Daniel Hill argues that without God, life would be meaningless.
What is the meaning of ‘the meaning of life’? In analytic philosophy the bearers of meaning have usually been considered to be words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. Hence life itself is not usually considered to be a bearer of meaning, but the word ‘life’ is.
As in, for example, defining it. A definition that comes closest to a technically correct understanding of it if you don't actually take into consideration the things that you do in the course of, say, living it.
Assuming first that we can pin down the precise definition of definition itself. As that relates to an epistemologically sound understanding of what this means to those who take philosophy seriously.
And, some suggest, that can only revolve around the manner in which the human mind begets human perceptions beget human conceptions about life in regard to the shadows on the cave wall. Not life en soi. Not life going all the way back formally to one or another transcending font. God say.
Understanding the meaning of the latter is itself an important philosophical task, to determine whether life involves any non-physical substance, or whether it merely involves a certain form or arrangement of a certain type of physical matter.
And this is crucial pertaining to any discussion of determinism. Meaning may well be whatever nature evolved itself into construing it to be. It simply is nature itself.
Then this part:
It is therefore a task that logically must be tackled before the task of understanding the meaning of life in the sense usually intended by the earnest questioner. However, the person that asks “What is the meaning of life?” is not usually asking for a definition of the word ‘life’. What I think the questioner means to ask is what the explanation is for the presence of life or existence of living things.
But that only brings some of us back to the gap between the mind of the questioner and the minds of any particular individual providing an answer and a comprehensive understanding of existence itself. How are we all not stuck there?
Peter van Inwagen gives a helpful analogy: “If Alice surprises a trusted employee who has broken into her office and is going through her files, and if Alice says ‘What is the meaning of this?’ she is requesting an explanation of a certain state of affairs in terms of the purposes of her employee or those whose agent the employee is.” So, if someone asked you the meaning of the fact that the water was boiling, replying that a heating element was giving the water molecules energy wouldn’t be a proper answer, nor would saying that the water had reached 100ºC. The answer would be that (for example) someone had put the kettle on in order to have hot water to make a cup of tea. If it was apparent that nobody was responsible for the event in question, if, say, the event was just the boiling of water in a natural geyser, the person asking “What is the meaning of the fact that the water is boiling?” would receive the answer that there was no meaning (or would perhaps receive just a puzzled stare). Thomas Morris calls this the ‘Endowment Thesis’: “Something has meaning if and only if it is endowed with meaning or significance by a purposive personal agent or group of such agents.”
What assessments like this bring me back to is encompassing the word meaning in a context in which explanations are able to be communicated back and forth such that reasonable conclusions can be derived. It means this or it means that. We just have to understand what the intent of the questioner is in regard to understanding the particular context.
On the other hand, in the is/ought world, the conflicting meaning that we give to words that encompass our value judgments, may or may not be resolved with a dictionary.