Monday, February 4, 2013

Big Questions 02 - Meaning & Purpose


Note: What follows below is a transcript of the video.

The next set of questions that apologists like to throw out that religion supposedly answers is:
“What is the meaning of life?” and “What is our purpose?” which is sometimes phrased as “Why are we here?”
What we’re talking about here is Meaning and Purpose, and the issues are tightly connected logically, and because the apologists make the same move with both topics.
I want to be completely upfront and honest here.  These questions are more rhetorical than the previous “Big Question” I tackled, so I can’t pretend to offer a specific answer.  What I am going to do here is highlight the difference between atheists and Christians in how we attempt to answer these questions.  I leave it up to the viewer to decide which approach is better able to answer these questions.
I will argue that the answer to these questions is that we as individuals create our own meaning and purpose for ourselves.  This is in stark contrast to Christianity that argues meaning and purpose for humanity can only come from god.


The first issue is that both meaning and purpose are inherently subjective.  This is very clearly demonstrable with a few thought experiments, and is immediately recognizable to anyone with small children.
If I buy my daughter a toy pony to ride on, there’s a very strong chance that she’ll end up wanting to jump in the box it came in and play with it.  Now that box’s “purpose” was to carry a product, and once the product is bought and opened, the box has fulfilled its “designed purpose”.  But to my daughter, the purpose of the box is completely different than what it was intended to do, however I doubt anyone would say that the purpose of the box to my daughter means nothing to her.
Similarly, we can see the same thing with meaning.  What something means is always relative to an individual.  This is pretty clear with things like heirlooms or mementos.  If something was handed down to you from a relative you loved, like a watch or piece of jewelry from a grandparent, then it means quite a bit more to you than the intrinsic value of the watch or jewelry itself, which could be quite inconsequential to anyone else looking at it – especially if the item shows its age or a lot of wear and tear.
So it is with our lives.  We define our own purpose, and our lives mean quite a bit to ourselves and our friends and families – they mean quite a bit in fact.  We see this in the grief that is poured out when our loved ones pass away.
But none of this is good enough for the apologists, they want to try and get something more out of meaning and purpose – but in doing so they destroy what we understand meaning and purpose to be.
When challenged on meaning and purpose being subjective, apologists like to push towards “ultimate or objective” meaning and purpose, which is almost silly on its face given how both topics are completely subjective.  But let’s look at what the apologist does here. 
They want to say that unless god exists, then “ultimately” our lives mean nothing, and we’re left without our purposes having done anything “lasting”.  This is because we know that in about 5 billion years or so, the Earth will be destroyed as the sun eventually runs out of fuel to continue its fission reaction.   Go quite a few more billion years after that, we’re pretty sure that our space-time universe will have expanded so much that all the stars will die and matter will settle out into an evenly distributed steady state, with no heat or life being possible anywhere.  This is known as the “heat-death” of our space-time universe.
So the apologists will claim that on atheism, the fact that eventually all life as we know it will end at some point in the very far future, means that we have “no ultimate meaning or purpose”, because there won’t be anything left for our lives to have meaning and purpose to.    
So according to the apologists, the fact that I’m alive, love my wife and child, and all the meaning that my existence brings to myself and my family and friends – that means nothing at all “ultimately” because eventually everyone it could ever possibly mean anything to will eventually die. 
All this amounts to is a way to smuggle in the fear of death to the debate.  It’s a purely psychological move to try and get the audience in a state of despair, making them more receptive to the comforting lie that is “eternal life”.
In case anyone watching thinks I’m making all this up, this is exactly what’s argued by William Lane Craig in Chapter two of his book “On Guard”.  In fact, Craig goes further, asserting that if atheism were true, and if we lived forever, and if the heat death wasn’t inevitable, then we’d still have no purpose, because we would have come about by chance, without a design, and if we weren’t designed, then we can have no purpose.
There are two huge problems here.  First is the problem that if we were designed then the purpose for us to the designer is still only subjective and relative to that designer.  As we can see with other examples things can have other meaningful purposes beyond what they were originally designed for.  But there’s a much bigger issue – if only things that are designed can have a purpose, even if they’re sentient beings – then on Christianity clearly god has no purpose since he wasn’t designed.  If god can have a purpose for himself, then he would have to give it to himself.  Why then is god the only being that can give a purpose to himself?  And if god has no purpose, then why is having a purpose important in the first place?  The entire assumption Craig makes here relies on special pleading.
But if we push a little further along on what the apologists offer, we can see just how shallow what they are offering really is, and how it belittles what meaning and purpose we do have.
Ask a Christian what the meaning and purpose of life is, and the answer you’ll get is: “To worship and glorify god”.  Note it’s not to be happy, worshipping god is supposed to make you happy. 
But how is this any different than deriving meaning and purpose ourselves? This is still subjective; it’s relative to god, since it’s given to us by god. 
The only difference is the timescale involved. 
Notice exactly what the apologist is saying here.  On the Christian view, our lives can have “ultimate meaning and purpose” because the meaning they offer will supposedly “last forever”. 
This is the only move the apologist can make because otherwise the “meaning and purpose” they’d be left with is subjective, being relative to god instead of to ourselves or our family and friends.  
So remember, this “ultimate meaning and purpose” is about “lasting forever”, not about what the meaning and purpose actually is.
Just thinking about this, we can immediately see how trivial it makes meaning and purpose as we currently understand it.
My love for my wife and child don’t have any real ultimate meaning on Christianity, especially not if one or both of them aren’t believers and end up in hell. 
On the ultimate view of things in Christianity, if the bible is to be believed, heaven isn’t like what we consider the “good stuff” here on earth.  It’s continual worship of god, with the “saved” become praise bots. 
So all the “meaning and purpose” we think about as the most important things in our lives now, our loves, our family, our friends, our continual growth in knowledge and understanding, they mean NOTHING on the Christian view; all that matters is praising god forever. 
The most depressing thing to me is that some Christians will hear that last sentence and nod their heads in agreement, that this is somehow a GOOD THING!
But even on this view, eternal life has its own problems.  Even if we were “free to do what we wanted” in heaven, rather than be praise bots, eventually on the eternal time scale, you run out of things to do.  There’s nothing new to learn, god can tell us anything we’d ever question.  There’s nothing new to experience after a while, you could exhaust every possibility and still have time left to go!
What’s supposed to make heaven great is perpetually doing the same thing forever – praising god.  I’m sorry, even if you love church; too much of any one thing is going to get pretty crappy after a while.  I mean you couldn’t eat your favorite meal for every meal of every day for too long before you were sick of it.
Now the Christian response is to say that this experience of god will be so great that it won’t matter, we’ll just be super-amazing-crazy happy forever, because god will make it so or because god is that awesome.
If that’s the case, then what the hell is the point of talking about meaning and purpose?  It’s no longer about what makes me happy and why, it’s about the state of being happy. 
It’s like humanity finding a way to give people a lobotomy in such a way that they can’t do anything but sit in a gibbering heap on the floor until they die, but they’ll be extremely happy the entire time.
Happiness in this way is devoid of meaning and purpose.  This obliterates any notion of free will or autonomy, which the theists need to believe in for their theology to work.   
Now sure, some Christians might say, why think the meaning of life should make us happy? But to quote Sam Harris, that’s hitting philosophical bedrock with the shovel of a stupid question.  I don’t think any Christian would accept a view of the afterlife where Heaven was just praising god forever for all eternity, and hell was a place where all heathens existed in a perpetual garden of Eden free from pain and suffering and left to do whatever their hearts desired.
So on the Christian view, happiness has nothing to do with meaning and purpose.  “Ultimate meaning and purpose” is knowing and worshipping god for ever. On this view meaning and purpose can only come from god, so what’s important in this life is being a saved Christian so you can achieve this purpose.  This is considered the “ultimate good” since in Christian theology “goodness” is literally defined as “the nature of god”.  The two phrases are actually synonyms on this view.  This is supposed to make us happy, if we “love what is good”, or rather “love god”.
Compare this with the atheist view, and the fact that our lives are short, that the existence of our species looks to be finite on the grandest scales – makes the only life that we know we’ll have that much more precious.  It drives us to live the most meaningful and purposeful life for ourselves and for each other that we can possibly achieve. 
Now you compare these two views, and you ask yourself, who better answers the question of what the meaning of life is?

21 comments:

  1. "They want to say that unless god exists, then “ultimately” our lives mean nothing, and we’re left without our purposes having done anything “lasting”."
    I think this correct. I am more modest that the believer (always nice to tell an Abrahamist) who uses this argument because I don't foster the arrogant pretention that I have any lasting effect on the universe or even on Earthly life. I may have (had) an effect on other people, for good or for bad, but they won't last either.
    So what'? It's good enough for me that I have some temporary effect on the people around me. The best thing is that they seem to appreciate it too, including the believers among them!

    "The most depressing thing to me is that some Christians will hear that last sentence and nod their heads in agreement, that this is somehow a GOOD THING!"
    I can confirm this. Out of curiosity I contacted a christian via one of those ads a few years ago and asked him why I would prefer christian heaven to buddhist nirvana. He couldn't think of nothing more exciting than sitting next to Jesus. The conversation didn't last long.

    "There’s nothing new to learn."
    It goes even a little further. Heaven being perfect means that every chess player - I am one - will be capable of playing perfect moves. The inevitable outcome will be a draw, which makes the game meaningless. So to go to heaven I have to give up chess. That rather sucks.
    There is a funny variation on this theme from Johan Cruyff, the famous Dutch football player, who has a knack for making smart remarks sound silly (he is not well educated).
    "In Spain every football player prays before the match. If God would exist the outcome of all matches would be a draw. So God doesn't exist."

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  2. You've hit some of the key points.

    The biggest problem is that this is where the "debate" between atheists and Christians breaks down.

    Our answer of "so what if it doesn't last forever" is almost an anathema to Christians. Everything is made "OK" because Heaven.

    This relates to the whole "Good Thing" comment, it's just a non-starter. It's like debating a Calvinist on how a good god could create people whose sole purpose is to eventually burn in hell forever, with no chance of escaping that fate. The Calvinist that believes in pre-destination will just turn and say "So?" They flat out admit and accept that their god is a dick, there's just no further conversing with them.

    The best we can do at that point is to force them to acknowledge that position as loudly as you can.

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  3. At best, from your perspective, your meaning and worth are temporary and subjective and you will have wasted none of your precious time thinking otherwise. At worst, you will have missed the ultimate purpose of your existence and spent all of your time playing in a box that will burn up forever and you with it. You will have never come to realize the magnificent toy prepared for you.
    At worst, from my perspective, I will have wasted most of my time getting meaning and purpose from a toy that only had an imaginary absolute purpose and all of my real meaning and purpose would have been temporary and subjective all along; although, I will never know it. At best, I will have spent my time honoring the giver of the gift and embracing my ultimate purpose and meaning for my life as set forth by God.

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  4. My meaning is as important as it needs to be, to the people it matters to. It's better than having anything dictated to me, by something who refuses to reveal itself in anyway that shows it exists, let alone is worthy of worship. And that worshiping it is supposed to be something of "ultimate meaning" for me or anyone else.

    Oh, and BTW that's not what's "worst for you". The worst for you is if it turns out you've been worshiping the wrong divine dictator, and then Allah or some other deity condemns you to eternal torture. There's about 3000+ of those other deities, so you better hope Yahweh is the right one, and that Jesus was really his kid, and the Orthodox Jews don't have the right of it.

    Or all the thousands of religions could be wrong.

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    1. Fair enough, however: “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

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    2. Bald assertions are still bald assertions.

      Still, this is pretty amusing. Your religion predicts that you'll find joy through Jesus, but also suffer in tribulations because of him.

      So basically you'll have good times and bad times, as a result of your religion.

      How exactly is this different from people who have other or no religions?

      It's a non-statement, a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. It covers all possible outcomes with no predictive power whatsoever - to the point where it becomes unfalsifiable:

      1.) "I'm doing great!" - God blesses you.
      2.) "I'm managing to get by." - God sustains you.
      3.) "I'm having a hard time." - Glory in the tribulations god puts you through so you can better understand what Jesus went through.

      Talk about post-hoc rationalizations trying to mesh religion with reality.

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    3. What happens to me on earth is irrelevant to my constant state of joy. However, the events of my physical existence have consequence on my mind, body, and emotion. Your perspective forces your focus on mind body and emotion as the more important. My spiritual perspective forces my focus on eternal things, Kingdom things. Of course I appear to rationalize to you because you have decided that “doing great” is far better than “having a hard time”. Where I don’t see the same spectrum of reality.

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  5. Melvin

    CA has it right, your claims are nothing more than bald assertions. To make your points stand, the least you would have to do would be to build up a deductive syllogism or something upon which you can build your argument.

    You certainly wouldn't be able to do it on empirical evidence, so a philosophical argument is your only option.

    Good stuff. My thoughts on the subject:
    http://skepticink.com/tippling/2012/11/20/the-meaning-of-life/

    I always think that it is far nobler to think hard enough to work out one's own purpose, rather than accept another's entity's purpose for us!

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    1. Major premise: The Holy Bible is inerrant and says: “Whomsoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.”
      Minor premise: I have called on the name of the LORD.
      Conclusion: I shall be saved.
      Question: Happy?

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  6. >The first issue is that both meaning and purpose are inherently subjective.

    An argument could be made that this will run you into problems. Let's say that materialism/naturalism is true. Any meaning or purpose is subjective. An arrow pointing to the beach means "beach this way" only because we humans have decided to apply that meaning to the arrow. If wanted arrows to mean "welcome to Hobbiton", then they would mean that. They have no meaning apart from someone assigning meaning to them.

    So the first premise: matter does not have meaning.

    But now think about thoughts. Your thoughts are about things. Your thoughts "point to" objects beyond themselves. Your thought about William Lane Craig points beyond itself to the person William Lane Craig.

    So the second premise: thoughts have meaning.

    From which it follows that no thought is physical. And hence, dualism is true and materialism is false. Which gives a slight point to theism over naturalism.

    It is suggested that denying objective meaning and purpose in the world leads to denying it even at the level of human thought, since our minds are part of the natural world as well and should therefore not have any objective meaning either.

    In which case, I can say your article here is about whatever I want it to be about because it is, inherently, meaningless.

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    1. Your first premise is clearly false.

      You can try to make that argument about "the beach" having only a subjective meaning, but the matter that makes up "the beach" does have meaning in so much that it exists.

      So the label we apply to that matter may be subjective, but when we say "this way to get to the beach" we're speaking about a specific set of matter which does lie in a direction relative to ones current position. That IS an objective fact, since that matter does exist.

      I think there are other problems with your second premise, but I don't think it's worth the time to get into since there are enough problems with the first premise to debunk this attempt at a reductio ad absurdum.

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    2. >the matter that makes up "the beach" does have meaning in so much that it exists

      You didn't understand the argument. The arrow is the one with the meaning "beach this way", but it only has that meaning because someone decided to assign that meaning to it. In virtue of just its physical properties, the arrow doesn't mean anything.

      Matter does not have meaning, unless that meaning is assigned by someone.

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    3. Ok, so then you're talking about language, or words having meaning requires a mind.

      I guess the response there is "So?"

      You say that things are subjective, and you can take what I write to mean whatever you want. On some level you could say that's true, if you define a language that uses all the words in English but applies them to widely different concepts than English does.

      But this has nothing to do with the "meaning" and "purpose" I described in the video/post.

      Still, even on it's own language, you're not showing that mind dualism is true, since a mind could be made out of matter. We do see plenty of cases where things made purely of matter can make sense of inputs and give different outputs based on that. Unless you want to argue that there's some spiritual component to computers that we don't know about.

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  8. >I guess the response there is "So?"

    The fact supports the first premise: no matter has any meaning, unless that meaning is assigned by someone.

    And the second premise cannot be denied without contradiction: all thoughts have meaning.

    So:

    1. No matter has meaning
    2. All thoughts have meaning
    3. Therefore, no thoughts are matter

    >Unless you want to argue that there's some spiritual component to computers that we don't know about.

    Computers have their meaning assigned by us. The output on a computer screen are some squiggles that look like this: dog. And this refers to canines. But those squiggles on the screen only mean something because we say they do. In virtue of just their physical properties, their shape, length, wavelength, electron properties (negative charge, spin), those squiggles don't mean anything at all.

    Without us around saying "an electron pulse in a computer means 1, and the lack of an electron pulse means 0", the electrons coursing through the circuitry in a computer don't mean anything at all. It's no different than the beads of an abacus, where the beads on the far right only mean the 1s digits because we (arbitrarily) chose to assign that meaning to them. But apart from that, beads don't mean anything.

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  9. Just as a side note, we're on a rabbit trail that's completely divorced from the video/article. That's fine, I just want that stated up front.

    You're talking about "meaning" based on language, but just because we have come up with language to communicate doesn't thoughts or more specifically consciousness isn't reliant on purely material brains.

    You're confusing the "thing" with the "concept of a thing", the concept is what's referred to in language, but that doesn't mean that the thing itself doesn't exist. Your use of "meaning" in this way is just referring to the fact that we have "concepts of a thing", which may or may not correspond to reality.

    As far as computers go, you've missed the point of the analogy. The computer processes things differently based on different inputs or outputs. The "meaning" to them is irrelevant, they still respond mechanistically to different stimulus.

    What says that we're not like really advanced biological computers, processing things differently based on what inputs we're given to our brains? On this view, language is just a byproduct of our brains, with language being based on the ability to recognize concepts that represent things that exist in the real world.

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  10. >Just as a side note, we're on a rabbit trail that's completely divorced from the video/article.

    I think its on topic, because you are taking the mechanistic physicalist view in the video: there is no purpose or meaning, aside from what we assign to things.

    As you correctly note, you need to provide a mechanistic explanation of the meaning of thoughts. That is, in terms of just matter and motion. But when something is "about" something else, there is no physical relationship between the two. The thought could be about things that don't even exist, like Santa Claus. And when you think about something, there aren't particles streaming out of your head to the thing you are thinking about.

    So the problem is how to provide a materialist, mechanstic account of "aboutness", or "meaning"?

    >What says that we're not like really advanced biological computers, processing things differently based on what inputs we're given to our brains?

    That is indeed the primary materialist theory of mind. But this does not get at the core issue of this topic, which is how to explain the "aboutness" property that thoughts have, without referencing purpose or meaning as a fundamental element. Can it be done? I have my doubts.

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  11. >I think its on topic, because you are taking the mechanistic physicalist view in the video: there is no purpose or meaning, aside from what we assign to things.

    I disagree (quell surprise), you're talking about "meaning" in terms of language and trying to build a bridge to theism from it. That's divorced from the kind of question "What is the meaning of life?" which is not the same use for the word "meaning" as it is in your argument.

    To get to your "aboutness" problem, who says that there's a hard relationship there? There are plenty of people suffering from mental diseases that can't associate concepts with objects.

    The view I've come at (and I haven't done too much in-depth reading) is that there is some kind of external world to our mind, that we interact with. We evolved to have concepts, and the most fit for survival were able to associate basic concepts with actual things that exist external to us.

    There isn't necessarily a relationship between the concept of a thing and the thing itself outside of the mechanics of our brains.

    For example, just because someone with mental deficiencies can't grasp the concept that there's a box in front of them doesn't mean that the box doesn't exist. It seems to me a simpler explanation that we assign meaning to concepts of things because we are able to perceive the existence of other things with our senses.

    This view is supported by all existing neuroscience that we have on the mind currently, and it's getting stronger support by the day. Are we fully there yet? No, but again just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean that you can just insert god there to try and answer the hard question.

    In fact, if we want to look at this from a probabilistic standpoint, in the history of unanswered hard questions, god was assumed for a lot of phenomenon, tides, lightning, successful crop growth, etc. In our long history, we've always found naturalistic answers for these issues, with no appeal to the supernatural required.

    Does that mean god definitely doesn't exist? No. Not at all. But it does mean that it is far more likely that the issue of substance dualism for the mind is likely going to be resolved in naturalistic terms rather than some supernatural ones.

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  12. >I disagree (quell surprise), you're talking about "meaning" in terms of language and trying to build a bridge to theism from it. That's divorced from the kind of question "What is the meaning of life?" which is not the same use for the word "meaning" as it is in your argument.

    I think it is, because I'm not talking about language necessarily. One who never learned a language could still think about things. The point is that a thought can be about something, language or not. And that very "aboutness" is the problem for materialism. How can this phenomenon be explained in terms of matter?

    If I ask for an explanation of the phenomenon of flying in terms of matter, there isn't a problem. The negative charge of the electrons in the wing repel the negative charge of the electrons in the air molecules, and causes an equal and opposite reaction. The wing pushes against the air molecules and moves in the upward direction.

    But try explaining "aboutness" in physical terms and you'll run into the same problem that has been plaguing philosophers of mind for hundreds of years. That is to say, there isn't any good physical explanation, and none seems forthcoming or even hinted at.

    >For example, just because someone with mental deficiencies can't grasp the concept that there's a box in front of them doesn't mean that the box doesn't exist.

    I'm not sure what this has to do with what I'm talking about. I did not say or imply that the external world doesn't exist.

    >In fact, if we want to look at this from a probabilistic standpoint, in the history of unanswered hard questions, god was assumed for a lot of phenomenon, tides, lightning, successful crop growth, etc. In our long history, we've always found naturalistic answers for these issues, with no appeal to the supernatural required.


    Try this for a new viewpoint (I'm not saying this is correct, but I'm also not saying it's incorrect; either way, it's worth chewing on):

    Descartes, Galileo, Newton, et al wanted science to focus on what is measurable, and part of this project involved ditching the Aristotelian philosophical system. To be precise, they ditched Aristotle's formal and final causes, and kept only Aristotle's material and efficient causes. What today we might call "matter and motion". Anything that didn't fit this model was put onto the "mind" side of the ledger. John Locke for example distinguished primary properties, such as length, width, momentum, and so on, from secondary properties, such as color, taste, and smell. The former are objective properties that are "really there" and can be measured by anybody. The latter are subjective and could vary with the observer, as well as not being measurable.

    So these secondary properties don't fit the "matter and motion" that the world is supposed to consist of, and so are said to be "only in the mind". The same goes for other remainders, like abstract objects. The same goes for meaning and purpose. It's all "just in our minds."

    In short, everything has been explained naturalistically only because there is a convenient dumping ground in which to place the untidy stuff, like secondary properties, abstract objects, and so on. But in the end, the mind itself cannot be explained using the same method. To borrow an analogy from Edward Feser, it is like cleaning a house by sweeping all the dirt under one particular rug, and then claiming that you are going to get rid of the rug in the same way. Clearly, that is the one method that will not work for getting rid of the rug. The only thing you can do is keep the rug (and the dirt), or throw out the rug entirely.

    Anyway, that is one take on this "everything else has been explained naturalistically" arguement, and I'm not convinced its false. It's certainly worth thinking about.





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  13. I'll set aside your caricatures of ALL Christians as believing that our eternal life consists of being "praise bots" or claiming that you loving your kids has no meaning, especially if they aren't saved.

    Let's instead focus on the definitions of meaning and purpose. When a creator makes a work of art, one might ask that creator what his art means. The creator gets to determine this-- not the art itself or a spectator. When someone mischaracterizes what an artist or speaker is saying, he is not just making his own equally valid meaning. He is simply wrong. Unless you're heavily influenced by Derrida, I suspect that you probably agree on this point. So, who gets to determine what the meaning of human life or the universe is? Well, clearly its creator. If there is no creator, there is no meaning. We can, so Derrida does, engage in "play" since the creation doesn't have any real meaning, lacking a real author, but we can't claim that any one interpretation is true or valid. The will to power, the pleasure principle, glorifying God forever-- all are equally valid (which is to say they are all invalid objectively speaking).

    Most of what I said above also applies to purpose.

    Now, what of your argument that if all of this follows, God cannot have a meaning or purpose? Well, I agree. Sort of. God does not have a purpose in the same sense that a created thing has a purpose. As A Creator, he has PURPOSES, but no outside purpose or meaning that has been bestowed upon Him. Well, all this means is that God is not created. Whoop dee do. We already knew that. I don't see how this is even an objection, except as a kind of sleight of hand based on equivocation.

    As creators, we can purpose to do something. As a creation, we have been made with a purpose. God, as only creator and not creation, was not made with a purpose, though He does purpose to do things. These definitions must be kept distinct, or else we commit fallacies of equivocation that do not hold up to scrutiny.

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  14. As I found this argument to be an interesting one, I gave a slightly more detailed response to it on my own blog:
    http://www.cantus-firmus.com/?p=522

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