The core of his “argument” starts at 38:00 (I quote the transcript below, here is the YouTube video at 38:00.
Check it out, and you’ll see that first, he conflates meaning in a philosophical sense with meaning in an experiential sense.
Philosophers can argue about the first sense all day long, without ever coming to a consensus. On the other hand, the experiential meaning that we feel, as far as I know, nobody denies that’s real. Unless a person is depressed. Or, is making exactly the kind error that I just mentioned.
Second, he assumes that the meaning (and all the other feelings that he experiences and finds important) can only come from God. That seems to be his real axiom. It has nothing to do with “reasoning” as such, it’s really only a faith thing: I trust that the meaning that I feel can only come from God. No reasoning, no argument required.
Of course experiential meaning can easily be explained evolutionarily as adaptive. Looked from that perspective, meaning arises from evolved drives for reproduction and social cohesion. Humans assign significance to actions and symbols that strengthen bonds, ensure cooperation, and enhance reproductive success.
No God required.
And then I went on this trip to visit a friend in Sacramento about five hours north of us, and he's an atheist friend of mine who had also lost his faith. He basically told me I was being ridiculous. He told me in very straight terms that this is like a joke that I'm actually living out.
He said, "I'm an atheist and I accept there's no meaning, value, and purpose." And then I proceed to make it up. You're an atheist, but you assume God exists and then you just make up your own meaning, value, and purpose. And he's like, "What's the point? Why add in that extra step? Why don't you just bite the bullet and accept there's no meaning, value, and purpose? Just make it up and live that way."
For the five-hour drive home, I thought a lot about this. I thought he was right. I was being ridiculous. But I really liked living as though meaning, value, and purpose existed. I didn't want to accept the reality that there was no meaning or value or purpose to this life because I was experiencing the truth that there is meaning and there is value and there's purpose.
He was kind of stealing away what I had, in a silly little way, created. After years of living as though there was meaning, value, and purpose, I had real trouble denying that there actually was and accepting the atheism that I really believed was true. And I had an epiphany. Maybe it's all real. Maybe these daily experiences of meaning, value, and purpose that are happening all around me are valid ways to conclude what the axioms should be.
Maybe the day-in and day-out love I have for my family, my wife, my students, and others—those experiences are valid ways to formulate axioms. I had got to the place where I realized I have to choose some axioms, and you sort of just choose them, right? I was like, why aren't I choosing to accept what's obvious, which is that there is meaning and value and purpose? I started to realize I was denying my experience—that my atheism was denying my daily, moment-by-moment experience—and I put it all together and said, "Of course it's real."
I came up with an axiom around that time, something like this: what I'm experiencing right now has some connection to what's real. It may seem like a daily axiom to you, but for me it was a big deal. What I'm experiencing right now has some connection to what's real. And if that's true, then the love I have for my wife is real, and the love I have for my children is real. And these day-in and day-out encounters of meaning and value and purpose—that's all real. I began to settle into the idea that this is all real. If meaning and value and purpose are real, I see no other way to get there unless there's a God somewhere in the mix.
So I accepted that God exists because this world is so meaningful, and I could no longer deny the meaningfulness.
For those ten years, I was trying to really believe there was no meaning, value, and purpose. But I knew it wasn't true. Having experienced that, it wasn't true. There's something to be said for our experience and our grounding existential sensibilities—our desires for love, for meaning, purpose, and value—but also for the things we experience in daily life, like freely choosing, freedom of choice, believing that humans are valuable, that we have human rights, and that there is such a thing as good and evil.
These things—whether you call them intuitions or brute facts inside of us—are things we just know exist. When you're looking for the best explanation or grounding for what those things are, they are best explained through a transcendent source who is the grounding for them: a personal, transcendent, powerful mind that creates us in his image and imbues us with a mind that can...