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The Cosmic Role of Godless People
Reconstructing the question of life’s meaning so it still makes sense after God’s death
What should you be doing right now?
Maybe keep amusing yourself or wasting time because you’re on a break? Getting back to studying or working because you’ve got to graduate or keep earning money to pay your bills? Or perhaps you should be planning for your next date or vacation?
Those are some obligations you might have to yourself, your family, or your society. But is there something you should be doing about the whole universe, to honour the fact that you exist at all? Is there something the universe wants you to do, as it were?
The question of life’s meaning
That way of asking whether life has a purpose is figurative because the question has become archaic due to God’s proverbial death (as Friedrich Nietzsche put it), as in his irrelevance to developed, informed cultures.
If you think God exists and created everything, the question of life’s meaning makes perfect sense since life along with everything else in nature would be an artifact. Just as the artifacts we construct have the functions we assign them which they’d be programmed to fulfill, we’d be obliged to serve our God-given role. We’d…
