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December 12, 2018 - January 22, 2019
two questions to ask
Is this a cogent, consistent position? And does it work, practically, for living your life?
the issue of cons...
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the postmodern approach to meaning is not very consistent.
He finds the “life is what you make it” view “seems troublingly narcissistic.
to some degree the world is “independent of our interpretations of it.”
Life isn’t simply what you make it. Often it is what it is.
We are not fully free to impose our meanings on life.
Who is right? Can we have meaning in life without any belief in God at all? To be fair to all, I would argue that the answer is both yes and no.
I say yes because both by our definition and by lived experience secular people can certainly know meaning in life. We defined “meaning” as having both a purpose and the assurance that you are serving some good beyond yourself.
It is quite possible to find great purpose in the ordinary tasks of life, apart from knowing answers to the Big Questions About Existence.
But I also say no.
Secular people are often unwilling to recognize the significant difference between what have been called “inherent” and “assigned” meanings. Traditional belief in God was the basis for discovered, objective meaning—meaning that is there, apart from your inner feelings or interpretations. If we were made b...
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The meanings that secular people have are not discovered but rather created. They are not objectively “there.” They are subjective ...
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I want to argue that such created meanings are much more fragile and thin than discovered meanings. Specifically, discovered meaning is more rational, communal, and durable than created meaning.
We have defined meaning in life as “making a difference,” but for the secular point of view, in the end, the universe gives you a final answer: Nothing makes a difference.
If this life is all there is, and there is no God or life beyond this material world, then
In the end what you do will make no difference whatsoever.
When secular people seek to lead a meaningful life, they must have discipline to not think so much about the big picture.
Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
there is “no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.” By this he meant that if the modern secularist thinks out the implications of his view of a strictly materialistic world in which all life evolved randomly and accidentally, human beings have no importance at all. But then he added that when he begins thinking like this it is time to “go down stairs and play solitaire.”
In A Confession Leo Tolstoy tells
Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?’” He also asked: “How can we fail to see this? . . . That is what is surprising!
By contrast, life meaning and purpose play out for a Christian believer in the very opposite direction.
if a Christian is feeling downcast and meaningless, it is because, in a sense, she is not being rational enough.
Christians believe that there is a God, who made us in love to know him,
The Gospel
And then all the deepest longings of our hearts will find their fulfillment.
but you are not experiencing peace and meaning, then it is because you are not thinking enough. There is a kind of shallow, temporary peace that modern people can get from not thinking too much about their situation, but Christianity can give a deep peace and meaning that come from making yourself as aware and as mindful of your beliefs as possible.
Created meaning is a less rational way to live life than doing so with discovered meaning.
Until the modern age
it was not thought good or possible for individuals to find a meaning in life of or on their own.
Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce in 1908 wrote The Philosophy of Loyalty, in
He believed that we are happy only if we make our meaning in life something greater than our happiness.
Now, tyranny is certainly a great evil but individualism, according to Royce, was the wrong way to overcome it. If every individual seeks his or her own meaning, we will have fewer shared values and meanings, which will erode social solidarity and public institutions. All this will lead to intractable polarization and fragmentation. And ironically, Royce argued, individualism undermines individual happiness. We need “devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable.”38
Exactly what is happening in politics.
Charles Taylor, lecturing in the last decade of the century, could see that modern individualism had triumphed.
Taylor argues that individualistic created meaning leads inevitably to a “soft relativism,”
And this in turn leads to what he calls “extraordinary inarticulacy” about what our society’s ideals should be.
How, in the context of self-created meanings, can you explain why my chosen meaning in life is wrong?
This means there is no way to have a conversation with someone who has not got the same inner feelings that you do. There is no shared authority that can adjudicate moral disputes, because everyone is free to determine his or her own meanings.
Created meanings cannot be the basis for a program of social justice.
Terry Eagleton notices that the common secularist proposal to create your own meaning sounds suspiciously like the consumerism of late-modern capitalism. “Capitalist modernity” he says, turns everything into a private commodity. Things that used to be communally held and accomplished achievements—from child rearing to listening to a concert to prayer and worship—are now seen as private choices that can be measured, priced, and consumed by you according to your tastes and convenience.44 “The meaning-of-life question was now in the hands of . . . the technologists of piped contentment, and
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Ironically, then, those who say that they are free to create their own meaning might be less liberated and more captive to consumerist, individualist culture than they think.
They are also less durable, less able to get you through adversity and suffering.
All other ways of understanding the world hold that “this life is not the whole story,” but with secularism, it is.
When secular people create their meanings, however, it must be around something located inside the material world.
Frankl discovered that the only way for the prisoners’ humanity to survive was to relocate the main meaning of their lives to some transcendent reference point, something beyond this life and even this world. All other religions and cultures outside of secular society do this.
In each case, the Meaning of life cannot be destroyed by adversity. If, for example, your Meaning in life is to know, please, emulate, and be with God, then suffering can actually enhance your Meaning in life, because it can get you closer to him.
Only secular culture sees suffering as accidental and meaningless, just an interruption or destruction of what we are living for. And so our society makes it difficult to fully affirm the goodness of all life, even life in the midst of affliction.53
Western societies are perhaps the worst societies in the history of the world at preparing people for suffering and death, because created meaning is not only less rational and communal, but also less durable.
It is very important for believers and skeptics not to insult each other unnecessarily in these discussions, even where there are sharp disagreements.
