The contributions

The six contributions gathered here approach these questions from different and, at times, competing perspectives. They do not collectively defend a single account of meaning, nor do they treat atheism as a unified philosophical position. Rather, atheism serves as a point of departure for reconsidering the relations between meaning, value, normativity, transcendence, agency, and human finitude. Some contributions locate meaning within secular human practices and projects, whereas others ask whether such accounts can adequately explain the normative dimension of our commitments. One contribution challenges the traditional and radical opposition between transcendence and immanence, while another contribution reflects on the question as to whether theism might nevertheless provide specific and fundamental forms of meaning unavailable without God. The issue thus moves beyond the familiar question of whether atheists can have meaningful lives and reflects on the notion of meaningfulness, and namely asks what makes meaningfulness intelligible in the first place.

Philip Kitcher’s ‘The Human Project, or What Difference Would God Make?’ poses the question in its most direct form: what, if anything, does God add to an account of a meaningful human life? Kitcher begins with the Augustinian model according to which earthly existence derives its significance from its relation to an afterlife and to a divine order of reward and punishment. He argues, however, that such a model is neither necessary nor philosophically innocent. If a divine plan is to confer meaning on human life, the ends specified by that plan must themselves already possess value. Divine command cannot simply transform something otherwise worthless into something valuable. Kitcher consequently develops a secular alternative in terms of what he calls the ‘Human Project’: the transgenerational enterprise of discovering, preserving, and extending human values. On this view, meaning arises through participation in something larger than the individual without requiring cosmic purpose, immortality, or divine sanction. Even ordinary acts of care and kindness can acquire significance insofar as they contribute to human flourishing. Kitcher thus reverses a familiar formulation of the problem. Rather than asking how atheism might compensate for the absence of God, he asks what God is supposed to contribute in the first place. His answer is that nothing essential is added: religious lives may be meaningful, but their meaning derives from the forms of human value and the contribution they make to the ‘human project’ rather than from their metaphysical commitments.

Fiona Ellis’s ‘Meaning, Desire, and the Limits of Atheism’ presses further on the distinction between meaningfulness and the grounds of value. Whereas Kitcher locates meaning within a secular human project, Ellis asks whether an account that remains within an immanent framework can adequately explain the normative dimension of the things to which human beings devote themselves. Drawing on Richard Taylor and Friedrich Nietzsche, she begins by stressing the importance of desire. Meaningfulness genuinely involves caring about what one does. Yet desire alone cannot explain why some objects of concern are valuable or why some desires ought to be transformed. Ellis therefore develops an expansive naturalist position that resists a simple opposition between naturalism and theism. Drawing on Hadewijch and Iris Murdoch, she places love at the centre of meaningful existence, understood as an openness to others and as a transformation of desire beyond self-centredness. God, on this account, is not conceived as an external supernatural entity standing outside ordinary existence, but as encountered through love within it. Ellis thus shifts the debate from the question as to whether a life can be meaningful without God to the more demanding question of whether an account that does not appeal to a transcendent divine purpose can explain the sources of value that make meaningfulness possible at all.

The relation between transcendence and immanence is reconsidered from a different angle by Sebastian Hüsch and Klaus Viertbauer in ‘Life’s Meaning and Transcendence’. They argue that the contemporary preference for speaking of ‘meaning in life’ rather than ‘the meaning of life’ reflects a deeper transformation in the conception of transcendence. Their distinction between absolute transcendence and immanent transcendence challenges the pertinence of a simple opposition between theism and naturalism. Both can contain forms of absolute transcendence when they claim to provide a comprehensive standpoint from which the meaning of human existence can be determined. Their concern, however, is not to reject the respective other worldview as such, but to resist the displacement of first-person experience by an allegedly final and objective account of existence. They develop this argument through a critical examination of narrative identity. Narratives are indispensable for integrating past, present, and future, yet human existence also includes events that happen to us and cannot be entirely mastered or assimilated into an established life story. Drawing on the notion of the minimal self, Hüsch and Viertbauer argue that meaningfulness is grounded more fundamentally in pre-reflective first-person experience and in the subject’s openness to what exceeds its agency. Their references to Taoism and Buddhism, particularly to the concept of Śūnyatā, further illustrate how transcendence may be conceived relationally rather than as a separate metaphysical realm. Meaning, on this account, need not depend on an externally given purpose, yet neither must it be reduced to what human beings can fully control or comprehend.

If Kitcher asks how far God is necessary for meaning, Ellis asks whether an immanent account can adequately explain value, and Hüsch and Viertbauer reflect on the necessity to understand transcendence as external to human existence, Thaddeus Metz turns the discussion into a more explicitly metaphysical direction. In ‘Introducing the State of Debate on God’s Role in a Meaningful Life’, Metz examines the moderate supernaturalist position according to which meaningful lives are possible without God, while maintaining that the highest forms of meaning might nevertheless depend upon God’s existence. Engaging with Guy Kahane’s argument that whatever a good God might provide could in principle also be realized without God, Metz distinguishes between goods that God might enable – such as immortality, cosmic justice, redemption, or an overarching purpose – and meaning itself, which he understands as a personal and variable good involving agency, contribution, admiration, and relationships with objects worthy of love. If moderate supernaturalism is to establish a distinctive advantage for theism, Metz argues, it must therefore appeal not merely to what God does for human beings but to what is unique about God. Drawing on Susan Wolf’s influential account of meaning as arising from loving what is objectively worthy of love, he proposes that a being whose perfections could not be instantiated in an atheist world could constitute an object of love whose significance could not be replicated without God. Metz does not claim to demonstrate that God is necessary for great meaning. Rather, he identifies the relationship with a uniquely perfect being as the strongest candidate for explaining why theism might offer a form of meaning unavailable without God. The question is thus no longer simply if, in a general sense, a meaningful life is possible without God, but if the greatest forms of meaning might be metaphysically dependent upon theism.

These questions also bear on the value of human existence itself. In ‘Religious Antinatalism: A Rare Breed’, David Benatar challenges the widespread assumption that religious belief and antinatalism are fundamentally incompatible. Antinatalism, he argues, does not logically presuppose atheism: it is possible to affirm the existence of God while maintaining that creating new sentient beings is morally wrong. Benatar examines the pronatalist tendencies of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, while also drawing attention to antinatalist elements within each tradition. Job and Jeremiah, for instance, express profound regret for having been born, while the Talmud records the striking debate between the Houses of Hillel and Shammai over the question as to whether it would have been better for human beings to never have been created. Within Christianity, Benatar considers the early valorization of virginity and celibacy, as well as the implications of doctrines such as original sin and hell. Buddhism, Benatar argues, provides a particularly significant framework for antinatalist positions through its analysis of suffering, its causes, and liberation from rebirth. Benatar’s analysis proposes a systematic distinction between religions that are explicitly antinatalist and religions that, given their own central commitments, contain elements favoring antinatalist stances. His contribution extends the discussion from the question of how an existing life acquires meaning to the prior ethical question of procreation: Is bringing new lives into existence is itself something we have reason to value? In doing so, Benatar’s paper argues that the question of meaning may presuppose a more fundamental one: whether existence itself is something that ought to be valued. Reflection on the value of existence therefore bears not only on how we ought to live but also very fundamentally, if we should create further lives.

J. L. Schellenberg’s ‘Atheism, Evolution, and Meaning’ addresses the relation between atheism and evolution and places the question of meaning within a broader temporal horizon. Schellenberg challenges the assumption that atheism and evolutionary theory necessarily undermine the possibility of meaning. On the contrary, he argues that an evolutionary perspective can furnish resources for an atheistic account of both meaning in life and the meaning of life. Distinguishing different senses of meaning, including meaning as explanation and as destiny, he develops the notion of ‘stage sensitivity’. Human beings, Schellenberg holds, occupy a particular and relatively early stage in an ongoing process of biological and cultural evolution. The significance of present human existence can therefore be understood in relation to its potential contribution to future forms of human development, without implying that this development has a predetermined or guaranteed endpoint. Meaning emerges not as something bestowed from outside but through individual and collective participation in projects that contribute to human flourishing and development. Indeed, Schellenberg suggests that meaning itself evolves insofar as changing biological, cultural, and technological forms of life create new possibilities for meaningful activity. Evolution thus becomes not an argument against meaning but part of the conditions under which meaning can emerge. Human beings take part in an unfinished developmental process, and the possibility of meaning is consequently connected to the possibility of shaping what humanity may become.

The question of meaning

Taken together, these contributions demonstrate that it is reductionist to frame the question of atheism and the meaning of life merely as the antagonistic choice between divine purpose and nihilism. They instead emphasize the necessity to approach the issue with detailed analysis which can be derived from various perspectives, using different methodological tools. Kitcher asks whether God is needed at all for meaningfulness. Ellis asks whether an immanent account can explain why the objects of our concern are valuable and why our desires may need transformation. Hüsch and Viertbauer challenge the assumption that transcendence must be external to human existence. Metz reopens the theological possibility that theism may provide a distinctive object of love and, with it, forms of meaning unavailable without God. Benatar takes a step back and shifts the reflection from the meaning of concrete existing lives to the value of life as such. Schellenberg places meaning within an open-ended temporal process in which human beings participate in the development of future forms of life.

The resulting picture is not a linear argument towards a single conclusion. Rather, each contribution stresses assumptions that otherwise often remain implicit in debates about meaning. In a certain way, they complement and contradict each other and thus highlight the main issues at stake in a Nietzschean ‘perspectivist’ sense. Taken together, they shift the debate from the mere focus on the opposition between theism and atheism to an analysis of the most fundamental conditions under which meaningfulness becomes possible.

What unites these approaches, therefore, is not a shared answer but a shared focus on the concept of meaning itself and its underlying structures. Once divine purpose can no longer simply be presupposed, an account of meaningfulness must clarify what makes human projects worth pursuing, desires worth transforming, objects worthy of love, experiences capable of significance, and future forms of human life worth being brought about. At the same time, the contributions suggest that abandoning the idea of a transcendent guarantor need not entail abandoning the concept of transcendence as a source of meaningfulness. Thus, transcendence may be located in human relationships, in the openness of first-person existence to what exceeds individual agency, in the temporal horizon of an unfinished evolutionary process. However, as Metz argues, these conceptualizations of what could be framed as immanent transcendence may lack what can be contained in a relation to a being whose perfections could not be instantiated in an atheist world.

The resulting picture is therefore more complex and multifaceted than either the well-known straightforward secularization thesis or the familiar reductionist antagonism theism-versus-atheism suggest. The central issue is not merely whether atheists can lead meaningful lives. Rather, we have to ask for the conceptions of value, normativity, agency, and transcendence that are required to make meaningfulness intelligible under conditions of human finitude. These questions are radically and inextricably interdependent: what counts as a meaningful project depends in large part on what counts as valuable; what counts as valuable raises questions about normativity; and both value and normativity depend upon how transcendence, agency, and the temporal limits of human existence are understood. Naturally, the contributions collected here do not resolve these questions. They show, however, why addressing them requires philosophy of religion to reconsider the complex interrelations between meaning, value, transcendence, and human finitude. The philosophical significance of this special issue hence does not consist of replacing a theistic account with an atheistic one, but in asking what any adequate account of meaningful human existence must ultimately be able to explain.