Part 7 of The Argument — the last of the five questions. We've looked at existence, dependency, fine-tuning, and moral standards. This one is about something even closer to home: meaning itself.
Question Five: The Universe Full of Meaning That Means Nothing
You are reading these words right now. And you understand them.
That simple fact, that arbitrary sounds and symbols carry meaning, that language works at all, is more remarkable than it first appears. Language is built entirely, from its most basic unit to its most complex expression, on meaning. Every word points beyond itself to something it refers to.
A universe in which meaning is ultimately unreal has a serious problem. Its most basic communication system is built entirely on it.
But language is only the beginning.
When we see smoke rising above a tree line, we know there is fire. When we find a watch in a field, we know someone built it. When a scientist analyzes water, its existence tells them something definite about what produced it. Effects carry the meaning of their causes. Existence points to origin.
Consider also how we navigate human society. A car sitting on the street with no owner is one thing. The same car, belonging to someone, is entirely different, even though the metal, the engine, the weight are unchanged. The physical object is identical. But the meaning is not. We build entire legal systems, economies, and civilizations on the reality of that meaning. Nobody argues that ownership is just a feeling.
And nobody actually lives as though love is just chemistry. When someone betrays a person they claimed to love, the response is not "my neurochemistry is mildly disrupted." It is outrage, grief, a sense that something real was violated. When a parent holds their child, the meaning of that moment is not a useful illusion. It is felt and lived as something real.
We are creatures saturated in meaning, at the level of language, causality, ownership, and our deepest experiences. We cannot function without it.
And now the question that cannot be avoided: what does it all add up to?
Either the universe is ultimately meaningless, a cosmos of blind, purposeless forces that somehow produced creatures constitutively incapable of living as though meaning is unreal. Or the meaning in the parts points to something in the whole. A universe rooted in something from which meaning flows.
Just to reiterate, we may still choose to believe that meaning comes from nowhere, and we simply choose to believe it. What we cannot say is that the answer does not require faith — that our shared experience of "meaning" is not objectively real. And what we cannot avoid is the incoherence of that position.
Alternatively, we can have faith that just as smoke points back to fire, just as a watch points back to a watchmaker, just as a cloudy day points to the sun behind the clouds, perhaps the universe, saturated with meaning at every level, points back to a source from which that meaning comes.
And honestly, we already live as though it comes from somewhere. The question is whether we have examined what that somewhere might be.
We have now looked at five questions. In every case, two answers were available. In every case, both were extraordinary. In every case, both required faith.
But each question, when you follow the theistic answer, points in the same direction. Toward something uncaused. Something independent. Something that grounds moral truth. Something from which meaning flows. Something that, in calibrating the universe with such precision, appears to have known exactly what it was doing.
Next: if you've followed the five questions honestly, what can we actually say about the Creator they point toward — using reason alone, no scripture required?