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Course 18 · Lesson 4.4

Meaning, morality and hope in nonreligious positions

12 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 18 outline

Module 1: Studying Religions Fairly

  1. Describing a religion in its own terms
  2. Insider and outsider views, and the limits of comparison
  3. Pluralism, inclusivism and exclusivism: the basic terms
  4. The comparison grid: God, revelation, authority, humanity and salvation

Module 2: Judaism and Islam

  1. Judaism: Torah, covenant and the shape of Jewish life
  2. How Judaism understands Jesus, Messiah and the Christian claim
  3. Islam: the oneness of God, the Prophet and the Quran
  4. How Islam understands Jesus, the Trinity and the Christian claim

Module 3: Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism

  1. Hinduism: its diversity and central ideas
  2. Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths and the path
  3. Sikhism: the Gurus, the one God and the Guru Granth Sahib
  4. Karma, rebirth and liberation compared with Christian hope

Module 4: Deism, Atheism and Agnosticism

  1. Deism: history and beliefs
  2. Atheism: varieties and arguments
  3. Agnosticism and the question of burden of proof
  4. Meaning, morality and hope in nonreligious positions

Module 5: New Religious Movements

  1. What a new religious movement is, and why the term is debated
  2. Movements with Christian roots and their relation to historic Christianity
  3. Other modern movements and spiritualities

Module 6: Comparing the Great Questions

  1. Revelation compared: word, law, awakening and incarnation
  2. Divine nature compared: one God, the Trinity, the Absolute and no creator
  3. Human nature and the human problem compared
  4. Salvation compared: forgiveness, submission, liberation and awakening
  5. Scripture and authority compared

Module 7: Christian Approaches to Other Religions

  1. Exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism examined
  2. Catholic and Orthodox approaches to other religions
  3. Protestant approaches to other religions
  4. Witness, dialogue and respect

All courses

Program / Course 18: World Religions / Lesson 4.4

What you will learn

  • Compare deism, atheism and agnosticism on meaning, morality and hope.
  • State how secular thinkers ground ethics and find meaning without God.
  • Describe the Christian argument that these goods find their deepest ground in God, and the strongest objections to it.
  • Describe the grid entries for the nonreligious positions in fair terms.

The big idea

People who do not hold a historic religion still ask what life means, what is right and what can be hoped for. Deists find an answer in a Creator known by reason. Many atheists and agnostics find meaning in love, work, truth and service, ground ethics in human flourishing or reason, and accept that death is final. Christians argue that meaning, moral obligation and lasting hope are best grounded in God. Nonreligious thinkers reply with serious alternatives. The honest comparison sets out both.

Key terms

Meaning of life
The question of whether life has a purpose, and what it is, either given from outside or made by the person.
Moral realism
The view that some moral claims are objectively true, whether or not anyone believes them.
Divine command theory
The view that what is morally right depends on God’s commands or nature.
Euthyphro dilemma
The question from Plato: is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? Each answer raises problems.
Existentialism
A philosophy that holds that individuals make meaning through their free choices. Some existentialists are atheist and some are Christian.
Humanism
A worldview that stresses human dignity and reason. It exists in religious and secular forms.
Eschatology
The doctrine of last things: death, judgment and the final hope for individuals and the world.

Background

The nonreligious positions are not only denials. Each has a positive story. A deist may say that the Creator made a rational world in which people can flourish and that virtue is the right response. A humanist atheist may say that life is a gift of nature, that human beings can build a good society and that the end of one’s life gives urgency to what one does. A skeptical agnostic may say that he lives by the best light he has.

Christians have often asked these thinkers where meaning, morality and hope come from. The thinkers ask Christians the same question about their own position. This lesson sets out the main exchanges and applies the comparison grid to the nonreligious views, noting where the grid’s categories fit poorly.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Meaning

For Christians, human life has a purpose given by God: to know, love and enjoy him forever. The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it as the chief end of man, and Catholic and Orthodox teaching express a similar thought. Meaning is received, not invented.

Many nonreligious thinkers say that meaning can be made. A life can be meaningful through love, children, craft, discovery, friendship and service, even if the universe as a whole has no purpose. Existentialists such as Sartre said that people must create their own meaning, and Camus described the dignity of living with the absurd without false comfort. Christians reply that these meanings are real goods, and that Christian faith can affirm them as gifts. They add that without an ultimate purpose these meanings are fragile. Atheist philosophers reply that fragile does not mean false, and that the finitude of life gives it value.

Step 2: Morality

The Christian traditions hold that moral law reflects God’s character and is known partly by conscience (Romans 2:15). Catholic natural law tradition, the Orthodox sense of the image of God and Protestant teaching on the law all give moral duties a divine foundation. The moral argument holds that objective moral values and duties are best explained by God.

Nonreligious thinkers offer other grounds. Some, like Kant, ground morality in reason itself. Others, such as utilitarians, ground it in the well-being of all who can suffer. Virtue ethicists look to human flourishing. Some atheists hold that moral facts are real and not dependent on God, and others hold that morality is a human construction that works well. The Euthyphro dilemma is used by atheists against divine command theory. Christians reply that God’s commands flow from his good nature, which is neither arbitrary nor outside him. Both sides agree that atheists and agnostics can and do live morally, and the disagreement is about foundations.

Step 3: Hope and death

Christians hope in the resurrection and the life of the world to come, and in the final defeat of evil (1 Corinthians 15, Revelation 21). Deists of the eighteenth century often kept a hope for a future life and for divine justice. Many modern atheists and agnostics accept that death is the end of the person, and find consolation in the continuing life of humanity, in the good done and in the acceptance of mortality. Some stress that finality gives urgency to love.

Christians reply that this offers no justice for those who suffered without redress and no final victory over death, and that the human heart longs for more. Nonreligious thinkers answer that longing is not evidence, and that false hope can distract from this world. A Christian may say that the hope of resurrection sustains care for this world, as it did for the early Christians who cared for plague victims, and many atheists would agree that some Christians have acted in this way.

Step 4: Community, ritual and practice

The grid should also ask about practice. Humanist congregations and secular societies gather for talks, charity and the marking of life events such as weddings and funerals. Some secular people use meditation, nature walks and reading as practices. Deists have rarely formed communities, which is one reason the movement faded. Agnostics are the least organized.

Christian communities offer weekly worship, sacraments and a lifelong community that includes the old, the sick and the poor. Sociologists find that regular attendance is associated with greater well-being and charity, although their explanations differ. Secular people sometimes say they miss the community that religion supplies, and many have tried to create it.

Step 5: Filling in the grid

A fair grid entry for deism reads: ultimate reality, a Creator known by reason; revelation, none beyond nature and reason; authority, reason and conscience; humanity, rational and moral, in need of virtue; hope, a just God and often a future life. For atheism: ultimate reality, nature; revelation, none; authority, reason, evidence and shared human values; humanity, a natural creature capable of good and harm; hope, human flourishing and the memory of a good life. For agnosticism: suspended judgment on the first questions, with the others varying by person.

These entries show a limit of the grid: the nonreligious positions answer some questions by declining them. A student should say so, and avoid describing a lack of belief as a creed.

  1. Can a purely natural world carry meaning, and what would count as meaning?
  2. Is moral obligation possible without God, and what is at stake in the answer?
  3. What is gained and what is lost by saying that death is the end?
  4. How would a Christian respond to the Euthyphro dilemma?
  5. What does the world’s suffering imply for the Christian hope, and for the nonreligious alternative?
  6. What do you admire in the way nonreligious people you know live?

Examples

A humanist funeral

A family gathers to remember a grandfather. A celebrant speaks of his work, his kindness and the people he loved. There is music and a poem, with no prayer. The family finds comfort in the memory of a life well lived. A Christian attending would honor the grief and may add silent prayer, and would also recognize a human hope for what is good to last.

A moral argument in a classroom

A student asks why cruelty is wrong if there is no God. The teacher, an atheist, says that cruelty causes suffering to beings who can feel, and that this is reason enough. The Christian student answers that this already assumes that suffering matters objectively. They discuss the question for the rest of the class. (A constructed example.)

Camus and the stone

Camus pictured Sisyphus, condemned to push a stone up a hill forever, and imagined him happy. He used the image to say that one can live with dignity without hope of final meaning. Christians may read the myth as an honest portrait of the human situation without God, while holding that a different end is promised.

Different perspectives

Secular and atheist thinkers

Many hold that meaning, morality and hope are possible without God and rest on human experience and reason. They often point to the long history of religious believers who used faith to justify cruelty, and to the moral achievements of secular societies. They insist that nonbelievers do not need religion to be good.

Catholic

The Catholic tradition holds that human reason can know the moral law (natural law) and that atheists can act well, since the law is written on the heart. It teaches that the deepest ground of dignity and obligation is God, and that hope for eternal life answers a longing built into the person (Gaudium et Spes 21).

Orthodox

Orthodox theology says that each human person is made in God’s image and called to share in the divine life, so that the meaning of life is communion with God and with others. Orthodox writers also say that goodness anywhere reflects the Creator, whether or not the person acknowledges him.

Protestant

Protestants range from presuppositionalists, who hold that without God no knowledge or morality is possible, to others such as C. S. Lewis, who argued from shared moral intuition to God. Many Protestants also affirm the common grace by which God gives goodness to all people, believers or not.

Scholarly

Moral philosophers disagree. Some, like Robert Adams, defend a form of divine command theory, and others, like Derek Parfit, defended moral realism without God. Sociologists find that secular people report meaning in family, work and community in about the same degree as the religious in many studies, though results vary.

Why it matters

Whether life has meaning, whether right and wrong are real and whether there is hope beyond death are questions that every person faces. Christians who understand how thoughtful nonbelievers answer them are able to speak with respect and to see where the real disagreement lies. They are also better prepared to examine their own reasons.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: Without God, life must be meaningless and morality empty.

Correction: Many nonbelievers find real meaning and live ethically. The question is about ultimate grounding, and thoughtful people on both sides acknowledge that.

Misunderstanding: Nonbelievers do not have hope.

Correction: Many have hope for humanity, for loved ones and for the good that outlasts a life. It differs from the Christian hope for resurrection, and it is real.

Misunderstanding: Atheists all hold that anything is permitted.

Correction: Most atheists hold firm moral convictions. Nietzsche saw the implications of lacking a foundation more sharply than most, but his view is not that of every atheist.

Misunderstanding: Christians believe only out of fear of death or hope of reward.

Correction: Christian teaching grounds faith in love of God and in what Christians believe is true. Some may be moved by fear or hope, as people are in many matters, but that is not the whole.

Knowledge check

How do Christians and many secular thinkers differ on the source of meaning?

Christians say that meaning is given by God, who made people to know and love him. Many secular thinkers say that meaning is made by people through love, work, discovery and service, even if the universe has no purpose. Christians reply that made meaning is fragile, and secular thinkers say that fragile does not mean false.

What is the Euthyphro dilemma?

It asks whether something is good because God commands it, or whether God commands it because it is good. If the first, goodness seems arbitrary. If the second, goodness seems independent of God. Christians commonly answer that God’s commands flow from his own good nature, which is neither arbitrary nor outside him.

Do Christians say that atheists cannot be moral?

Mainstream Christian teaching does not say this. Paul writes that the law is written on all hearts (Romans 2:15), and Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions grant that atheists act well. The disagreement is about what grounds moral obligation, not whether nonbelievers can be good.

Why do the nonreligious positions fit the comparison grid poorly?

The grid asks about God, revelation, scripture, salvation and practice. The nonreligious positions answer some of these by denying or setting them aside, so the entries are often about what is lacking. A fair entry says that these positions decline the question and avoids treating the absence of belief as a creed.

Think it through

  1. What gives your own life meaning, and would it survive the loss of what you now depend on?
  2. How would you explain to a nonbelieving friend why you think goodness has a source?
  3. What can a Christian learn from the secular insistence on honesty about death?
  4. Where do you see Christians and nonbelievers working together well?

Independent assignment

Meaning, morality and hope: a conversation

In your notebook, write a conversation of about 500 words between a Christian and a thoughtful nonbeliever (atheist, agnostic or deist) on the three topics of meaning, morality and hope. Give each speaker real arguments and let neither win by caricature. End with 100 words stating where you think the strongest disagreement lies. Complete the nonreligious columns of your comparison grid.

Further study