Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. (John 17:17 ESV)

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.  C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. Carl Jung, Modern Man In Search Of A Soul

Your eternal word, O Lord, stands firm in heaven. (Psalm 119:89 NLT)

Deeper than our need for food or air or water is our need for meaning, our need to know our lives count for something. That need can get distorted by our egos. It can get sidetracked into narcissism or egotism. But we are built for meaning the way Porsches are built for speed.  John Ortberg, When The Game Is Over, It All Goes Back In The Box

 

The question, “What is the meaning of meaning?” is both deep and tricky.  Almost immediately our eyes glaze over and we are tempted to leave it yet something about it tickles our imagination.  We know there is a meaning to meaning but we rarely talk about it or think about it… we simply understand it and assume it!  Try this experiment if you want to see the phenomenon in action: ask 10 people tomorrow for the meaning of meaning and keep track of their responses.  Most will be annoyed by it because, of course, everyone knows what meaning means!  Some will attempt to define it in a circular fashion, using meaning to define itself.  It is slippery.  The weirdest part about meaning is that it doesn’t exist at all without a mind.  And even though it relies on a conscious, intelligent mind (like our own), we will vehemently defend our understanding of meaning as objective.  Hopefully an illustration will help here.

Old Ed:  Hey Timmy, hand me that video tape.
Young Timmy:  What do you mean video tape?  What’s a video tape?
Old Ed: It’s the thing you put into a VCR.
Young Timmy:  What’s a VCR?
Old Ed:  Uh… how old are you again?
Young Timmy: You’re just makin’ those words up!!
Old Ed: No, you’re just dumb.

It’s difficult enough for Ed to explain what a video tape is to young Timmy when they both speak the same language (a system of meanings).  Try to imagine how Ed would get Timmy to hand him the video tape now if they were in different rooms and both were blind and deaf.  When they can’t use meaning to create meaning, nothing can happen.  Or, if something were to happen, it would take a miracle!

The idea of “meaning” is a slippery concept because it tends to define itself with the aid of other concepts that don’t really exist when it is gone.  In fact, it’s an impossible concept without a mind.  From a purely naturalistic, atheistic point of view, all meaning is ultimately just a construction of the individual mind which reality is interpreted to fit.  Things mean what you think they mean and nothing more.  When mature, this view becomes “an epistemological theory denying any objective, universally valid human knowledge and affirming that meaning and truth vary from person to person, culture to culture, and time to time.”[i]  Nothing can “mean” anything in and of itself because meaning presupposes order, purpose and intelligence behind (or above) the raw material.  Meaning must have a mind to exist.  And it is true that meaning does not exist in the isolated vacuum of relativism and it does not occur in the random chaos of materialism.

The subjective approach to meaning (i.e. the vacuum) quickly devours itself because, with the self as the only foundation for definition and interpretation, reality becomes incoherent and ultimately disappears in death.  If Timmy’s subjective meaning for the word “apple” corresponds with what most people would call a dead possum (and his definition is just as true and valid as any other meaning for the word), that meaning dies along with him unless he can get it to catch on in society.  This proves difficult to live out, however, and those holding to a completely subjective view of meaning betray their true beliefs in the way they live and communicate with others.  In fact, the possibility of communication itself stands as a witness against the argument for completely subjective meaning because anyone who attempts to communicate with another human operates under the assumption that the words they use and the semantic structure they choose has an objective meaning that the other person can interpret and understand.  If we “can’t be sure our ideas correspond to the world around us, there is even less reason to assume that the meaning we think we are conveying with our words actually transfers from our mind to the mind of another.”[ii]  Also, the example used here with the meaning of the word “apple” is weak because in it objective simply means what’s normal in society.  In a way, it’s still subjective with society standing in as the individual. We know intuitively, however, that society isn’t the highest authority for meaning.  You can probably think of several meanings society presents as truth that you believe are false.  Things get dicey when important concepts like love, murder, freedom, rape, suicide, and hate start getting defined by a culture.

The chaotic approach to meaning is the one modern scientists and philosophers are espousing when they reduce the framework for reality to a series of blind accidents where “the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance”[iii].  This view also eats itself as it invalidates its own foundation with its construction (i.e. if the cosmos is truly random chaos that, luckily, just happened to be what it is, then the brain and its immediate environment giving birth to this thought is also a product of the random and meaningless process and, as such, is also meaningless and untrustworthy).  Both, however, give strong clues as to the nature of meaning and how it exists.  Meaning does not exist in a vacuum and it does not exist in chaos- meaning exists in a mind.  In fact, those claiming that meaning is completely subjective have almost got it right.  Because meaning is the product of an interaction between objects and concepts in an active, rational mind, in a way all meaning is subjective.  However, to unify meaning throughout creation, the mind connecting all the dots has to be able to contain the entire cosmos in perfect truth.  In short, the only way meaningful meaning can exist is as it is held in an omniscient mind (i.e. God).  We are capable of assigning subjective meaning in our limited environments and we do so all the time (examples would be our preferences, values, names, and loves) but for meaning to truly exist in a way that keeps the universe coherent, God is required.  In fact, absurdity, the necessary description of all things without God, can only be understood by us because of our deep need for and common understanding of the meaning and purpose that frames our existence.  Another way of putting this is that we can only notice the absurdity of life without God if God exists.  And though the word “absurd” sounds innocent and playful, evoking images of Monty Python, circus clowns and cartoons, there is nothing funny about it when applied to our lives.  Jane Polden, a psychotherapist in England, has seen that “our greatest fear is not that we should suffer pain, but that our pain should be meaningless.  Depression itself takes us into the depths of meaninglessness.”[iv]  This is not an untested theory either.  Heimler, one of Germany’s few concentration camp survivors, told of an experiment in meaninglessness with truly horrific results.

In 1944 Heimler was forced to take part in an experiment in the Concentration Camp at Troglitz. He was among a group of prisoners assigned to move sand from one end of a factory to the other, and then back again, week after week, as an ‘experiment in mental health.’  Those forced to participate in the experiment experienced a substantial increase in mental disturbance, and the growth in suicide rates amongst the group of prisoners led the camp commandant to joke ‘now there is no more need to use the crematoria.’ ‘It was clear,’ wrote Heimler, ‘that meaningless tasks and pointless work destroyed people.’[v]

Dr. William Lane Craig sums up the situation stating that “if there is no God, then life itself becomes meaningless.  Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.”[vi]  The loss of objective meaning for individuals, words and concepts is not an isolated anomaly for the naturalistic worldview but a tiny vignette representing the whole.  And once embraced, nihilism, “the natural child of naturalism”[vii], is the next logical step; abandoning the shore of logic altogether in a boat borrowed from the real men and women who existed before and pushing off into the rotten, sunless ocean of futile despair.  Shakespeare said it with more elegance in MacBeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.  It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.[viii]

We were created for meaning and we need it as much as we need oxygen, food and love.  If it is absent, our health declines and our reasons to live begin to evaporate.  A study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focusing on how our bodies react to selfish happiness verses meaningful happiness (living to have fun vs living to help others or serve something larger than the self) found that “feeling good is not enough.   People need meaning to thrive.”[ix]  We process everything we think and do within a framework of meaning that we are immersed in like fish in the ocean and without it we flop and gasp desperately on the shore until we die.

There is a website (suicideproject.org) created to help people anonymously yet publically vent their despair with the goal of giving hope to people thinking about suicide.  On it, people can post their struggles with life and there’s even a section just for suicide notes.  The messages there are haunting because some are not just copies of notes from failed or untried suicide attempts- some posts are the actual last words.  The site has a search function where you can type in something like “meaning” and see what comes up. Isn’t it funny that you know where this is going before I even try to present evidence from this website?  Page after page of posts appear with titles like: “What is the meaning of life?” “Meaningless!” “Everything seems so meaningless.” “I am meaningless.” “There is no meaning to anything.”  We know that life must have meaning to be worth living regardless of what any happy atheist tries to tell us. And you are probably going to visit that web site (if you haven’t already) because something about the despair of others who give up on existence is chillingly curious to us.  It’s something we can imagine identifying with if there truly is no meaning to life.

When I was in middle school, one of my teachers used to lead us in a creative thinking exercise.  He would have all the students gather in a circle and each of us would try to come up with something that was completely meaningless and useless.  As each student offered up their idea for a meaningless object the rest of the students refuted the claim with scenarios in which the useless thing could be good for something.  This activity made an impression on me because even then I was haunted with the feeling that the correct answer, the thing that was truly meaningless, might be me.  Now I believe I have a better grasp on reality and I know how I would answer that teacher.  What is one thing with no conceivable meaning?  The answer is everything… if there is no God.  Even though we operate as though meaning is objective, it’s really not.  Without a mind large enough to contain creation and assign changeless meaning that is above ours, there is no true meaning to anything, just multiple interpretations.  That these interpretations also differ and change is evidence that meaning is relative- it varies with individuals- and as these individuals die or change, the meaning itself disappears.  Because this type of meaning can appear and disappear without affecting anything other than an individual interpretation, it doesn’t exist in reality.  It is an illusion of perception.  It is a fantasy; a construction of the individual mind.  But we understand that there is a type of meaning that doesn’t rely on our subjective interpretations.  We naturally assume this objective meaning for the “real world” and we will passionately argue for it when it concerns us.  A doctor may try to convince everyone that he is prescribing me poison because I get on his nerves but I will go to the highest court I can (and win I hope) fighting so our political authorities will understand that this is not a treatment but attempted murder!  This “objective” truth really is relative on ground level though- there must be a higher, comprehensive consciousness for the objective to exist.  And, again, this is God.  Objective truth is just code for God’s truth.  Those who deny the existence of God understand this and that’s one reason they fight the uphill battle of relativism.

Here’s another way of looking at the problem of meaning that has kept me up at night: meaning can’t even begin to exist unless it is already present.  Meaning can’t begin to exist unless it is already present!  I could type it a thousand times and end this book with a smile.  This is another important clue.  Without the framework of meaning in place (which is a set of meanings), nothing can signify, point to, or conceptualize anything else; there can be no signs or symbols or mental constructions.  Without the meanings of meaning already in place in our minds, we are unable to learn and make any progress at all intellectually.  Our minds work in a fashion similar to everything else in the universe- neither creating nor destroying, only modifying.  Try this thought experiment: imagine something completely unique that doesn’t borrow any attributes of form or function from anything else that already exists in your mind; something that is not “like” or “unlike” any other existing concept.  I don’t believe it’s possible for us because our minds work to create through comparison, contrast and a type of analogy.  Inductive and deductive reasoning won’t even begin to work in a vacuum.  Our reason requires a ladder of meaning to go up to larger, more universal ideas or down from the larger concepts to more particular, individual ideas.

We learn by using what we already know as a bridge over which we pass to the unknown.  It is not possible for the mind to crash suddenly past the familiar into the totally unfamiliar.  Even the most vigorous and daring mind is unable to create something out of nothing by a spontaneous act of imagination.  Those strange beings that populate the world of mythology and superstition are not pure creations of fancy.  The imagination created them by taking the ordinary inhabitants of earth and air and sea and extending their familiar forms beyond their normal boundaries, or by mixing the forms of two or more so as to produce something new.  However beautiful or grotesque these may be, their prototypes can always be identified.  They are like something we know.[x]

So, it becomes clear that though meaning requires a mind to exist, to be created at all meaning requires a mind that is free to create original thoughts in a way that transcends our dependent model.  It is an act of creation that we can imagine but we can’t accomplish.  This road, again, leads to God.

Without God all our meaning becomes subjective and therefore meaningless.  But meaninglessness strikes us as so wrong that we refuse to live with it.  James W. Miller writes that apparent meaninglessness “attracts our attention” because we were created for meaning.  Just as “aging stands out as odd to eternal beings.  A lamppost in the woods would only look odd if you’re from a world where lampposts appear on streets.  Life without meaning looks as wrong as a lamppost in the forest.  Meaninglessness doesn’t go there.”[xi]  Of course, atheists will stick to their guns and declare that, even though we’re just part of a random, cosmic accident that will fade into oblivion, life can still have meaning to you.  The fact that they haven’t killed themselves proves this… or it belies their premise.  Camus came to grips with godless existence and the only question left for him was whether or not to commit suicide.   A post from the suicide project illustrates this better than I can.

Everything Seems so Meaningless  [August 13th, 2014 by “nizzerd”]

I finished school, got my degree, married my long time partner, moved 1000 miles away and got a salaried job.

None of this means anything to me. I can’t enjoy any of my accomplishments. I’m not happy with my marriage and this job is only busy work. I can’t remember a time that I felt truly satisfied with life. I drink my weight in alcohol, smoke packs of cigarettes, buy worthless crap off the internet…I feel like there’s nothing I can do, like there’s no such thing as content. I am wasting my time.

We fight often, my husband and I. I feel a heavy sinking feeling even thinking about him sometimes; I’m trapped. But when I envision life without him, it’s just as empty.

I daydream often about my death. It’s almost sweet to me, even the twitching as that last breath leaves. It would be the rope for me. I remember how these thoughts brought tears to my eyes when they first started. Now there’s only a surging, a pull into action. It’s only a matter of time for me.[xii]

There was only one response on the website to this cry for help and it came one day later.  “You are testimony to the fact that contentment is an elusive thing. Marriage and a job can’t do it, even fortune and fame won’t do it, this is the human condition and we either choose to live with it or die from it I guess.”[xiii]

This is the human condition, meaninglessness, without God.  If we are simply an accidental by-product of a random cosmos spiraling toward oblivion like an enormous toilet flushing in slow motion, then we were created by nothing and for nothing.  Richard Dawkins puts his hollow spin on the matter: “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.”[xiv]

Or, as Dr. Victor Frankl puts it more positively, “Meaning is missing in the world as described by many a science.  This, however, does not imply that the world is void of meaning, but only that many a science is blind to it… If this is true of meaning, how much more does it hold for ultimate meaning.  The more comprehensive the meaning, the less comprehensible it is.  Infinite meaning is necessarily beyond the comprehension of a finite being.”[xv]  And even though it may be elusive, we still function as if this meaning exists and is testified to by the intricate and elaborate design we see in ourselves and the universe as a whole.  In the words of Hannah Arendt, “Action without a name, a “who” attached to it, is meaningless whereas an artwork retains its relevance whether or not we know the master’s name.”[xvi]  We understand intuitively that our actions and our “artwork” can be viewed as living analogies- tiny individual meanings that point to the greater meaning.  And as this greater meaning encompasses the smaller meanings we find purpose.

 

 

[i] Walter A. Elwell, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001), 1002.

[ii] James W. Miller, Hardwired: Finding the God You Already Know (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2013), 136.

[iii] Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 18.

[iv] Jane Polden, Regeneration: Journey through the Mid-Life Crisis (London: Continuum, 2002), 32.

[v] Joseph Melling and Pamela Dale, eds., Mental Illness and Learning Disability Since 1850: Finding a Place for Mental Disorder in the United Kingdom (New York: Routledge, 2006), 22):188.

[vi] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 74.

[vii] James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: a Basic Worldview Catalog, 5th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 97.

[viii] William Shakespeare, Macbeth (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), 77.

[ix] Emily Smith, “Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness,” The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/meaning-is-healthier-than-happiness/278250/%20…%20study%20found%20at%20http://www.pnas.org/content/110/33/13684.abstract (accessed June 27, 2015).

[x] A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy: the Attributes of God, Their Meaning in the Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009), 6.

[xi] James W. Miller, Hardwired: Finding the God You Already Know (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2013), 110.

[xii] Anonymous, “The Suicide Project,” http://suicideproject.org/2014/08/everything-seems-so-meaningless/ (accessed June 27, 2015).

[xiii] Ibid., comments (accessed June 27, 2015)

[xiv] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: a Darwinian View of Life (Science Masters Series), (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 133.

[xv] Viktor E. Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy and Humanism (New York: Touchstone, 1979), 65-66.

[xvi] Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt (Penguin Classics), Reissue ed. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 179.

 

© 2015 Michael Nathan O’Neal – All rights reserved.