“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

― Alan Watts

Theistic philosophers and theologians have historically argued that life in an atheistic universe is devoid of meaning, value, or any reason for hope. Life is absurd, they claim, because death robs us of a future and puts an end to all our projects, desires, and aspirations.

This line of thinking is laid out most clearly in William Lane Craig’s essay “The Absurdity of Life without God”:

If God does not exist, then both man and the universe are inevitably doomed to death. Man, like all biological organisms, must die. With no hope of immortality, man’s life leads only to the grave. His life is but a spark in the infinite blackness, a spark that appears, flickers, and dies forever. Therefore, everyone must come face to face with what theologian Paul Tillich has called “the threat of non-being.” For though I know now that I exist, that I am alive, I also know that someday I will no longer exist, that I will no longer be, that I will die. This thought is staggering and threatening: to think that the person I call “myself” will cease to exist, that I will be no more! If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.

Notice what is being claimed: that because our lives ultimately end, they are therefore ultimately insignificant and absurd. It is the finite nature of our lives that robs them of meaning, value, and purpose.

Is this true? Does the value of life really depend on its length or whether we’re mortal or immortal?

The philosopher Thomas Nagel doesn’t think so, and in his classic essay “The Absurd” he explains why the claim that life is absurd is supported by unpersuasive arguments that should not make us lose confidence in the value and meaningfulness of our own lives.

Nagel tackles the three central arguments usually offered in support of the claim that life is absurd, showing how each of them rest on an error.

If Nagel is right, then Craig and theistic philosophers more generally owe us a better explanation as to what, exactly, it is that makes our lives absurd in the absence of a God.

Let’s investigate the following claim first:

“Nothing we do in our lifetimes will matter in a million years.”

Nagel responds:

By the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. Moreover, even if what we did now were going to matter in a million years, how could that keep our present concerns from being absurd? If their mattering now is not enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they mattered a million years from now? Whether what we do now will matter in a million years could make the crucial difference only if its mattering in a million years depended on its mattering, period.

Here, Nagel’s response depends on a type of symmetry argument against views like Craig’s. Nothing that happens a million years from now currently matters either, including the alleged fact that a million years from now nothing that is currently happening matters.

More colloquially, Nagel is saying “it just doesn’t matter that a million years from now the things happening right now don’t matter.”

It’s an attempt to show that privileging what we would think is valuable in the future is an arbitrary standard by which to measure the worth and value of our current lives. Moreover, why a million years? Why not 100 years from now, or 50, or even tomorrow?

Here’s the second claim:

“We are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute.”

Nagel, again:

Even if this is true, this can’t be what makes life absurd, for suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts seventy years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity? And if our lives are absurd given our present size, why would they be any less absurd if we filled the universe (either because we were larger or because the universe was smaller)? Reflection on our minuteness and brevity appears to be intimately connected with the sense that life is meaningless; but it is not clear what the connection is.

The length of one’s life is not the value making property that makes it meaningful or worth living. It may be connected in some unspecified way, but Craig doesn’t quite tell us how.

With that said, I think Nagel is too quick in jumping from “a 70-year-old absurd life would only be infinitely absurd if we lived forever.”

A better answer would be: it depends. What was the 70 year old doing throughout his life that made it absurd? If he or she was working on a monumental project that was cut short by an untimely death, a project unable to be picked up by anyone else, perhaps that life may have been absurd, but had the individual benefited from a longer or infinite life, allowing them to finish the project, then it’d be hard to see how that life would be equally absurd. All the person needed was more time.

But there are circumstances where life would be equally absurd whether mortal or immortal. In the book The Boy Who Was Raised as A Dog, the childhood psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry describes the story of a boy named Justin:

During her illness, her live-in boyfriend, Arthur, babysat for Justin. Baby Justin’s behavior became difficult, surely a result of losing both his mother and his grandmother in such a short time. Arthur, still grieving himself, didn’t know what to do with a crying, tantruming young child — and in his late 60s, he wasn’t physically or mentally prepared for such a challenge. He called child protective services, seeking a permanent placement for the boy, who after all, was not even a relative. CPS apparently felt the boy was safe and asked if Arthur would keep Justin while they found alternate placement. He agreed. Arthur was a passive man, in general, and patient. He assumed that CPS would get around to finding a new home for Justin. But CPS is a reactive, crisis-focused agency and with no one putting pressure on it to do so, it didn’t act. Arthur was not malicious, but he was ignorant about the needs of children. He made a living as a dog breeder, and sadly, applied that knowledge to the care of the baby. He began keeping Justin in a dog cage. He made sure the baby was fed and changed — but he rarely spoke to him, played with him or did any of the other normal things parents do to nurture their children. Justin lived in that cage for five years, spending most of his days with only dogs as his companions.

Thankfully, Justin was rescued. After several months of therapy with Dr. Perry, he managed to recover from such severe childhood neglect. It is easy to imagine a different scenario where Justin isn’t rescued, ultimately condemning him to spend the rest of his life in that cage. Such a case would seem to be an obvious candidate for the type of meaninglessness and absurdity at stake in this debate.

If an entire life spent in a cage would be ultimately meaningless and absurd, then imagine Justin living forever in that cage. A world where Justin is immortal, and where Arthur never deviates from his treatment of Justin, would also seem to be equally absurd.

Thus, like Nagel, we shouldn’t be too quick to accept Craig’s contention that death is what robs life of meaning, because the type of life you have surely matters just as much, and living forever does nothing to remove the absurdity.

Here’s the third claim:

“Because we are all going to die, all chains of justification must leave off in mid-air: one studies and works to earn money to pay for clothing, housing, entertainment, food, to sustain oneself from year to year, perhaps to support a family and pursue a career- but to what final end? All of it is an elaborate journey leading nowhere. (One will also have some effect on other people’s lives, but that simply reproduces the problem, for they will die too.)”

Nagel responds:

Life does not consist of a sequence of activities each of which has as its purpose some later member of the sequence. Chains of justification come repeatedly to an end within life, and whether the process as a whole can be justified has no bearing on the finality of these end-points. No further justification is needed to make it reasonable to take aspirin for a headache, attend an exhibit of the work of a painter one admires, or stop a child from putting his hand on a hot stove. No larger context or further purpose is needed to prevent these acts from being pointless. Even if someone wished to supply a further justification for pursuing all the things in life that are commonly regarded as self-justifying, that justification would have to end somewhere too. If nothing can justify unless it is justified in terms of something outside itself, which is also justified, then an infinite regress results, and no chain of justification can be complete. Moreover, if a finite chain of reasons cannot justify anything, what could be accomplished by an infinite chain, each link of which must be justified by something outside itself? Since justifications must come to an end somewhere, nothing is gained by denying that they end where they appear to, within life — or by trying to subsume the multiple, often trivial ordinary justifications of action under a single, controlling life scheme. Through this type of argument’s misrepresentation of the process of justification, the argument makes a vacuous demand. It insists that the reasons available within life are incomplete, but suggests thereby that all reasons that come to an end are incomplete. This makes it impossible to supply any reasons at all.

Once again, Craig seems to be arguing that death robs life of meaning. There must be some “final end” to our activities, otherwise the entire enterprise of living is absurd.

But immortality would not solve this problem. There are good reasons to believe that an immortal life would be imbued with just as much absurdity and tedium as a mortal one. Many of the activities we engage in and choose to pursue are done so precisely because we have a finite life. We must prioritize what we can accomplish in this life, and making the choice between one activity versus another imbues that choice with meaning it would not otherwise have if we had an infinite lifespan. Without time and our mortality placing constraints upon our choices, we would be free to engage in anything we wanted throughout the course of that immortal life at some point.

As Martha Nussbaum correctly points out:

The intensity and dedication with which very many human activities are pursued cannot be explained without reference to the awareness that our opportunities are finite, that we cannot choose those activities indefinitely many times. In raising a child, in cherishing a lover, in performing a demanding task of work or thought or artistic creation, we are aware, at some level, of the thought that each of these efforts is structured and constrained by finite time. And the removal of that awareness would surely change the pursuits and their meaning for us in ways that we can scarcely imagine — making them, perhaps, more easy, more optional, with less striving and effort in them, less of a particular way of a particular sort of gallantry and courage.

Stephen Maitzen further elaborates:

Craig can ask, “In the cosmic scheme of things, what’s so great about postponing the deaths of particular members of a particular terrestrial species on an insignificant planet? Nothing, unless God exists.” What Craig is evidently seeking is a purpose from which it makes no sense to step back in that way, a purpose about which it makes no sense to ask “What’s so great about that?”, a purpose that satisfies any possible quest for purpose. But Nagel (as I read him) argues that such an ultimate purpose is in principle impossible, because the concept of such an ultimate purpose is incoherent. For as soon as we understand an alleged purpose for our lives well enough to see how it could count as our ultimate purpose, we thereby become able to question it and hence make it non-ultimate. Suppose that enjoying the Beatific Vision of God is our ultimate purpose. It’s perfectly possible to imagine someone stepping back, in the midst of such an experience, and asking, “You mean this is it? This is what we’re ultimately here for? This is what makes the Holocaust and everything else comprehensible and worth it?” … So the quest for an ultimate purpose is incoherent on conceptual grounds; neither theism nor anything else can provide such a purpose.

I would add that Craig’s line of reasoning is one we don’t employ in many other avenues of life. Would anyone tell the Golden State Warriors that winning an NBA championship is a pointless exercise, since next year will bring a new season, and potentially a new champion? If no one 30 years from now will remember who won the 2017 NBA Finals, what’s the point of competing for the championship this year? Looking for an answer to this question that is external to the psychological motivations and drives of the Golden State players themselves seems misguided and doomed to failure. Any externally imposed reason for the value of participating in a sport doesn’t seem all that helpful or explanatorily sufficient unless that reason is one that accords with the internal motivations of the players themselves.

The players engage in their sport not only because it’s a career, but presumably because it’s also intrinsically rewarding to them. The value is in the doing, not solely on the outcome. Would any of us tell a chess player or any other athlete that their entire season was pointless and meaningless because they didn’t win?

Doesn’t this view, one that assigns value to activities solely based on certain outcomes, pose more danger to rob life of meaning than the alternative? Doesn’t a view which tells you that all your efforts were pointless unless you achieved a certain thing commit us to a far more grim outlook on life and threaten to rob of value almost everything we do?