In approaching the great questions, one thing everyone can surely agree on is that no one is responsible for their own birth. In that sense, no one will ever be able to know for sure why they find themselves in the world, however fervently they may believe or wish to believe that their existence has been orchestrated by a benign power traditionally called “God”.

This fact does not prevent people from raising questions about the meaning of life. It may, however, prevent them from answering them. If the ultimate origin of life is hidden from the human mind, how can the meaning of life not be hidden as well?

It may have been some such calculation that led Friedrich Nietzsche to claim, albeit somewhat histrionically, in Twilight of the Idols (1888) that it was impossible, even stupid, to make value judgments on life, either for or against. As a party to the dispute, he argued, no one could at the same time be its judge.

While the “value of life” may not exactly be the same thing as the “meaning of life”, the two notions have some overlap. The concepts of both meaning and value entail some sense of order, as opposed to chaos: a world without order is almost by definition a world without........

© The Irish Times