Introduction
Imagine a father and his three-year-old daughter step out for a neighborhood stroll. The familiar sights and sounds hum around them. The sun, in its gentle descent, casts a warm glow upon the neatly lined houses adorned with blooming flower gardens and neatly trimmed lawns. The noise of children playing intermingled with the bark of a dog echoes from nearby yards. Father and daughter greet neighbors and exchange pleasantries.
As they saunter down the familiar streets, an unfamiliar person appears. The little girl asks her father, “Is that guy a bad guy?” The father asks back, “Why do you think he is a bad guy?” “He has holes in his jeans,” the little girl explains. “Dad has holes in his work jeans. Does that make me a bad guy?” “No,” the little girl says, in deep contemplation.
Children, even the smallest children, filter everything into the simplistic moral categories. They are learning about the world and trying to make sense of it. The categories they start with are “good” and “bad.” It’s not just children that ask why. Adults ask too. Humans cannot help but ask why because, as creatures made in God’s image, we are moral creatures who cannot grasp or understand the world around us without moral categories.
To say we need moral categories is to say we need a moral sense of meaning about that which is right and wrong; about that which is significant and insignificant. Humans ask why because we must have knowledge. We must have meaning. We must discover purpose. Take away knowledge, meaning, and purpose, and you take away our humanity.
Creatures of chance in a world of happenstance wouldn’t necessitate structure, categorization, or the embrace of order. Accidental creatures in an accidental world wouldn’t have “why” coursing through their veins. The moral category of bad points inexorably toward an imperative moral judgment, one stemming from a moral authority—a transcendent, supernatural being—far surpassing a merely materialistic form. The acknowledgment of such moral absolutes implies a source beyond the accident of existence, revealing a profound truth in which human existence intertwines with a higher moral plane.
Scientism
When Voltaire took up the science of Newton minus Newton’s God, he set the Western world on a path of a material explanation of all things independent of God. The problem with this project is it leaves out the biggest questions of life. Science—knowledge of the natural world—describes the way nature works. Science explains the what, but Christianity explains the why. In his book Gentle Regrets, Roger Scruton explains, “The best that science can offer is a theory of the how of things; but it is silent about the why. When we ask for the why of the world we are seeking a point of view outside all time and change, from which we can view the world as a whole. Only God can obtain that point of view. Hence it is to him that we must look for an answer.”[1]
By seeking to explain everything based on the material principles of the universe, Voltaire, couldn’t explain everything. He couldn’t explain why, or why humans ask why. Modern science renders marvelous things. But the one thing it never renders is the reason why we look for marvelous things. David Berlinski writes, “A man asking why his days are short and full of suffering is not disposed to turn to algebraic quantum field theory for the answer.”[2] Monochromatic naturalism can’t explain the meaning of meaning.
The Meaning of Meaning
The master narrative of exclusive humanism is that if there’s meaning it is of our own making. But the entire project of self-authorization (as Charles Taylor calls it), begs the question. Why do people have to have meaning? Why do they have to construct a meaning? Why don’t they just exist as material stuff with no regard to the meaning of the stuff?
Chesterton said, “Meaning must have someone to mean it.”[3] If you exclude God, what have you got? Without the Absolute Personal God of the Bible, people are just accidents in an accidental cosmos. Accidental people in an accidental cosmos are just atoms that think. There is no love, no gifts, and no meaning. Blind atoms and molecules lost in the cosmos make for a thin explanation of human nature—atoms that somehow think in a world that somehow exists according to the laws of physics, somehow established.
A world grounded in the world, grounded in planet Earth, grounded in itself, expands no higher than compounds, elements, and chemical bonds. This Nietzschean abyss destroys meaning and morality, which are the social bonds of sanity, and leaves a materialistic, sterile, and minimalistic definition of human beings.
Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the most influential atheist of the 20th Century, makes this point well in his novel Nausea. Though obscene, the book is refreshingly consistent with the presuppositions of atheism. It is the story of a man who, after arduous searching, finds the terrible truth that life has no meaning, that it’s simply nauseating excess, like vomit or excrement. Sartre shows us the true face of atheism, namely, that without God all is meaningless. This is why Sartre makes many atheists uncomfortable. Likewise, Friedrich Nietzsche, when you put all of his works together (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music; The Use and Abuse of History; Ecco Homo; The Genealogy of Morals; Beyond Good and Evil; The Twilight of the Idols; Thus Spake Zarathustra; The Eternal Return; The Will to Power), also accurately explains the consequences of atheism. In short, if there is no God, then there is nihilism. If God does not exist, there is no objective truth. Things like the human soul, the human will, reason, love, and purpose are not real if God does not exist. Thus, discussing the meaning of meaning is purposeless. Nietzsche candidly formulates the complete alternative to Christianity, explaining the logical conclusion of unbelief.
Yet people persist in asking why, which is one clue that Sartre and Nietzsche should pick different presuppositions. Only creatures that are full of nobility and joy ask why. People have curiosity. It’s a function of the human soul, another splendid strand of God’s creation that the MRI machine can’t decipher. Christianity remains as long as certain transcendental facts of life remain ineffable. Science has circled and will continue to circle around the why. The meaning of meaning is so impenetrable and provocative that to twiddle your thumbs while science fumbles with an answer is as stultifying as following a map in an ever-shifting labyrinth.
In contrast, Christianity accounts for love, first shared between Father, Son, and Spirit. It accounts for gifts, given by a Giver. And it accounts for meaning since the Giver is the Creator and no meaning of creation is meaningful until it comes into relation to its Creator. In love, the Creator gives image bearers meaning. This meaning is unveiled in three parts: Syntax, context, and use.
Christians start with the assumption that there is truth that can be expressed with language. If you don’t agree, stop reading this essay, stop speaking words to people, and stop all thinking. Language communicates meaning syntactically through propositions being arranged according to the proper grammatical formulation of sentences.
Since there is truth that can be expressed with words, that means language is capable of expressing, interpreting, and translating reality. Language communicates meaning contextually in the sense that language is capable of expressing a real world that exists apart from the interpretation of it. In other words, meaning ties back to something real and language is capable of expressing that meaning. More directly, the context of meaning is a real and knowable world. This means that human language is the expression of meaning.
Furthermore, meaning has a way in which it ought to be used or applied. Meaning implies intention and intention implies a person standing behind the meaning. Intended means Intender. One doesn’t know the meaning of a piece of language if one cannot use it in the way it was created to be used. The meaning of meaning, from this tri-part perspective,[4] means that life can be lived in the way it was intended to be lived, in the world it was intended to be lived, for the purpose it was intended to be lived.
Conclusion
What is the significance of meaning? What does it mean that there is meaning? What does the very existence of meaning presuppose and imply? What are the conditions that must be in place for two people to even have a conversation about the meaning of meaning?
In Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, he argues that the single greatest motivating factor in human beings isn’t the drive for money, sex, or power, but the need for meaning. He observed that during World War 2, the people who survived the Nazi camps were those who found meaning in their suffering. Those who lost the meaning of life were the ones who died. Meaning is as psychologically necessary as air is biologically necessary. He developed logotherapy, which is a technique that helps people through their problems by helping them find meaning in their lives.[5]
Children naturally wonder, “Why? What is the meaning of all this?” The very essence of meaning is not a question of existence but a reality embedded in the fabric of their consciousness. For them, meaning is axiomatic and ubiquitous. Children don’t have to be trained to have a sense that there is a fuller and deeper significance beyond the ordinary. The child isn’t taught to ask “Who fashioned me?” They inherently embrace the expansive significance of life with unfettered curiosity. Children’s untaught prejudice toward a greater power renders them as pint-sized theists, the model of how we should all enter the Kingdom (Mark 10:13-16), willing to believe incomprehensible things.
[1] Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (London: Continuum, 2006), 236.
[2] David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009) xvi.
[3] Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Company, 1909), 62
[4] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 1987), 93-98.
[5] Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984).
Trinity Reformed Church 