would make impossible any future experiences of pleasure with their intrinsic goodness. Significance also connects with the idea of impact. We bring about marked effects all the time; for example, on our family, on the environment, and so on. Some of these impacts have ripple effects that last only a very short time. Others, have implications that extend for generations. Some people are even in a position to leave their footprints that affect the entire world for centuries. These find their way into the annals of history and are not lost quite as easily in humanity’s collective consciousness.

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When we conceive of significance through the lens of impact, it is not hard to see why people start to worry about life’s S-Meaning because of the brevity imposed by death. Whether we are talking about relatively modest local impacts or world-changing impacts, the one who produced them will eventually die as will countless other generations who experience and remember them and their effects. Eventually time and entropy will destroy those results and the memories of them when the universe “dies.” These effects were real, but because of the death of ourselves and eventually the universe, the effects will come to nothing. This is what acutely worries many people, and what gives them a sense of tragedy to life. Just as the anthill seems insignificant to us (unless the ants invade our kitchen), we and our accomplishments are also insignificant from the cosmic vantage point of a silent and aloof naturalistic universe. For those with this concern, life having a kind of poignant significance because of its brevity would not be enough to outweigh this other kind of cosmic insignificance arising out of a universe that cares nothing about us and is ultimately bounded by death. Finally, more than a few people believe death can also undercut a kind of I-Meaning, insofar as we struggle to fit such a painful reality with other aspects of existence, especially the deep-seated psychological and emotional longings to continue living and to see the realization of ultimate justice. That we should live for the briefest of moments, to love and laugh, only to quickly say goodbye—forever—to all that we value most and with no hope of ultimate justice to right what is wrong in this world seems to make life ultimately senseless (I-Meaningless).

DEATH AND FUTILITY Concerns that death undercuts significance naturally lead into discussions about futility. It is commonly held that life in a naturalistic universe is futile, if all we are and do eventually comes to nothing. It is not exactly clear what people mean by this, but the sentiment behind it is both intense and widely shared. Is such a strong pessimistic view reasonable though? Is there something correct in thinking that life is, in some important sense, ultimately futile if death is the absolute end? In order to investigate this idea, we must first get clear on what is meant by futility. In normal cases, something is futile when the accomplishment or fulfillment of what is aimed at or desired is impossible. Here are some examples. It is futile for a human being to try to both exist and not exist at the same time and in the same sense. It is futile to try to jump over the moon. Both are impossible, though in different ways. The first is logically impossible. The second is physically impossible. Futility is also present for someone suffering with crippling polio and who also desires to play in the NBA or Premier League, because fulfillment of the desire is impossible. An important implication of the preceding account of futility is that the existential angst that accompanies some instance of futility is proportional to how you feel about what it is that is futile. The extent to which you are invested—for example,

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emotionally and relationally—in attempting to reach some desired end will affect how you respond to real or perceived futility (after all, you could be wrong about whether or not something is, in fact, futile). Say you have a curiosity to experience what it is like to fly as an eagle flies. It would be futile to attempt to fly as an eagle flies. Though you might be slightly agitated about not being able to experience this, it is doubtful that you would experience soul-crushing angst. Contrast that with a situation where you have trained for years to run the Boston Marathon, but one week prior to the event, you are paralyzed from the neck down in an automobile accident. To try and run the marathon now would be futile. Given its central place in your life, you would rightly feel a lot of existential angst at not being able to compete. Years of training would be unrewarded. Deep hopes would be dashed. A central life goal is now forever unfulfilled. The level of existential angst accompanying futility, then, is proportional to the level of one’s investment in some desired end and the relative desirability of that end. How does this all relate to life’s meaning? What might people have in mind when they say that life itself in the end is futile if death is the last word of our lives and of the universe itself? The discrepancy from which a sense of futility emerges is between central longings of the human heart and a naturalistic world which is incapable of fulfilling such longings. There is a stark incongruity between what we really want (even what we think we need) and a universe completely and utterly silent that does not care. There is also a discrepancy between the final state of affairs where quite literally nothing matters, and the current state of affairs where many things seem to matter (for example, one’s happiness and the happiness of others, relationships, personal and cultural achievements, and scientific advancements, among others). It seems hard to fathom that things with such existential profundity to us are but a vapor in the grand scheme of things. We might also call this absurd (absurdity and futility are connected, both of which are partly encapsulated in the I-Meaninglessness idea of a profound incongruity or lack of fit).

Leo Tolstoy on death and futility In a famous passage, the influential Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, voices his intense concerns about whether or not life is futile in light of death: So I lived, but then something strange began to happen to me. I began to experience moments of perplexity where life “froze,” as though I did not know what to do or how to live, and I felt lost and became dejected. But this passed, and I went on living as before. Then these moments of perplexity began to reoccur more and more frequently, and invariably took the same form. When they came, the same questions kept coming to my mind: “Why? What is it for? What does it lead to?” . . . While thinking about the management of my household and estate, which greatly (continued)

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(continued) preoccupied me at that time, the question would suddenly occur: “Well, you have five thousand acres of land, and three hundred horses—What then? So what?” I was absolutely muddled up inside, and did not know what to think. When thinking about how best to educate my children, I would ask myself: “What for?” . . . And when I thought about the fame that all my literary works would bring to me, I would say to myself: “Very well, I will become famous. So what? What then?” . . . My question—that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide—was the simplest of questions, a question lying in the soul of every person. It was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my life? What is life for?” Differently expressed, the question is: “Why should I live, why hope for anything, or do anything?” It can also be expressed thus: “Does my life have any meaning that death cannot destroy?” (Tolstoy, 2006, pp. 46–50)

Futility, then, connects to hope and expectations about fulfillment and longevity. In some circumstances, we are inclined to think that something exhibits futility if it does not last as long as we think it should last, given the kind of thing that it is. If  you spend half a day building a snow fort and your children destroy it in five minutes, you will be inclined to think that your efforts were futile (even though you accomplished your goal of building the fort). You will not, however, think your efforts were futile if the fort lasts a few days and provides you and your children with several fun adventures and a memorable snowball fight. It needs to last long enough to serve its purpose (have P-Meaning). Some say that an average human lifetime with average human experiences is sufficient to satiate core human longings and for us to accomplish central purposes. Others, however, think that only eternity is long enough to do justice to those aspects of the human condition of superlative value, primarily and especially, happiness and love (understood roughly as commitment to the true good or well-being of another). There are some things, the argument goes, that have so much gravitas, that are so sublime, that for them to be extinguished, even after billions upon billions of years, is truly tragic. Anything less than forever is less than enough time and leads to a sense of ultimate futility. We want the most important things in life—especially happiness, love and relationships—to last indefinitely. But if naturalism is true, all will be dissolved in the death of ourselves and the universe; it will be as if none of this ever happened. If the important stuff of life in which we are so invested lasts only a short while, then many conclude life itself is ultimately futile. Thus far, our discussion of futility reveals that we often give the ending of something an important role in assessing that thing. With life’s meaning in view, some therefore

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worry that life’s meaning is jeopardized if, in the end, all comes indelibly to naught. Such worries have been articulated in what some call Final Outcome Arguments. A Final Outcome Argument is one whose conclusion is that life is meaningless (or its meaning is threatened) or absurd or futile because of a bad ending. You can imagine weaker and stronger conclusions for such arguments, ranging from a bad ending only slightly undermining meaning all the way to completely destroying meaning. What all such arguments have in common, however, is that they give the ending an important say in evaluating life’s meaning. Why think that endings have such power? Many have argued that giving them this power arbitrarily privileges the future over the past. Philosopher Thomas Nagel once said that “. . . it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter” (Nagel, 1971, p. 716). But more than a few people disagree. Iddo Landau makes clear that [i]n most cases, if something matters to me [now], it also matters to me that it will matter in the future. In most circumstances, it would affect my love, religious beliefs, or commitment to moral ideals now to know that in five years they would stop mattering at all to me or to other people. (Landau, 2017, 74) Why do people think the future is more important than or relevant at all to the past and the present? There might, in fact, be good reasons to think that how life ends is relevant for evaluating its meaning.

THE IMPORTANCE OF ENDINGS Compare two very different endings to life and the universe, the first of which is the way it will all end if Bertrand Russell is right: That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins . . . . (Russell, 2000a, p. 72) The second is how it will all end if St. John’s vision on the isle of Patmos and recorded in the New Testament book of Revelation is true: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned

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for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:1–4) These, of course, are not the only accounts of how life and the universe will end. We cannot survey all such viewpoints here, nor can we decide which is more likely to be true. Rather, the point we are trying to make is that the way something ends— and these are two strikingly different endings to our lives and the universe—might importantly bear on how one feels about life right now, whether optimistically or pessimistically. Indeed, there are some reasons to think that the way the whole show of life ends is important for how one evaluates life here and now before the end. Contrary to what critics of final outcome arguments claim, perhaps we as humans are rightly concerned about how it all will end.

A CHANGING PAST? It is possible to provide support for the idea that the ending of life is relevant for appraisals of life’s S-Meaning by looking at a couple of interesting cases. First, consider an initially counter-intuitive idea: the past changes. Unless you think there is something to time travel, you will think that the past is fixed. Done. Settled. In a word, past. There is no use crying over spilt milk, the adage states. Philosophers often talk about the necessity of the past. Once something has occurred, it cannot be altered. In this way, there is an asymmetry between the fixity of the past and the openness of the future, unless you are a determinist, in which case both the past and the future are fixed. That said, the claim that the future can, in some sense, alter the past need not imply some strict ontological change to events that have already occurred (for example, make an event that occurred un-occur). The change might be weaker, though still important; namely, that the future has power to alter the significance of the past, a kind of S-Meaning-altering influence. Here is how. The description and significance of past events often changes in virtue of their connection with later events. One can account for this change by distinguishing the thick past from the thin past. The thick past, the past as told by historians, makes use of descriptions of events in terms of results of those events. For example, “The Thirty Years War began in 1618” is a thicker description of events described thinly as “Various Protestant and Catholic states skirmished in and around 1618” because the former describes the events referred to in the latter in terms of how long the skirmish lasted. Though it is implausible to think that the thin past can change, the

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thick past changes in its significance and meaning as it enters into new relationships with later events. Consider the following scenario: Notre Dame’s quarterback throws a touchdown pass with one minute left in the final quarter of the game. The thick description of that touchdown pass (above and beyond a mere physical description of the ball’s velocity, distance thrown and so on) will change depending on whether Notre Dame goes on to win the game. If they do win, the thick past can now include the description that the quarterback threw the winning pass with a minute to go. If they lose, it cannot be the winning pass. Something about the past remains fixed, but something not entirely trivial changes given the outcome of the game. The future altered the significance and meaning of the pass (and the past!). In this scenario, nothing changes about the touchdown pass in the strict (or thin) sense after the game’s outcome. A ball was thrown, it was caught, and a touchdown was scored. That said, as the future unfolds, complete with the additional layers of descriptive meaning, the same event acquires new, thick descriptions. Later events, including outcomes, foist new properties onto earlier events, thus “altering” the past. A natural way of thinking about this is to say that the past, though not literally changing, changes in its significance and S-meaning precisely because of the influence of later events. Significance and meaning evolve as events are situated within and framed by an expanding context. The touchdown pass thrown with one minute left in the fourth quarter means something different or accrues additional layers of S-Meaning depending on whether or not Notre Dame wins the game. Winning passes are still touchdown passes in the thinner sense, but they are more in a thicker sense. They acquire new significance in virtue of when and under what circumstances they are thrown. Furthermore, it is not simply that they can now be described as “winning” passes; they acquire an emotional significance and added value that they would not have had otherwise. They can acquire additional significance and S-Meaning on other levels too, many of which are not fully actualized until the event is placed within even wider contexts (for example, the pass ignited the team in new ways that set the trajectory for an undefeated season).

NARRATIVE ENDING Another way of providing support for the idea that later events can alter the characteristics and significance of what comes earlier—and in this context that endings are important for evaluations of life’s meaning—is through the idea of narrative ending. The way a narrative ends is important. A narrative ending is not merely the last occurrence in a succession of narrated events. It also contributes to irreversibly structuring the whole, even affecting the whole’s significance and sense-making meanings. In virtue of being the end, it has power to elicit a wide range of broadly normative responses on emotional, aesthetic, and moral levels towards the story

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as a whole. The ending’s power to “reach back” and influence in a final way the entire narrative is relevant here given the close connection that discussions of death and futility have with the meaning of life. Conclusions about the naturalistic worldview suffering from cosmic futility or cosmic meaninglessness, for example, are saliently connected with claims about how it is all going to end on both individual and cosmic levels. Why think that a narrative’s ending has such retroactive power? What gives the conclusion such potency to yield a settled stance toward the narrative as a whole? Is this simply an instance of arbitrarily prioritizing the later over the earlier? Embedded within his account of what narrative explanation is, philosopher David Velleman briefly articulates how the end shapes and galvanizes our perspective on the entire narrative, especially on the emotional level: What’s more, the emotion that resolves a narrative cadence tends to subsume the emotions that preceded it: the triumph felt at a happy ending is the triumph of ambitions realized and anxieties allayed; the grief felt at a tragic ending is the grief of hopes dashed or loves denied. Hence the conclusory emotion in a narrative cadence embodies not just how the audience feels about the ending; it embodies how the audience feels, at the ending, about the whole story. Having passed through emotional ups and downs of the story, as one event succeeded another, the audience comes to rest in a stable attitude about the series of events in its entirety [emphasis added]. (Velleman, 2003, p. 19) This is no small point. The ending marks the last word, after which nothing else can be said, either by way of remedying problems or destroying felicities that have come about within the narrative. If the last word is that hope is finally and irreversibly dashed, the end will be indelibly characterized by despair and grief; if the last word is that deep longings have been satisfied, then joy will be celebrated at the end. Perhaps more importantly, one cannot backtrack into a narrative, for example, where the grief felt at a tragic ending is the final word, and expect that one’s emotional stance toward any specific event within the narrative or the narrative as a whole will not now be affected by its ending. The ending relevantly frames the entire story, as it does our normative evaluations and emotional response to it. There is an important truth here. The evaluative priority and settled nature of the final stance one takes toward a narrative because of the way it ends provides insight into the importance of apocalyptic accounts (accounts relating to the ultimate destiny of the world), whether naturalistic or theistic, for how we appraise life. It is why so many have difficulty shaking conclusions of cosmic futility and meaninglessness on worldviews where death has the final word, and happiness and love are eventually consigned to everlasting oblivion. This is largely why so many have seen the practical, existential, and rational need—in order to avoid ultimate futility and meaninglessness—of positing an ending where happiness, love, and other markers of human flourishing have a lasting place. The general point here, though, is that the way an individual life ends is important to us to the extent that that life is a lived narrative. If we view the history of the cosmos as a whole from

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the perspective of a worldview, it becomes clearer why we are so concerned with how it all will end. Neither naturalist nor theist can wholly avoid the evaluative encroachment of the cosmos’s ultimate ending into the present moment of their respective worldviews. So the ultimate ending of life, on both personal and cosmic levels, can retroactively influence and alter the significance and sense-making, S- and I-Meanings, of what came earlier. And this point provides some reason to think that privileging the future (or even just claiming that it is relevant) in terms of its finality as an outcome may not be arbitrary, since it is plausible to think that significance and sense-making are malleable when placed in a larger context where later events come to bear on them. This brings to mind comments made by former Phoenix Suns point guard Rex Chapman, who hit an improbable, running, off-balance, three-point basket to tie a play-off game with the Seattle Supersonics and send it into overtime back in 1997. In the overtime period, Seattle won the game. These were Chapman’s words after the game, “It was great at the time, but we let the opportunity it gave us get away. I’m sure it was exciting to watch, but it’s just a basket in a loss” (Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader, May 3, 1997). Neither Chapman nor anyone else is arguing that the shot somehow lost some of its greatness because the Suns eventually lost. It was an amazing shot. Nothing can change that. He, his teammates, and their fans would have felt great joy as the ball went through the net. No one doubts that. But, given the final outcome—a loss—that joy is muted. The significance of the shot is lessened. And the emotional connotations the shot initially acquired are reduced and supplanted by others, especially the sadness accompanying the ultimate losing effort. Last words often possess deep seriousness in virtue of their settled nature: “Don’t ask me again, and that is final!” A judge reading the sentence at the end of a trial: “Life in prison.” Your death. The “death” of the universe. All of these are stark, partly because of their finality. Like the Doctor says in Season Nine, Episode 11 in the beloved BBC series Doctor Who: ‘It’s funny, the day you lose someone isn’t the worst. ‘At least you’ve got something to do. ‘It’s all the days they stay dead. In a naturalistic narrative, the settled word is that all life, conscious experience, love and progress will ultimately end in oblivion (tenuous stories of secular immortality aside). The cosmic story, then, is that the rich technicolor of human existence is bookended on either side by utter silence. C. S. Lewis put it as follows: If Nature is all that exists – in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature – then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. (Lewis, 1986, p. 74)

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Though a theist, Lewis here agrees with the atheist Bertrand Russell whom we quoted earlier in this chapter. If naturalism is true, the ending is stark, as are its implications for the whole story. Finally, it is important to relate the issue of the retroactive power of narrative endings to the meaning of life understood as the purpose of life. In Chapter 2, we discussed at length the idea, affirmed by theists, that the purpose of life is that one experience perfect happiness. The notion that perfect happiness is the purpose of life is an affirmation of the theistic belief that God intends that an individual’s life ultimately end well. However, perfect happiness is supposedly a happiness that is everlasting in nature. It is a happiness that never ends. But if it never ends, how can it be the final end of the narrative? Is not the idea of perfect happiness as the purpose (end) of life deeply incoherent? Theists have attempted to avoid the suggested incoherence by distinguishing different senses of the idea of an ending. First, there is the sense of ending as termination. Here, the idea is of something being finished. Locutions such as “the race is over,” or “I am finished with school,” or “it ceased to exist” all capture the sense of ending as termination. The second sense of ending is that of purpose. “The purpose of a pencil is to facilitate writing” and “The purpose of life is perfect happiness” are examples of this second sense of ending. Third, there is the sense of ending as closure. This is best illustrated in terms of the problem of evil discussed in Chapter 6. If perfect happiness or some other purpose of life can justify and, thereby, render intelligible, the experience of evil, then it will have brought closure to the issue. It will have provided a settled stance toward a problem that arose within the narrative. According to the theist, perfect happiness can be the ending of an individual’s life narrative in the sense of the ultimate purpose of that narrative, without being an ending in the sense of the narrative’s termination. Just because it is an ending in one sense does not imply that it must be an ending in the other sense. And if perfect happiness is an ending that brings closure to the problem of evil, then its status as ending—as the final purpose of an individual’s life—is compatible with its status as ending as closure to that life. It is also helpful to remember that the naturalist believes an individual’s life has an ending in the sense of termination, but no endings in the sense of a purpose of life or closure of life with respect to evil, assuming, for the sake of discussion, that the naturalist recognizes the existence of evil. There can be no closure with respect to what does not exist.

IMMORTALITY AND AFTERLIFE This last section ends with the concern that if death has the last word, then that may be bad news for us. Would it then be good news if we lived forever? We briefly consider a fairly influential argument that would have one think again about whether unending life is something that is desirable. The full range of questions and ideas about the afterlife cannot be discussed here. Some of them were discussed elsewhere (for example, ultimate justice and the defeat of evil in Chapter 6), and others

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must remain undiscussed in this volume (for example, specific conceptions of the afterlife as they are presented in various religious traditions). So, is an immortal life really desirable? To probe this question, consider British philosopher Bernard Williams’s (1929–2003) now famous discussion of immortality, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” (Williams, 1973). Borrowing from a play by Karel Čapek, Williams discusses a character who had a number of names with the initials EM. At the age of 42, EM’s father gave her an elixir that granted her the possibility of living forever at her current biological age. At the time the play introduces us to her, EM is 342 years old, and, as Williams notes, her unending life has come to a state of boredom, indifference and coldness. Everything is joyless: “in the end it is the same,” she says, “singing and silence.” She refuses to take the elixir again; she dies; and the formula is deliberately destroyed by a young woman. . . . (Williams, 1973, p. 82) In his influential discussion of immortality based on Čapek’s play, Williams thinks that two criteria must be met in order for a conception of immortality to be desirable: identity and attractiveness. Identity Condition (IC): the person must be the same person from one point to the next across immortal existence. Attractiveness Condition (AC): the life of the person across immortal existence must be attractive to that individual. To sum up the conditions, in order for a conception of immortality to be attractive to an individual, the individual must be able to recognize herself across immortal existence (IC) and her immortal life must be appealing to her (AC). Though Williams discusses IC, we will not consider that here except to say that in order for a person to experience immortal existence, she must be the same person across (throughout) that never-ending existence. If she is not, then it is a stretch to say that she is immortal (see the discussion of the soul at the end of Chapter 6). What about AC? Would immortality be attractive? Williams thinks the answer is no, because immortality would inevitably lead to meaning-robbing boredom, the kind that EM experienced by the time she had lived for a relatively short three centuries. Williams’s defense of this claim is multi-faceted and has generated a fairly sizable body of literature that both defends and criticizes his conclusions. We do not pretend to address here every nuance of either his or subsequent arguments for or against his views. Instead, we use the basic ideas from Williams to give the reader some thoughts to consider when thinking about the desirability of immortality. Before proceeding, it is important to be clear that the discussion is about immortality, about unending existence. It is easy to fool oneself into thinking about millions upon millions of years, but that does not, indeed cannot, come close to the scope of unending existence, because such existence never ends. Think about your current age; maybe you are 20 or 39 or 55 or 82. Think about what you have accomplished

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in life and the amount of time this has taken. Think about your joys and sorrows. Think about the various activities that occupy your time in life. More to the point, think about times in which your life has been dull and how quickly this dullness can overtake you. Now think about living several hundred years. How much do you worry about boredom? Might you get more bored after, say, 500 years of living? What about 10,000 years? This would give you quite a lot of time to do many, many things. 10,000 years is nothing though. What if you lived 1,000,000 years? At this point, we all have trouble even conceiving of what such a timespan would mean for the rhythms of human existence. Are you worried about tediousness now? Many might be. But even a billion years is not even a drop in the bucket of immortal existence, of forever. A life that comes to be characterized by acute and settled tedium because one has, to put it colloquially, done and seen it all, is one that looks unattractive to us. Anything to which we want to point and say, “There, that thing or those things are enough to hold boredom at bay,” must be able to do so throughout unending existence.

Escape Clause In a thought-provoking episode from the always thought-provoking series, The Twilight Zone (Season 1, Episode 6, 1959), an abusive hypochondriac, Walter Bedeker, sells his soul to the devil in exchange for immortality. The devil agrees to Bedeker’s list of demands, but stipulates an escape clause which allows Bedeker to choose to die if (or when) he tires of immortality. At first, Bedeker is thrilled with his new status of being immortal, but soon grows bored and comes to realize that his perpetual fear of fatal illness gave him a kind of interest in life. He is convicted of murdering his wife (which he did not do) and hopes to get the electric chair. To his dismay, however, instead of being executed, he gets life in prison. Eventually, the devil visits him in his prison cell and Bedeker opts out of his deal by taking the escape clause. Immortality for Bedeker was not what he had hoped it would be.

It is not clear, however, that we should think that there can be no boredom in an immortal existence (unless the idea of perfect happiness excludes it), only that boredom cannot become the settled state that we experience. Periods of tedium are not as worrisome; it is coming to a settled place of boredom. This is a worry worth taking seriously. But even though we are talking about forever, there are some reasons to think that tedium might not veto the value of immortal life. To begin, Williams’s critics sometimes appeal to the idea of repeatable pleasures, pleasures that we return to again and again. Some active sources of pleasure might be one-offs: you engage in them once and that is enough; maybe skydiving would be

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like this for you. That said, if it really is pleasurable, it is fair to ask why one would not want to experience it again. Other pleasures, and here we can include pleasures involving food, sex, and especially relationships, have a repeatable aspect. We want to experience them again and again. Do some such repeatable pleasures also have an inexhaustible quality to them? Are they such that no matter how much they are experienced, their sources will never cease to be pleasurable and serve as motivations to act? If you listen to the same song over and over you get tired of it. If you eat the same meal over and over you get tired of it. We have all experienced this. We reach a point of satiation when experiencing something too frequently within a given timespan. If this is true of our lives now, surely it is true all the more of immortality. But let us not forget that we eventually return to our favorite songs and favorite meals. We again savor the sounds and flavors after a break. Why not think that this could happen even forever, even if you eat the same meal forever as long as there are sufficient breaks? And given human creativity, we can continue to arrange flavors and musical notes in endless varieties. Distributions and creativity, among other ideas, hold important resources for assessing Williams-style arguments against the desirability of immortality. Relationships probably provide an even stronger reason to be suspicious of claims that immortality must necessarily become inescapably tedious. The pleasures of human relationships are real, powerful, and varied. They also exhibit a kind of open-endedness and boundlessness that comes from interaction with another person and not just with objects. The depths of another person, along with the accompanying joy and wonder of experiencing those depths and being in relationship with them, may be inexhaustible. It is also worth noting two additional points. First, Williams’s argument seemingly presupposes that the only way one might experience pleasure is through action. However, as discussed in Chapter 2, one of the purposes of Nozick’s example of the experience machine is to raise the possibility that one does not need to act in order to experience pleasure. One might simply be provided experiences of pleasure without having to do anything. Perhaps, then, Williams is far too concerned with action as a source of pleasure when he thinks about immortality. Second, Williams’s argument and the subsequent debate about boredom and immortal life is largely framed around a conception of immortal life that looks thoroughly naturalistic, a life with pretty much the same stuff as life right now. But there are other prominent conceptions of post-mortem, everlasting life that appeal to important theological notions. Aside from the inherent plausibility of such ideas, they are surely relevant for assessing claims that unending life would—necessarily—become dull. Take theistic claims about the infinity and inexhaustibility of the Divine nature and the beatific vision. If finite human persons themselves have a sort of inexhaustibility, what about a Divine, infinite person? It is worth considering how these ideas mitigate worries about everlasting life becoming irredeemably tiresome. It is also worth remembering that maybe the stuff on which we are focused as being the only stuff available to stave

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off boredom in immortality is the wrong sort of stuff to fit the bill. Thus, Christian theism stresses we should humbly acknowledge the limitations of the human imagination when it comes to what an afterlife may or may not be like: For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Cor. 13:12) But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”. (1 Cor. 2:9) As C. S. Lewis once said: . . . if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. (Lewis, 2001c, p. 26) Perhaps Shakespeare was right when he said that all is well that ends well. And maybe others are right when they say that all is not well that does not end well, and that things do not end well if naturalism is true. But is an ending of perfect happiness that itself never ends better news? We leave it to our readers to reach their own conclusions.

CHAPTER SUMMARY Death is a sobering reality we must all face. Some of our deepest human emotions accompany our encounters with it. This makes it a unique topic of philosophical inquiry. In this final chapter, a number of questions were raised surrounding death: What does it mean to die? Is death bad? If so, why; if not, why not? Does death enhance or threaten the meaning in our lives? Would it be good to live forever? Both ancient and contemporary philosophers and the worldviews of naturalism and theism were enlisted to help us frame and consider various options for answering these deep questions about the profound reality of death and its meaning for our lives.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1 Do you intuitively and immediately think of death in negative, positive, or neutral terms? Why? 2 Do you think the Deprivation Argument is plausible? 3 Are there other arguments for the badness of being dead that you find persuasive?

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4 Do you agree with Epicurus? If not, where is/are the problem(s) in his argument? 5 Do you agree with Lucretius? If not, where is/are the problem(s) in his argument? 6 Do you think that meaning is enhanced and/or threatened by death in the ways discussed in this chapter? Do you think there are additional ways that death threatens and/or enhances meaning? 7 Is life ultimately futile if naturalism is true? 8 Are there good reasons to think that we ought to put so much emphasis on endings in our conclusions about life’s meaning? Does it really matter how it all ends? 9 Do you think an immortal life eventually would become boring?

• INTRODUCTORY FURTHER READING Allison Jr., Dale C. 2016. Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Becker, Ernest. 1997. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press Paperbacks. Kagan, Shelly. 2012. Death. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. May, Todd. 2013. Death. Durham, UK: Acumen. Updike, John. “Pigeon Feathers.” In Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, pp. 116–150. New York: Random House, 1990. Tolstoy, Leo. 2006 “A Confession.” In Spiritual Writings, pp. 46–59. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

• ADVANCED FURTHER READING Luper, Steven. 2010. The Philosophy of Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seachris, Joshua W. 2009. “Death, Futility, and the Proleptic Power of Narrative Ending.” Religious Studies 12: 5–23. Taylor, James Stacey, ed. 2013. The Metaphysics and Ethics of Death: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1973. “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.” In The Problems of the Self, pp. 82–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

• FREE INTERNET RESOURCES “Death” Aeon (https://aeon.co/philosophy/death). “Immortality” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by James Fieser and Bradley Dowden. www.iep.utm.edu/immortal/) Luper, Steven. “Death.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death/. “What Does It Mean to Die?” The New Yorker. www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2018/02/05/what-does-it-mean-to-die.

appendix I •

(one type of) midor quarter-life crisis UNSATISFIED At the Mexico City summer Olympic Games, October 18, 1968 would become one of the most memorable days in Olympic history. On that day, 22-year-old Robert (Bob) Beamon, after taking 19 long strides down the runway, jumped farther than any other human being had ever jumped in recorded competition, a staggering 29  feet 2 ½ in., besting the previous mark by nearly two feet. His world record stood for 23 years. Beamon had accomplished an incredible goal that no doubt required intense training, discipline, and focus, and one that, for a season, largely structured the rhythms of his daily existence. One of his central purposes had been realized—becoming the longest jumper on the planet. Years later, this is what Beamon had to say about his feelings afterwards: “When I got to the medal stand, I said, ‘what am I gonna do? I’ve reached one stage, and so what is the next peak experience in my life?’” (Alter, 2017, p. 100). Perhaps Beamon’s experience resonates with you in the form of questions that can follow accomplishing your goals. You finish that project around the house: what next? You complete that game on your iPhone: what next? You get 10,000 steps on your Fitbit: what next? You attain a six-figure income: what next? These accomplishments are the end points, the culmination of teleological, purposeful activity. We renovate our homes to make them nicer and in order to increase their value. We play games and walk steps, partly at least, to get high scores. We work, again partly, to earn wages. The purposes that give rise to these structured activities determine how we spend our time. A big chunk of our lives follows this pattern. Accomplishing our aims in life can be a mixed bag though. Goals and purposes motivate us to get out of bed in the morning. We get excited about achieving a goal, and we feel fulfilled at having accomplished it. But a darker reality lurks. Often, our relationship to goals and the purposeful activity directed toward them is a striking blend of restless striving, limited satisfaction, followed by more restless striving in search of the next goal. We work hard to attain the goal, to get what we want, but attaining it sometimes feels anti-climactic at best. From another vantage point, each time we

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accomplish a goal, we eliminate P-Meaning that provided important structure—a kind of I-Meaning—to our lives. Each of these worries illustrates that goal-orientation may come with some costs. We included “quarter-life” in the title of this Appendix, because experiencing such a crisis need not come at mid-life. People can experience this sort of crisis at any point at which they are preoccupied with achieving aims. That said, mid-life seems to be a season when these sorts of worries can often reach a critical point.

THE PARADOX OF THE END The kind of worry accompanying our relationship to purpose(s) can be thought of in terms of what philosopher Iddo Landau refers to as the paradox of the end. This paradox, according to Landau, occurs because: People set ends for themselves and try to achieve them in the hope that the attainment of those ends will improve their condition. The closer they get to achieving their goals, the more meaningful they feel their life to be. Paradoxically, however, when they finally achieve them, their sense of meaning in life is sometimes diminished. They have a sense of insignificance and emptiness and feel that in attaining their goal they have lost the meaning they experienced while they were striving toward it. Paradoxically, it seems as if the struggle to achieve the end was more meaningful than the achievement of the end. (Landau, 2017, p. 145) Most of us can probably relate to this. We anticipate the goal toward which we are striving, eager for the sense of fulfillment and satisfaction that comes with its achievement. Sure, we pay lip service to the idea that P-Meaning is also in the process, but we still really want the result and experience a kind of restlessness prior to attaining it. When we finally reach our goal, it can be a letdown, perhaps even accompanied by a sense that we lost something important in completing the project. The paradox of the end can take on two distinct forms.

PARADOX OF THE END I: SCHOPENHAUER’S VERSION We do not suggest reading Schopenhauer if you are looking for an optimistic, feel good discussion of life. For Schopenhauer, life is vain and empty. We humans try to distract ourselves from this vanity and emptiness by doing things. Our existence is characterized by unrest and striving for a happiness that we do not attain or attain only for a fleeting moment. We quickly come back to a state of boredom, which, for Schopenhauer, is the sensation of the utter emptiness of existence. Were life not empty and vain, he thinks that mere existence, apart from any striving, would satisfy us. According to Schopenhauer, then, our preoccupation with goals is symptomatic of our malaise of living in an empty, valueless world. Furthermore, pursuing and

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C

H

OP

EN

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I have it!

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achieving goals does not actually help us overcome this predicament. The following argument is part of Schopenhauer’s reason for drawing such conclusions.

1

3

I want that...

I’m tired of it...

4

I want something else now...

Premise 1: Our lives are predominantly structured in such a way that we strive to accomplish ends (goals) that we think will satisfy us. Premise 2: Prior to accomplishing these ends (goals), we “suffer” because we have not yet accomplished them. Premise 3: Upon accomplishing these ends (goals), we are quickly left feeling unsatisfied, empty, and/or bored (or some similar type of unease or malaise). Conclusion 1: Therefore, we are caught between (1) the suffering of the notyet-having-achieved, and (2) the boredom/malaise that eventually comes after having accomplished what we set out to accomplish. Conclusion 2: Existence, because of such suffering, is empty. (Note: one can draw a variety of less pessimistic conclusions, for example, Conclusion 2*: Existence, therefore, is saliently characterized by suffering, and such suffering threatens (in some way) the value of life.)

Schopenhauer in everyday language Premise 1: If you want stuff, you are in a state of not having what you want. Premise 2: Not having what you want is a bummer. Premise 3: When you get what you want, you eventually (often quite soon) feel empty or bored (that is a bummer too). Conclusion: So, either you are bored or you want stuff that you do not have in which case you experience the suffering of not having it. Either way, life is a bummer.

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One might rightly question whether Schopenhauer is correct in claiming that the unsettled anticipation you feel prior to accomplishing a goal is a form of suffering. One might also question whether or not it is reasonable to conclude that existence is empty given that we are dissatisfied some of the time (or even most of the time if Schopenhauer is right). Still, Schopenhauer is on to something, even if he overstates his case. Premise 1 has merit. Pursuing goals is a big part of life. At least some variations of Premises 2 and 3 also should resonate. Think of the restlessness you can feel in anxiously anticipating the achievement of your goals. Then think of the times you have felt a let-down after accomplishing something, and the ways in which you strive for the next goal or the next thing—the next level in that smartphone game, the next smartphone itself, the next toy, the next car, the next home, and the list goes on. Adam Alter, in his popular book on the rise of technology addiction, aptly characterizes this Schopenhauerian crisis: Like the curse that doomed Sisyphus to roll a boulder uphill for eternity, it’s hard not to wonder whether major life goals are by their nature a major source of frustration. Either you endure the anticlimax of succeeding, or you endure the disappointment of failure. All of this matters now more than ever because there’s good reason to believe we’re living through an unprecedented age of goal culture—a period underscored by addictive perfectionism, selfassessment, more time at work, and less time at play. (Alter, 2017, pp. 106–107) In response to Schopenhauer, one might concede that we are too preoccupied with certain kinds of goals—earning a college degree, advancing in video games, pursuing larger salaries, and so on. Such goals are not intrinsically bad (many are good and necessary parts of life), but they must be balanced with aims like enjoying the natural world, spending quality time with family, and partaking of delicious meals. Such things do not, of course, put us outside of the purpose cycle, but they do re-frame how we think about it. They are a means to an end, but that end is the enjoyment of life, which is often shared with others. Additionally, they seem to have a kind of full and inexhaustible quality to them. Such goals also appear to track the ideas of restoration and re-creation. Here the idea of Sabbath, central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, might be of help. In this tradition, we are made to act: to cultivate, to create, to have vocation. We have future-oriented goals which are good, and they motivate us to get up in the morning and face the day with something to do. They provide a kind of structure and therefore I-Meaning to our daily lives. We are, however, also told to rest, to pursue restorative aims—periods of Sabbath. Theologian Marva Dawn explains the meaning and significance of Sabbath: Sabbath ceasing [means] to cease not only from work itself, but also from the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our efforts to be in control

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of our lives as if we were God, from our possessiveness and our enculturation, and, finally, from the humdrum and meaninglessness that result when life is pursued without the Lord at the center of it all. (Dawn, 1989, p. 3) Though there are certain theological connotations to Sabbath, one might believe the idea provides a strategy for addressing the kind of vicious purpose-cycle that Schopenhauer highlights.

PARADOX OF THE END II: SETIYA’S VERSION Kieran Setiya, a contemporary philosopher who has written on the paradox of the end (Setiya, 2017, pp. 127–154), presents a slightly different form of it that is centered not so much on affective states like desire, satisfaction, and dissatisfaction but rather on structural features that characterize purposeful (what Setiya calls telic) activity. Here is Setiya’s version of the paradox of the end: Premise 1: Much of our life consists of activities, the goal of which is to complete them. Premise 2: These activities give meaning to our lives. Premise 3: In completing them, we extinguish meaning. Conclusion: Therefore, much of life consists of movement toward extinguishing that which gives our lives meaning. A slightly elaborated form of Setiya’s reasoning is as follows: Much of our life revolves around setting, striving for, and (hopefully) attaining goals (Premise 1). Goals, which are the loci of P-Meaning, provide structure, and therefore a kind of I-Meaning, to the activities aimed at the achievement of those goals. Not infrequently, these structured activities are themselves accompanied by enjoyment, which is S-Meaning (Premise 2). Thus, P-Meaning provides I-Meaning, which in turn provides S-Meaning. For example, the structured activity of manipulating and forming sand on a beach (I-Meaning) is enjoyed (S-Meaning) and explained by the goal of building a sand castle (P-Meaning). Upon achievement of the goal (the sand castle is built), P-, I-, and S-Meaning are extinguished (Premise 3). Therefore, much of life is made up of movement that leads to the elimination of meaning in our lives (the Conclusion). In Setiya’s own words, The way in which you relate to the activities that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and so expel them from your life. Your days are devoted to ending, one by one, the activities that give them meaning. (Setiya, 2017, p. 133) It appears, then, as though our relationship to purpose can create some tensions for meaning. Purposeful activity has a terminus, an end goal, a point at which it is complete and finished (in a couple senses of ending, which we discussed in Chapter 7).

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Walking home, going to college, and writing a book are all like this. We walk to get home; we attend college to get a degree; we write to complete a book. These activities are completed when you make it home, receive your degree, or finish the book. But Setiya says that we can orient ourselves differently in relationship to these activities. We can re-frame them and focus not solely on the product, but also on the process. We can even engage in some activities exclusively for the activity itself and not with any extra aim in mind. Setiya calls this an atelic orientation (in contrast to a telic one). Take the above example of walking. We can walk to get somewhere (telic) or we can walk just to walk, for the sheer enjoyment of the activity itself (atelic). Walking in order to get somewhere is complete, finished when you get somewhere. However, you cannot really finish walking for the sheer enjoyment of walking. You might stop walking, say, to eat or rest, but you cannot complete the activity because it is not really the type of thing that can be finished. Companionship with close friends and family, enjoying a meal (not just eating for the purpose of staying alive), and enjoying the staggering beauty of nature all exemplify such atelic activities. The idea is that we should balance telic and atelic pursuits, to use Setiya’s terms. The difference between these distinct ways of viewing our activities is illustrated by the notion of free play. About free play, authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt write: Peter Gray, a leading researcher of play, defines “free play” as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.” Piano lessons and soccer practice are not free play, but goofing around on a piano or organizing a pickup soccer game are. Gray and other researchers note that all play is not equal. Vigorous physical free play—outdoors, and with other kids—is a crucial kind of play, one that our evolved minds are “expecting.” It also happens to be the kind of play that kids generally say they like the most. (Lukianoff and Haidt, 2018, pp. 183–184) Setiya has raised an important issue and provides a possible way through the paradox. It is worth making three additional observations on Setiya’s distinction between telic and atelic activity. First, the distinction is not so much between activities that have a point (telic) and those that do not (atelic). Rather, it is a matter of the kinds of purposes pursued. Walking, either to get home or for sheer enjoyment, both have a point, a purpose, where in the latter case the purpose is the joy or pleasure that accompanies the walking. Second, purposes themselves appear to be essentially future-oriented. In the case of walking to get home, we aim towards a state of affairs that we currently do not experience—getting home. In the case of walking for enjoyment, even though we currently enjoy walking—our enjoyment is thus simultaneous with our walking—we continue to walk in order to sustain that enjoyment, giving the activity an ineliminable future orientation. Third, and finally, in walking to get home, your activity is not directly connected to an intrinsic, final value like

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pleasure (though it may be indirectly connected), but in walking for enjoyment it is. There is an explicit, direct line from the activity itself to intrinsic value, that value in this case being pleasure. The paradox of the end in either of its forms that we considered here does not call into question the idea that meaning and purpose are closely intertwined. Rather, it invites us to think more carefully about the role of purpose in our lives and the kinds (and distribution) of purposes we choose to pursue.

appendix II •

buddhism and the meaning of life In thinking about the meaning of life, the philosopher Richard Taylor (2000) considers Sisyphus’s unsuccessful attempts to get the boulder to stay on top of the hill. Taylor believes we are tempted to conclude that Sisyphus’s life is meaningless because Sisyphus constantly fails in his efforts. However, Taylor maintains this conclusion is mistaken. According to him, Sisyphus can have a meaningful life, even if he never succeeds in getting the boulder to remain atop the hill. To guarantee Sisyphus a meaningful life, Taylor says we should provide him with a desire to roll boulders. Sisyphus is then happy because he is continually fulfilling his desire. Buddhists, however, believe providing Sisyphus with the desire to roll boulders is the worst thing that can be done to him. This is not because it would be better to provide him with a different desire. Providing him with any desire is a terrible mistake because desire is the source of pain and suffering, especially when it goes unfulfilled. But even if one manages to fulfill one’s desire, pain and suffering often accompany the struggles leading to that fulfillment. And the fulfillment, once achieved, does not last, which leads to more desire and the inevitable pain and suffering that goes with the struggles to satisfy it. More generally, Buddhists believe desire for pleasure gives rise to a conception of happiness as the experience of pleasure (Macaro, 2018, pp. 75–76). We become attached (addicted) to pleasure, and when our experience of it wanes, we try for further experiences of it, only to have those pass away on the occasions when our efforts are successful. The result is we spend our waking hours trying to experience that which cannot be held on to, and what we initially thought would make life S-Meaningful ends up making us miserable. Thus, Buddhists maintain we would be much better off without any desire, whether it be for pleasures themselves or the food, sex, wealth, power, beliefs, and opinions that are sources of pleasure (Rahula, 1959, pp. 29–31). According to Buddhists, the fundamental problem we face in this life is how to rid ourselves of desire. To eliminate this problem, they advocate the eradication of the illusory or erroneous belief that one is a self which now exists and can continue to exist into the future as the same self. A belief that one is a thing (substance) that can endure into the future as the same self raises concerns about what one should do to

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provide for one’s desired future well-being (conceived of as one’s happiness), where this desire produces the aforementioned pain and suffering. When one successfully rids oneself of the belief that one is a self that can persist as the same self into the future, one understands there are psychological events (e.g., beliefs and desires) but no thing that has them: As Buddhaghosa [a great commentator on Buddhism] says: “Mere suffering exists, but no sufferer is found; The deeds are, but no doer is found.” . . . [T]here is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found. (Rahula, 1959, p. 26) According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of “me” and “mine”, selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world. (Rahula, 1959, pp. 26, 51) What do Buddhists recommend one do to rid oneself of the belief that one is a self that can persist into the future as the same self both in this life and, perhaps, the next? According to Buddhists, one must not ask and seek answers to questions like whether the soul (an immaterial substance) exists and is distinct from and capable of surviving the demise of its body, or whether there is life after death (Rahula, 1959, p. 13). And one should not ask, analyze, and try to answer the question “What is the meaning of life?” Instead, one should meditate to produce liberation of the mind from belief in the existence of the self, which will bring about the elimination of suffering, the state of Nirvāna. One form of meditation involves concentrating on the in-and-out nature of one’s breathing to the exclusion of awareness of all other things, including one’s surroundings or environment (Rahula, 1959, pp. 69–70). “This exercise of mindfulness of breathing . . . is meant to develop concentration leading up to very high mystic attainments” (Rahula, 1959, pp. 70–71). However, most of us cannot continuously meditate with a focus on our breathing in order to achieve a permanent, high mystical state. We must eat, drink, work a job, socialize, etc., if we are to remain alive in this world. Buddhists acknowledge this problem by distinguishing between conventional and absolute reality. On an everyday level, which is conventional reality, “our sense of there being an inner ‘me’ that endures seems pretty inescapable. . . . [W]ithout an ordinary sense of self it wouldn’t be possible to function in the world” (Macaro, 2018, p. 106). Nevertheless, we must always remember that things are not really as they seem to be in conventional reality. There is also absolute reality, “real” reality, in which no inner “me,” no substantial self, exists. Buddhists believe realizing the non-reality of the self helps “us to accept our mortality” (Macaro, 2018, p. 106). Strictly speaking, because the self is not a substantial thing with the potential to persist, it cannot die (what does not exist cannot go out of existence). For the Buddhists, given the self does not exist as a thing

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that can persist through time as the same self in this world, there is no possibility of “it” surviving into an afterlife. In terms of the Meaning Triad, Buddhists believe there is no purpose of life (no P-Meaning) because no self exists that could have a purpose. And because Buddhists are skeptical about our ordinary notion of happiness (Macaro, 2018, p. 78), which presupposes the existence of a self that can be happy, they believe there is not, in terms of absolute reality, a life worth living (there is no S-Meaning). With respect to conventional reality, we are foolish to identify happiness with the experience of pleasure (Macaro, 2018, p. 102) because this identification produces pain and suffering. Pleasure, contrary to what one initially thinks, does not make life in the conventional realm worth living. Thus, a life lived within conventional reality should be one that is deeply suspicious of the pleasures of food, drink, sex, social standing, climbing the career ladder, wealth, and other people’s respect and admiration (Macaro, 2018, p. 93). A life within conventional reality should be one of renunciation of these pleasures for the purpose of facilitating the achievement of Nirvāna. That kind of life ultimately makes sense and provides I-Meaning within the context of conventional reality.

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glossary of terms NOTE The complexity of the following concepts is much greater than we can possibly account for in the concise definitions below. These definitions are meant to give a broadly accurate—if incomplete—sense of the basic ideas. Amalgam Interpretation An interpretive view according to which the best way to understand the request being made in “What is the meaning of life?” is not as a single request/question, but as a cluster of questions, many of which share family resemblances. In this way it differs from the single-question interpretation. On this view, the traditional formulation—What is the meaning of life?—is not really one question that can be answered in that form but must be broken down into other questions, like “What should I do with my life?”, “Do I matter?”, and “Is life worthwhile?” Many who hold to the amalgam interpretation see the question “What is the meaning of life?” as a placeholder for these other queries. Analytic Philosophy The dominant method and style of philosophy in the Western, Anglophone world beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing today. Analytic philosophy prizes argumentative clarity and precision through rigorous conceptual analysis. Central figures in the rise of analytic philosophy were Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and G. E. Moore. Precursors of analytic philosophy can be traced back further, though, to the scholastic philosophy of the medieval period all the way back to antiquity insofar as many philosophers throughout history also have prized clarity and precision. Atheism From the Greek a + theism meaning “without God.” Generally, atheism refers to the denial of God’s existence. Some, however, prefer to think of atheism neither as the positive denial of God’s existence nor the positive belief that God does not exist, but rather as a lack of belief that God exists. This is a subtle, but crucial, distinction. On the latter definition, a greater number of people would count as atheists. Whether atheism should be defined in this more inclusive way is a matter of debate. Contingent Being A contingent being is one whose existence is not necessary. Contingent beings exist but might not exist, and thus it is false that they must exist. Cats, dogs, and

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humans are contingent beings. We exist, though we do not have to. Our existence is not necessary. Contingent being are contrasted with a necessary being. Determinism The view that every event or state of affairs that occurs must occur as it does, and could not occur otherwise. Another way of thinking about determinism is that there is only one possible future. Naturalistic determinists typically maintain that every physical event must occur given antecedent physical events and states of affairs combined with the laws of nature. Theistic determinists typically maintain that everything is determined either because of God’s foreknowledge or God’s will or both. Epistemology (Epistemic) The branch of philosophy that deals with questions about how it is that people believe and know what they do, and what justifies their claims to believe and know. Eudaimonism On this ethical view, happiness is the ultimate justification or reason for morality, and the best way to achieve a happy life is through cultivating and exercising virtue. Many eudaimonists actually make virtue or virtuous activity constitutive of a happy life (i.e., to be happy just is to be virtuous). Existentialism (Existentialist) Existentialism was largely a twentieth-century philosophical movement (primarily originating on the European continent) concerned with existence and the way humans live in the world. For existentialists, the human condition is a central philosophical problem because the human being, as a thinking, feeling, acting, living subject, is central. Generally speaking, existentialists think that we exist first and then are faced with the lifelong task of molding our own essence or nature (existence precedes essence). In this way, existentialism is a philosophy that prioritizes developing the self and finding meaning through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. Existentialism is one of the most well-known philosophical movements outside of the discipline of philosophy, especially with such representatives as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whose work (especially their novels) appeals to a wider audience. Extrinsic Good An extrinsic good is one that gets or derives its goodness from its relationship to some other good and ultimately that which is intrinsically good. If you think a thousand-dollar bill is good, you will likely think it is so extrinsically; it is good insofar as it can secure other goods like food and shelter. It is not good for its own sake but good for something else. The most common form of extrinsic good is instrumental good. Free Will Theodicy A theistic response to the problem of evil which states that free will is such a great good that God’s creation of beings with free will justifies any evil they might cause through their immoral choices. Hedonism The view that pleasure is the only intrinsic good in life.

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Hedonistic Conception of Happiness The view that happiness is made up of nothing but experiences of pleasure. Human Predicament (or Human Condition) The general state, predicament, or condition in which human beings find themselves in virtue of existing in the universe. This includes the characteristics and situations which compose human existence from cradle to grave, including birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, suffering, and death. Experiencing this condition causes us to ask existentially weighty questions about our origins, purpose, value, suffering, death, and destiny. Often, the idea of the human condition carries negative connotations as it focuses on the epistemic (limitations of knowledge) and practical (limitations of control) struggles that we face. That we ask questions about life’s meaning is both part of the human condition and a response to the human condition. Hybridism A view according to which life is meaningful to the extent that one is fulfilled or satisfied in engaging in objectively worthwhile activity and/or being causally responsible for good effects of that activity. Put simply, one must be satisfied by doing the right stuff in order to have a meaningful life. Neither the miserable person responsible for good effects of activity nor the fulfilled person satisfied in worthless projects leads a meaningful life according to this view. Instrumental (Extrinsic) Evil An instrumental or extrinsic evil is one that gets or derives its evilness from its relationship to some other evil, where the other evil might be the diminishment of something that is good. Instrumental (Extrinsic) Good An instrumental or extrinsic good is one that gets or derives its goodness from its relationship to some other good, where the other good might be the diminishment of something that is evil. Intrinsic Evil An intrinsic evil does not derive its evilness from its relationship to some other evil. It is evil in and of itself. Pain is often regarded as an intrinsic evil. Intrinsic Good An intrinsic good does not derive its goodness from its relationship to some other good. It is good in and of itself. Pleasure is often regarded as an intrinsic good. Logical Positivism An early twentieth-century movement in philosophy (largely arising in Austria and Germany in the 1920s) that insisted that many philosophical problems are actually meaningless. A central tenet of logical positivism was verificationism, which states that in order for a statement to be meaningful it must either be a tautology (the truth of the statement requires no observation of the way the world is: for example, all unmarried men are bachelors) or capable of being empirically verified (for example, the ball is red is visually verified). Statements that do not meet either of these criteria do not qualify as propositions and are meaningless.

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According to logical positivists, the proposition “God exists” is not just false; it cannot possibly be true because it is meaningless. Also on this view, there is no meaning of life because no proposition that meets the verifiability standards can be given in response to the request, “What is the meaning of life?” Mental Something is mental in nature if it has content. Examples of content are typically expressed in that-clauses. For example, if one believes that it is going to rain today, then “that it is going to rain today” is the content of what one believes. One’s belief is regarded as mental in nature because it contains or is directed at content. Just as one can believe it is going to rain today, one can hope that it is going to rain today. In this case, hope is something mental in nature. More generally, thinking, believing, hoping, fearing, choosing, remembering, etc., are all mental in nature because they contain or are directed at contents. A mind is simply something that is capable of having or considering contents by means of having thoughts, beliefs, hopes, fears, etc. What is mental in nature is often contrasted with what is qualitative in nature. Metanarrative An all-inclusive story-like or narrative-like setting, context, framework or explanation that helps us understand and fit together answers to questions about origins, purpose, value, suffering, death, and destiny. Though you can narrate your weekend, that would not be a meta-narrative. A metanarrative is much larger in scope. See worldview (for our purposes in this book, we treat metanarratives and worldviews as more or less synonymous). Metaphysics The branch of philosophy that deals with questions about the nature of reality or being, specifically, what is real or what exists. Questions of metaphysics include: Do we have free will? If so, in what does it consist? and Do we have immaterial souls distinct from (even if connected to) the brain and central nervous system? Moral Evil Evil that is produced by the free but immoral choices of intelligent beings, whether human or non-human (e.g., Satan). Moral Value The kind of value concerned with notions like morality and immorality, rightness and wrongness. There are other kinds of value distinct from moral value, for example, the nonmoral intrinsic goodness of pleasure. Natural Evil Evil (e.g., pain, suffering, and death) that is produced by events in nature such as earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes, as opposed to being caused by the immoral choices of humans or, perhaps, other intelligent beings such as Satan. Naturalism The view that the space-time universe is all that exists, that there is no God or gods, no angels or demons, no souls, and that human beings are exclusively material beings who cease to exist at death. Carl Sagan once gave this succinct statement

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of naturalism: “The universe is all there is, was, or ever will be.” Naturalism often includes a metaphysical component: everything is composed of natural entities, and an epistemological or methodological component: the appropriate methods of explanation or justification are those of science. Necessary Being A necessary being is one whose existence is necessary. It is not possible for a necessary being not to exist. Whereas contingent beings exist but might not exist, a necessary being, if it exists, must exist. Thus, a necessary being is not caused to exist by anyone or anything outside of itself. Its essence is to exist. God would be an example of a necessary being. Necessary and Sufficient Conditions On the one hand, If X is a necessary condition of Y, then Y cannot exist or occur without the existence or occurrence of X. For example, if having earned 128 credits is a necessary condition of graduating from an American university, then graduating cannot occur without earning 128 credits. Or if scoring more goals is a necessary condition of defeating one’s opponent, then one cannot defeat one’s opponent without scoring more goals. On the other hand, if X is a sufficient condition of Y, then the existence or occurrence of X guarantees the existence or occurrence of Y. For example, if being happy is sufficient for experiencing pleasure at some point in life, then one’s being happy guarantees that one has experienced pleasure at some point in one’s life. But X being a sufficient condition of Y is not the only way for Y to exist or occur. Winning a million dollars in the lottery is sufficient for obtaining that amount of money, but you could also earn that amount of money by working. Finally, in some cases, X can be both a necessary and a sufficient condition of Y. For example, scoring more goals can not only be necessary for defeating one’s opponent, but it can also be sufficient for defeating one’s opponent. Nihilism The view that there is no objective value. Nihilism is often associated with extreme pessimism and radical skepticism. In one of its existential forms, life is thought to be without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. In this way, one might be nihilistic about any kind of deep, cosmic meaning, but optimistic (not nihilistic) about terrestrial forms of subjective meaning. For example, there may be no overarching purpose of life, but one can still pursue one’s own, self-chosen purposes in life. Objectivism A view according to which life is meaningful to the extent that one engages in objectively worthwhile activity and/or is causally responsible for good regardless of whether or not one is fulfilled or satisfied. Optimistic Naturalism The view that consists of the following two claims: (1) God does not exist, but (2) meaningful life is possible in a world without God.

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Principle of Sufficient Reason There are different versions of this principle. As a principle of intelligibility, it is the idea that everything can be made sense of from an overall framework or point of view. As a principle of explanation, it is the idea that either everything contingent in nature has an explanation or everything, both contingent and necessary in nature, has an explanation. Qualitative That which is experiential in nature but is not mental in nature. For example, pleasures and pains are typically regarded as qualitative in nature. Many regard color, smell, taste, sound, and touch as also qualitative in nature. Single-Question Interpretation An interpretive view according to which the best way to understand the request being made in “What is the meaning of life?” is as a single request (answerable in that form) for one thing. In this way it differs from the amalgam interpretation. One version of this interpretive strategy prioritizes the sense-making aspect of meaning (I-Meaning) and sees the question as asking for a kind of sense-making framework in which our questions and concerns about origins, purpose, value, suffering, death, and destiny fit together in an intelligible way. The single thing that the question of life’s meaning seeks, then, is this sense-making framework. In this way, the single-question approach allows us to take the traditional formulation “What is the meaning of life?” seriously in that form and it also addresses the many other issues part and parcel of life’s meaning. Skeptical Theism (Theists) A theistic response to the problem of evil which maintains that because God’s knowledge vastly exceeds our own (e.g., God knows everything that can be known), it is unreasonable to believe that we could know the reason/justification God has for allowing evil generally, and/or any particular evil. Strong Naturalism A form of naturalism which maintains that all that exists is non-psychological in nature and can in principle be completely described in terms that make no mention of beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, thoughts, pleasures, pains, purposes, etc. While we make use of psychological terms to describe what exists, this is only for convenience or because we at present are unable to provide the correct nonpsychological descriptions. Subjectivism A view according to which life is meaningful to the extent that one is fulfilled or satisfied. Meaning, then, is a matter of having positive affective states that fit a certain psychological profile. Supernaturalism The view that God is necessary and sufficient for meaningful life, likely on metaphysical (God must exist), epistemic (one must, in some sense, believe in God), and axiological/relational (one must be in a trusting relationship with God as expressed, for example, in worship, devotion, and the right kind of life lived in

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relation to others) levels. Other, more moderate forms of supernaturalism hold that God, though not necessary for meaningful life, would enhance the meaningfulness of life. It is worth noting that there can be subjectivist, objectivist, and hybrid forms of supernaturalism that connect supernaturalist meaning to either subjective fulfillment (in God), proper engagement with objective value (objective value grounded in God and/or with God Himself), or a combination of the two. Teleology From the Greek word telos, meaning purpose, end, or goal. Teleological explanations often appeal to the purposes, aims, and goals of agents who have intentions. Such explanations are contrasted with (mechanistic) causal explanations that appeal to matter and motion, and which do not make use of ideas like reasons, desires, and goals, all of which seem to require agents. Theism The view that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, morally perfect, necessarily existent, personal being who created the universe and sustains it in existence. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are three examples of theistic religions. Theodicy (Theodicist) A theistic response to the problem of evil which maintains we know in part or in whole God’s reason/justification for allowing evil generally, and/or any particular evil. Transcendence The characteristic or property of being beyond or outside. In theism, God is ascribed with transcendence because God is not identical with (and is thus beyond) the cosmos. Value The objective worth of something, the basic forms of which are good and evil. There is nonmoral value, some forms of which might be either qualitative in nature (for example, the goodness of pleasure and the evilness of pain), aesthetic in nature (for example, the goodness of beauty and the evilness of ugliness), etc. There is also moral value, in the forms of rightness and wrongness of actions. Weak Naturalism A form of naturalism which allows for the existence of what is irreducibly psychological in nature. Thus, beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, pleasures, pains, etc. cannot be reduced to what is non-psychological in nature. Worldview An all-inclusive, sense-making framework that helps us understand and fit together answers to questions about origins, purpose, value, suffering, death, and destiny. A worldview can be thought of as a kind of map. It helps us to see facts in relationship to one another, and it aids us in navigating life. See metanarrative (for our purposes in this book, we treat metanarratives and worldviews as more or less synonymous).

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index Abbott, H. Porter 107–108 activity (agent) 23 Adams, Douglas 5 afterlife see immortality Alter, Adam 164, 167 amalgam interpretation 11 analytic philosophy 5 Anaxagoras 31 Annas, Julia 62–63 Anselm, St. 27 Aquinas, St. Thomas 27 argument from desire 104–107 Aristotle 2, 21, 22, 47 Armstrong, David 36, 41 Asimov, Isaac 138 Augustine, St. 26, 27 Baggini, Julian 25, 28, 29–30, 40, 48–49, 58, 65–66, 126 Baier, Kurt 25–26, 30 Bateson, Mary Catherine 90 Bayne, Tim 118 Benatar, David 26, 28 Berger, Peter L. 85–86 Bering, Jesse 130 Bettelheim, Bruno 15 Bloom, Paul 129, 130 Boethius 26–27 Broks, Paul 130 Buddhism 171–173 Calvin, John 27 Camus, Albert 4, 102–103, 175 Chekhov, Anton 109–110 Confucius 2, 106 contingent being 23–24 Copernicus 3, 75

Crane, Tim 19 Crick, Francis 81 Crisp, Roger 47 Darwin, Charles 4, 55, 75 Dawkins, Richard 34, 40, 41, 54–55, 57, 106, 127 Dawn, Marva J. 167–168 death 103, 134–154 Dennett, Daniel 53–54, 55, 106 Deprivation Argument 140–142, 144, 145 Dershowitz, Alan 109–110 Dilthey, Wilhelm 100 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 66 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 113 Durant, Will 44 Eagleton, Terry 25, 29, 45 Einstein, Albert 13, 91 Epicurus 139, 142–143, 143, 144, 145 essence versus existence 4, 30–31 Euthyphro 114, 116 Euthyphro’s dilemma 114 evil: and naturalism 125–128; and theism 114–125 evolution 4, 40–41 existentialism 4–5, 30–31, 102 Fiddes, Paul S. 110 Flanagan, Owen 48 Frank, Semyon Lyudvigovich 16 Frankl, Viktor 15, 93 Freud, Sigmund 93, 99 Galileo 3 Gay, Peter 43

188   ●index

Gell, Alfred 130 geocentrism 3–4 Gilovich, Thomas 93 Goetz, Stewart 33, 66, 130 Haidt, Jonathan 169 happiness: eudaimonistic 21–22; hedonistic 47–52; perfect 26–28, 103, 115, 119, 121, 131–132 Harris, Sam 29, 65 Hawking, Stephen 71, 81 Heliocentrism 3–4 Hinduism 106–107 Hume, David 115 Humphrey, Nicholas 130 hybridism 10 immortality 103, 131–132, 137–138, 141, 148, 149, 158–162 Jobs, Steve 109 Kagan, Shelly 143 Kahane, Guy 86–87 Karlsson, Niklas 93 Kekes, John 61, 62 Kierkegaard, Søren 5 Kim, Jaegwon 52–53 Kitcher, Philip 88 Landau, Iddo 44, 103, 127, 149, 153, 165 Larkin, Philip 145 Leibnitz, Gottfried 24 Lewis, C. S. 27, 50, 102, 104, 105–107, 115, 124, 125, 157, 158, 162 Lindberg, M. J. 9 Loewenstein, George 93 logical positivism 5 Lucretius 139, 142, 144–145 Lukianoff, Greg 169 Macaro, Antonia 171, 172, 173 Mackie, J. L. 116, 119, 120, 121 Magee, Bryan 129–130 Makkreel, Rudolf A. 100 Malick, Terrence 71 Markman, K. D. 9

Mavrodes, George 58–60, 61, 62, 63, 125–126 Mawson, Timothy 25 McCafferty, Jane 93 meaning: cosmic versus terrestrial, sub specie aeternitatis 75–77, 82–88; cosmic versus terrestrial, sub specie humanitatis 75–77, 82–88; I-meaning 7, 9, 57–63, 91–95, 96–98, 101–111, 115, 121–122, 125–128, 146, 150, 151, 164–168; impact 80–82; in life 13–15, 95–98; of life 13–15, 98; P-meaning 6, 7–8, 63–67, 121–122, 147–149, 152, 164–170; S-meaning 6–7, 8–9, 63–67, 72–73, 121–122, 147–150, 154, 155 Meaning Triad 6–11 mental, the 21 Metz, Thaddeus 106, 131–132 Moore, G. E. 174 Mother Teresa 61, 96–97, 98 Munitz, Milton 99 Murdoch, Iris 93 Nagel, Thomas 153 narrative 107–111, 155–158 naturalism 9, 33; strong 33–37, 103; weak 37–40, 103 necessary being 23–24 Newsome, Bill 103 Nielsen, Kai 57, 78, 117 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 93 Nihilism 3 Nozick, Robert 50–52, 161 objectivism 10 Papineau, David 36, 41 Pascal, Blaise 69, 71 passivity (patient) 23 Plantinga, Alvin 116, 124 Plato 2, 31–32, 58, 62, 108, 114 Polman, Dick 60 Proulx, T. 9 purpose: external versus internal 21–22, 25–26, 28; and the future 21, 37–40; in life 31–37; of life 22–31

index

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   189

Qoheleth 2, 71, 135 qualitative experience (Qualia) 9–10

Stump, Eleonore 124–125 subjectivism 10

Rahula, Walpola 171, 172 Rescher, Nicholas 82 Ring of Gyges 58, 60–62 Rorty, Richard 36, 41 Rosenberg, Alex 33, 35–36, 41 Rowe, William 120, 123, 125 Rowling, J. K. 130 Ruse, Michael 28, 37–40, 56–57, 127 Russell, Bertrand 20, 44, 59, 60, 102, 125, 126, 153, 158, 174

Taliaferro, Charles 33, 130 Tartaglia, James 23 Taylor, Richard 24–25, 171 Teresa, Ste. see Mother Teresa Teacher, the see Qoheleth theism 5 Tolkien, J. R. R. 139 Tolstoy, Leo 3, 4, 5, 23, 151–152 Tyson, Neil deGrasse 70

Sagan, Carl 69, 70, 177–178 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4, 30–31, 63–64, 65, 66, 103, 108–109, 110, 175 Schopenhauer, Arthur 2–3, 4, 145, 165–167, 168 Schovkin, S. S. 109 Scorsese, Martin 19 Setiya, Kieran 58, 168–169 Shakespeare, William 9, 102, 162 single-question interpretation 11–12 Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter 63 Sisyphus 2, 167, 171 Smith, Christian 100 Socrates 31–32, 33, 38, 114 soul 129–132 Stace, Walter 57, 75, 125 Stalin, Joseph 96–97, 98 Steger, Michael F. 98 Stoppard, Tom 140

value: authenticity 63–67; intrinsic versus extrinsic 45–46; moral versus nonmoral 46 Velleman, J. David 156

Updike, John 75, 91, 134

Wertmuller, Lina 1 White, Hayden 108 White, Nicholas 48 Wielenberg, Erik J. 104–106, 126 Williams, Bernard 159, 160, 161 Williamson, Timothy 129 Willock, Brent 136 Wilson, Catherine 72, 124, 126 Wilson, E. O. 55–57, 127 Wisdom, John 90 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 174 Wolf, Susan 20, 22, 56 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 62, 135–136 worldview (metanarrative) 3–4, 99–101 Wright, N. T. 100