William Lane Craig on the Absurdity of Life without God

Is life meaningless without God? That is what the Christian philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig claims with great confidence in a chapter of his book Reasonable Faith, published in 1994:[1] “if there is no God, then man’s life becomes absurd.” (40) The main reason for this appears to be, at least initially, the fact that we all have to die. If there is no God, then death is real, both for us and for everything else, including the universe itself, and “the prospect of death and the threat of non-being is a terrible horror.” (41)[2] Without God there is no immortality for us, and without immortality “the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.” (42)

Life has no ultimate significance because all the significance it can ever have is merely relative. What we do is relatively significant if it impacts on other events. But if the changes we bring about do not change the final destiny of the universe (because whatever we do, things will cease to exist someday), then they have no ultimate significance. Whatever we accomplish in life, it is then “utterly meaningless”: “This is the horror of modern man: because he ends in nothing, he is nothing.” (42) Immortality, however, is not enough. Without God, an immortal life would still be meaningless because we “could still ask of life, ‘So what?’” (43).

In addition to having no ultimate significance, life has no ultimate value either since we will die (i.e. be punished by death) no matter what, whether we are good or bad. This means that good deeds remain unrewarded and bad deeds unpunished (or, if we see death as punishment, then they are not punished more than good deeds, which is, presumably, what justice would require). Moreover, there are no objective standards of right and wrong. Hitler’s values are just as good as those of a saint. Good and evil do not exist.

Finally, if God does not exist, our life has no ultimate purpose either. “If there is no God, then our life is not qualitatively different from that of a dog.” (45) We are just like all the other animals, freaks of nature, a “blind product of matter plus time plus chance”, soon to return into nothingness. There is no reason why we are here. Only if God exists, is there any hope for us. Without him, there is only despair.

For all those reasons, Craig concludes, atheism is a practical impossibility. We cannot live consistently and happily without believing in the existence of God. We can perhaps think atheism, but we cannot live as atheists. In order to do so we need to delude ourselves. We need to live a lie, pretending that the universe acquires meaning when we give it one and things matter for some reason or other. That, however, is not the case. “Without God, there is no objective meaning in life.” (47) And since there is no absolute (objective) right or wrong, the consistent atheist would have to acknowledge that “all things are permitted” (49). In fact, however, the vast majority of atheists do not act as if they really believed that. They act as if there are things that are not permitted, which makes no sense if there are no objective values. What they should do, if they were consistent, is care only for themselves. They should do whatever it takes to survive, because that is what natural selection “dictates” (51). If there is no God, but only nature, then the atheist has no reason to be moral, and every reason to be immoral. For in nature, “whatever is, is right. But who can live with such a view?” (51) Indeed, why would we want to live with such a view? Clearly, it is better to believe that there is a God (and not just any God, but “the God of the Bible”), because if we don’t, our lives are “absurd”, i.e., worthless and pointless. Therefore, “a rational person ought to choose biblical Christianity” (54).

COMMENTARY:

Craig insists that life without God is meaningless, but he does not really explain why we should expect the existence of God to make a difference. Why does the existence of God rid our life of absurdity? Or is it actually our belief in the existence of God that does that? “It seems to me positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and destruction to life, meaningfulness, and happiness. As Pascal said, we have nothing to lose and infinity to gain.” (54) The reference to Pascal suggests it is the belief that matters. This would change things. If the existence of God gives our lives significance, value and purpose, then it doesn’t really seem to matter whether or not we believe in God. Even if we don’t believe in God, our lives are meaningful. If, on the other hand, it is our belief in the existence of God that makes our life meaningful, then it doesn’t seem to matter whether or not God actually exists. Even if he does not, our lives would still be meaningful if we believed he did. Craig would probably want to argue that for our lives to be meaningful it must both be true that God exist and that we believe in his existence, but he does not give us a reason why this should be so. (Will God perhaps punish us if we don’t believe in him, by withholding eternal life from us?) As it stands, his position is certainly ambiguous.

But let us assume that it is God’s existence that matters most for the possibility of living a meaningful life, and ask why we should think that. Only if God exists, is there any hope, Craig says, but hope for what exactly? It cannot be immortality as such because Craig has stated clearly (and quite plausibly) that an immortal life without God would be just as meaningless as a mortal life without God. So it is not really death that is the problem, and not really immortality that is the solution. Immortality may still be necessary for a meaningful life, but it is not sufficient. But if it is not because of the immortality that God’s existence promises to us that God’s existence can be expected to make our lives meaningful, what else can it be?

If there is no God, Craig claims, then there are no objective values, and if there are no objective values, then “all things are permitted”. So does God’s existence make our life meaningful because only then what appears good to us really is good and what appears evil to us really is evil, so that not everything is permitted? There are at least two problems with this interpretation. First of all, it is unclear how exactly God makes values objective. We may want to say that God has a privileged perspective, so while we may occasionally be unsure about what is right and wrong, good and evil, he knows exactly what is good and what is not. However, in that case we seem to be presupposing that there already is an objective good and evil (because if there were not, how could God know about it?). Therefore we don’t really need God for there to be good and evil. The only thing we might need him for is to tell us what is really good and evil. But not knowing for sure what is really good and what is really evil does not seem to make our lives absurd, at least not to the same degree that the non-existence of good and evil would, and certainly not in the sense that Craig uses the term. The alternative is that God literally makes things good and evil: he decides that, say, looking after a sick friend is good and torturing a puppy to death is evil, and the one is good and the other bad only because he has made that decision. Had he made a different decision, then it might not be. Had he decided that looking after a sick friend is evil and torturing puppies to death is good, then that would be what is good and evil objectively. This is of course exactly what Craig believes,[3] but this view strikes me as a lot more absurd than the view that some things are really bad and that for this very reason God does not want us to do them. In any case, either things, or rather actions, are good or bad in themselves independent of whether we regard them as good or bad, or they are not. If they are, then God is not needed to make them so. And if they are not, then God regarding or postulating them as good does not make them good in themselves. They would still be only subjectively good, namely for, or from the perspective of, the divine subject.

The second problem with the argument that without God there are no objective values and that without objective values “all things are permitted” is that even though it might be true that from the point of the universe all things are permitted, meaning that the universe does not care what we do and do not do and whether we are “good” or “bad”, from our own point of view there are clearly many things that are not permitted. And it seems to me that our own perspective is, and should be, more important to us than the point of view of the universe, even if there is a God and the point of view of the universe is in fact God’s point of view. Craig is obviously wrong (and blatantly inconsistent) when he suggests that natural selection “dictates” that we only care for ourselves. In nature, he claims, “whatever is, is right.” This is of course not the case. Natural selection does not dictate anything, and if there are no objective values, then whatever is, is neither right nor wrong. It simply is. Yet among the things that are, are also our values, our views on what is right and wrong, what should and what should not be done. The atheist, therefore, is in no way rationally compelled to be a selfish bastard. Perhaps in theory nothing is (absolutely) forbidden, but in practice there are certain things we approve of and others that we disapprove of, certain things that we forbid ourselves, and each other. And that is all we will ever have. Even if there is a God who could tell us how things really are (that, for instance, torturing puppies is actually not so bad at all), we could still think that what God tells us is good is a heinous thing to do, even if the only basis we have for our judgement is the fact that we are repulsed by it. Why would it matter so much to us what God thinks and wants? Because he is more powerful and (presumably) holds our fate in his hands?  

To sum up: if our lives are meaningless because our values lack objectivity or absolute validity, then it is not clear how God’s existence would change that. Nor is it clear why we should, in a naturalistic, godless universe, have to live as if nothing mattered, given that certain things clearly do matter to us.

The situation is similar with respect to purpose. We clearly do have purposes, so in that sense our lives have purpose (though perhaps not a purpose). Are they good for anything else? Perhaps not. But why do they have to? There is no reason for our existence, Craig says. Maybe not. Probably not. But again, why does there have to be such a reason? We may be better off without it. Certainly, we may need a reason to go on living (and fortunately most of us have such reasons most of the time), but we don’t really need a reason for being there in the first place. And more importantly, why should our being part of some greater, divine purpose make our lives more meaningful (in the only sense that matters: of being more worth living)? It seems to me if there were a God and God had assigned some role to me, so that my existence had in that sense a purpose (i.e., it would help realize God’s purpose), then I would still have to think about it and then either accept or not accept my role in the divine plan. If I did not like the role I was supposed to play, then playing it would not make my life any more meaningful. But if I have to accept a role in order for it to give my life not just a purpose, but a meaningful purpose, then why can I not just create a role for myself that I am happy with and play that role as best I can? Why is God’s purpose better than my purpose? Why would my existence be more purposeful if it aligned with God’s purpose rather than my own?

Finally, it seems strange and rather implausible to say that because we end in nothing, we are nothing. Why should only the eternal, the never-ending, count as something? This (essentially Platonic) assumption is especially weird since all the somethings we have ever encountered and are ever likely to encounter are finite. As far as we know, everything that exists one day started to exist and will one day cease to exist. This is what being something means: being something in time and therefore for a time. What is absurd is to expect and desire more than that.

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[1] William Lane Craig, “The Absurdity of Life Without God”, in: William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologies, Wheaton, Ill.: Good News Publishers/ Crossway Books 1994, 57-75. Reprinted in: The Meaning of Life, ed. E.D. Klemke, New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, 40-56. My citations are from this edition.

[2] It is not quite clear to me why the death of the universe is relevant for Craig. If the prospect of my own personal death makes life meaningless/ absurd already, then why does Craig make so much of the ultimate fate of the universe? Also, Craig thinks that death only becomes horrible when we contemplate our own death. The death of others is not such a big deal. (41) But it seems to me that often the death of others (most frequently the death of our loved ones) is more horrible to imagine than our own death. I can live with the fact that I have to die. That they have to die I find much harder to accept.

[3] Craig supports the divine command theory, which holds that certain actions are right simply and solely because God commands us to act that way, rather than that he commands us to act that way because it is the right thing to do. Morality thus depends entirely on what God wants. It follows that without God there is no morality, no objective right and wrong.

Richard M. Hare on what it means to say that something matters

What exactly do we mean when we say that “nothing matters”? Richard Hare attempts to answer this question in an early (1957) essay.[1] The way he answers it is intended to convince us that the view that “nothing matters” (or in other words existential nihilism) is an untenable, for most of us even nonsensical position, and quite obviously so.

Hare starts his essay by relating the story of a young Swiss student staying with the Hares, who after reading Camus’ L’Etranger suddenly became convinced that “nothing matters”. Hare then proceeded to talk him out of it in Socratic fashion. Here is how: when we say that something matters what we do is express concern about that something. Concern, however, is always somebody’s concern. Therefore, when I say that something matters I express my concern for it. I am saying that it matters to me. Accordingly, when you say the same, then you express your concern for that thing. You are saying that it matters to you. Neither of us is then really saying anything about the thing in question. We are only saying something about ourselves.

Now most of us are in fact concerned about many things. And so, apparently, was Hare’s Swiss student, which means that things did matter to him, which means that they did matter, period. For the statement “nothing matters” to be true it would have to be true that the one who makes the statement is not concerned about anything at all. So if I am the one who says that nothing matters, then this is true if and only if nothing matters to me, and if you are the one who says it, then it is true if and only if nothing matters to you. Yet if it were true that nothing mattered to me, why would I then bother to make that statement in the first place? It seems I would at least have to care enough about something to find it worth pointing out to the world that nothing matters, in which case I would have immediately contradicted myself.

The reason we may not be immediately aware of this contradiction is that we tend to misunderstand the function of the word “matters”. Its function is to express (somebody’s) concern. It does not tell us anything about the nature of things. Contrary to what we seem to think when we declare that nothing matters (or seriously wonder whether it might be true that nothing matters), mattering is not something that things do. My wife may both chatter and matter, but while the chattering is something that my wife actually does,[2] the mattering is not. In that sense it is quite true that (strictly speaking) no thing matters, from which we can easily, but mistakenly, derive the conclusion that nothing matters: we take a deep and hard look at things, fail to observe any mattering activity in them, and then conclude that nothing matters. However, we have looked in the wrong place. We should have looked at ourselves. If we had done that we would most likely have found that some things do matter, namely to us and therefore in the only way something can matter.

This is not to say that there are no people out there who are not very much concerned about anything. But they are an exception, and even if nothing or nothing much matters to them, this has absolutely no bearing on the question what matters, or should matter, to us. Instead of wondering whether things matter, Hare suggests in conclusion, we’d better ask ourselves what matters to us, what matters most to us, and what should matter to us and how much it should matter. These are all important life questions. Whether things matter is not.

COMMENTARY:

The obvious question to ask here is of course whether Hare is right to say that what we mean (and all we can mean) when we say that something matters is that it matters to us. Is the function of saying “it matters” really the expression of one’s own personal concern, and nothing else? Is there really no difference between “this is important” and “I find this important”? Personally, I am inclined to agree with Hare, mostly because I don’t see how things can matter if they don’t matter to someone, and how they can matter other than by mattering to someone. On the other hand, it seems to me that when we say something like “nothing matters” we do not really mean to say that nothing matters to us. That is why we would, when we say this, not feel contradicted if somebody pointed out to us that some things do in fact matter to us. We already knew that, and never meant to deny it. So it seems it is something else that we wished to express by saying that ‘nothing matters’. But the question is, what do we mean if we don’t mean that nothing matters to us? I find this question very difficult to answer. Consider the following fictional dialogue between A and B:

A: Nothing matters!

B: What do you mean, nothing matters?

A: What I said.

B: So what you mean is that nothing matters to you, right?

A: No, I don’t mean that at all. In fact, it matters very much to me that nothing matters. I’m extremely concerned about it!

B: But if you are concerned about it, if it matters to you that nothing matters, then there clearly is something that matters.

A: Yes, but only to me. The point is that it doesn’t really matter what matters to me or if there is anything that matters to me. It doesn’t matter whether or not things matter to people, me included.

B: Okay, but what do you mean when you say it doesn’t matter? If they matter to you, and they matter to me, if there is somebody to whom they matter, how can they still not matter?

A: They do not matter in the sense that it makes no difference whether or not they matter to me, or, for that matter, if they exist or not exist.

B: No difference to you, you mean?

A: No, not to me. To me it does make a difference.

B: To whom then?

A: To nobody in particular. It simply makes no difference.

B: But it does make a difference. After all, if those things didn’t exist or if they were different, other things would be different, too, wouldn’t they?

A: Yes, but not in the long run. A time will come when the world will be exactly as it would have been if things had been different. Say in 5 billion years when the sun will swell up and swallow Earth. None of the things that we do now will then have made any difference. So I guess what I mean when I say nothing matters is that nothing matters ultimately or in the long run.

B: Okay, fine, perhaps what happens now and what we do and whether we live or die makes no difference for the long-term future. But all of this certainly makes a difference now. Why should we want it to make a difference for all eternity?

A: Well, I guess you are right. Although when that future comes, there will also be nobody left to whom anything matters that matters to us now. So then nothing will matter anymore, right?

B: Yes, correct, but why should we worry about that? Perhaps it is true that there will come a time when nothing matters any more, but that time is not here yet. That nothing will matter does in no way show that nothing matters, namely now. So what is your problem?

A: I don’t know. You are confusing me. Let’s go and have a drink. It doesn’t really matter anyway.

Still, it remains difficult to consistently think about ‘importance’ or ‘mattering’ the way that Hare suggests we do. Hare himself seems to forget what he has just told us when, in the last paragraph of his essay, he advises us to “learn to prize those things whose true value is apparent only to those who have fought hard to reach it.” (46) This is clearly something that matters to Hare. However, in suggesting that this matters he is also clearly not merely expressing his own concerns. He is, rather, expressing the belief that we, too, should be concerned about it. So ‘this matters’, at least in this particular instance, means, in addition to “this matters to me (= Hare)”, “this should matter to you (= the reader)”. Why should it, though? The reason seems to have something to do with some things being truly valuable and others not, yet in light of Hare’s own analysis it makes little sense to assert that things have a “true value” that is not always apparent to us. In accordance with Hare’s analysis of the meaning of ‘X matters’, it seems that what we mean (and all we can mean) when we say that “something has true value” is that it has true value for us. But in that case it would make no sense to say that the “true value” may not be apparent to us. If having such a value means having such a value for us, then it needs to be apparent to us. Yet the very term “true value” is designed to suggest that we may be mistaken about a thing’s true value (just as, perhaps, we can be mistaken about what truly matters, or that things matter at all). “True value” implies the possibility of “false value”, but it would be very odd to say that certain things have a false value for me. They either have value or they don’t. That their value is false can only mean that even though they appear to be valuable to me, they are in fact not valuable at all. Accordingly, to say that something is truly valuable can only mean that it has value even if I am unable to see it (so that it has no value for me). If nothing matters unless, and to the extent that, it matters to someone, then nothing has value either, unless, and to the extent that, it has value for someone.

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[1] “’Nothing Matters’” was written in 1957 when Hare was 38. It was originally published in French as “Rien n’a d’importance” in La Philosophie Analytique, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit 1959, and later reprinted in English in Hare’s Applications of Moral Philosophy, London: Macmillan 1972, 32–47. I am using another reprint, namely the one in Life, Death and Meaning, ed. David Benatar, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2004, 41-47.

[2] Note to my wife: this is Hare’s example, not mine.

Thomas Nagel on the Absurd

It is often said that life is absurd. However, it is not always clear what exactly we mean by that. What, if anything, makes it absurd, and why do we think, as we seem to do, that life’s being absurd is something we should rightly worry about? Perhaps life is absurd and that is actually a good thing. This is what Thomas Nagel argues in a paper on the topic, published in 1971.[1]

Nagel begins his investigation by ruling out the usual suspects. What makes life absurd is not the fact that what matters to us now will most likely not matter anymore at some time in the future (say, in a million years), because we have no good reason to think that the things that matter to us now would matter more or would only really matter if they also mattered in the future. Also, if what happens now does not matter in the future, then surely what happens in the future does not matter now. Consequently, it does not matter now whether what matters now will also matter in the future.

Neither is what makes life absurd the fact that we will die, or the fact that we are very small and insignificant when compared to the enormous size of the universe. If our life is absurd (i.e. meaningless) now, then it would also be absurd if we lived considerably longer or forever, or if we were actually big enough to fill the universe. Nor is life absurd because it will be cut off at some point and in that sense does not lead anywhere. What we do in life does in fact lead to many things in life. Why should it have to lead to something that is no longer part of our life? The chain of justifications (‘I do this in order to achieve that’) needs to come to an end somewhere, and there is no reason why it should not come to an end within our given life span.

From this it does, of course, not follow that life is not absurd. What follows is merely that if life is absurd, it must be something else that makes it so. Nagel suggests that we normally call a situation absurd if there is a “conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality” (31). You are being knighted and your pants fall down, that kind of thing. Accordingly, life as a whole would be absurd (for each one of us) if there were an inevitable clash between our pretensions as human beings and reality (or what we know about it). Now there is indeed such a clash, namely between our inability to take our life other than seriously and our inability, as thinking beings, not to understand the ultimate arbitrariness of everything we do. Among the animals, only humans have the ability to look at their own lives from, as it were, the outside, as mere spectators, or sub specie aeternitatis. If we adopt this “view from nowhere” (as Nagel shall later call it), then we realize that everything that is important to us is only important because we happen to be the kind of creature that we are. If we were different, then different things would matter to us. Nothing matters in itself. It is all contingent, and in that sense arbitrary. When we look at our lives from that perspective it seems rather ludicrous how seriously we take it all. And yet, seriously we do take it. We have to carry on with our lives and to continue to treat things as important that from an impartial spectator’s point of view are anything but. (I know it does not really matter whether I get that promotion or not, but knowing this does not change the fact that it still matters to me.) This inevitable conflict of perspectives is where absurdity lies: that we can be deeply involved in our lives and, at the same time and without undermining or diminishing our involvement in any way, realize that if we had been “put together” (35) differently we could just as well be involved in something else, or in nothing at all. In this respect, our sense of the absurd resembles epistemological scepticism: despite understanding perfectly well that I have no grounds to be certain about anything (for instance the existence of an external world or other minds), I cannot help continuing to act as if I was certain. Or rather, I am certain, although I know that, rationally speaking, I shouldn’t. Similarly, I take my life seriously, although I know that I have no rational grounds to do so.

However, something changes when we cultivate (rather than suppress) the external view on our lives: our seriousness is not gone (which would in fact be disastrous), but it is now “laced with irony”. (37) Should we regret this? For Nagel, the absurdity of (our) life is actually a good thing and not something we should bemoan or try to escape from. It is most definitely no reason to despair. Remember, it is only because we can look at our lives from the outside that life can appear absurd to us. We don’t really discover it to be absurd. If Nagel is right, then our lives are not absurd prior to our realizing this. The absurdity consists in the conflicting viewpoints. That is why the life of an animal is never absurd, precisely because it cannot be absurd for it. For an animal, say a mouse, life is never absurd because he lacks that crucial impartial perspective. He lacks the “self-consciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a mouse.” (38) Yet is he better off because his life is not absurd? No. The animal’s life is not absurd, says Nagel, but it is not meaningful either. In fact, at the end of his paper Nagel comes very close to suggesting that it is actually the very fact that we have a sense of the absurdity of our lives that makes our lives meaningful. “I would argue”, he writes, “that absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.” Our sense of the absurd is in fact “a way of perceiving our true situation” and a result of our “capacity to transcend ourselves in thought” (39). So nothing to worry about. (And anyway, Nagel rather glibly concludes, if nothing matters, then it does not, or should not, matter that nothing matters either.)

COMMENTARY:

I am wondering whether Nagel’s analysis of our sense that life is absurd does not rely rather too heavily on a redefinition of the absurd. Nagel’s absurd does not seem to be the absurd that people tend to be concerned about. When he begins his analysis he occasionally uses the term ‘meaningless’ synonymously with ‘absurd’, but when he reaches his conclusion, the absurd has mutated into something else that can no longer be equated with meaninglessness. No wonder then that Nagel does not find the absurd particularly bothersome. All it does is invite us to adopt a slightly ironical, moderately detached attitude towards life. We still take life seriously, but perhaps not that seriously anymore. We have distanced ourselves slightly from our individual persona, have gained a little freedom from ourselves and can now meet the world with a little more equanimity. That is all very useful and liberating, I’m sure. However, it does not really address the existential concerns that people sometimes have, about whether, when all is said and done, life is really worth all the trouble. Why bother if in the end it will all be for nothing? The worry that nothing might really matter is an existential worry, or, in Kierkegaard’s sense, an ethical worry. In contrast, Nagel’s absurd is purely aesthetic, more pleasurable than horrifying. It is indeed the product of the view from nowhere, the absurd of a pure spectator. Never mind that I am that spectator and what I am looking at is my own life, which I cannot help taking seriously. It is still from the spectator’s perspective that it appears absurd to me. It is the place where I can laugh about my struggles, where death is simply the end of a story that has been told before and will be told again, many, many times. But the absurd that bothers and alienates us, which might even drive us into despair, is something that is perceived not from the viewpoint of the spectator, but from the viewpoint of the one who actually lives that life. And who lives it here and now and only this once. Nagel’s absurd is harmless, even edifying, because it is perceived from the outside. It invites us to see the comical side of things. Yet there is also an absurd that is perceived from the inside, and that is a very different thing, something that does not liberate us from our natural obsession with ourselves, our inborn parochialism, but that instead rips a hole into our world and threatens to rob us of our sanity. Here be lions and dragons, here be cold and dark and emptiness. It is a different, far less congenial kind of absurd, one that is more akin to the absurd of Lovecraft and Ligotti than to that of Nagel.

One more thing: the notion of the absurd is very much associated with the French philosopher Albert Camus. Nagel mentions him, but only briefly and rather disparagingly at the end of his paper, only to accuse him of being a bit too “romantic and slightly self-pitying” (39). Instead of happily embracing the ironic detachment that the absurd can and should give rise to, Camus asked us to respond to the absurd with defiance, by “shaking a fist at the world”. This, however, is at best only partly true and a bit of a caricature. The absurd, for Camus, also rests on a discrepancy, but not between an internal and an external view, but between human hopes and desires on the one hand, and the unresponsiveness and indifference of the universe on the other. But what Camus thinks of as the appropriate response to this discrepancy amounts to more than just shaking one’s fist at the world. It is, rather, a determination not to accept the indifference with which the universe looks back at us, and to resist this indifference by not adding to it. We defy the absurd by insisting that it matters what we do, by making them matter, by caring about what happens and what is being done to other people, and by acting accordingly. We thus create, little by little, a different universe, one that does care, at least in part, because we do. In short, Camus’ absurd prompts us to care more, whereas Nagel’s absurd prompts us to care less.  

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[1] Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd”. Originally published in the Journal of Philosophy 68/20 (1971): 716-727. Reprinted in Life, Death and Meaning. Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions, ed. David Benatar, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2004, 29-40 (which is the version I have been using).