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Heresy

The Meaning of Life

Daniel Hill argues that without God, life would be meaningless.

What is the meaning of ‘the meaning of life’? In analytic philosophy the bearers of meaning have usually been considered to be words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. Hence life itself is not usually considered to be a bearer of meaning, but the word ‘life’ is. Understanding the meaning of the latter is itself an important philosophical task, to determine whether life involves any non-physical substance, or whether it merely involves a certain form or arrangement of a certain type of physical matter. It is therefore a task that logically must be tackled before the task of understanding the meaning of life in the sense usually intended by the earnest questioner. However, the person that asks “What is the meaning of life?” is not usually asking for a definition of the word ‘life’.

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