Is there a meaning crisis and what do we do about it? Stephen Bartlett wants to know, which is why he had onto his podcast, The Diary of a CEO, three different guests. He had an atheist thinker, Alex O'Connor, he had a spiritual thinker, Dr. Kay, and he had a Christian, Greg Kukel. Stephen Bartlett framed the conversation around some statistics about meaninglessness.
SPEAKER_01And a lot of people are turning back to religion. There is something going on.
SPEAKER_03Later on, Stephen Bartlett told two stories about meaninglessness. One in which a friend found Christianity and found meaning. Another in which a friend was lost.
SPEAKER_01I can literally lay out the personas, but I've got one particular friend who's 35, between 35 and 40 years old, living in Dubai, living in a glass box freelancer. So he wakes up in the morning, his bed is there, he then works there, then goes back to bed. He's single, no kids. In his life at the moment, he said to me that he can't get out of bed anymore. He feels stuck. And then about six months after, out of the blue, it turns out, without telling any of us, and we're his best friends, he's flown to America, he's been baptized, he's a Christian, suddenly his life has purpose and meaning again. He's a completely different person. And this individual never, ever, he would be the last person that you'd think would be religious. Got another friend, female, just over 30 years old, doesn't have kids, freelance, works at home. Um when I asked her what her meaning and purpose in life, she said to me she wants to get to having 200 plants, plants she can water. She names all of them. She then told me a week after she's in therapy because she feels lost and stuck in life. And so much of the central point why I've been motivated to have this conversation is it appears to me, and I haven't nailed this hypothesis yet, that freedom, independence, be your own boss, the decline in people having children, the glamorization of, as you said at the very beginning, like, you know, do it yourself, do it your way, is failing people in some way. And then actually the push for independence w was in some way some kind of lie. I actually also went through the same new atheist uh baptism that you went through. And I read all those books at 18 years old and two years, I was I was debating dog walkers on the street about God. I was so such a staunch atheist. But I now find myself in a position where I'm almost back to being curious again because it feels like independence wasn't the answer.
SPEAKER_03The whole conversation is nearly three and a half hours. We're just gonna focus in on one portion of the conversation in which Alex O'Connor says that the meaning crisis is ancient, in which he says a higher purpose is not going to solve it, and neither is God going to solve it. I'm gonna push back on those three points and we'll try and figure out what we even mean by a meaning in life. My name's Glenn Scrivener from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. We're in the process of moving into our new studio. We're not we're not yet fully moved in, but I think we're heading in the right direction. Let's dive into Alex O'Connor very early on in this conversation, talking about how ancient the meaning crisis actually is.
SPEAKER_02There is this idea that we are living in a meaning crisis that has cropped up maybe in the past hundred years or so, or maybe in the last few hundred years or so, as a response to the Enlightenment and the decline of religion. I think that's far too easy. I think that's way too easy. I think that if there is such a thing as a meaning crisis, it is literally the human condition and the reason why these projects were invented in the first place. Aaron Powell I think literally speaking, what people are doing in religious traditions is realizing the finitude of their existence and therefore trying to commune with something less finite.
SPEAKER_03Of course. Aaron Powell So that's issue number one that Alex says the meaning crisis is a very ancient problem. You just need to open the Bible and discover that there are people like Job who are asking God 20 times, why am I having to live through all this suffering? Or you read through the Psalms, people crying out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Or we read in other wisdom literature like Ecclesiastes, in which the teacher says meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless. So you might think there's nothing new about the meaning crisis, but Greg Kukel is going to push back on that.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell We have this hunger. And I I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic explanation can explain the consciousness's hunger for meaning and significance. Because that's all propositional. It's not molecules in motion.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr.: What's naturalistic mean?
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Naturalistic just means nature, and that's all there is, basically. So you have uh molecules in motion largely governed by natural law. There is no outside transcendent anything. There's no immaterial anything, certainly not an immaterial God that has started the process and sustains the process and gives life meaning. There either is meaning objectively or not. Okay. If not, then it's up to us. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_03I think that's a good pushback from Greg Kugel. It's one thing to shake your fist at the heavens and say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's another thing to think I am not freely in charge of my fist shaking, as Alex believes as a hard determinist, that actually a whole bunch of necessary causes has led me to shake my fist, and then who is the me that is doing it? I think consciousness on a naturalistic worldview is very, very difficult. I think Alex actually agrees with that. But if you are a hard determinist who has problems with consciousness and you think the heavens are empty, then what even is going on as you shake your fist at the heavens? For an Old Testament believer to have a meaning crisis is one set of issues. But for a modern person who is told that they are simply determined by their biology, who has difficulty even conceiving of their own agency in the world, their own conscious first person narrative of the world, a person who is told that the heavens aren't just empty, but there is no such concept, that is a meaning crisis of a whole different order. The Bible is giving you a narrative in which you are you, your agency matters, the heavens are not empty, and yes, there is still suffering, yes, there is still an experience of the hiddenness of God. But crucially, you are allowed to struggle with meaning in that worldview. Greg Kugel is asking the question: if naturalism is true, why do we even have a problem struggling with meaninglessness? Why are we not just machines? Speaking of machines, this is the second thing that Alex O'Connor is going to bring up. He's very good at bringing up analogies and illustrations. And here is his second one, where he's going to try and say to us that a higher purpose is not sufficient for giving you meaning in life. Here's the analogy.
SPEAKER_02For example, a moment ago you said that if there is a creator God who brings us into existence, then you are designed and you are given purpose by God. And I think we need to investigate this a bit further. Because, for example, uh a quite sort of boring and overdone debate at the moment is the extent to which we are engaged in the production of potentially artificially conscious agents with artificial intelligence technologies. And there's all this discussion about whether or not these things can be conscious, like you know, whatever. But let's just suppose for a moment that they were. Let's suppose that I created an artificially intelligent machine and I gave it a purpose, and that purpose was to produce paperclips. And because of the development of artificial intelligence technology, it became conscious in a recognizable sense. It had an interior sense of self, it sort of had, say, feelings or emotions about the world. But it is just an AI robot whose entire purpose in life is to make paperclips. Now I could say that because that AI was designed by a creator with a purpose that was explicitly given to it, that that life is meaningful. But I think it would seem to most people that a life whose meaning consists in creating paperclips is not sufficient, is not enough to address what people really want. It's not just some kind of purpose. It's not just even some kind of purpose which is given to you by an authoritative creative source. Can I respond to that? Something which is further than that.
SPEAKER_03We'll hear Greg's response in just a second, but let's deal with this paperclip analogy because it's good for showing that a higher purpose is not itself sufficient for giving you meaning in life, because I don't think we would consider that simply making paperclips is meaningful. It sounds in fact like slavery, like drudgery. Later on, Alex will reference Albert Camus, who talked about the myth of Sisyphus as this kind of the story of slavery, of this drudgery of Sisyphus having to push a boulder up a hill all the time. And this was a Greek myth about what hell is like. Like hell is pushing a boulder up a hill for no reason, and then it rolls back down, and you gotta do it again, and it rolls back down and you gotta do it again. It's drudgery. And Albert Camus, from a naturalistic point of view, he was quite the absurdist. And he says at the end of this famous essay, he says, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. If you're going to find meaning in life, you've got to just consider that the drudgery that you find yourself in is your meaning in life, and you've got to take your kicks where you can get them. Alex finds that unsatisfactory. I think most of us find that uh deeply unsatisfactory. And therefore, what Alex is warning us of is let's not simply say, in a meaningless world, we just need a sense of purpose. Be more specific, be more picky about the kind of purpose that you're wanting to have in life. There are some higher purposes that will only make you a slave. I think that's an excellent point. We'll see the way that Greg uh responds to that in a second. But let's just hear Alex's third point. It's really quite a clever point that we've we've thought about in a different context on this channel before. But Alex brings meaning in conversation with a very old philosophical conundrum. Let's have a look.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but if I can just relate this to the God question, the problem that arises is that you have to answer the question of why God infuses life with the meaning that he gives it. It's either something which he has sort of arbitrarily plucked up and chosen to create, in which case we have this problem of arbitrariness. Or no. Or in fact, there is some reason why God had to give us a particular kind of meaning that's endemic to the human condition, that he had no choice but for that meaning, that more important kind of meaning, to be given to human life. But if he was beholden to that, if he had to give us a particular kind of meaning, it seems like there's a standard of meaning which exists outside. Right, right, outside of God.
SPEAKER_03And for those paying attention, that is a kind of an example of the Euthyphro dilemma. We've talked about the Euthyphro dilemma on this channel many times before. Uh it's an ancient conversation that Socrates had with Euthyphro. And in the original Euthyphro dilemma, it's all about how you relate goodness and God. And here, Alex is doing a version of the Euthyphro dilemma that instead of using goodness and God, he's using meaning and God. The Euthyphro dilemma goes like this. Socrates asks Euthyphro, is goodness loved by the gods because it is good? Or is it good because it is loved by the gods? And really it's about saying, is something good because God just says it's good and so it is arbitrarily good? Or is something independently good and God can do nothing other than recognize this intrinsic goodness to something? And it's known as the Euthyphro dilemma because you're on the horns of a dilemma. If you go either way, it seems to lead to an unsatisfying conclusion. Either goodness is arbitrary, or goodness is independent of God, and you don't need God anymore. Alex is doing the same thing, but he's doing it with meaning. Is there something that is meaningful in and of itself and you don't need God or the gods to say it's meaningful? God is just recognizing something that is already meaningful. Or is meaning simply this arbitrary thing? God just says, make paper clips, that's what meaning is, or God just says, push a boulder up a hill, that's what meaning is. And at that stage, that's unsatisfying because you just think, well, that's very, very arbitrary. Now, Plato, who is writing down the Euthyphro dilemma, has an answer to the dilemma. Plato just says God is goodness. And in a sense, we can say the same thing to this dilemma. God is meaning. And those two statements might sound unsatisfying, and they are unsatisfying in a Platonic frame, but I think in a Christian frame, the idea that God is goodness really makes sense. And the idea that God is meaning really makes sense. How so? Well, the answer is the doctrine of the Trinity. Okay? God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is therefore a communion of love, and love is the good life. God is love, and love is the good life. Therefore, 1 John chapter 4 says, God is love. Those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. That ultimately godness and goodness are equivalent because the Father, Son, and Spirit have lived a life of liberty, equality, and fraternity. They've lived an ethical life for all eternity. To live in God is to live in goodness, because God is love and goodness is love. Now you can do the same thing with meaning. God is meaning. What do I mean by that? Well, the very first verses of John's Gospel, the famous Christmas reading is in the beginning was the logos, okay? The word. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. That again in the doctrine of the Trinity, you have the Father and His Word in the communion of the Spirit, such that you have interpersonal, meaningful connection as the very life of God. There is a subject, object union that is the ground of all being. In John's Gospel, in that second verse, when it says the word was with God and the word was God, the word for with God is even more literally towards God. There is a second person of the Trinity who is facing the first person of the Trinity and bound together in the joy of the third person of the Trinity. There is one who is the logic of the cosmos, who is also the logic of God, who is in communion with the Father in the joy of the Spirit, and this God is goodness because God is love, and love is goodness. But this God is meaning because God is love, and the meaning of life is love. And Alex actually knows this. He was once asked the question, what is the greatest thing? Here's the answer that he gave.
SPEAKER_02What is the most valuable thing? More specifically, what object or concept should be regarded as most important in society and or day-to-day life? Time, money, pleasure, knowledge. Uh love, man. Um gosh, that's a bit soppy, isn't it? But like really, I mean I'm thinking of like an empirical analysis here. If you look historically, when somebody experiences love or even like claims to experience love, it it it drives people crazy. And and all of the things that you've listed, so uh time, money, pleasure, knowledge, these are all things that people have regularly been willing to just sacrifice in a heartbeat for love. Uh and there are kinds of love which I've never experienced, like I've never experienced the love that somebody has for their children, right? I don't have children. Uh but I have no doubt that if I have a child, like, yeah, I'm gonna give up time to raise that child. I'm gonna give up money because I'm gonna put that money into raising my child. I'm gonna give up pleasure because it's gonna suck in many ways, there's gonna be lots of late nights and that kind of stuff. Um Knowledge, I don't know if I would have to sacrifice that to raise a child, but like I probably would once I had that child, right? And so just looking at how easily people have given up basically anything else ever for love when they experience true love, it seems to be the thing that's most valuable.
SPEAKER_03And the Christian says, the reason why we think love is the greatest thing is because the greatest thing God is love. And that is the meaning that we are seeking in life. It is not to make paperclips, it is not to push a boulder up a hill, but to be bound in bonds of love, but to be the beloved in the presence of the lover, in the joy of that communion. Alex is absolutely right that we should not simply seek a higher purpose as this power to which we bow. But if God is love, here is the most wonderful possibility. Here's how Greg Kugel puts it.
SPEAKER_02Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I'm not sure, in other words, the mechanism by which being created by someone who says this is your purpose would be fulfilling in the way that people want it to be.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The reason the paper clips uh illustration doesn't match is because it seems to me that you're subtly taking the thing that's conscious that makes paper clips and comparing it to a human being. And for human beings uh who seem to have a different purpose, I would argue, uh be consigned to make paper clips, well that's dehumanizing to them. But if you have, just to follow your illustration, if you have a creator that makes something for a reason that the creator has in mind, then it's fulfilling its purpose uh perfectly, you know. For a human being, that's not going to be satisfying making paper clips. And a lot of people who are making paper clips are not satisfied with it. Okay? I don't think it's arbitrary if God is making something for a purpose. If God decides that he wants to make creatures to be in friendship with him because this reflects his loving character, and that purpose is to be in friendship with him, I don't see how that is somehow negligible or arbitrary at all. I guess you could have said that God could have done otherwise, but his love and desire for communion is seen to be an adequate explanation for that.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Ross Powell I think it's not just an adequate explanation. It is, if the doctrine of the Trinity is true, absolutely foundational to God's own being. God is love, he is constitutionally love. Therefore, to live in love is to live in God and God to live in you. The alternative to this is very unsatisfying. I think Dr. Kay kind of talks about uh karma and from some very Eastern traditions in which the self is meant to die, you're intended to have ego death, you're intended to transcend the self. Alex speaks in very similar terms about how he thinks that we ought to transcend the self.
SPEAKER_01For my friend in Dubai, if he came to you and he was your friend in Dubai, and he said, My life is lacking meaning, I can't get out of bed anymore. What would you prescribe him? What would you recommend? What would you suggest as he's your friend?
SPEAKER_02It's hard to know without knowing that friend. But if it seemed to me like going to church or reading the gospels might provide that for him, then I'd probably recommend that he did that. But I think that literally the subjective feeling of meaning is is usually tied up in the identification of something that transcends your individual self. And I think at any whatever is the most plausible course of action for that person to engage in something like that would be what I would recommend for them. But if they're maybe that maybe they're not particularly interested in religion, I'd recommend that they read some philosophy of mind and try to understand the nature of consciousness. And they might start I might recommend, depending on who they are, that they take a psychedelic drug and try to experience something which cannot be put into words. Because a lot of the time when you experience something like an ego death, and you might realize that the the individuated self is an illusion.
SPEAKER_03But in Christianity, persons go all the way down, all the way back to eternity. And my personal identity has an integrity over time into all eternity that I as a person am bound to the Son as a person in the bond of the spirit as a person, brought towards the loving Father as a person. And the Christian can really genuinely say love is ultimate. Love goes all the way back and will go all the way into eternity. Neither the spiritual thinker nor the atheist thinker in this conversation can say the same. And so that's why I think that this friend of Stephen Bartlett's has found meaning and purpose in Jesus in a way that is superior to all the other meanings that are out there on offer. If you want to discover life according to Jesus, you can go and do 321. It's our online introduction to Jesus Christ. It is utterly free. Just go to 321course.com, start an account, and you're in. We won't spam you, we won't charge you, but it's your way of discovering that God is love and you're invited. That'll do for us on this video. Probably on the next video. We'll have set up the studio a little bit better than this. But what do you think about this new studio? Let us know. But please do subscribe so that we can see you on the next one. God bless