"Human beings are hungry for significance," writes
John Cottingham in his erudite and beautifully
written On the Meaning of Life. "It is
intolerable that life should consist merely of one darn thing after another."
(32)

How one responds to Cottingham’s
eloquent advocacy of the need for religion – or at least spirituality – to give
meaning to life will depend partly on just how hungry for significance you are
and how intolerable you find the idea of a universe lacking in any significance
beyond that which we give it. Fundamentally, Cottingham’s
case seems not to rest on his careful and insightful arguments but the
deep-felt convictions which motivate them, a metaphorical banging of fist on
table, decreeing that there just has to be more to life that three
score
years and ten of mortal existence.

Cottingham wants to avoid the usual "dogmatic
stand off" (ix) between atheists and the religious. But dogmatic or
otherwise, a stand-off seems unavoidable. This book helps us to understand why
by showing how such convictions are needed to take us beyond the inconclusive
demands of rationality. The middle chapter of this book makes a persuasive case
that there is nothing in our scientific or rational understanding of the world
that necessarily rules out a religious world view. To put it crudely, whether
one should be an atheist or a religious believer is cannot be determined merely
by "the facts". Cottingham, I think,
underestimates the extent to which the weight of evidence falls more heavily on
the side of the atheist, but the mere fact that this point is debatable shows
that nothing remotely conclusive follows from it.

Given this inconclusivity, what
can or should persuade us to fall on one side or the other? Cottingham
advocates the religious option by trying to show the emptiness of the secular
alternative and then showing us how attractive the spiritual life is.

The positive part of his argument works better than the
negative one. His arguments that secular humanism provides an inadequate basis
on which to base our lives, while not quite working against straw men, do not
defeat the strongest versions of that position on offer. He makes much of the Nietszchean will to power and the creation of values by the
atomised individual as though this were the logical consequence of embracing
atheism, whereas it is surely truer to say it is an extreme position which few
atheists adopt. In pitching his extremely moderate form of religion against his
moderately extreme version of Nietzsche, one feels Cottingham
has loaded the dice.

The positive case, however, presents more of a challenge to
the atheist. For Cottingham is surely right that the
religious form of life does have advantages which the godless one has trouble
availing itself of. Such things as a sense of the fragility of life and
goodness, an appreciation for the beauty and goodness around us, a sense of
hope – all these things are not beyond the atheist but they have a more natural
place in the life of a believer.

Cottingham, following Pascal, wants to
tempt the atheist down the slippery slope to religious belief by arguing that
these advantages are so worth having that one should adopt the religious form
of life needed to attain them. In taking this first step, there is no need to
adopt any propositional beliefs about the real existence of God, heaven or
anything else. But the spiritual practices such a form of
life require will, Cottingham argues,
naturally lead one to adopt the kind of substantive beliefs associated with the
religion practised. Given his arguments that our best knowledge of the world
doesn’t rule out the truth of these religious beliefs, and given that there is
so much to be gained from living life religiously, why not give it a go?

For the convinced atheist, Cottingham
is acting as God’s own serpent, tempting us to give back the apple from the
tree of knowledge on the promise the Eden is a better place than the
cold, meaningless universe we find ourselves condemned to live in. Because I
don’t find the blind purposelessness of the universe intolerable, am not so
hungry for significance I’ll feed on whatever world view is offering the most,
and think the evidence that this mortal, earthly life is the only we have got is
overwhelming, I am not tempted to renege on Eve’s deal.

But perhaps books like these never change our fundamental
convictions. At best they can help readers see better the merits in the views
they oppose. In this respect Cottingham succeeds
admirably. His case is helped by his ability to enrich his text with countless
apt allusions, quotes and illustrations. But his success is not a result of
mere rhetoric. Cottingham has identified what makes
the religious life not just attractive, but genuinely desirable and
intellectually defensible. For that non-believers should be grateful.

©
2003 Julian Baggini

Julian Baggini
(www.julianbaggini.com) is editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine and the
author of Making Sense: Philosophy Behind the
Headlines and Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (Both Oxford
University Press). His book on philosophy and the meaning of life will be
published in 2004.

Categories: Philosophical