Atheists typically try to reply as you did, that of course we can “create” meaning. But this only shows a relative meaning to these events, not an ultimate meaning.
That’s right. We definitely know that people
can give relative meaning to things. But an “objective” meaning? It’s my contention that no one has demonstrated that such a thing exists – in fact, I assert that it is a fundamental misunderstanding of language to think that “meaning” can ever be “objective.”
This is why the atheist is inconsistent when he affirms that life is meaningless (as it obviously is without God), and then tries to claim he can create meaning. He is committing the logical fallacy of equivocation, using meaning in the first part of refer to ultimate meaning, and then in the second to refer to relative meaning.
There’s no equivocation or inconsistency as long as we’re clear about terms. Indeed, most atheists would be happy to say that life is “meaingless,” if by “meaning” you mean some objective, supernatural meaning imposed on the world from without; but within this meaningless world, there is, in fact, individual meaning that can be made.
There’s nothing at all inconsistent about that position.
The typical Christian position is that if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless and without ultimate meaning, but humans cannot live happily with this conclusion and so the non-theist has to try to “create” meaning, by pretending the universe has meaning. In which case, we are just fooling ourselves.
There are a few things wrong with your thoughts here.
In the first case, this “Christian position” that you’re presenting here makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that anyone who creates meaning does so because “they cannot live happily with the conclusion that life [has no objective meaning].” This is just false. People naturally create meaning as they live and experience – there’s nothing at all that suggests that the average person’s sense of meaning in his or her life is at all motivated by dissatisfaction.
What this position is really saying is this: “If I didn’t have my fantasy of ‘objective meaning,’ I would be dissatisfied, so I’ll just blindly assume that everyone else feels the same exact way, without any evidence whatsoever.”
In the second place, you attempt to equate the giving of personal meaning to things “pretending that life has meaning,” but here it is
you who are equivocating. Nobody – nobody who spends a few seconds thinking about it, of course – when giving personal meaning to things, is pretending that things have objective meaning.
When I give meaning to things that I value, those things really do acquire personal meaning. Obviously, this is different than asserting that they have objective meaning, but the fact that it’s not objective meaning doesn’t in any way render my act “pretend.”
