The meaning of life

What imbues one’s life with meaning? What gives us significance in the universe?

Many people would answer, “God.” God provides our lives with purpose. In a universe that God forged, we all have a role in His master plan. This means we all matter within the grand scheme of existence. Without God, our lives could have no meaning, because we’d just… be. We would have no more relevance to the universe than a stone or a stick.

I object to that viewpoint. If one lives because of God’s will, then he is little more than a cog within the universe that is God’s machine. He has no identity but that which God allows him to have. Certainly, he can’t bear culpability for the shape of the universe or the condition of his brethren, because ultimate blame for the way things are doesn’t lie with him. It doesn’t reside with anyone else, either, but with God.

Far from giving humanity purpose, God instead robs us of individuality and absolves us of responsibility. We become helpless babies within the orchestration of existence. (The similarity in this regard between religion and Marxist dialectics is ironic, considering the anti-left rhetoric of the modern Religious Right.)

Without God or any other supernatural force, our lives have no preordained purpose. No one from on high has constructed paths for us to follow. In those senses, we do indeed have commonality with the matter and energy around us. But from similarity doesn’t follow sameness. We still possess something that makes us inherently different from everything else: sentience, a.k.a. self-awareness, a.k.a. the ability to think. We know who we are, we know what we want, and we formulate and execute plans based on our identities and desires.

Therefore, we imbue our lives with meaning ourselves. We construct our own paths and then follow them… Or not; maybe we’ll change our minds and think another direction is better, and so veer off that way. With all this power, though, comes responsibility. We can’t hold anyone else at fault for our actions. We can’t shift accountability for the state of our world onto anyone else. Our lives are only what we make them, or what we don’t make them.

This, and not vapidity, is what some people fear in a life without God. The onus of control terrifies them. So they attempt to transfer it to another agency, God.

They don’t succeed, though. Consider that the God or supreme force of everyone who is religious conforms to whatever the believer thinks is righteous. No person worships exactly the same God someone else does. One man’s God condemns homosexuality, whereas another man’s does not. One cleric’s God commands the masses to slaughter unbelievers, whereas another cleric’s does not. Etc., etc. God isn’t a mystical otherworldly force telling his flocks what to do. He is a mental construct people use to justify the beliefs they’ve chosen to hold and the lives they’ve decided to lead. God buttresses what individuals were going to do or think anyway, and he functions as a lightning rod to draw away the attendant responsibility.

Ergo, all that separates people who derive their meaning from God, and those who craft their own meaning, is the latter’s recognition and acceptance of personal responsibility and control. Even if this concept isn’t new—Friedrich Nietzsche expounded on this with his Superman concept—it is, in my opinion, profound. It makes everything we do more important.

The television program Angel, which was more philosophical than superficial critics believe, made this point in the 16th episode of its 2nd season, “Epiphany.” Angel, the main character, realized at the end, “Nothing we do matters. So all that matters is what we do.”

That phrasing is quirky, but the message is insightful: In a universe that has no great plan behind everything, there’s nothing else but our actions and choices. So they’re not meaningless, but as meaningful as they could possibly be.