Meaning and Purpose of Life

In the absence of a transcendent purpose, how do atheists find meaning and purpose in life?

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

In The Infinite Staircase, I propose that atheists find meaning and purpose in life the same way that theists do—through narrative.  That is, they get exposed to a narrative that captivates them, and they commit themselves to live within it, to base their understanding of the world upon it, and to align their ethics and behavior with its core values.  Such narratives, be they theist or atheist, are organized around role models who exemplify strategies for living that address life’s deepest challenges.  Immersed in such narratives, we identify with the protagonists and participate imaginatively in their actions.  When those experiences resonate deeply enough, they can lead us to model our future actions, indeed our entire identity, around them. 

When it comes to living a meaningful and purposeful life, stories and storytelling do most of the heavy lifting.  Importantly, this role does not fall to rule-based regimes.  Ethical precepts can be a mnemonic to remind us of the moral of our story, the principles we can extract from it, but they do not motivate, nor are they always accessible in the moment of choice.  Moral life begins in the heart and only subsequently finds its way to the head.  That is why the overly intellectual approaches to morality that characterize much of Western philosophy can at times be so tone deaf.  They’re looking for love in all the wrong places.

Perhaps the biggest difference between theist and atheist narratives is that the former are grounded in immortality, whereas the latter are grounded in mortality.  Both shape our ethics in fundamental ways.  There is a lot of history behind the first approach, but the second one is relatively new, getting much of its momentum in the past century from Darwin’s account of evolution.  So, what does Darwin have to say about mortality? 

In The Infinite Staircase, I try to capture it in the following catechism:

1. All the plants and animals alive today, including ourselves, are a result of evolution. 
2. Evolution, in turn, is a result of natural selection.
3. Natural selection, in turn, is a result of life-or-death competitions.
4. If there were no death, there would be no natural selection.
5. If there were no natural selection, there would be no evolution.
6. If there were no evolution, there would be no plants, no animals, and no us.

In this context, as counterintuitive as it feels, instead of demonizing death, it appears we should give it a vote of thanks.  It’s how we got here, and we need to own it.

Of course, none of this does away with our fear of death, for that too is a product of natural selection.  And because we are gifted with language and narrative, we can experience this fear at any time, even when we are in no danger.  To help us cope with such fear, we need a narrative that can maintain our identity and continuity, one that can keep us whole and together.  

Such a narrative has to be both about us and not about us. It must be about us, for we are the ones who need to be served. But it cannot be about us alone because we know we are temporary and transient. As actors, we come and go, but we know that the play will go on when we are no longer here, just as it has been going on long before we ever got here. Most importantly, whatever this play is about, its narrative must confer meaning on the limited time we have here together.  It must give us a robust answer to the question, What should I do with my time? 

What kind of narrative might this be?  It might be anchored in love and family.  It might be anchored in honor or duty, in learning or self-realization, or in being in service to others or to a cause.  There are many different narratives in the secular humanist portfolio to choose from. 

That said, compared to religious narratives, secular narratives are inherently fragile.  There are no guarantees, there is no absolute truth, there is only this life given to us to do with as we may, and while there are plenty of instruction books, all are subject to critique.  Contrast this with narratives of immortality.  Here, the anchor relationship is with God as revealed in sacraments and sacred texts, and it is both absolute and eternal.  That sets the context for everything else.  It anchors the ethics to which believers must hold themselves accountable.  Given these obvious advantages, why would anyone opt for anything else?  Indeed, that is the core of Pascal’s wager.  Being immersed in probability theory, he reasoned that religious belief had little downside risk if it is wrong, and enormous upside gain if it is right, so it is the rational choice, regardless of how much or little faith you have in it.

And that is what became the sticking point.  There is an inherent inauthenticity in Pascal’s wager that is alienating.  It particularly stuck in the craw of the French existentialists for whom authenticity is everything, something more along the lines of Thoreau’s explanation for why he went to the woods:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

For Thoreau and the existentialists, the alternative to a belief in God is a belief in life.  Both are life-affirming, both ultimately mysterious, so regardless of which path we choose, we need to remain humble.

That’s what I think.  What do you think?

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