Hope, Meaning, Transcendence

Every decision presupposes an answer to a question that is seldom spoken aloud: what for? Whoever accepts a job, raises a child, founds a company or makes a sacrifice does so towards something. If this what-for is missing, even the best decision loses its footing.

Timothy Keller, pastor and author, defines meaning as the intersection of two things: a purpose, which asks back what one is here for, and a significance, which asks ahead whether what one does makes a difference. His image is three stones on a hillside. If they lie there by chance, they mean nothing. If someone has deliberately laid them there as waymarks, they show a way.

Hope is the temporal side of the same question. Chapter 1 presented Keller's observation that human beings are creatures founded on hope: what they believe about the future determines how they experience the present. Keller distinguishes here between a personal hope, which concerns one's own death and what comes after it, and a cultural hope, which is directed towards the future of society and of humanity. Both shape life now.

This chapter asks what grounds a meaning and a hope that withstand suffering and death, and what changes in this respect when technology itself becomes an object of hope.

Keller's thesis is clear. A meaning that lies only within this world, he argues, is destroyed by suffering, for suffering takes away precisely that in which this meaning consisted. His image: a this-worldly meaning, he says, holds back suffering no more than a spider's web holds back a falling stone. Only a meaning that comes from outside the world equips one for life within it.

Keller appeals to Augustine. Against ancient philosophy, which sought happiness in withdrawal, Augustine, according to Keller, maintains that what is sought really exists; against modernity, that it does not lie within the world. The deepest need of the human being, he says, is to love God and to be loved by him.

From this there follows for Keller a shift that is easily overlooked. What makes life meaningful, he says, is not in the first place a life after death but a love after death. Love, in his view, presupposes a person; the human being was created for a love without separation, and death separates. Christian hope is therefore personal: one remains a self and is recognised. In all the accounts of the resurrection the witnesses at first do not recognise Jesus, and then they do.

Enoch Sundaram, physician and preacher, describes continued existence differently. The mind, he says, is like software, invisible and present as long as the brain lives. With death it ceases to function, and the body goes into the earth. The entire memory, however, the whole experience of a life, goes to God, who keeps it and gives it back at the Second Coming, with a new body and the same memory.

The two images are not the same. With Keller the person remains; with Sundaram the memory is preserved. Chapter 6 showed that Sundaram's model stands in the line of the memory theory of the person and inherits its objections, whereas Keller stands closer to the view that identity does not lie in storage. For the question of this chapter the difference matters, because it shows how close a religious hope can come to the language of technology. A stored memory is an idea that is also familiar from talk of digital continued existence.

The secular opposing view appears in Keller only in his own presentation. According to him, there is for secular people no discovered, objective meaning, but only a self-created one; he cites for this, among others, the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the biologist Jerry Coyne. He quotes the French philosopher Luc Ferry as saying that all religions want to save us from death, and that Epicurus's argument that death does not concern us is too brutal to be honest; for secular people, he says, love ends with death. And he describes the strategy of interpreting death as a natural part of a cycle.

In its own words the secular side sounds different. The Declaration of Modern Humanism, adopted in 2022 by Humanists International, explicitly understands humanism as a source of meaning and purpose, as an alternative to dogmatic religion, but also to nihilism. Both words need explaining. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, humanism was first the name for the endeavours of scholars who turned to the writings of antiquity, among them many Christians such as Erasmus of Rotterdam. Only later did it become above all the name of a secular outlook on life that places the human being, human reason and human dignity at the centre and seeks to manage without God; it is in this sense that the 2022 Declaration uses it. Nihilism comes from the Latin word for nothing. What is meant is the conviction that there is no meaning and there are no values that are more than human positing. Friedrich Nietzsche saw it coming as a consequence of belief in God losing its force: the highest values devalue themselves. Science, according to the Declaration, provides the means, human values determine the ends, and one's own convictions are not grounded in revelations fixed for all time.

The strongest voice is Albert Camus, writer and philosopher. He held the question whether life is worth living to be the most urgent question of philosophy. He wanted to answer it without eternal values. He rejected the leap into faith as an escape and set against it revolt, freedom and passion; even without belief in God, he held, giving up is not a legitimate answer. Camus thereby disputes Keller's alternative of transcendence or despair. But he shares with Keller the test question: can a stance be lived in suffering?

Charles Taylor, philosopher, offers a concept that makes both sides comparable: fullness. Every human being, he writes, experiences their life in such a way that somewhere there is a place where it is fuller, richer, deeper and more worthwhile. As an example he tells of a young man on an evening walk who hears the singing of the birds and suddenly experiences the world as if it were only a veil before the face of God. Such experiences give life orientation. Opposite them stands the experience of emptiness and loss, and in between a middle condition of everyday life, order, work and family, in which most people live most of the time.

Believers and non-believers know all three places. The difference lies in where they expect fullness to come from. For believers it comes from outside. It is received in a relationship, in love, prayer and devotion, and one must open oneself to it. For the non-religious person of the modern age, the power to reach fullness lies within oneself, in reason, for instance. Taylor emphasises that this difference is not only one of theories but one of lived experience. In an age in which both possibilities are open, belief and unbelief weaken each other, and many are under pressures pulling in opposite directions.

This thought does not defuse the dispute, but it moves it to the right place. The question is not whether secular people can experience meaning. They can. The question is on what this meaning is grounded and whether it holds where life tests it hardest.

At this point the chapter asks what can be said empirically about the effect of hope and of religious practice. This is not a test of the truth of a faith, but of the effects attributed to it. The evidence here is more cautious than some sources make it appear.

A large study from the United States followed almost ninety thousand women over fourteen years. Women who attended a religious service at least once a week had a markedly lower risk of taking their own lives than women who never went. The researchers themselves stress the limitations: the data are observational, the group is not very diverse, and they interpret the finding above all as an effect of communal participation.

A similar pattern is found with Alcoholics Anonymous. Their programme provides for entrusting oneself to a higher power, which each person can name for themselves. A systematic review from 2020 covering 27 studies shows that this programme leads more often to lasting abstinence than other established treatments. The studies of the reasons, however, find above all changed social relationships, strengthened coping skills and motivation; spiritual factors are central only for a minority of participants.

Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and survivor of the concentration camps, placed his work with fellow prisoners under a saying of Nietzsche's: whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how. Whoever, by contrast, no longer saw any goal ahead and no longer recognised any meaning in his life soon gave up, according to his observation. Frankl draws a careful distinction here. Not every hope held. Many prisoners had expected to be home again by Christmas 1944. When this did not come true, according to the camp doctor, a mass dying set in during the week up to New Year such as had not been seen until then. What sustained them was not optimism but a what-for. Frankl therefore turned the question of meaning around: what matters, he says, is not what we can still expect from life, but what life expects from us.

Keller sharpens this: those who had found their meaning in career or status, he says, broke down, and the survivors had mostly become more religious. That is not what Frankl writes. He reports a religious interest in the camp that, where it arose, was particularly fervent, but he speaks of meaning, not explicitly of faith.

Even animal experiments have been cited on this subject. Curt Richter, psychobiologist, observed in 1957 that rats which he briefly rescued from a hopeless situation afterwards held out far longer than animals without this experience. His conclusion: if hopelessness is taken away, the animals do not die. The experiments are regarded today as cruel, and they show something other than faith: the effect of the expectation of being rescued.

Other figures that Keller cites to demonstrate a crisis of hope in secular societies are deliberately not adopted here. They are unverified, in part questionable, and Keller himself admits that he is very selective in his choice.

The result is double-edged. Hope, belonging and a what-for make a measurable difference; this is well documented. Whether orientation towards something transcendent is itself the cause, or the community that sustains it, is open.

This brings the most difficult question of the chapter into the open. If faith works because it gives hope, does it also work if it is not true? And if so, does its effect then speak for its truth at all?

Keller touches on this question without treating it. No one, he says, examines the evidence for Christianity without first thinking that it would be good if it were true. That is why, in his view, showing that faith fits experience is the first step. For the other side, precisely this is the core of the objection: the wish that something be true is the origin of faith. This criticism has a long history in the critique of religion of the modern age.

The book cannot refute this objection, and it is not meant to play it down. But it can establish two things. First: the usefulness of a belief does not entail its truth, but neither does its unprovability entail its falsity. Second: the objection does not apply only to religious faith. Secular hope in progress, science or technology can also arise from a wish. Which hope holds is decided not by the wish but by whether it proves itself in life. That is the standard that Chapter 1 proposed.

The question of hope leads back to the theme of the book. Hopes that were once directed at religion are today directed at technology as well.

Chapter 14 recounted how OpenAI was founded in 2015 to save humanity, or at least to prevent someone else from destroying it; Sam Altman, the head of the company, says that this is still his aim today. The founders saw themselves as rebels who wanted to build a Death Star of good. In this language technology is more than a tool. It is redeemer and threat at once.

A recent example shows how far this language reaches. Mo Gawdat, formerly responsible for business at Google X, predicted in October 2026, on the podcast “The Diary Of A CEO”, a decade of dystopia: loss of jobs, surveillance and control, concentration of power. After that he expects a utopia of abundance. Physics, mathematics and biology, he says, show that a superintelligence is benign. Things will turn out well in the end, according to Gawdat, not because humanity had contributed much to it or its leaders had suddenly become ethical, but because unethical leaders would be replaced by a highly efficient principle that sees no value in anything destructive. Whoever makes it to 2038, he says, will enjoy this future.

The shape of this hope is remarkable. It knows a time of tribulation before salvation, a salvation that does not come from human merit, and a redeemer who stands above the human being. That is the shape of a religious expectation of the end times, except that a machine takes the place of God. That is why it too must face the same test. Gawdat himself recalls that the Second World War did not destroy the world, and adds that one should ask those who lived through it. A hope that imposes a decade of suffering on the living for a future that only the survivors will see must be measured by the standard of this chapter: whether it holds in suffering, and for whom.

John Lennox sees in such hopes a very old temptation. He points to Harari's book “Homo Deus”, the human being as god, and recalls that the human urge to deify oneself runs through the whole of history, from the building of the Tower of Babel onwards (Genesis 11:4). The Bible knows it from its first page: you will be like God, the serpent promises (Genesis 3:5). And Lennox poses a question that is missing in Gawdat. Whoever wants to build a paradise with technology without facing up to the harm that human beings inflict on one another and on themselves, he says, passes over the real problem. The Bible calls it sin; the Greek word for it originally means to miss the mark. A machine can make many things better. It does not relieve human beings of the fact that they hurt one another.

Whoever places their hope in technology in this way must face the same question as the believer: on what is this hope grounded, and does it hold when it is tested? And a second question is added, one that Chapter 8 prepared. A machine can have a function that benefits human beings. Whether it has meaning or can give meaning is another question. A system that produces hope without itself hoping is like the stones on the hillside: whether they are a waymark depends on who laid them there, and what for.