Making Meaning is Meaningless

And it’s just impossible anyway

Some atheists have promoted the notion of “making your own meaning.” These types are wise enough to realize that if they affirm Nietzsche’s proclamation, “God is dead”, then they also have to accept the consequences of “wiping away the horizon” which he spoke of. Without God there is no truth. There is no moral compass. There is no objective purpose to life. This has led some existentialist philosophers to advocate that the ultimate act of courage is suicide. But who gets to decide what courage means if there is no God?

Many, however, not wishing to die, because that seems scary and possibly painful, have advocated creating your own meaning in life. This is, however, absurd and meaningless. Creatures cannot create meaning, they can only borrow it.

Let’s make an analogy.

Sometime children have taken it upon themselves to make their own languages for fun. Good! I applaud the creativity! Some of those attempts…indeed many… are probably fairly unsuccessful. But J. R. R. Tolkien was a kid once and, even when he grew up, he kept going. Tolkien made several functioning languages including more than one dialect of Elvish.¹ Yet even Tolkien had to borrow from somewhere to make his languages. In fact, even “real” languages which are spoken and used in different countries are dependent upon something that they did not and could not make.

Every single language that exists and functions has to obey certain grammatical laws. Laws, in this sense, are things which are discovered and cannot be changed. Like the laws of Physics and the laws of logic. We might be able to get better at describing and understanding them, but we won’t be actually changing them. It is the same with language. It doesn’t matter if you speak English, Mandarin, German, Latin, French, Italian, or any other language, they all obey grammatical laws in order to function. There is no working language that has statements which do not have both a subject and a predicate. It’s a basic law of language that in order to convey meaning you have to have a subject (that which you are speaking about) and a predicate (that which you are saying about the subject). If you don’t do that, you don’t say anything meaningful (intelligible).

Of course languages can be very different. Some are word order dependent, others are inflected and words derive their purpose from the endings attached to the roots. The scripts by which we represent language are manifold and beautifully different. But all of them make use of subjects and predicates. In order to make a language meaningful it must conform to truths that exist in the universe God made and there is nothing we can do about it.

It’s the same way with our life’s meaning. We cannot simply make meaning for ourselves. We discover meaning. If there is no God then Nietzsche was right, life is absurd and pointless. As H. G. Wells put it, the best the atheist can do, who thinks that the world ends in humanity’s eventual ruin, is, “live as though it were not so.” But then that is just sticking your head in the ground.

If we are to “make our lives meaningful” we don’t do it by making our own meaning. We do it by accepting the meta-meaning built into the universe by God. We are, indeed, made to have meaningful lives but that comes by conforming to God’s will for our lives and not by rebelling from it to the point of absurdity.

If there is no God, there is no meaning. Paying it forward to the next generation will only last so long because the atheist eschatology affirms the ultimate destruction of mankind sooner or later. If there is a God, then there is access to meaning through obedience and that meaning will last forever just as the soul of every human person will.

What is the chief end of man? Man’s Chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

1. A quick Google search will find you some places to start learning it if you really want to!