We can create our own meaning without God

What's right about this

People clearly do find deep meaning in relationships, creative work, justice and service, whatever they believe about God. Believers shouldn't pretend otherwise. And there is something admirable in the existentialist call to stop drifting and take ownership of our choices. Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, pictured a man condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever and concluded, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." That is a brave response to a universe he believed had no built-in purpose.

Two kinds of meaning

It helps to distinguish between subjective meaning, the sense of purpose I feel, and objective meaning, whether my life actually matters in a way that doesn't depend on my feelings. Self-made meaning can supply the first. The question is whether it can supply the second.

If meaning is purely self-created, then a life devoted to caring for refugees and a life devoted to collecting bottle caps are equally meaningful, as long as each person feels fulfilled. Most of us don't believe that. We think some lives really are more worthwhile than others, and that a person can be mistaken about whether their life is meaningful. That intuition points to a standard outside ourselves.

The problem of the long view

Without God, the universe will eventually end in heat death, with no minds left to remember anything. Every achievement, every love, every sacrifice will be as if it never happened. Bertrand Russell faced this honestly, writing that we must build our lives on "the firm foundation of unyielding despair." Many atheists are less bleak, but the question remains whether meaning that ends in total erasure is meaning in the fullest sense.

How Christianity frames it

Christianity says meaning is not invented but discovered. We are made by a personal God, for relationship with him and others, and our lives are part of a story that doesn't end at death. That doesn't erase personal creativity; it gives it a foundation. Your work, love and choices matter because they matter to God and last into eternity. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived Nazi camps, observed in Man's Search for Meaning that people could endure almost anything if they had a "why" to live for. Christianity claims to offer a "why" that is true, not just useful.

A fair concession

Saying "God gives meaning" doesn't prove God exists. Our longing for objective meaning could, in principle, be unfulfilled. But it's worth asking why we have such a longing in the first place, and whether it fits better in a world made by God (see Is there a God?).

How to explain this to a friend

A good way in is to ask a friend what makes their life feel meaningful. Usually the answer is love, family, work they believe in or helping people. Affirm all of it. Then ask a follow-up: do you think those things really matter, or only matter because you've decided they do? That question opens the conversation without making anyone defensive, and it gets to the heart of the difference between invented and discovered meaning.

The bottom line

We can create personal purposes, and that matters. But self-made meaning can't tell us whether one life is truly better than another, or whether anything lasts. If you want meaning that is real rather than just felt, it has to come from beyond us. For more, read What is the meaning of life?