Dean asked:

Could there ever be — or, one might say, is there — any external meaning to human existence?
Even if God exists in the traditional sense, would we not be merely his/her play things?

How can purpose be quantified?

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I can't imagine how, in general, purpose could be quantified. If a particular purpose were to achieve
something or acquire something which could be quantified, e.g. to visit all the cathedrals in Britain
before I die, then, I suppose, I could be said to have realised a certain percentage of that purpose.

An "after life" could be, or could contain the meaning of human existence only if it is of an entirely
different order from our present experience. It would have to be such that (a) it did not give rise to the
questions which generate the alleged need for a meaning in the first place (b) the answer it provided
would have to be satisfactory to us; if it turned out that the purpose of this life was to fatten us up for
consumption by some greedy alien in the next, or to be the toy of some frisky God, our search for
meaning would not be satisfied.

The Beatific Vision, as conceived in the Christian tradition, in which all our dynamism and desires are
satisfied, would be such an existence. If it turns out, on the other hand, that we are merely the
playthings of God, then our aspirations would be unfulfilled and Sporty God would not be our God.

As your question implies, there may be an internal meaning to life, if there is no external meaning.
There are numerous things we enjoy doing and find meaningful, even though they fill no further
purpose. We do them for their own sake: talking to friends, listening to music, walking in the country,
to give a few, high-minded examples. The built-in meaningfulness which we experience, if we are
lucky, in certain activities in life, or sections of our lives, could, conceivably, be experienced over the
whole of a life. Perhaps one might feel this if one had a strong sense of mission or a highly developed
aesthetic sense of the unity of life. Whatever generates this sense, it would have to be something
strong enough to overcome the depressing thought that life is just one damned thing after another.

Even if we come to believe that life does not need a purpose external to itself to be meaningful, death
may remain a matter of regret. The meaninglessness of life and the awfulness of death are two ideas
that have often been run together, but they should be uncoupled. Finding life meaningful does not
necessarily reconcile me to its termination. There may be, as Thomas Nagel suggests in Mortal
Questions, a bad end in store for us all.

Michael Bavidge Deputy Director Centre for Lifelong Learning University of Newcastle