God, soul, and the meaning of life

Recently I was reading Thaddeus Metz, God, Soul and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge 2019). I'll comment on some statements in the book:

this Section articulates the view widely accepted by those party to debates about the role spiritual considerations play in life’s meaning, viz., that meaning is not reducible to any other single final value. For most these days, talk of ‘life’s meaning’ (and of synonyms such as ‘significant existence’ or ‘important way of being’) signifies a cluster of conditions that are good for their own sake and that can come in degrees. In particular life is usually taken to be meaningful by definition to the extent that it makes sense, forms a narrative, merits ‘fitting’ reactions such as esteem or admiration, manifests value higher than animal pleasures, realizes a purpose or contributes positively to something beyond itself. Few believe that any single one of these properties exhausts the concept of meaningfulness, although some do (e.g. Nozick 1981: 574–612; Martela 2017). Instead, for most in the field, when we think or speak about life’s meaning, we have in mind at least one of these features and quite often more than one as an amalgam.

That's a useful distinction. Something maybe a necessary condition for life to be meaningful without being a sufficient condition. 

When it is claimed that God, for instance, is ‘necessary’ for life’s meaning, this is shorthand for ‘identical to’ it (in part). The claim is not merely that there would be no meaning without God, but rather that there would be no meaning without God because meaningfulness essentially consists of human life relating to God in a certain way. Hence, it will not support extreme supernaturalism to argue that because the universe would not exist without God having created it, there would be no human life at all and hence also no meaning either in or of human life. At best this reasoning would show that God is instrumentally necessary for life’s meaning, i.e., that God is merely a means to the production of meaning, but this is not the relevant claim, which is instead that God must constitute life’s meaning as an end.

That's another useful distinction. In my experience, that's a limitation with Jewish ethicists/culture warriors (e.g. Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro).  

A soul is taken to be an immortal, spiritual substance that contains our identities and that will survive the deaths of our bodies. A supernaturalist is one who maintains that either God or a soul (or the pair) is central to life’s meaning. At least one spiritual condition is deemed to be necessarily constitutive either of meaning as such or of a great meaning, where the relevant life is either that of an individual or of humanity.

i) If the brain was capable of generating consciousness, then in that respect, the soul would be unnecessary. If, on that view, God recreated our brains and memories, then in that respect the soul would be unnecessary. The soul is necessary if there's no functional equivalent. Hypothetically, there could be a substitute for the soul. But if, given the hard problem of consciousness, that's not possible even in principle, then the soul is indispensable. 

ii) That would still be insufficient to form a bridge between death and resurrection. There'd be no intermediate state. It would be like undergoing general anesthesia, not remembering what happened in-between, coming out of sedation and picking up where you left off. The intermediate state is a fringe benefit of the soul. 

The standard objection to a purpose-based account of why God is necessary for meaning is that not just any purpose assigned to us is intuitively meaning conferring, and that it is the content of the purpose, not the fact that it has come from God, that makes it meaningful to fulfil or not. Consider, for example, the difference between serving as food for intergalactic travellers (Nagel 1971: 721; Nozick 1981: 586–7) or committing rape (Sinnott-Armstrong 2009: 106), on the one hand, and donating money to the poor, on the other. If God were to assign the former purposes to human beings, they would not confer meaning on our lives, or so most readers will think. If not, then the mere fact that God is the source of a purpose is not what makes it meaningful; it is rather what the purpose would have us do, making the fact that it has come from God irrelevant.

The meaning or purpose is indexed to the nature God endowed us with. It's not an arbitrary assignment. Some actions are improper given the way we were designed. But in naturalism, nature can't be normative. It's just the random byproduct of a mindless, amoral process. We could be wired differently.  

It is worth pressing to ask why death is sufficient for there being ‘no real value under the sun’ (2.11). Sometimes the claim is that it is meaningless for good people to face the same fate as the wicked, where the latter deserve to die (Ecclesiastes 2.14–2.16, 9.2–9.3). Other times, the thought is that nothing is worth doing unless it will have some ultimate consequence for oneself or the universe (Tolstoy 1884).

A world in which everyone shares a common oblivion means nothing we do makes any ultimate difference. So why be good? 

More recently, some have suggested that, insofar as a meaningful life is a worthwhile one, a worthwhile life would only be one that enjoyed happiness for all eternity (Goetz 2012).

One way to develop that principle is to argue that life is too short to develop our human potential. 

Regardless of the exact reason for thinking that having been created only by God would be sufficient for the meaning of life, there are at least two major concerns for this position. One is an analogical objection to the idea that humanity’s source is crucial to its meaningfulness. Just as an individual person’s life can be meaningful, even if his parents had created him accidentally, so the life of the species can be meaningful, even if it had arisen by chance. Consider, for instance, the life of Albert Einstein, often taken to be an exemplar of meaningfulness in the philosophical literature. ‘In judging whether his life was meaningful, no one would ever ask “Was his existence intended?”’ (Trisel 2012: 400). By analogy, if the existence of the human race as a whole can be significant, it is probably not its origin that is essentially at stake.

It doesn't follow that because your life is meaningful even if your mother got pregnant by "accident", your life is meaningful if we inhabit an accidental universe. On a Christian worldview, an "accidental pregnancy," even if unintended by the parents, was intended by God. 

To take a comparison, a game of chance has a random element. But it also has rules. There's more to a game of chance than randomness. There's a structure that underlies the element of chance. But if it was random all the way down, it wouldn't even be a game of chance. It needs more than sheer chance to be challenging or entertaining. 

Here is a second reason for doubting that humanity’s source is the key to its meaning. Suppose that the human race had been created by God, where such creation is alone constitutive of its meaning. In that case, there would be nothing to be done on the part of humanity in respect of its being meaningful. No matter what human beings were to do, considered as a collective, humanity would be meaningful for having been created by the right agent and for the right purpose. However, most enquirers into life’s meaning, including into the meaning of the human race, believe that what is crucially at stake is what shape that life should take upon having come into existence.

But that just means the nature of the source is a necessary rather than sufficient condition for life to be meaningful. 

Some arguments advanced against having a soul or otherwise being immortal appear, upon reflection, to be best construed as objections to having a belief in it.26 Consider, for instance, the claim that if one would live forever, then one would not prioritize or be motivated to do very much, in the expectation of another tomorrow in which to get everything done (James 2009; May 2009: 45–7, 60–72; Scheffler 2013: 99–101).

But that's circular. To a great extent, prioritization is a virtue in a world where time is at a premium. But is it still a virtue in a world where there's all the time in the world? 

Mind you, some things remain more important than others even if immortality is true. Not having to meet a deadline doesn't mean all activities become equally important or unimportant. The relative importance of an activity is independent of the order in which you do things. 

The same concern applies, at least to some degree, to the suggestion that if we were immortal, our lives could not display an important sort of virtue (Nussbaum 1989: 338–9; Wielenberg 2005: 91–2). If we cannot die, then we cannot risk our lives for the sake of others, and if others cannot die, then we can cannot save anyone else’s life. It seems that the meaningfulness of being a doctor, lifeguard, firefighter or the like depends on our not having a soul and instead having only this earthly, mortal life. 

A third prominent argument for thinking that more meaning would come from an atheist world28 turns on the impossibility of making certain kinds of moral sacrifice in a world with God (Wielenberg 2005: 91–4; Hubin 2009; Maitzen 2009; Sinnott-Armstrong 2009: 114). In at least one atheist world, people could face the prospect of undeserved harm, where substantial meaning in life intuitively would come from an agent making a sacrifice so that others do not suffer that. It would, for instance, confer some meaning on one’s life to suffer some pain in order to prevent an innocent child from being burned alive. However, by a standard conception of God, He would always compensate any undeserved harm suffered while on earth.29 That means that a mother who undergoes pain in order to prevent her son from experiencing intense suffering makes no real sacrifice, since God will make it up to her.

That's an interesting objection to Christian immortality, but in that regard, naturalism generates an empathetic or moral dilemma. Is there something ignorable or improper about having an ineluctable element of self-interest? Should I be morally obligated to make the ultimate sacrifice? Or is that unreasonable? What if there's too much to lose? 

If you think this life is all there is, isn't it foolhardy to squander your unrepeatable opportunity? If the price of moral heroism or heroic altruism is oblivion, why would you risk it? And if everyone passes into oblivion, why sacrifice your life for theirs? What makes their life more valuable than your own? 

And not just oblivion. What about the danger of being horribly maimed? Living in chronic excruciating pain or disability, with no hope of restoration? In a godless universe, how is that obligatory? 

Christianity liberates us to hazard our life and health because it relieves the unbearable empathetic dilemma, where we want to get involved, but intervention is too risky, too costly. As social creatures, we find meaning in life in part by sharing our lives with others. But there have to be some situations in which it's safe to let your guard down. 

If repetition is unavoidable, might meaning reside in the ability to display certain attitudes in the face of an eternal recurrence of the same (suggested by Nietzsche)? Or might substantial enough meaning be available from the parts of one’s life considered in themselves, even if they repeated some millions or billions of years down the road?

Another argument against having a soul or otherwise living forever also invokes considerations about the pattern of the life as a whole. Some maintain that essential to a particularly meaningful life is some kind of narrative, where there could not be a narrative to an eternal life (Scarre 2007: 58–60). At the core of a narrative is a beginning, a middle and an end, and the suggestion is that a life that never ends would be incapable of forming a narrative. An existence without a life-story could be happy or moral, so the argument goes, but would be missing meaning in it, or at least one key sort.

i) What makes life interesting and fulfilling depends in part on a dialectical dynamic between continuity and variety, stability and change. Too much repetition is mind-numbing, but too much fragmentation is alienating. Take the proverbial army brat who never lives long enough in one place to form lasting friendships. 

Pauline Kael never saw a movie twice. But there's something shallow and desperate about that, as if life is just about living in the moment, experiencing something new, never looking back, never savoring the past. Squeeze in as much as you can before time runs out. Some people come back to a book or movie after a long absence, and discover new things they didn't notice the first time. It may have a resonance it didn't have the first time, because life changes them. They didn't get it the first time around. They weren't ready for it. Memory becomes more layered over the course of a lifetime, with increasingly dense associations. 

ii) In The Last Picture Show, most of the characters are restless and unfulfilled. Ironically, the only happy character is Billy. Due to his cognitive disability, sweeping a dusty street or playing a hat game with Sonny is enough to make him happy. He doesn't need closure. He isn't bored by repetition. 

This goes to a distinction between happiness and fulfillment. His cognitive disability means he has a potential that's never realized. In a sense, he's unfulfilled, but he doesn't know it. 

But isn't the difference between raking leaves for fun and playing sports for fun a difference of degree rather than kind? We're finite creatures. The ceiling for human fulfillment isn't stratospheric. 

Along with (or part of) a lack of independence has been a concern regarding a lack of privacy that would be unavoidable if God existed (Kahane 2011, 2018; Lougheed 2017). God’s being all-good and hence a perfect moral judge means that He would be apprised of all our mental states. God’s being all-knowing likewise appears sufficient for Him to know everything about us. 

i) What if that's a necessary price for existing? To be a creature is to be contingent on another. 

ii) In terms of Calvinism, God isn't an eavesdropper. Rather, he wrote the script. It's not embarrassing for God to know what I'm thinking if God caused my thoughts in the first place.

iii) Naturalism doesn't avoid radical dependence. It simply relocates the issue. Humans are now dependent on a universe that's indifferent to their needs and aspirations. Everything they think and feel is the end-product of physical determinism. Brain chemistry.