If God is not the ground of reality, the concept of objective meaning is difficult to sustain because there is no anchor outside of human opinion or shifting biological processes. While many people live meaningful lives without explicit faith, the Christian tradition argues that this experience relies on a moral and personal order that only a Creator can provide.
The question of whether anything matters if there is no God touches upon what theologians often describe as 'borrowed capital.' While many individuals who do not believe in God live deeply loving, moral, and purposeful lives, the Christian tradition contends that such a life assumes a world that is inherently significant. When a person treats justice as a true obligation or love as more than a chemical reaction, they are acting as if human life has intrinsic, objective value. notes that while evolution might explain why we have moral feelings, it struggles to explain why any act is truly 'wrong' in an objective sense. A worldview that starts with blind matter cannot easily provide a standard for moral truth that stands independent of human opinion. As noted in , the person who lives as though love and justice are real is spending moral capital that their stated worldview did not earn, effectively relying on a reality that requires a moral Author to function as it does.
A recurring theme in both philosophy and theology is the human inability to fully live as a nihilist. Even those who intellectually argue for a meaningless universe tend to act as if their choices, their grief, and their connections to others have profound, lasting importance. Blaise Pascal famously suggested that the human heart’s profound restlessness and its refusal to be satisfied with meaninglessness is evidence of a deeper design. highlights that the appetite for meaning itself suggests the existence of its food. If the universe were truly devoid of purpose, the persistent, universal human struggle to find significance would be a strange anomaly. Scripture confirms this inner awareness, noting that God has 'set eternity in the hearts of men' (), suggesting that we were created for a purpose that transcends the transient nature of physical life. The Christian response, therefore, does not ignore the nihilist's premise but points to the inherent contradiction between the claim that nothing matters and the lived experience that everything matters deeply.
In the absence of a transcendent Creator, meaning becomes something that must be invented by the individual will. Friedrich Nietzsche recognized that once God is discarded as the foundation, objective values lose their external authority, leaving humanity to create their own 'values in the void.' However, argues that a value legislated by the self, knowing it was legislated by the self, lacks the authority to bind others or to sustain a life through deep suffering. Meaning that is merely a human construct is ultimately fragile, whereas the Christian gospel declares that meaning is a gift we receive from the One who authored the story. Because God created the world and entered it in the person of Jesus Christ, meaning is not an illusion we manufacture to cope with a cold cosmos; it is an objective reality anchored in the character of God. As Acts 17 reminds us, 'for in him we live, and move, and have our being' (). The Christian hope is that our labor, love, and justice are not lost to the void but are held in the providence of the One who raised Christ from the dead.
The ultimate challenge to the belief that 'nothing matters' is the finality of death. If materialism is true, death is annihilation, and all human endeavor will eventually be erased by the entropy of the universe. The Christian response does not offer empty slogans, but points to the event of the Resurrection. If Christ was raised from the dead, as the New Testament proclaims, then death is not the end of the human story but a defeated enemy. explains that because Christ is the 'firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep' (), our lives and our work are not swept into oblivion. This gospel event provides a foundation that transforms our understanding of labor, love, and justice. They matter because they are kept by God and are part of a story that is going somewhere. This is why the Christian can rejoice even in a fallen world: the ultimate reality is not the silence of the grave, but the promise of the renewal of all things in Christ.