This is a Q&A blog post by Talbot School of Theology’s Visiting Scholar in Philosophy, William Lane Craig.

Question

I'm not a Christian myself, but find Christian theology to be interesting and your defence particularly interesting.

I've heard you mention on numerous occasions that you believe a life without God is absurd, meaningless, pointless etc.

I personally disagree with that claim, but that's not the purpose of this question. My question is, why do you repeatedly emphasise that life without God is meaningless and absurd?

To me that only seems to create problems. There are undoubtedly atheists who believe that their life is meaningless and are depressed as a result.

If they hear your comments on this then it seems like they will just be more depressed.

I don't think telling someone "Your life is meaningless without God" or spreading that message will get many people actually believing or searching for God. To me it just seems like it will make things worse for those already depressed, and for the atheists who disagree with your claim, they will be even more anti Christianity because the claim appears arrogant.

William Lane Craig’s Response

Please understand that by what you call “life without God,” I do not mean living without a belief in God. I’m talking about the objective fact of whether or not God exists, not whether people believe in him. I think that atheists’ lives are filled with meaning and value precisely because God does exist, whether they know it or not.

The reason that I stress that if God does not exist, then human life is absurd is to shake people out of their indifference and get them to think about this most important of life’s questions. People who shrug their shoulders and say, “What difference does it make if God exists?” simply show that they haven’t thought very deeply about this question. Even atheist philosophers, like Nietzsche, Russell, and Sartre, who have thought deeply about this question, recognize that in the absence of God human life does become absurd.

It's also important to understand that my claim is not offered as a reason for believing in God. Maybe the horrible fact is that God does not exist and our lives are absurd. Rather, the claim is offered in order to motivate people to explore whether or not there are good reasons to believe that God exists. In my work, I have offered numerous arguments that I believe are sound and persuasive arguments for the existence of God. So I do not leave people in despair but offer them a solution to the human predicament that I have attempted to expose.

So although the argument that atheism implies the absurdity of human life is not aimed at getting people to actually believe in God, it is aimed at motivating them to search for God. This was exactly Pascal’s strategy in his famous Pensées, I have tried to follow his lead in this regard. Perhaps one reason that I believe it is effective is that it was such a powerful motivation in my own life as a non-believer. I sensed deeply the darkness and despair of life without God, and I found the Christian Gospel to be magnificently good news. When I finally became a Christian, the biggest difference that it made in my life was meaning. Now every day that I get up, I know that what I do is invested with eternal significance.

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