Atheism and Meaning: Life Without a Given Purpose

The charge is old and it is not stupid: without God, nothing means anything. Every value is a preference, every project is arbitrary, and the honest atheist should either admit this or stop pretending the admission has no consequences. Dostoevsky’s version—if there is no God, everything is permitted—has been reformulated by better philosophers since, and it deserves a better response than the one it usually gets, which is a brisk assertion that people make their own meaning, delivered as though the difficulty had been addressed rather than renamed.

The literature on this question is now substantial and considerably more interesting than the debate-stage version. It divides on a point that the polemics tend to blur: whether meaning requires a purpose assigned from outside, or whether purpose from outside was never the sort of thing that could do the job.

Sorting the Question

“The meaning of life” runs at least three questions together, and most disagreements survive on the confusion.

Cosmic purpose asks whether the universe was made for something, and whether human existence has a role in that design. This is the question theism answers yes and naturalism answers no, and on this one the atheist concedes immediately. There is no assigned purpose. That is the position.

Meaning in a life asks whether a particular life can be significant, worthwhile, non-futile. This is a different question, and its connection to the first is precisely what is in dispute. The theist argues the second depends on the first. The atheist typically denies the dependence.

Mattering asks to whom or against what standard significance is measured. Much of the intuitive force of the nihilist worry comes from silently adopting a cosmic scale and then noticing that human beings do not register on it.

Keeping these apart does not settle anything, but it changes what the arguments have to do. “The universe has no purpose, therefore your life has none” is not a valid inference; it needs a premise linking the two, and supplying that premise is the real work.

The Absurdist Line: Camus and Nagel

Albert Camus set the terms for the twentieth century in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942). His absurd is not a property of the universe or of human beings but of the relation between them: we demand clarity and significance, the world returns silence, and the absurd is the collision. Camus’s move is to refuse both standard exits. Suicide, the essay’s opening problem, resolves the collision by removing one term. Religious faith, which he calls philosophical suicide, resolves it by supplying an answer he thinks is unearned. His alternative is to keep the contradiction alive—to live without appeal, in lucid revolt. Sisyphus, condemned to a pointless task, is to be imagined happy at the moment of consciousness on the way down, when he knows exactly what his situation is and is not defeated by it.

Whether this is an argument or a temperament is a fair question, and Camus was not always clear about which he was offering. What is durable in it is the diagnosis: absurdity is relational, which means it survives the discovery of any external purpose. If a deity told you your purpose, you could still ask why that purpose is worth having, and Camus’s collision would reopen one level up.

Thomas Nagel developed the point rigorously in “The Absurd” (Journal of Philosophy, 1971). His account locates absurdity in a structural feature of self-conscious creatures: we are simultaneously immersed in our lives, taking them seriously, and capable of stepping back to a standpoint from which any justification we could give looks arbitrary. The two perspectives cannot be merged and neither can be abandoned. Nagel’s conclusion is deflationary in a useful way. Since the absurd follows from a capacity we would not want to lose, and since nothing hangs on it practically, the appropriate response is irony rather than despair or heroism—a mild joke about our situation rather than Camus’s defiance, which Nagel thought retained a whiff of the romanticism it claimed to reject.

Notice what Nagel’s version does to the theistic objection. If the source of absurdity is the availability of a detached standpoint, then a cosmic purpose does not close it, because the detached standpoint can be taken up toward the purpose too. The demand for a justification that admits no further question may simply be a demand for something incoherent.

Building Meaning Without a Blueprint

Existentialism supplied the best-known constructive answer. Sartre’s formula—existence precedes essence, stated in L’existentialisme est un humanisme (1946)—inverts the design picture. A paper knife has an essence before it exists, because a maker had a specification in mind. A human being exists first and defines himself afterward. There is no human nature, on this account, because there is no God to have conceived one, and this is why the position is described as a humanism rather than a nihilism: nothing is decided, therefore everything is at stake in what one does.

The obvious objection is that a meaning one invents can be revoked by the inventor, and a value one confers is not obviously a value at all. This is the standard religious critique of subjectivism, and it lands. If meaning is just whatever you happen to care about, then a life devoted to memorizing phone books or counting blades of grass is as meaningful as any other, provided the person is engaged. Most people’s intuitions resist that conclusion firmly.

Susan Wolf’s Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010) is the most influential attempt to keep the subjective element while blocking the grass-counting result. Her formula: meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness—when a person is gripped by something that is independently worth being gripped by. This is a hybrid view, deliberately. It needs some objectivity about worth, but the objectivity it needs is far thinner than a divine purpose. It requires only that some things really are worth caring about, a claim many atheists hold and most theists hold as well. Whether that thin objectivity can be secured on a naturalist footing is contested, and it is where the real argument between naturalists and theists about value ought to be conducted—not over whether atheists can feel motivated, which was never the issue.

Contemporary analytic work has run further in this direction. Thaddeus Metz’s Meaning in Life (2013) surveys and systematizes the field; Iddo Landau’s Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (2017) argues that most nihilist despair rests on a perfectionist standard nobody could meet under any metaphysics, including theism. That last point is worth sitting with. If the standard for a meaningful life is permanent, cosmic, and unimprovable, then almost nothing qualifies, and the failure is in the standard.

Cosmic Insignificance and the Scale Trick

The most viscerally powerful form of the worry is not an argument but a picture: a very large universe, a very old universe, and a species that occupies an unmeasurable fraction of both. Set against that, nothing anyone does registers.

Guy Kahane’s “Our Cosmic Insignificance” (Noûs, 2014) takes the intuition seriously enough to analyze it rather than dismiss it. His argument is that significance is relational and comparative—one is significant relative to some domain and some standard of value—and that vast size does not by itself confer or remove it. Spatial magnitude is the wrong currency; a large volume of empty space is not a rival source of value that outbids us. Kahane goes further and notes an irony: on the assumption that value is confined to conscious beings, an empty universe would make us more significant, not less, since we would be nearly all the value there is.

Nagel had made an adjacent point. The badness of our smallness cannot be a matter of size, because we would not feel better if we were much larger, or if we lived seven thousand years rather than seventy. The scale imagery is doing rhetorical work that the underlying argument does not support.

Finitude: Bug or Feature

Religious frameworks often locate meaning in permanence—a project matters because its results are preserved, judged, or completed beyond death. The atheist must say that everything ends. Whether that is a loss is less obvious than it looks.

Bernard Williams argued the reverse in “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” (Problems of the Self, 1973). Working from Janáček’s opera, in which a woman has lived over three centuries and has become frozen and indifferent, Williams argued that an endless life would eventually exhaust the categorical desires that give a person reason to go on, leaving either unbearable tedium or a series of successors who are not recognizably the same person. On this view, the shape and pressure of a finite life is what makes choices weighty at all.

The counterarguments are real—defenders of immortality suggest that new projects could be generated indefinitely, and that Williams’s model of desire is too static—and religious traditions do not generally imagine eternity as extended duration in the first place, but as a different mode of existence. Still, the exchange makes a useful point: mortality’s relation to meaning is an open philosophical question, not a settled deficit column on the atheist’s ledger.

Epicurus made the older version of the argument, that death is nothing to us because where death is, we are not—advice about fearing death rather than about meaning, but a reminder that non-theistic traditions have been working this ground for a very long time. The Stoics supplied a companion discipline, locating the good entirely within the agent’s own judgments and treating the cosmos’s indifference to one’s plans as the basic fact to be trained for.

What the Religious Critique Gets Right

Two things, at least.

First, sources of meaning are not equally available to everyone by an act of will. Religious communities supply narrative, ritual, and belonging as inherited goods, delivered to people who did not have to construct them and who receive them at their worst moments as well as their best. A philosophy that says meaning is available to anyone who chooses their projects well is describing something easier for the secure, the healthy, and the employed. Whether one can build a comparable infrastructure without shared metaphysics is a practical question that secular movements have addressed unevenly; this site’s article on secular humanism traces some of the attempts.

Second, the honest atheist should concede that certain consolations are unavailable, and stop offering substitutes that do not fit. Ultimate justice is not coming. The victim of an unrecorded atrocity will not be vindicated. There is no reunion. Suffering that produced nothing produced nothing. Saying this plainly is more respectful of religious hope than pretending that atoms-recycled-into-stars performs the same work, which it does not.

What the critique gets wrong is the inference from these concessions to nihilism. That a life’s significance is not permanent does not make it unreal while it lasts, any more than a piece of music is worthless because it ends. And theism’s own account of meaning is not free of difficulty: if a life’s point is a purpose assigned by another agent, the standard objection is that this makes the creature an instrument, and the theistic tradition has spent considerable effort—on participation, on friendship with God, on beatitude as the creature’s own fulfillment—precisely to avoid that reading. Both sides have to explain how an external source of purpose becomes genuinely the agent’s own. Neither has a free lunch.

Where the Argument Actually Sits

Stripped of the debate-stage framing, the disagreement is narrower than either side advertises.

Almost no atheist philosopher writing on this topic defends the grass-counting view that any preference confers meaning. Almost no serious theist claims that unbelievers cannot lead lives of evident depth, care, and accomplishment. The live dispute is about grounding: whether the objective element that hybrid views like Wolf’s require—that some things are genuinely worth caring about—can stand on a naturalistic foundation, or whether it needs an anchor the naturalist has ruled out. That is a question in metaethics, not a question about whether atheists get out of bed in the morning. It is also the same question raised from the other direction by the Euthyphro dilemma, and neither dilemma resolves the other.

The practical upshot, if there is one, is a demotion of the whole framing. The demand for the meaning of life, singular and final, may be a bad question wearing a grand costume—a request for a justification that ends all further questions, which nothing could satisfy. What remains after the demotion is not nothing. It is the ordinary and hard business of identifying what is worth doing, doing it with people who also think so, and not requiring the universe to sign off.