It seems odd to not even mention God in this article. I get that theism isn't fashionable, but it seems strange to write him out of the history altogether, and to mention Alistair Macintyre's thoughts without connecting them to his Catholic thinking.
I also think it's ridiculous to neglect God in a discussion of the quest for meaning, because I think it's obvious he's the only possible source of objective meaning and everything else is "let's make something up and muddle along". But it is not odd for writers to ignore that.
I'm a little out of my element here, but I reckon the key word there is "objective." Human attempts to make objective meaning tend to proceed from a subjective declaration that something or other is objective, rendering it subjective meaning with an obscured origin. God would have a special relationship with the universe (literally creating objective existence), so meaning sourced from him would have a better claim at being objective.
It's a corollary of the question of moral realism. "What is my purpose?" is another way of asking "what should I do?" or "what kind of person is it good for me to be?" Under naturalism, you run straight into the impassable barrier of the is-ought problem.
With God, we can consider the possibility that he has goals for us.
OK, there could be alternatives in between theism and naturalism, but they make even less sense to me and I don't know anyone who takes them seriously.
Meaning isn't intrinsic. It's not something you can measure externally, it's part of a relationship between a sentient being and an object.
So either all meaning is subjective (i.e. we each individually find meaning in things) and intersubjective (we can understand what meaning others find in something), or there is a creator who can say "Well, I made you, and here is what I meant by it."
Which does mean it's still subjective, but God's meaning gets prioritised because they created us. (And Lucifer's fall was because they said "Hey, what if we don't have to listen to _your_ meaning, and can come up with our own instead?")
On the flip side, there are a lot of subjective connotations attached to the concept of God, which differ from person to person. An explanation which seeks to remain objective would do best to avoid concepts with such an enormous amount of subjective associations and meanings attached to it. The validity of your arguments would then depend on whether it plays into the preconceptions of each individual.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 47.9 ms ] threadI also think it's ridiculous to neglect God in a discussion of the quest for meaning, because I think it's obvious he's the only possible source of objective meaning and everything else is "let's make something up and muddle along". But it is not odd for writers to ignore that.
Can you explain? It's far from obvious to me. Quite the contrary in fact.
With God, we can consider the possibility that he has goals for us.
OK, there could be alternatives in between theism and naturalism, but they make even less sense to me and I don't know anyone who takes them seriously.
So either all meaning is subjective (i.e. we each individually find meaning in things) and intersubjective (we can understand what meaning others find in something), or there is a creator who can say "Well, I made you, and here is what I meant by it."
Which does mean it's still subjective, but God's meaning gets prioritised because they created us. (And Lucifer's fall was because they said "Hey, what if we don't have to listen to _your_ meaning, and can come up with our own instead?")
Well, sorry, that's not on offer. Your options are either Nietzsche or God, or ignoring the problem.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism