At last! After years of assailing our ears with the wet smacking of faith-osculation and the unbearable blather of Krista Tippett, National Public Radio (NPR) has published a piece defending atheism and dismantling one of the commonest criticisms tendered by the Unthinking Faithful: atheism sucks the meaning out of life.

And I’m proud to see that the piece, “An unkillable myth about atheists,” is by a faculty member at my alma mater William & Mary: Barbara J. King. She’s a professor of anthropology and author of several books, most recently How Animals Grieve.  More good stuff: here’s her picture from her website (the caption is mine), which also includes the statement, “Together with her husband, she cares for and arranges to spay and neuter homeless cats in Virginia.”

But onto King’s short piece on Cosmos & Culture (she writes there frequently), which was inspired by a new book written by accommodationist Alister McGrath. McGrath is a professor of Science & Religion (!) at Oxford, an ordained Anglican priest, and a man whose writings I’ve slogged through with great distress. According to King, McGrath says stuff like this:

“Since science discloses no meaning to the universe, the only reasonable conclusion is that there is no meaning to find.”

By now all of us can respond to this as King does:

Here, yet again, is the unkillable myth, the persistent blind spot about atheism that apparently no amount of explaining can make go away. No matter how lucidly atheists explain in books, essays and blog posts that, yes, life can and does for us have meaning without God, the tsunami of claims about atheists’ arid existence rolls on and on.

. . . First is the understanding, emergent from evolutionary theory, that neither the universe as a whole, nor we humans within it, have evolved according to some plan of design. Cosmic evolution and human evolution unfold with no guiding hand or specific goals. Most atheists do accept this, I think.

Second is to embrace as a logical next step the idea that our own individual lives have no purpose or meaning. Do you know of any atheists who believe this? I don’t.

. . . An anthropological perspective teaches us that we humans are a quintessentially meaning-making species. We create love and kindness (hate and violence, too), and also work that matters. We recognize and protect (or, too often, harm) our sense of connection to other animals, to plants and trees, to all of nature’s landscapes. What are those acts if not ones of meaning and purpose?

. . . I’m yet another atheist voice chiming in to say that my life, thanks very much, is full of meaning.

Now, how to make this unkillable myth about atheism into a moribund myth?

I’ve often agreed with King, arguing that we nonbelievers imbue our lives with our own meanings—things like satisfying work, hobbies, raising a family, communing with friends, helping others, drinking good wine, and wearing cowboy boots. But after thinking about King’s essay, I’m not sure if I could really answer the questions, “What is the meaning of your life?” or “What gives your life meaning?”

I won’t get into the tedious and perennial philosophical argument about “the meaning of meaning” here. But what I want to say is this: what nonbelievers see as the “meaning” of life is simply what we like to do and prefer to do—the things that give us satisfaction.

Thus I much prefer the question, “What gives you satisfaction in your life?” That sounds a lot less portentous than the word “meaning”, for I’m not sure what it means to say things like “studying evolution gives my life meaning.” I enjoy studying evolution, and it gives me a lot of pleasure and satisfaction to learn the diverse ways plants and animals have evolved, but I don’t walk around imbued with the feeling that those endeavors have given my life “meaning”. I’m just doing what I like to do. In fact, I’d prefer that nonbelievers entirely avoid the notion of “meaning” because of its religious overtones. Why try to ape the faithful? Saying what gives our life “meaning” is like trying to create secular churches so we can satisfy a supposed need.

Now “purpose” is a different issue, for atheists can argue more credibly that we do give our lives purpose. And that purpose is to do those things that bring us satisfaction. Usually, though, “purpose” isn’t taken to mean pleasurable activities like reading or traveling. Rather, it denotes satisfying activities that seem “higher” because they help others. But again, I’d be hard pressed to say what the “purpose” of my life is. Can you tell us what yours is?

As an example of the idea she opposes, King discusses When Breath Becomes Air, the popular new book by the late neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, diagnosed at age 36 with terminal cancer. Here’s one of the book’s passages she criticizes:

“To make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning — to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life doesn’t have any.”