1. New Religious Thought about Meaning in Life

In the West, philosophers sympathetic towards a religious account of what is central to meaning in life have changed their account of late. For much of the modern era, up until about 20 years ago, the dominant view amongst those who believe that life's meaning depends crucially on God or a soul (as characteristically conceived by the Abrahamic faiths) has been that such spiritual conditions are necessary for any one of our lives to be meaningful. Positions have included the claims that: a meaningful life is a purposeful one, where God alone could provide an objective purpose; only God could ground a universal morality without which life would not make sense; living up to a universal morality, and hence living meaningfully, would require having an indestructible spiritual nature that is able to overcome the physical laws of nature; meaning in life consists of coming close to God or of God meting out justice, which can be done only if we have immortal souls. Call these rationales instances of ‘extreme supernaturalism’, for entailing that, if neither God nor a soul exists, all our lives are meaningless, which involves denying that anything about the course of our existence merits pride, admiration, or awe or that there are any values in it higher than animal pleasures and satisfactions.Footnote ¹

However, in the 21^st century, many western religious thinkers – beyond those inclined towards a naturalist approach to meaning in life – have found objections to extreme supernaturalism compelling. One powerful intuition has been that at least the lives of Gandhi, Einstein, and Mandela were meaningful, even on the supposition that there exists only a physical universe.

Supernaturalism has not died out, but instead has morphed into a more ‘moderate’ version. A salient view amongst religious philosophers of life's meaning has become that, while a meaningful life is possible in a world without God or a soul, a greater or ultimate meaning would be possible only in a world with (at least one of) them. Explicit adherents to this view include thinkers such as Philip Quinn (Reference Quinn, Runzo and Martin2000), John Cottingham (Reference Cottingham, Seachris and Goetz2016), Richard Swinburne (Reference Swinburne, Seachris and Goetz2016), Timothy Mawson (Reference Mawson2016), and Clifford Williams (Reference Williams2020).

There have been a variety of specifications of what constitutes a great or ultimate meaning, with moderate supernaturalists yet to debate amongst themselves which is most promising.Footnote ² In this article, I critically discuss temporal and quantitative interpretations of greatness or ultimacy, according to which it is the longest or largest amount of meaning. According to this sort of moderate supernaturalism, on which I focus here, while an earthly life could offer a limited or finite meaning, only a life with a soul and God could offer an eternal or infinite one.

William Lane Craig can be read as providing an important argument for the view that only with God and a soul could our lives have an eternal, as opposed to temporally limited, significance.Footnote ³ According to him, without such spiritual conditions, our moral decisions make no ultimate difference, neither to the world nor to our lives, whereas if those conditions do obtain, then our moral decisions do make an ultimate difference.

After briefly expounding this argument in the following section (2), I present objections to it. I contend that if God existed and we had souls that lived forever, then, in fact, all our lives would turn out the same (section 3). One central rationale is that, if God and a soul exist, then we cannot make any difference to the quality of others’ lives, since, in terms of harms, God would compensate others for any that befell them and, in terms of benefits, we could not improve on the infinity in Heaven coming to them from God. After that I maintain that, if this objection is wrong, so that our moral choices would indeed confer an eternal significance on our lives (only) in a supernatural realm, then Craig could not capture the view, aptly held by moderate supernaturalists, that a meaningful life is possible in a purely natural world (section 4). Basically, an eternal significance would be ‘too big’, reducing any meaning possible during an earthly life to nothing by comparison. I conclude that moderate supernaturalists would probably be wise to avoid appealing to eternal or infinite meaning when spelling out the respect in which God and a soul could alone impart a great meaning to our lives; some other notion of greatness should be considered (section 5).

2. Craig on Life Mattering through Making a Difference

It is not clear that it is right to view Craig as a moderate supernaturalist, for there are places in his writings where he defends Divine Command Theory, which naturally supports the extreme versionFootnote ⁴; if only God could ground universal moral obligations, the living up to which were necessary for meaning in life, then God would be necessary for meaning. However, there are other arguments of Craig's the logic of which does support moderate supernaturalism, even if he does not accept this position. One of them appeals to the idea that a great meaning requires making an ultimate difference, something possible only if God and a soul exist.

Consider the following quotations:

Notice the recurrent qualifications. Speaking of ‘eternal’ significance invites comparison with a less than eternal significance. Talk of an ‘ultimate’ contribution or of something being ‘ultimately’ meaningless or insignificant suggests a less than ultimate meaning or significance. Making a ‘lasting’ difference implies making a difference that does not last. Hence, this argument is sensibly read as supporting a moderate supernaturalism, according to which meaning is possible in the world as known particularly well by science, but an eternal, ultimate, or lasting one is not and requires a God who rewards good and punishes bad in the course of judging one's soul. In any event, that is how I shall interpret the above quotations, regardless of Craig's own intentions.Footnote ⁵

In some ways, this reasoning harks back more than 2000 years to some passages in Ecclesiastes.Footnote ⁶ The worry that all our lives end up the same, regardless of the nature of our moral choices, is one factor that led Koheleth (the presumed author of the book) to proclaim that ‘all is vanity’ and that life is akin ‘to the pursuit of wind’. He remarks of death: ‘(T)he same fate is in store for all: for the righteous, and for the wicked; for the good and pure, and for the impure….That is the sad thing about all that goes on under the sun: that the same fate is in store for all’ (9.2–9.3; see also 2.14–2.16, 3.17).

Craig is not explicit when advancing this reasoning about how it is that God would hold us morally accountable and respond to our choices (nor is Koheleth about how he wishes God would do so). However, the picture seems to be a common one amongst Christian and Muslim theists, according to which God sends the souls of those who have exhibited moral virtue (whether in the form of faith or works) to Heaven, where they will enjoy eternal life with God, and God sends the souls those who have exhibited vice to eternal damnation in Hell. If, and only if, there is such judgement can one's moral decisions make an eternal, ultimate, or lasting difference and exhibit a corresponding meaning, so the argument goes.

Contra Craig, in the following section I maintain that it is not so much death, but more clearly immortality, that would be the great leveller. If we all had souls that could not perish, and if God determined the quality of life of those souls in response to their moral choices, then it would in fact be the case that everyone ends up the same and our moral choices do not make any real difference to the course of our lives or those of others.

3. Immortality as the Great Leveller

In this section I make the case that if we have immortal souls that God looks after, then our moral choices do not make a lasting difference and confer an eternal significance, whereas if we are mortal and on our own, then some difference remains possible, even if not a lasting one. I first show how the lives of others as moral patients would not be differentially affected by our ethical decisions if an Abrahamic spiritual realm exists (3.1) and then how our own lives as moral agents also would not be so affected (3.2).

4. Immortality as the Great Overshadower

Suppose that, despite my argumentation in the previous section, somehow Craig were able to reach his conclusion. Perhaps he would suggest that the sense of ‘making a lasting difference’ sufficient for an eternal significance is making certain choices and then going to Heaven, even if these choices could not change the overall quality of anyone else's life and even if one's own overall quality of life would end up the same as everyone else's. I submit that this sense of the phrase does not in fact seem to be the one pertinent to what would make one's life matter; after all, making a difference in respect of meaningfulness is intuitively understood to involve one's improving others’ net quality of life and then not seeing the wicked and lazy end up doing as well as oneself, neither of which is possible on the assumption of theism, or so I argued in the previous section. However, let us grant Craig that he can reach his conclusion, that an eternal significance for one's life is possible with God and a soul and only with them.

In that case, I submit that the logic of Craig's position would render him unable to capture the intuition that life in an atheist world could be meaningful. Recall the difference between extreme and moderate supernaturalism. The former is the view that God or a soul is necessary for one's life to be meaningful, while the latter is the view that, although these spiritual conditions are not necessary for that, they are necessary for one's life to have a great or ultimate meaning. Reading Craig as providing an argument for the moderate variety, my claim is that, if he understands a great/ultimate meaning to be one that is eternal or infinite, then it is ‘too big’: for then a life of approximately 80 years amounts to nothing by comparison and Craig cannot make sense of the moderate claim that a meaningful life is possible without God or a soul.Footnote ¹⁵

I note that the comparative aspect of this point has been made by others recently. For example, T. J. Mawson recognizes that ‘given that the afterlife is potentially infinite, so any finite dollop will diminish in relative size, tending to nothing over time’ (Mawson, Reference Mawson2016, p. 144), and Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu note that ‘whatever value we bring to our lives or the lives of others will fade gradually to nothing in the course of eternity’ (Persson and Savulescu, Reference Persson and Savulescu2019, p. 234). What has not been acknowledged is that these plausible claims render moderate supernaturalism unstable. If a great meaning is an eternal one, then no life of 80 or so years can be meaningful by comparison, undercutting moderate supernaturalism and returning us to an extreme form.

More carefully, there are two ways to make the objection, depending on whether the great/ultimate meaning is construed in temporal or quantitative terms. In terms of time, if God and a soul would afford eternal significance, then no earthly life of about 80 years can compare and hence the supernaturalist cannot account for the intuition that a such a life could be significant. If a life of eternal significance would bring an infinite amount of meaning in its wake,Footnote ¹⁶ then consider that no life with a finite amount of meaning can compare and hence the supernaturalist cannot account for the intuition that such a life could be meaningful.

To be sure, by the present position, although an 80 year life would ‘tend to nothing’, it need not be a ‘flat zero’ (Mawson, Reference Mawson2016, p. 5) in terms of the amount of meaning in it. However, it would, compared to infinity (or eternity), come as close to zero as is mathematically possible for a positive number, which, I maintain, fails to capture the judgement that a life can be meaningful absent God and a soul.

The moderate supernaturalist who invokes eternal life in Heaven needs to explain how we can avoid thinking that its value would ridiculously outweigh that of an earthly lifespan, reducing it to next to nothing by comparison, thereby leaving us unable to capture the intuition that an earthly life, such as that of Gandhi, Einstein, or Mandela, could ever count as meaningful on balance. Note that she cannot coherently suggest that judgements of whether someone's life is meaningful are not in some way comparative or relative, for the defining point of her view is precisely a particular comparative or relative judgement, viz., that a spiritual dimension would alone make possible a greater sort of meaning in life than what is on offer in the physical universe.

Prior to advancing this argument against Craig's appeal to eternal significance, I had done so in respect of Mawson's appeal to infinite significance, and Mawson has recently authored a substantial reply to it (Mawson, Reference Mawson2020). He makes two major criticisms that are relevant here, which I now aim to rebut.

Mawson's initial criticism is that the life in Heaven would be a merely potential infinity, not an actual one, and so the relevant comparison is not between a life that in fact has lasted for an infinite amount of time and a life that has not. ‘(T)he amount of meaningfulness our lives will ever contain is always going to be a potential infinity, not an actual infinity, i.e., it will always be finite’ (Mawson, Reference Mawson2020, p. 4).

However, the two points made above in the context of potential infinity apply here, too. On the one hand, if the life will indeed never end, then it is reasonable to compare a life that will have an unending amount of value with one that will have a finite amount. On the other hand, if one elects to consider the life at a given point in time, the logic of my point remains: for a life of billions of billions of years would also overshadow a life of approximately 80 years. An actual infinitude would be sufficient to overshadow, making any one of our earthly lives ‘tend to nothing’, but it is not necessary; a merely potential infinity will suffice.

Mawson's second criticism involves supposing that I believe that judgements of meaning are solely comparative, when they in fact are not. In the way judgements of whether something is big do seem to be merely comparative, Mawson says, ‘Metz is, I suggest, naturally read as supposing that “meaningful” functions in a similar way. “Meaningful” means relatively meaningful, relative to some suitable comparison class and its relative meaning is the only meaning it has’ (Mawson, Reference Mawson2020, p. 7). Mawson then reasonably contends that not all appraisals of whether someone's actual life is meaningful are relative to someone else's actual life or to that person's possible life. For Mawson, one can make an absolute judgement of meaning. Simply looking at one actual person's life, without knowledge of how anyone else is faring or how that person could have fared, one can determine whether her life has some meaning in it or not. In addition, ‘No matter how much meaningfulness it's our destiny to receive, that future cannot diminish the absolute amount of meaningfulness we have at any time received’ (Mawson, Reference Mawson2020, p. 15).

However, I do not deny that one can make absolute judgements of meaning in the ways that Mawson believes. And I do not need to hold that judgements of meaning are only comparative in order to make the point about overshadowing. I think all I need to note is that essential to Mawson's (and others’) moderate supernaturalism is a comparative claim, namely, the judgement that a meaningful life is possible without spiritual conditions, but that they would alone make possible a greater meaning and specifically a (potentially) eternal or infinite one. When it is said that ‘a meaningful life is possible without spiritual conditions’, I take that to say more than just that a life could have some meaning in it without them. Instead, it is plausibly read as the claim that a life could have enough meaning in it to make it sensible to describe the whole life as meaningful, which is much more difficult to establish when an earthly life is put into comparison with eternal life in Heaven.

Recall that a key motivation for moderate supernaturalism has been the attempt to capture the widely shared intuition that the lives of Gandhi, Einstein, and Mandela were meaningful even supposing there is only a physical universe. That involves the claim that these lives warranted reactions such as pride from a first-person perspective and admiration and awe from a third-person perspective. It is difficult to see how that claim can be sustained if we are comparing these lives with those that have an eternal or infinite meaning, even a merely potential one. They simply are not that impressive by comparison. Central to moderate supernaturalism is the claim that, although a meaningful life is possible without God or a soul, these spiritual conditions would alone make a much greater meaning available, where that, for Mawson (and probably implicitly Craig) is a potential infinity. And so we are back to Mawson's own point that ‘given that the afterlife is potentially infinite, so any finite dollop will diminish in relative size, tending to nothing over time’ (Mawson, Reference Mawson2016, p. 144), where tending to nothing is not enough for a life to count as meaningful by comparison.

Notice the title of Mawson's essay: ‘Why Heaven Doesn't Make Earth Absolutely Meaningless, Just Relatively’. My claim is that if supernaturalism entails that an earthly life is meaningless relative to Heaven, then it is no longer moderate, that is, no longer able to capture the intuition that an earthly life can be meaningful, even if a Heavenly life would have a greater meaning. Hence, I am not committed to holding that all judgements of meaning are comparative. Instead, the moderate supernaturalist is the one inviting us to compare degrees of meaning, indeed to compare (what I accept are) absolute amounts of it, in the present case between finite and infinite lives. When Mawson claims that eternal life in Heaven would give us a potential eternity or infinity of meaning, which is much more desirable compared to the dollop available on earth, we are to consider whether we would judge our dollop to afford us a life aptly described as ‘meaningful’ compared to a potential infinity and so warranting reactions of pride and awe. The answer, I submit, is ‘No’, which means that extreme supernaturalism is what is really being offered.Footnote ¹⁷

5. Concluding Thoughts about the Way Forward for Moderate Supernaturalism

William Lane Craig is usefully read as arguing that God and a soul are necessary for an eternal significance in one's life, although not a significant life as such, because only with them can one's moral decisions make a lasting difference to others and ourselves. I have advanced two major objections to this argument. On the one hand, I contended that theism would not enable us to make a lasting difference of the sort most clearly relevant to meaning. We could not affect how well off anyone else is over the course of their life since God would compensate for harm done to them and bestow endless benefit on them, and we also could not influence the quality of our own lives relative to that of others, on the reasonable supposition that Hell would not be on the cards for anyone and universal salvation would instead be expected from God. On the other hand, I maintained that, if the logic of Craig's argument is successful, it entails a conclusion that, upon reflection, is difficult to square with a genuinely moderate supernaturalism. If an eternal significance would come with the presence of God and a soul, then such a life would be so much more significant than one of our earthly lives as to render the latter insignificant by comparison.

Now, Craig's appeal to moral accountability is not the only rationale for moderate supernaturalism, and his appeal to eternal significance is not the only way to interpret moderate supernaturalism. If it is true, given theism, that our moral choices do not make a difference to the net quality of others’ lives or our own and that an appeal to eternal significance is in effect extreme, then the moderate supernaturalist has reason to give up theism. However, that need not mean giving up the entire picture that philosophers working within the monotheist tradition have advanced. For one option to consider, it would be worth reflecting on whether God should be conceived as putting an expiration date on our souls, as it were. That is, imagine that we were able to survive the death of our body, with the virtuous receiving reward for a long while and the wicked receiving something negative, but that none of our selves would continue forever. Then, the significance of the afterlife would be greater than what an earthly life could afford, while not necessarily overshadowing it. In addition, then it would be the case that our moral decisions could in fact make a difference to the net quality of others’ lives and also our own, for no eternal life would serve as a great leveller. Although this would be an unusual position for adherents to the Abrahamic faiths, I note that something broadly like it is the standard position for Traditional African Religion,Footnote ¹⁸ a globally under-recognized form of monotheism. It will be interesting to see how moderate supernaturalism continues to be articulated and defended as debate continues.Footnote ¹⁹