I have often been asked, by Christians, how I—as an atheist—answer to the nihilist.

Well, not so much “asked”. Nihilism—the view that life has no meaning, that nothing has value—is posed as a challenge to the atheist. I have been called dishonest for being a non-nihilist atheist! This is, to a certain degree, bemusing to me. Nihilism is to my mind very obviously false, and I don’t feel as if I need to invoke any form of God or cosmic teleology in order to call it so. That is to say, nihilism neither draws me to itself nor towards theism.

Meaning is all made up?

So the story goes: without a God or Fate (or whatever cosmic teleology takes your fancy) there is no meaning that is really in the world. It must just be something we made up.

I think perhaps the underlying mistake that both the nihilist and the Christians who ask this question share is that they believe that if something is subjective, it must not be real. Of course the meaning I attach to my life is “made up”. Why is this a problem? If I have made a thing meaningful to me, well then to me it is meaningful. I should say that that is all the meaning to one’s life could ever be; even if God exists, we must still decide to incorporate that into what makes our life meaningful.

But that is me getting ahead of myself, perhaps some examples will sharpen the point.

Traditions can be very powerful sources of meaning, despite being entirely “made up”. My extended family has a tradition of all gathering together at my grandmother’s a Christmas. We did not always have this tradition, until recently we all did our own separate things. It started a number of years ago when my grandfather died a couple of days before Christmas, so we all dropped our original plans to come together. And we have done so ever since, in honour of my grandfather. Now, you could say that there is nothing to this but a group of people getting together at a holiday. There is certainly nothing that objectively makes it about my grandfather, or that requires it to have the deep significance that it does to me. But, since when were those the relevant questions? The significance is real, even if it was made up by us as a family.

Or to take another, a while back I went to see a performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Beforehand, the conductor took a moment to explain the story of the piece: that Mussorgsky had an architect friend who died young but who had a bit of a cult following, so that after his death there was an exhibition of his sketches. The piece is Mussorgsky looking at the pieces in that exhibition and putting his thoughts and emotions into music. And it is wondrous. I really could feel the impact this friend had on Mussorgsky’s life, of the meaning that he had to him, woven into the music—through that music I (in part) participated in that friendship, to use that term in the technical sense. Now suppose along comes the nihilist, who snidely remarks that all that occurred was that I listened to some sounds bouncing around a concert hall whilst a man wove a stick about and people sawed at their instruments. Should I not laugh at this person and go on my way? Where in their words lies this supposed great challenge to the meaning I found in that music? And note I need invoke no deity to tell this story, no cosmic telos. Only that a man, to whom a friend had great meaning, through artistic skill wove that meaning into a piece of music such that I, a century later, could upon hearing that music participate too in the meaning of that friendship.

Meaning, Death and Insignificance

But how could what we do in this life, on this Earth, be meaningful? In a few billion years the Earth will have been swallowed up by the Sun, likely taking all traces of the lives we are leading with it. We are but a speck of dust in a vast, uncaring cosmos—how could anything we do really matter?

But do these facts, that eventually nothing we do will be remembered, that we are tiny compared to a universe that cares nothing for us, give us a reason to think nothing we do matters? Surely not.

To be sure, if there is a time when I have been totally forgotten—all traces of me wiped away—then nothing I will have done will matter to anyone or anything at that time. But so what? That doesn’t mean they don’t matter now.

We can answer both worries by letting go of the idea that meaning has to be some cosmic, eternal thing. If what I do matters to people here and now, well then that is to say that it does matter. It may not matter forever. It may not matter on some vast, cosmic scale. But it matters to me, and it matters to other people too.

The prospect of death, of all that we are being annihilated, is indeed daunting. Perhaps if everything that we did was washed away as soon as our body passed on, then that might make striving for meaning in this life a little foolish. But we do not need to propose a soul that lives forever for us to have life beyond our death. To me, a life becomes meaningful through its self-creation in the act of living of the person whose life it is. Through the projects they work on, through the principles they espouse, the ideas they have and their expression in the things they make. And the beauty of these acts of living is they aren’t just for one person. I can adopt your act of living. Your projects, your principles, your ideas and your expression can be incorporated into my own. To quote a poem by Bilbo Baggins towards the end of his life in Return of the King:

The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.

Thus by me following the road that you forged, you can become alive in me even long after you have died. In this way Jesus is alive in the Christians who live according to him, Buddha alive in the Buddhists or Martin Luther King in one who adopts his example in striving for racial justice. So the fact that we live for but a short while hardly seems to me to make how we live not matter.

Answering the Nihilist

Thus much I have said to the point of why the nihilist holds no sway over me. But what to say to the nihilist? We cannot try to refute the nihilist, for their position is consistent within itself. I cannot enter into their world, where music is just sound, and compel them into mine. But I can—as I have tried to do so here—invite them into my world. I cannot argue the blind man into believing in colour, but if I can give him my eyes for even a second he will never again doubt it. That music has meaning to me is not something I deduced by argument: I simply react to it as meaningful, in much the same way as I react to a rose as red. Demanding I have an argument to refute the nihilist is thus as bemusing to me as demanding I have an argument that proves that roses are red.