Some philosophers use this approach to tag certain premises, such as “Other minds exist” or “God exists”, as part of the basic foundation of a rational worldview. Such basic premises, they maintain, can be rationally embraced without any need for evidence or observation to back them up.

But instead of embracing foundationalism, philosophers can turn instead to the scientific method and learn from it. Let’s take a closer look at what I have in mind.

Science relies on making inferences and then devising tests to see if those inferences are reliable. Philosophy, traditionally, relies on deductive reasoning, as in

Premise: All men are mortal
Premise: Socrates is a man
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal

But the premises are recognized as needing to be buttressed by arguments of their own. Such as

Premise: Only men engage in the use of complex tools and language
Premise: Socrates engages in the use of complex tools and language
Conclusion: Socrates is a man

But even these premises need the support of a logical argument. Thus

Premise: I saw Socrates typing on the computer
Premise: Socrates explained to me in English what he was typing
Premise: A computer is a complex tool
Premise: English is a complex language
Conclusion: Socrates engages in the use of complex tools and language

Eventually we end up with an extremely long string of interlocking arguments in which the conclusion of one becomes the premise of another. But is it enough? Doesn’t each premise always need supporting argument, and each argument need premises which need arguments in a never-ending chain? Not always.

Some premises are different than others. Some premises are true “by agreed upon definition”.

Premise: A triangle is a polygon with 3 sides.
Premise: Figure A is a polygon with 3 sides.
Conclusion: Figure A is a triangle.

We may need a Premise which defines polygon and perhaps one which defines sides. But given an agreed meaning for its words, our first premise defines a triangle. We do not need (and can hardly imagine) a classical argument to support it as a premise. (The best we could do would be to utilize premises which constitute compatible ways of defining a triangle.)

So there are two types of premises: those which define things and those which describe some presumed “fact” about the world. Instead of calling all premises “premises” it would therefore be more useful to call some “definitions” and some “facts”. But there is something a bit odd here. The premises we call “facts” are precisely the ones that seem to need to be the conclusion of prior argument.

The General Semanticists distinguished between “inferences” and “facts” and we will find that distinction useful here. A fact is something that you can observe directly; an inference an assumption you make about things you can’t observe, but which might be observable by someone in the right position. The clock tells you it is 2 PM, so you infer that it is still daylight out. Or you observe sunlight streaming in the window and infer that it is sunny outside. Those are inferences. But only if you see the daylight or the sun directly do they become assertions of fact.

But here we must retreat: even our direct perceptions are not necessarily facts. We infer that the leaf we see on the tree is green because we see it as green—and yet, as we now know scientifically, neither the leaf nor the light reflected from the leaf is green. That the leaf has color is an inference which our brains have evolved to make on our behalf—not because it is “factual” but simply because it is useful. The brain has a built-in inference machine—eyesight—in which it takes hints from detected photons and manufactures colors and shapes from those hints. Sometimes the brain’s built-in inferences are wrong, and we experience an “optical illusion” as a result.

If you observe the way scientists (and other intelligent people) define something as “fact”, what you will observe is that facts are always built on prior, dependable inferences. It is a “fact” that the earth orbits the sun—of course we know that this supposed fact about the sun is built on a complicated framework of inferences about the apparent movement of the sun, planets & stars in the sky. At a lower level of abstraction, we know that our “direct observations” of the sun, planets & stars are themselves inferences—we don’t for example ever experience any of those things “moving” but instead infer that they have moved. And at an even lower level of abstraction, as mentioned earlier, our experience of sight is based on the brain’s inferences about the hints from photons gathered by the sensor cells in our retina. (Of course, that there are such things as “photons” or “sensor cells” are themselves very high level inferences—built upon many levels of inferences treated at each intervening level as facts.)

But back to our classical syllogisms. As we saw, some classical “premises” are “definitions” and others are “inferences.” We might ask, Does it make a difference what we call them? I believe the answer is that it can make a significant difference, and I will argue that the term “premise” ought to be dropped for the terms “inference” and “definition”. Consider the following,

Definition: all bachelors are unmarried.
Inference: John is a bachelor.
Conclusion: therefore John is unmarried.

In the traditional syllogism the first and second statements are merely premises, with the presumption that they are on a par. But by recognizing that the first statement is a definition of terms and the second an inference we have drawn about John, the argument is clarified. The conclusion, of course, is also an inference, since one of the premises it relies on is an inference. This is exactly as it should be, since our conclusion “John is unmarried” may serve as an inference in our next syllogism.

This approach helps us distinguish the following two arguments:

Inference: All men are mortal.
Inference: Jesus is a man.
Conclusion: Jesus is mortal.

Definition: All men are mortal.
Inference: Jesus is a man.
Conclusion: Jesus is mortal.

Per this last argument, there is something “inhuman” about someone who never dies, so that, for example, if Jesus is still alive on the cross 2000 years later he must not be a man after all. Whereas in the case of the prior argument you would not know which inference was false.

Or, taking the Christian doctrine of the trinity as a definition of Jesus, you might have:

Inference: all men are mortal
Definition: Jesus is a man
Conclusion: Jesus is mortal.

In this case if Jesus is still alive on the cross, then the inference “all men are mortal” must be false given the definition of Jesus. (I’m pretending that 2000 years is enough to infer immortality—of course it may not be). At any rate, I hope this shows that distinguishing between premises which are definitions and those which are inferences (even when the wording is identical) is clarifying—and therefore preferable.

Definitions are always tautological (& tautologies are always definitional). In classical syllogisms a premise may sometimes masquerade as an inference but sometimes turns out, on examination, to be tautological in actuality. (Several of the classical arguments for God existence have this flaw.)

There is a lot more that might be written on this topic. But I’ll stop with this: when there is a conflict between an observed inference and a definition, the scientist modifies the definition to fit the inference, whereas the theologian usually denies the inference to preserve the definition (or the basic belief, if they are a foundationalist philosopher). This is why many religions deny the inference of evolution.

It is also why science improves over time, and religion & philosophy do not.

We must face the facts: our lives, in the grand scheme of things, are short. Like the leaves falling from the tree, we bloom, flourish, and inevitably wither. Vast expanses of time preceded each of us, and equally vast expanses of time will follow us. We were not there, will not be there, to know what happens; we will never meet the people who inhabit those times, as they will never meet us. Our existence is, as Robert Ingersoll said, like a narrow vale between two cold and barren peaks.

And yet, in that narrow valley in between, there is a wondrous thing: a creature who exists, who lives, and who is conscious of that life and that existence. —http://www.daylightatheism.org/2007/10/fragile-trappings.html

We don’t need religious nonsense in order to convince ourselves that life is wonderful, that being human is worthwhile. In fact the religious nonsense gets in the way of appreciating reality in its fullness. It throws up a smokescreen, it imposes a fake “holiness”—fake God or gods—between us and the real holiness: physical life itself. Access to this holiness is free: we don’t need to fill the coffers of any religious sect, hop to unnatural moral commandments, or swallow any impossible nonsense. We are bodies, and that gives us direct access to the great reality itself.

Although we know much about that reality, it is true enough that we will never really know what it is. Likewise, we will never really know ourselves, no matter how much we know about ourselves. Our scientific knowledge is built of consistent, useful models of physical reality: the models work in that they are testable against that reality. But they do not lay bear its ultimate nature: knowledge never can.

Yet that doesn’t give excuse for believing nonsense, or for embracing models which long since collapsed under the weight of their inconsistencies and uselessness. Adam says it best,

In the face of our imperfect knowledge, what we need is humility and a candid admission of our ignorance. We do not need anyone pretending they know all the answers and dignifying that pretending with the name of “faith”. The mysteries we confront are far deeper than that, far too profound to admit of such shallow, simplistic, easily disproven answers. In truth, they are not answers at all; they are baubles, little diversions, stories invented for the comfort of children. —http://www.daylightatheism.org/2007/10/fragile-trappings.html

As if hell and a vengeful God could ever comfort children—such nonsense is more likely to traumatize than comfort. But beyond the Pyrrhic victory of believing that by faith you will be saved while others burn, beyond that rather vicious conceit lies the fact that everything which makes life wonderful is physical. All the great emotions are emotions felt in bodies, by bodies, for bodies. All our wonderful sensations, including our most sublime thoughts, are sensations of the body, require a body for existence. Without body, they can’t happen. Without body, we can’t be.

Life is an embodied enterprise. Without body, life loses its magic. And we must not forget that whatever that magic is, it is physical magic. Why then do so many try to separate human life from its reality by inserting this or that religious or spiritual barrier? Why do they seek such a condom? Why throw up so many obvious lies, such nonsense, from so many pulpits? Why shrink from reality?

What are they afraid of? To me, that’s the real mystery.

1. under a natural world view life has no meaning
2. God provides meaning to life

But right away we notice something strange about this: it implies that we must obtain our meaning from something outside of us, namely God; and yet apparently there is no need for God to obtain meaning from something outside of himself. There is an unspoken assumption here that God is inherently meaningful. Or else the assumption is that God doesn’t have a need to be meaningful.

Why wouldn’t either of those options apply not just to God but to us as well?

Perhaps because God is eternal and we are not.

But this line won’t work, since it turns meaning into a matter of longevity. We are meaningful only if we live forever. Therefore it is not God but eternity in heaven (or, one could infer, eternity in hell) which makes us meaningful. But how can this work to make today meaningful? This moment meaningful? After all, the future has not yet been written. At the very least, I can’t know how many future days I shall have, or with certainty whether I shall end up in eternal heaven or not. Since I can’t know what kind of longevity I will have, therefore I can’t know with certainty if this day or this moment is meaningful or not.

Furthermore, unless each moment is meaningful in itself, it makes no sense to say the whole series of moments is meaningful. Can you have an on-and-on series of meaningless moments that somehow become meaningful simply because they go on and on? I doubt it. Years ago I wrote

How can immortality make life worthwhile, if mortality can’t? If a minute, a moment, isn’t sufficient to imbue life with value, what use is an infinity of them? Endless time is then only endless failure.

It still holds. Meaning cannot be a matter of longevity. If anything, it would make more sense to tack in the opposite direction. If I have an infinite number of days ahead of me, how important can this particular day or this particular moment be? If I waste it, it doesn’t matter at all. On the other hand, if I only have a few days left then this moment and this day become vitally important.

It is not longevity but brevity which makes our day important.

Did God Create Us Meaning-Deficient?

Perhaps God derives his meaning from us, just as we derive our meaning from him. But if so, then the objection to naturalism self-destructs. We could just as easily get our meaning from each other and leave God out of it. We already saw that meaning can’t be due to longevity, and that means that another person can be the source of our meaning as effectively as God can. This in fact is the natural answer: that meaning is social. It is human.

Perhaps it could be asserted that we derive our meaning from the fact that God authored us. But this has already been shown to be inadequate, for no one authored God yet we don’t go around bemoaning God’s meaninglessness.

Perhaps, the supernaturalist might argue, God deliberately created us with a deficiency which makes us reliant on him for meaning. God would have no equivalent deficiency and therefore would be self-sufficient as far as meaning goes, but as for us sons of Adam, God would be essential. Perhaps it is even punishment for humankind’s original sin as depicted in Genesis.

First it should be noted that this is an attempt to make God necessary by postulating a deficiency which makes us need a deity in order to feel meaningful. But is there really such a deficiency? How do we explain atheists, for example, who do not seem to have the deficiency? Did God not create atheists? Did he not punish atheists along with everyone else?

Perhaps atheists are people who have discovered that God doesn’t exist and suddenly — poof! — their “meaning deficiency” vanished with God. My suggestion, in other words, is that the theistic feeling that life lacks inherent meaning may simply be a bugaboo due to confused notions theists have — notions which atheism can resolve.

What Does Meaning Mean?

How can becoming an atheist make the problem of meaning go away? If there is some secret here, what is it? To answer that, we need to look carefully at the subject. What, for starters, does the word meaningful mean?

It means, of course “to have a meaning.” Okay, so if we say something “has a meaning” what are we in fact saying?

We can clarify this by considering words. Words indisputably have meaning — at least usually. If I say “look at that tree” my sentence has a meaning: turn your eyes toward that particular tree, the thing I’m looking at or pointing at. And what is the meaning of a word like “tree”? It is a reference to something actually out there in the world, something we designate as being similar to a number of other things which we classify as “trees”. By saying “that tree” I reference one of these tree-like things in the real world.

Words are meaningful because they reference something, they point at something we can identify, either something conceptual — that is to say a concept (“trees”) — or an action (“look”) or an actual something in the world (“that tree”). Words are meaningful because they point elsewhere: they refer to something.

The words “that tree” point to an actual something in the world, therefore they are meaningful. But what does the actual something — the tree in question — point to? What does it mean?

The answer is that the tree is not a word. It is simply itself. It is a real object and therefore does not mean anything. It is a referent not a reference, a source of meaning and not itself meaningful. This is actually to the tree’s glory. It is real, and not merely a bit of language pointing to something else.

If words are meaningful, it is because there are sources they point to — like our tree — which are real things and give those words meaning. Words can be references to other words which are references to more words still. But ultimately there have to be real things, final referents that bring to an end the sequence of pointing, or else language is nothing but a game of mirrors. Trees, and all the other real things in the world, are those final referents.

Being meaningful, in other words, is something appropriate to words, but not appropriate for real things.

From this we see that to ask what our lives mean, or what makes us meaningful, is to make the mistake of thinking that we are like words, rather than like the tree — that is to say, like real things. We ought to dance and be glad our lives are meaningless, for this means we are sources for meaning, not mere references but actual referents for meaning.

The objection to naturalism based on lack of meaning is, in other words, entirely misconstrued and therefore bogus. If we are wise, we should adamantly object to being “meaningful”.

I think it is fair to say that this is the ultimate religious question. All of our major religions have a “story” whose purport is to answer it.

It’s likely that humans are the only species on earth who asks such a question of themselves. That observation itself, that we alone ask the question of existence, is often thought to be a clue to the answer. Perhaps other animals fail to ask why they are alive because they have no “higher purpose”; perhaps we ask because we sense that we do. That we even wonder about such things could itself be evidence that there is something “untold” about our lives, that there is “something more”.

Before continuing, let’s ask ourselves what kind of answer could ever satisfactorily resolve this question of “why?”.

Imagine God asking himself (itself/herself)

Why do I exist? What is my purpose?

For God, what could the answer be to such a query? What is it that makes God’s existence meaningful for God?

If we try to address this question from God’s point of view (rather than our own) we are likely to conclude that no possible answer could do God justice. God doesn’t have a “higher purpose” because God is the higher purpose. God doesn’t yearn for “more” because God is the “more”.

God doesn’t have to ask why his life is meaningful, or what makes it meaningful, because God is the source of meaning itself. If your life is the source of meaning, it makes no sense—indeed there is no need—to ask why or whence.

The Meaning of Meaning

But to understand this, let’s look at what it means to be meaningful. Words, as we know, are (usually) meaningful, but what makes them meaningful? Their meaning derives from the fact that they reference—that is to say, they point to—something in the world. Sometimes, to be sure, words only point to other words which point to other words and so on. But eventually there are real, existing things being pointed at which are the source of meaning (even if only in a pretend way, as in fiction), or else the whole pile of words signifies nothing.

Put simply, something is meaningful if it points at something else which serves as its source of meaning. Thus a theist would say that our human lives are meaningful because they point back to a source of meaning in God. But notice a peculiar consequence of this. Unless there is a greater God who is God’s source—and by definition there isn’t—God’s life isn’t meaningful. God has nothing to point back to for a source of meaning.

In this sense in which we use the word meaningful, if applied to God’s case we have to admit that God is not meaningful. God’s existence doesn’t reference something else. This follows because God is a source of meaning, something which meaningful things reference, and not something whose existence references elsewhere.

To our God asking himself what makes his life meaningful, the correct response would be,

God, you don’t understand—that question doesn’t apply to you because you are not meaningful but a source of meaning.

And what if the question doesn’t apply to us either? What if it makes no sense to ask the why questions about our existence because, like God, we are sources of meaning, because our living does not reference elsewhere.

Unexplainable Us

It’s not even that we must create meaning for ourselves, as Sartre maintained. After all, do we imagine God making up stories about himself, creating “reasons” for his existence? It would be unnecessary. Existence doesn’t need meaning, and the attempt to apply “meaning” can only bring it down a notch. Real beings exist; they don’t exist for a reason.

In fact, reasons are only explanations. They come afterward, when we want to talk about things. When we want ideas to work with. Just as it would demean God to say he exists for the purpose of bringing us into the world and furthering our human careers, so it demeans us to say that God created us to carry out some grand plan of his. Meanings & explanations turn us into mere tools. To say we need a meaning is to say—beforehand—that we are tools for something else. It makes us illegitimate, makes us important for someone else, rather than important within.

All such efforts stem from the mistaken trap of believing that thought can legitimize existence. It never can.

We can smother ourselves in explanations (as we smother everything else)—and they are useful (extremely useful when the scientific method is followed)—but explanations can never justify usefulness itself, or justify us in our lives.

We are not the sort of things that need be or ever can be explained. We simply are.

De-Valuing the Body

What is curious is that theists cannot accept the possibility of bodily life being valuable on its own. From the natural perspective, this is difficult to comprehend. The atheist wonders how one could not see bodily life as inherently valuable. How can value not be embodied?

The answer is that theism derives from an incomprehensible but long-standing tradition of splitting body from soul, with all value assigned to the soul side of the equation. The body is devalued “by definition,” which means the theist faces a logically-defined barrier to identifying our bodies as valuable.

As one theist explained to me years ago,

The soul, the personality, is actually the being, not the body. The body is the mere tool or the puppet of the soul to be used for playing the game, and for communication. The truth is that you don’t need a body to experience joy and pleasure. Actually the pleasures that can be had on a ‘body’ level are quite low level when compared to the spiritual ones of serenity and exhilaration.

Life, the soul, the being, can exist with or without the body, but the body without the soul is little more than a hunk of meat with no goals, no hope, no desires, no personality. It is in short ‘dead’ for all practical purposes, except for that it can breath and perform the physical functions of life. —John Kendrix, Seekers BBS, Atlanta, GA, 11/14/1988, Msg# 6476, To: The Atheist, Re: Bodies (spelling corrected)

Kendrix’s devaluation of the body demonstrates the pernicious (if not outright evil) influence of spirituality. It represents a viewpoint endemic to theism, which effectively sets believers up for a life bordering on depression, unmoored from any stable source of value. Within its framework, God is essential of course, and in this sense devaluation of the body serves the religious priesthood well.

Yet God’s role is a disturbing one here, for deity serves as a last-ditch effort to introduce a stable and enduring source of value for our lives, a desperate way to make some kind of sense of life and why we exist as bodies.

But you can’t make sense of why we exist as bodies by denying that we are bodies or denying that bodies are valuable. And you can’t deny the body’s centrality to life and at the same time live and feel with any kind of sanity or moral ground. The problem is that adding God doesn’t make sense of things. A bodiless God, brought in to be the ground of life, is anything but grounded. Inevitably God floats off in the realm of non-existence, weightless, groundless, absurd.

The core problem with God is that he has no body, and therefore no way to move or exist, no way to be valuable, much less to serve as a source of value for us. A disembodied mind—whether God’s our ours—can’t bring value to life.

It takes a body for that.

Getting Rid of the Middleman

The natural world view enhances our inherent value because it removes the “middleman”—God—which has separated us from our worthiness. Many claim that nature without God leads to despair and loss of intrinsic value to life, but in reality we ought to be delighted to be able to dispense with the middleman. Without God, ultimate worth comes back to bodily life itself.

Remove God from your world view and everything that matters gets redirected to life.

If we think of ourselves as natural, and of the natural world view as one that folds God into nature, then we see that atheism can only enhance our worth as human beings. Naturalism eliminates God, but more importantly it eliminates the need for God. It brings value—everything we value—home to our bodies. Home to us.

Why should there be two types of knowing? Why should that be a feature of our existence? Yet it is. This is the key, the giveaway clue, perhaps the single most important observation in all of philosophy.

If the world and our thoughts were of the same basic stuff, there would only be one type of knowing. Yet we have a different kind of knowing for the world—one which is approximate, inexact, provisional—than we have for our thoughts themselves, and that means that the world and thoughts are different in essence. The domain of our thoughts is mental in nature, with an innate conceptual/rational/analytic framework. The world outside lacks any such framework. It is non-mental, non-rational, non-knowable in its essence.

The consequences of this are simple and significant.

We expect our thoughts to be rational and meaningful because that is appropriate for thoughts; but outside of our thoughts the world is not rational or meaningful because the outside’s essence is non-mental. Consequently it makes no sense to expect the outside world (the world outside thoughts) to have characteristics that pertain to thoughts, such as meaningfulness or rationality.

It is only common sense that the world outside our thoughts must be irrational and meaningless — otherwise we would never have developed two types of knowing.

To expect or wish otherwise is to be confused.