Divine Revelation and Life’s Meaning

Abstract

Over the last two or three decades, analytic philosophers have become increasingly involved in debates about life’s meaning. They have fruitfully adopted a bottom-up strategy involving the observation of human experience and the description and comparison of circumstances that can make life meaningful. In this essay, I intend to adopt a top-down strategy. This approach involves accepting the notion of life’s meaning as it is presented in theistic views of a supernatural being who has made it possible for humans to become aware of him through divine revelation. More specifically, I will focus on Christian revelation. My thesis is that the view of life’s meaning it offers can only be revealed by God, and that this view is more beneficial than those that emerge from a bottom-up strategy because it enables everyone to become aware of and achieve life’s meaning, rather than just some people.