Ultimacy's Meaning for Meaning Ultimately

Why God Still Matters in the End

Abstract

This paper explores a common oversight in the philosophical literature on meaning, arguing that the nature of God’s ultimacy prohibits a shared conception of “meaning” between Christian theists and non-theists. The contemporary debate between Supernaturalists and Naturalists often assumes that God’s existence would provide quantitatively more meaning in life than God’s non-existence. Thus, they primarily question whether a sufficiently meaningful life is possible without God, or whether God’s added meaning is a coherent and net benefit to our lives. However, I argue that the nature of God’s ultimacy, following from the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, requires that meaning be understood fundamentally as a value-relation grounded in God. God does not quantitatively augment meaning, but qualitatively determines what meaning means. As such, Supernaturalists and Naturalists frequently speak past one another when discussing questions of sufficient or quantitative meaning, which assume the possibility of a common conception and metric for comparison.