Introduction: On What Grounds Is Life Declared Meaningless Without an Afterlife?
“What is the purpose of life if there is no afterlife?”—this question is often posed as though rejecting the existence of an afterlife necessarily entails the conclusion that life is meaningless. Yet the very conclusion that ought to be demonstrated is smuggled into the question as an assumption. Why must a life last forever in order to be meaningful? Why must the worth of a person’s love, thought, creativity, sense of justice, or efforts to relieve another person’s suffering be determined by a reward after death? The value of rescuing a child from danger, securing justice for someone who has been wronged, or discovering a treatment for a disease can be recognized in this world. The effects of these acts are real; their worth is not suspended until we learn whether another life exists after death. The claim that an afterlife is an indispensable condition of life’s meaning is an unproven philosophical proposition, not a self-evident truth. The problem begins when the origin of human life, the task assigned to it, and its meaning are treated as three names for the same question [1].
Religious discourse often equates the meaning of life with the question, “Why were we created?” But how a being or object came into existence, whether some task was assigned to it from outside, and whether its existence is valuable are three distinct matters. Even when the biological history of human existence is understood, that does not settle all of a person’s moral goals; conversely, merely declaring a goal does not make that goal just. The fact that a religious text declares a purpose for creation must not be confused with two further claims: that the declaration is true and that all life outside that purpose is worthless. An evidence-based discussion of meaningfulness must therefore establish workable criteria for what counts as meaningful rather than confining life in advance to a prescribed religious goal. Human beings suffer, experience joy, form relationships, think, and can change the lives of others. There is no rational basis for making the value of these real capacities await supernatural permission.
Morality in Exchange for Rewards and Punishments: Self-Interest versus Justice
Why an action is good and how a person may be encouraged to perform it are two separate questions. Helping someone in distress is morally justified because it reduces their suffering, increases their safety, and fulfills our responsibilities toward one another. A promise of reward or a threat of punishment may be attached to the action, but the incentive itself does not prove that the action is moral. When the pursuit of heaven and the avoidance of hell become the ultimate foundation of morality, the assessment of right and wrong gives way to a calculation of the benefits and costs of obedience. The distinction between helping because one understands another person’s suffering and helping to secure one’s own salvation is important to an evaluation of moral character. Psychology has long distinguished intrinsic from extrinsic motivation; systems of rewards and control can, under some conditions, alter people’s spontaneous interest in an activity [2]. A beneficial outcome is not the same as the reason for performing a good act, and the expectation of a reward cannot serve as the argument that establishes its moral worth.
Consider a child who has become lost on the street and is crying. Someone takes the child safely back to their family. The act is good because the child has been brought to safety; we do not need to know how much money entered the rescuer’s bank account to establish that. Now suppose that the same person acted in the hope of extracting a large sum of money from the child’s wealthy family. We need not deny the good outcome, but the character of the person’s motive has changed. There is an even more important question: if someone promised a reward for helping the child but an even larger reward for abusing the child, which action would be moral? Without an independent standard of justice, this question cannot be answered. If the reward-giver’s command is the final criterion, the moral difference between causing suffering and preventing it also becomes subject to that authority’s wishes. A morality that places the authority’s reward above the victim’s suffering removes human welfare from the center of moral judgment.
The fundamental question raised in Plato’s Euthyphro is relevant here: is an action morally right because the gods approve of it, or do the gods approve of it because it is morally right? In the first case, right and wrong depend on an authority’s preferences; in the second, there is a standard of moral quality independent of those preferences. An order to kill innocent people, the acceptance of slavery, or permission for nonconsensual sexual relations does not cease to cause harm simply because it is attributed to a sacred authority. Moral judgment requires an examination of characteristics such as human suffering, consent, justice, freedom, and mutual responsibility. When religious commands conflict with these standards, questioning their morality is not irrational; it is the ordinary process of determining whether a command is just at all [3].
The Origin of Life, Assigned Functions, and Meaning Are Not the Same Thing
“Why do human beings exist?” can mean, first, how human beings came into existence—a question investigated through evolution, biology, and history. It can also mean whether a creator made humanity for a particular task; that requires evidence of the creator’s existence, intentions, and the nature of the supposed task. A third meaning concerns which experiences, relationships, and actions make life valuable; this is a question of moral and philosophical evaluation. Not knowing the answer to the first does not establish the second, and the third can be addressed even if the second has not been established. An individual had no control over being born, but can nevertheless participate in decisions about how to treat others, what knowledge to pursue, and what injustices to oppose. The absence of a preassigned purpose does not make the adoption of a purpose impossible. Equating life’s meaning with obedience to commands instead diminishes the real value of moral judgment, creativity, and human relationships.
When a craftsperson makes a machine for a particular function, the machine’s intended purpose can be found in its maker’s design. A human being, however, is not a machine. A person can think, feel, and exercise autonomy; their dignity does not depend on how effectively someone else can use them. Parents who bring a child into the world do not thereby become owners of that child’s life, nor do they acquire an unlimited right to determine every purpose of the child’s future. The argument “I made you, therefore your life has value only insofar as you serve my purposes” reduces a person to an instrument of the maker. The foundations of human dignity include the individual’s feelings, aspirations, reasoning, and rights; identifying a creator does not, in itself, justify unconditional authority over that individual. When claims about a religious purpose deprive people of the ability to determine what makes their own lives meaningful, the issue is no longer merely one of belief. It becomes a question of personal freedom.
The meaning of human life is not simply a matter of private whim, either. Someone may find pleasure in harming others, but that does not make the pleasure a human good. Goals that advance knowledge, justice, creativity, care, mutual assistance, and freedom possess a significance that can be defended by reasons beyond individual preference. Meaning can therefore be constructed, and the meanings people construct can also be criticized. Language, education, law, and human rights have all developed through social history; that does not make them unreal. Naturalist approaches in contemporary philosophy of life’s meaning examine the worth of human lives precisely within the relationships, activities, and experiences of this world [4].
The Quran on Humanity’s Purpose: Worship, Testing, and Return
The Quran makes explicit statements about humanity’s purpose. Verse 51:56 of Surah Adh-Dhariyat says that jinn and human beings were created to worship Allah. Verse 67:2 of Surah Al-Mulk presents life and death as a test of human deeds. Verse 23:115 of Surah Al-Mu’minun challenges together the notions of purposeless creation and of not returning to Allah. In this scriptural framework, the assessment of life revolves around the task prescribed by the creator, the test, and the return in the afterlife. Yet a fundamental logical gap remains: that a text declares a purpose proves what the text says; establishing that this purpose is factually real and that human life without it is meaningless requires independent arguments. Accepting a command as true does not, by itself, erase every other form of value existing in the world [5].
وَمَا خَلَقْتُ الْجِنَّ وَالْإِنْسَ إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُونِ
English translation: I did not create jinn and human beings except to worship Me. [Surah Adh-Dhariyat 51:56]
Describing life as a test raises the same difficulty. A test is a method; its value depends on what it assesses, why it assesses it, and whose legitimate welfare follows from that assessment. A school examination assesses a student’s abilities; a medical test provides information about disease. But declaring the test conducted by an omniscient creator to be the sole meaning of human existence does not independently answer the question, “Why is this test the fundamental source of existential value?” The fact that a test is under way does not extinguish the intrinsic worth of a person’s love, grief, search for knowledge, or efforts to help others. Rather, those genuinely valuable activities are being made into the material of the test. If their moral importance can already be recognized without reference to the test, then the test was not necessary to establish that importance [6].
الَّذِي خَلَقَ الْمَوْتَ وَالْحَيَاةَ لِيَبْلُوَكُمْ أَيُّكُمْ أَحْسَنُ عَمَلًا وَهُوَ الْعَزِيزُ الْغَفُورُ
English translation: He who created death and life to test you as to which of you is best in deeds; and He is the Almighty, the All-Forgiving. [Surah Al-Mulk 67:2]
God’s Purpose and Human Meaning: The Problem of a Double Standard
A fundamental claim of religious conceptions of life is that human existence becomes meaningful only when it fulfills the purpose assigned by God. On this view, a person might build a meaningful life through relationships, work, knowledge, and moral responsibility, but that life supposedly lacks ultimate meaning unless it is connected to God’s purpose. Yet the same standard is not applied to God’s own existence. God is described as self-sufficient, beginningless, and free from the need to perform a task assigned by anyone else. This is the central double standard: human existence is declared meaningless without a purpose prescribed by another being, while God’s existence is not required to satisfy that condition. If a rule genuinely expresses an indispensable condition of meaningfulness, it should not disappear merely because the identity of the subject has changed. And if God can possess worth or meaningfulness without an external directive, an external directive cannot be a universal condition of meaning. The problem created by religious authority here is not whether God and humans are identical in every respect. The issue is whether there is any general argument for the condition of meaningfulness imposed on human beings in the first place.
What Is the Purpose of God’s Own Existence?
When people are asked, “What is the purpose of your life?”, a religious answer often invokes worshiping God, following His commands, and achieving success in the afterlife. But if, according to that answer, a purpose must always be a task assigned by a higher authority, then for what purpose does God exist? Who assigned Him that task? As soon as it is said that God needs no external authority and that His existence is complete without a task assigned by someone higher, the supposed necessity of an external purpose-giver collapses. If God is said to determine His own purpose, that also recognizes that a self-determined purpose can, in principle, be meaningful. Human beings likewise reason about their goals, revise mistaken aims, form new relationships, and choose to promote others’ welfare. Declaring these capacities meaningless on the sole ground that “God is different” achieves nothing. Identifying a difference does not establish a conclusion; one must show why the difference changes the standard of meaningfulness. If meaning can arise from a being’s own nature, actions, and relationships, then making human beings dependent exclusively on external religious commands is irrational.
When a person chooses medicine, education, art, science, or human rights work as a purpose in life, the meaning of that purpose is determined by the character of the work. Medicine alleviates patients’ suffering; education expands knowledge and the capacity to make decisions; justice protects people who have been harmed. These outcomes are real even without being declared in God’s name. If such work is nevertheless denied recognition as a basis of meaningfulness on the assertion “A purpose counts as a purpose only when it is assigned by a superior authority,” then the word “purpose” has been made to mean subordination, not meaning. Under this reasoning, the answer to why human beings live no longer comes from the worth of their lives but from who appointed them to which task. An employer may determine an employee’s duties, but the employee’s human value is not exhausted by the employer’s plans. Likewise, even granting the claim of creation, the creator’s plan does not exhaust an individual’s moral dignity or the full meaning of every human activity. Claiming authority over a life is not the same as demonstrating that life’s meaningfulness.
A Self-Sufficient God and ‘Dependent’ Humanity: Dependence in What Sense?
Surah Fatir 35:15 describes human beings as dependent upon Allah and Allah as free of need and worthy of praise. Within its religious framework, the verse defines a relationship between God and humans: one side is self-sufficient, the other dependent. But how does this dependence establish that human life is meaningless? People depend on food, water, oxygen, their environment, and one another’s cooperation. None of these real needs entails that their lives have no meaning. A child is dependent on parental care, yet the child’s joy and suffering are no less important. An ill person depends on a doctor, but the value of that person’s survival does not disappear. Depending on something to sustain one’s existence and depending on another being’s commands for one’s moral or human worth are entirely different relations. The truth of the first provides no evidence for the second. Trying to settle the question of meaning by declaring “God is free of need, while humans are needy and dependent” is therefore a change of subject: a description of need is presented as a definition of value. The Quran states [7]:
يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ أَنْتُمُ الْفُقَرَاءُ إِلَى اللَّهِ وَاللَّهُ هُوَ الْغَنِيُّ الْحَمِيدُ
English translation: O humanity, you are the ones in need of Allah, whereas Allah is the One free of all need, the Praiseworthy. [Surah Fatir 35:15]
Confusing these forms of dependence is a major logical error. A tree rooted in the ground cannot survive without soil, water, and light. That does not make its shade, fruit, or contribution to biodiversity meaningless. The same applies to human beings: a life depends on an environment and the assistance of others in order to continue. This identifies the conditions of its existence, not the reasons it may be valuable. There is a more difficult question still. If human beings were created to worship Allah, yet Allah is not in need of anyone’s worship or assistance, whose need does this worship serve? If Allah is said to have no deficiency that needs to be remedied, worship cannot be described as meeting a need of His. Establishing worship as humanity’s sole purpose would then require showing how it promotes human welfare, moral development, or some other real good. And if that welfare is the basis of the argument, welfare itself becomes the standard of evaluation—not the mere act of obeying a command. The question therefore cannot be avoided: why should human beings bear an ultimate obligation to serve someone who lacks nothing, and why should their lives outside that obligation be meaningless?
Does the Creator’s Plan Determine the Entire Value of a Human Life?
The purpose of a manufactured object may be determined by its maker’s plan. A pen is used for writing; a lock is used to secure a door. But placing human beings in the same category as pens or locks creates a fundamental moral problem. A pen feels no pain, does not consider its future, and does not revise goals of its own. Human beings experience pain, seek safety, think, love, protest, and make decisions. These capacities provide real grounds for personal interests and dignity. The assertion that someone was created does not entitle the maker to reduce that person’s feelings and freedom to instruments of the maker’s purposes. Parents do not acquire a moral right to use their child for the rest of the child’s life simply by bringing the child into existence. The principles used in making such moral judgments about human relationships cannot be suspended for a purported creator without further justification. “He has the power, therefore His decisions are just” describes power; it does not demonstrate justice. Possessing overwhelming strength does not make a command moral. Power and moral legitimacy are different concepts.
Making the identity of the creator the sole criterion of meaningfulness ultimately reduces the human person to a tool. Whom someone loves, what injustices they resist, or what knowledge they create becomes secondary whenever it lies outside the creator’s will. But the value of saving a child’s life is present in the child’s survival, future, experiences, and relationships with family. Whether a god approves of that act does not make the reduction of the child’s suffering any more or less real. Similarly, unjustly imprisoning someone deprives that person of freedom; religious approval does not erase the harm. Attempting to detach the moral value of an action from its real effects on human life and locate that value solely in an authority’s command subordinates evaluation to authority. This provides no strong demonstration of life’s meaning. It replaces the original question with a different one: who is entitled to issue orders?
God Exempt from Accountability, Humans Subject to Unconditional Obedience
Surah Al-Anbiya 21:23 of the Quran states that Allah will not be questioned about what He does, while others will be questioned. The religious meaning is explicit: the creator stands beyond interrogation, while created beings are subject to accountability. Yet this poses a new moral problem. Declaring someone exempt from accountability has no logical connection to proving that every decision they make is just. In human society, judges, rulers, parents, and teachers do not stand beyond moral scrutiny; the reasons, consequences, and fairness of their decisions can be questioned. The more extensive an authority’s power, the greater the potential for harm from its decisions, so the need for rational examination does not disappear. Removing the right to ask “why” cannot turn a claim into a truth. Human beings must devote their lives to the task God has assigned, but God owes no answer as to why He assigned it: this framework establishes a one-sided power relationship instead of a moral explanation. [8]
لَا يُسْأَلُ عَمَّا يَفْعَلُ وَهُمْ يُسْأَلُونَ
English translation: He is not questioned about what He does, but they will be questioned. (Surah Al-Anbiya 21:23)
Asking where a person’s power to punish others comes from is one question; asking whether the punishment is just is another. Even if the source of that power is claimed to be religious or supernatural, the second question remains relevant. If “Allah is beyond question” is treated as the final answer, no moral debate remains, because the authority’s position replaces the truth or justice of the decision as the only criterion. Yet the same system makes extensive claims about human purpose, testing, obedience, wrongdoing, and accountability. People are told that to discover the meaning of their lives they must first accept God’s purpose, while the question of why that purpose is just and why it must be the sole meaningful goal is denied its proper standing. This asymmetry directly expresses a double standard. There is no substitute for a reasoned account of moral justification: the identity of an authority does not create a standard of truth and justice. Commands issued under that authority must themselves be subject to rational examination.
A Beginningless Conscious God: Evidence Is Required, Not Adjectives
God is described as beginningless, eternal, omniscient, and endowed with will. But reciting four attributes of a being together does not establish that any of them exists. “The being has no beginning” is a claim about time and existence. “The being is conscious” is a claim about experience and information processing. “The being has a will” is a claim about decisions and action. “The being assigns purposes” is a claim about the relationship among desires, goals, and actions. The words used in one claim cannot serve as evidence for another. In known conscious beings, memory, feeling, changes in conscious states, and thought are connected to functioning neural processes. Anesthesia, brain injuries, and neuroscientific observations make this connection evident. A claim that there is a conscious being without a brain and without a beginning therefore requires independent explanation and evidence of how such consciousness exists and functions. Calling the being self-sufficient does not answer the question.
The conception of a God existing outside time creates further explanatory problems. In ordinary usage, thinking involves considering information; making a decision involves selecting among alternatives; responding to a prayer involves a relationship between the request and the response. These activities involve sequence and change. A being existing throughout an endless span of time is not the same concept as a being existing outside time altogether. The first claim concerns an unbeginning past; the second calls into question the temporal order of experiences and actions. If God creates at one point, later judges human deeds, and hears someone’s appeal, the relationship between these acts and timelessness needs to be clearly explained. “Time does not apply to Him” is not that explanation; it merely restates the problem in different words. The relationship between a timeless God and a changing world remains a profound and disputed philosophical issue, examined extensively in scholarship on time and eternity [9].
The immediate conclusion is clear: one cannot declare a beginningless conscious being to be the giver of humanity’s purpose without evidence that such a being exists. To establish God as the sole source of meaning in human life, one must first establish His existence, consciousness, and the reality of His assigning a purpose to human beings. The fact that these claims appear in a religious text does not make them true. Even if the being’s existence were established, it would still need to be demonstrated separately why human life could possess no real value outside that being’s purpose. Thus the claim “Life has no meaning without God” rests not on a single unsupported assumption but on several. People do not have to accept these uncertain assumptions in order to recognize the real value of love, intellectual activity, social relationships, and the alleviation of suffering.
If Intrinsic Value Is Accepted for God, Why Deny It to Humans?
We may value an action as a means of securing an outcome, while regarding the outcome itself as valuable in its own right. Taking medicine is a means to recover one’s health; the experience and capacities of good health are valuable in themselves. Education can be a means to employment, but the joy of understanding and the growth of comprehension can also be valuable in themselves. Love can contribute to family security, while at the same time being more than a stopping point on the road to another reward. Meaningfulness therefore does not require placing an ever higher purpose beyond every experience. This principle is relevant to God as well. If the value of God’s existence is said to reside in His own nature, knowledge, or activity, then intrinsic value has effectively been admitted. Human beings may also find intrinsic value in their nature, relationships, understanding, and actions. There is no general rule by which intrinsic value can be accepted in one case and ruled out in advance in the other. Independent justification is required for shutting human beings out of the possibility of meaning that is left open for God.
Calling a religious purpose the “highest” purpose raises another problem: the word “highest” does not make every other form of value disappear. A person may have an overarching goal in life, but friendship, laughter, art, inquiry, rest, and compassion can still have value of their own. A researcher may dedicate much of a lifetime to discovering a treatment for cancer. That goal may be their deepest commitment, but it does not make love for their child meaningless. Likewise, a person may accept the worship of God as their principal purpose, but this does not justify concluding that the nonreligious lives of others have no meaning. There is no valid inference from “my purpose” to “the only legitimate purpose for everyone.” To hand a monopoly over life’s meaning to a single authority, one would need evidence that every independent source of human value has been invalidated. No such evidence is supplied by religious proclamations themselves.
The Decisive Issue Is Legitimacy, Not the Power to Assign Purposes
Even if a powerful being is capable of assigning purposes to human beings, whether compliance with those purposes is morally obligatory requires a separate judgment. Power and authority can cause a command to be enforced, but they cannot establish that it is just. A dictator may have the power to determine the occupations and life courses of thousands of people, yet this capacity does not make the lives he prescribes meaningful or the people’s independent goals meaningless. The same reasoning applies to any being presented as the giver of purpose: it remains necessary to ask how the prescribed purpose relates to the welfare, freedom, and justice owed to others. Neither the magnitude of the reward for obeying a questionable command nor the severity of the punishment for disobedience changes the moral character of the command. The attempt to derive the legitimacy of a purpose from the cause of existence or the source of authority ultimately fails.
Breaking this double standard does not require God to be like a human being or a human being to be the creator of the universe. What is required is a consistent logical standard for claims about meaningfulness. If it is acknowledged that the worth of a being’s existence can be present without a task assigned from outside, there is no basis for saying that human life is meaningless merely because it lacks a duty tied to the afterlife. If the value of human choices and actions can be assessed through their actual contribution to the welfare of others, knowledge, and justice, making the presumption of an afterlife a necessary gateway to that assessment is mistaken. To exalt God’s existence as self-sufficient without an externally imposed purpose, while declaring human existence empty without one, is not a profound philosophical discovery. It is the application of two incompatible standards to the same question.
God’s existence is not said to require an external command in order to have meaning, but human existence supposedly does. This unequal rule is the heart of the dispute. Without a valid reason for the distinction, it is a double standard.
Assigning someone a particular task and recognizing real value in that person’s existence are different matters. The value of children, friendship, knowledge, and justice does not remain suspended until a supernatural command is issued.
Another Afterlife Beyond the Afterlife? The Problem of an Endless Chain of Purposes
If the afterlife is described as the ultimate purpose of earthly life, a question arises: how is meaning established once someone reaches the afterlife? If the purpose of working, worshiping, and succeeding in the test of earthly existence is to receive rewards in the hereafter, what will be the purpose of life after those rewards have been obtained? Will another reward then be necessary? If endless life is valuable only because it leads to some further and higher outcome, this calculation never ends. But if the happiness, peace, and relationships of paradise are valuable in themselves, then a fundamental principle has been conceded: not every kind of value must be established through a subsequent reward. By the same principle that makes the experiences of the afterlife meaningful in themselves, earthly love, knowledge, and well-being can also be meaningful in themselves. If paradise requires no succession of further paradises to justify its pleasures, then the claim that earthly life must have another life to possess meaning lacks any general basis. Longing for an afterlife may be a belief or a hope; it is not the only method of establishing life’s meaning.
Why does a doctor treat a patient? So that the patient recovers. Why does the patient recover? So that they can live free of suffering. At some point in this chain, happiness, freedom, health, and well-being must be recognized as valuable in themselves. There is no reason to append another external purpose beyond every good thing. A mother rejoices in her child’s happiness; seeing the child smile gives her joy. She needs no certificate from a still higher purpose to establish the meaning of that experience. The purpose of her actions does not depend on whether she will enter paradise or be rewarded for them after death. Similarly, when an injustice has been stopped, the value of that success is found in the victim’s actual safety and dignity. A belief in the afterlife may be associated with the event, but does not create the event’s value from nothing. The sequence of purposes can produce entirely tangible outcomes: action → benefit → improved quality of life. But the formula “action → afterlife → meaningfulness” does not establish why the second step must be the sole source of all meaning. Substituting the afterlife for an explanation of valuable activity merely transfers the task of evaluation to an unknown future world.
Surah Al-Mu’minun 23:115 connects the assertion that human beings were not created without purpose to the claim that they will return to Allah. Return is therefore a central part of the verse’s religious account of meaningfulness. But the fact that a religious text declares a future return does not establish that another life actually exists after death. Nor does it establish that people are incapable of doing meaningful work without believing in that return. If meaningfulness is evaluated through the reduction of suffering, creative achievement, the expansion of knowledge, and just relationships, the value of these things can be recognized in the present. A religious declaration alone is insufficient to establish that rewards in an unseen future are indispensable [10].
أَفَحَسِبْتُمْ أَنَّمَا خَلَقْنَاكُمْ عَبَثًا وَأَنَّكُمْ إِلَيْنَا لَا تُرْجَعُونَ
English translation: Did you think that We created you without purpose and that you would not be returned to Us? [Surah Al-Mu’minun 23:115]
Living Forever Is Not the Same as Living a Valuable Life
The fact that a life is finite does not entail that it is meaningless. A piece of music has a final note, but that note does not render all the preceding notes worthless. Someone may spend years discovering a medical treatment; the value of the discovery does not vanish when the discoverer dies. A child may endure hours of pain before recovering through treatment. There is no principle requiring the relief of that suffering to last forever before it can be valuable. Duration and significance are different dimensions. If an action had to be eternal to count as valuable, no particular medical treatment, act of justice, work of art, or moment of friendship could be regarded as worthwhile. Yet every real benefit occurs at some particular time and under particular conditions. Endless duration is a claim about the quantity of time; the meaning of life is a judgment about experiences, relationships, activities, and values. Treating quantity as proof of quality is a logical error.
The desire for eternal life also reveals something about human beings: death separates us from loved ones, experiences, and future possibilities. People do not want this separation because love, goals, and happiness already exist in the life they are living. Using the fear of death to declare earthly life meaningless therefore undermines the very reasoning involved. If people did not already consider their present lives valuable, the fear of losing those lives would not be so intense. The longing for endless life depends, instead, on an existing appreciation of finite life. The inevitability of death does not diminish our responsibility for what happens now. The limited time available to stop an injustice, protect a child, or care for someone who is ill may increase the urgency of our decisions. Meaning is thus to be found not in denying death but in the real actions performed before death.
The idea of living forever itself requires us to imagine some particular kind of life. Simply possessing unlimited time does not make every experience during that time meaningful. If there are no goals, relationships, creativity, freedom, or understanding, merely extending existence does not generate value. Conversely, when those qualities are present, life can be valuable even over a limited period. The answer to the question of life’s meaning is therefore not a mechanical number placed at the end of time. It concerns how one lives, the relationships one forms, and what one creates and protects. Before declaring life eternal, one must explain where its value lies. If that explanation consists only of a future reward, the existing worth of love, knowledge, and justice is once again overlooked. The activities that make a meaningful life possible are all available while human beings are alive.
The Promise of Judgment After Death and the Duty to Pursue Justice Now
When an abuser or oppressor dies without being punished, people long for justice. The victim’s injury remains unresolved, and society may experience anger and helplessness. That desire for justice is real and reasonable. But the fact that justice is desirable does not entail that a courtroom must exist after death. An outcome we wish for is not the same as an event that will actually happen. A starving person’s need for food does not cause food to materialize miraculously; food must be provided. Likewise, when justice remains incomplete in this world, remedies must be sought through evidence, social institutions, protection, compensation, and the prevention of crime. The assurance that every account will be settled after death cannot replace a victim’s medical care, safety, and legal support today. Hope for judgment in the afterlife may provide psychological comfort; that hope is not evidence that such a judgment will occur.
When the promise of compensation in the afterlife becomes an instruction to endure injustice in the present, its social consequences are serious. Securing the safety of an abused woman, paying workers what they are owed, ending religious or state persecution, and preventing violence against children are immediate responsibilities. If victims are promised future rewards while the oppression they face continues, the social harm continues as well. The real test of morality is not an imagined supernatural courtroom in the future, but how actual people are treated now. Justice is not merely the infliction of punishment; it involves ending harm, restoring rights, preventing repeat offenses, and protecting people’s safety. The justification for these activities does not have to await proof of a divine command. The reality that people experience suffering provides a basis for responsibilities directed against that suffering.
Creating Meaning in Our Own Lives: Freedom, Reason, and Responsibility to Others
Recognizing that life has no single predetermined purpose does not condemn people to a prison of meaninglessness. Instead, each person has the capacity to choose meaningful goals in light of their abilities, limitations, relationships, and judgment. A researcher may devote a lifetime to difficult questions; a teacher may give generations of students the freedom to think; a writer may confront injustice through new forms of expression; a parent may devote their efforts to protecting a child; an activist may organize against oppression. The value of these activities is not created by a particular religious identity or a promise of the afterlife. The fact that human beings choose their own goals does not render those goals fictitious. Human-created language, art, law, medicine, and human rights have real effects. Personal preference, however, is not the final measure of morality: an individual’s freedom must be consistent with the freedom and safety of others. The freedom to create meaning is therefore inseparable from justice, equal dignity, and responsibility.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” is not an account of the literal death of a divine being. It is a philosophical expression of the crisis caused by the erosion of traditional religious moral authority in European intellectual history. When established authorities lose their force, people are not freed from questions of value. Rather, they must ask which values are justifiable, which rules produce oppression, and which goals genuinely improve human life. An inherited belief is not true merely because it is old, nor is a rule just simply because a religious institution approves of it. Freedom of thought means submitting beliefs and commands to evidence, correcting errors through reason, and making human welfare relevant to decisions. This freedom is not uncontrolled whim; it is the capacity to take reasoned responsibility for one’s choices. The human ability to determine goals independently is a fundamental source of our capacity to construct meaning in life [11].
The histories of science and literature reveal several independent domains of human meaning. Darwin’s work in biology explained the history of species. Hawking’s work in cosmology advanced our inquiries into the laws of nature. Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry gave voice to the longing for fearless thought, knowledge, and human freedom. A scientific theory is not a book of moral commandments, just as a poem is not a laboratory result. Nevertheless, science and literature together demonstrate that human beings can undertake worthwhile activities through the investigation of reality, emotional expression, and the pursuit of a just life. Reducing life’s purpose to an examination paper administered by a supernatural authority obscures the real significance of this immense range of human achievements.
Charles Darwin’s ideas of natural selection and common ancestry explain biodiversity and adaptation through processes of natural history. Declaring a separate miraculous purpose for every stage of life’s extraordinary diversity is not a scientific explanation. Questions about the development of species are to be investigated through evidence and testable models.
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design discusses the role of physical laws and cosmological models in explaining the origins of the universe. Announcing a creator’s will as the answer to an unknown event does not constitute a testable explanation. Investigating the history of the universe and establishing the meaning of human life are separate questions; what remains unknown about the former does not demonstrate the meaninglessness of the latter.
Poem 35 of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali expresses the aspiration for a fearless mind, free knowledge, the clear stream of reason, and a humanity liberated from narrow divisions. This literary appeal to intellectual freedom and the pursuit of truth is not founded on the calculation of rewards after death. Its value lies in the real questions of how human beings think and live while they are alive.
Conclusion: Life’s Meaning Does Not Await Permission from the Afterlife
The claim that “life is meaningless without an afterlife” has not been established, because no necessary logical relationship between meaningfulness and life after death has been demonstrated. The origin of life, tasks assigned by others, morality, and meaningfulness are distinct questions. Relieving suffering, producing knowledge, building loving relationships, protecting freedom, and resisting injustice are genuinely valuable activities. None of them must last forever, nor must they have been preassigned as purposes by another being, in order to possess value. If a purpose declared by religion is to be established as a fact about reality and as a universal moral obligation, independent reasons and evidence must be offered for it. In their absence, religious authorities have no grounds for denying the meaning of human life. Evidence of life’s meaning is found within human life itself—in the reality of suffering, joy, decisions, relationships, labor, knowledge, and struggle.
It is not enough simply to assume both that God is self-sufficient and free of an externally assigned purpose and that the meaning of human life depends exclusively on such a purpose. A justification is needed for this inconsistency. The Quran assigns humanity the goals of worship, testing, and return, while also describing God as free of need and beyond accountability for His actions. But the inference “God needs no authority to assign Him a purpose, whereas human beings require such an authority to have meaning” lacks the necessary logical connection. Dependence is not worthlessness; power is not justice; and purpose is not the same as command. A finite life does not make its joys and sorrows unreal. More morally urgent than imagining endless human existence are the questions of how real people are allowed to live now, how securely their freedom is protected, and how much good their lives bring to the lives of others. Even in the absence of evidence for an afterlife, the human capacity to create, assess, and protect meaning in life is real, present, and sufficient.
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Meaning of Life ↩︎
- Ryan and Deci, Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations, 2000 ↩︎
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Religion and Morality in Western Philosophy ↩︎
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Meaning of Life, Naturalism ↩︎
- Surah Adh-Dhariyat 51:56 ↩︎
- Surah Al-Mulk 67:2 ↩︎
- Surah Fatir 35:15 ↩︎
- Quran, Surah Al-Anbiya 21:23 ↩︎
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Eternity in Christian Thought ↩︎
- Surah Al-Mu’minun 23:115 ↩︎
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche ↩︎