His response was something along the lines of, "But this isn't ultimately meaningful." I asked him if his love for his wife was ultimately meaningful. He replied, "Perhaps not, but love itself is ultimate." The other night when I was discussing the problem of evil with a room full of Christians, another fellow made this same fact-value error (and, maybe, a fallacy of composition) in stating, "Your emotions are just atoms!" I pointed out to him that it would grieve him very much if I slung some atoms of lead into his body, although they were "just atoms"...
It seems that the terms "ultimate" and "absolute" are often misused in religious apologetics, in particular, as well as complaints that materialism logically necessitates a lack of value. The informal fallacy that is often committed is equivocating on the fact-value distinction between something being meaningful or valuable versus its being everlasting or infinite in terms of duration. Mysteriously, there is also some value assumed to be intrinsic to things that are immaterial, or at least are not composed only of material substances. I have two good quotes:
1) Chris Hallquist, reviewing Craig's Reasonable Faith, writes:
The first subheading reads "No Ultimate Meaning Without Immortality and God." The immortality part has something like an argument:2) Gene Witmer, talking about presuppositionalism as an apologetic method, writes (p.10):If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he existed at all? It might be said that his life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But this only shows a relative significance to his life, not an ultimate significance. His life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If all the events are meaningless, then what can be the ultimate meaning of influencing any of them. Ultimately it makes no difference.[11]Craig seems to be doing one of two possible things here. On the one hand, he seems to be equivocating between two different senses of the word "ultimate"--namely between "what eventually happens to a thing" and "what really matters." Alternatively, he seems to be making an argument containing the hidden premise that the value of a thing depends entirely upon what eventually happens to that thing. If the former, Craig is committing a classic informal fallacy; if the latter, he is making an unsupported and dubious assumption. The latter implies an infinite regress: If each moment is given meaning only by the next, then the next moment must be given meaning by the moment after it, and so on ad infinitum.
Note, incidentally, the constant use of "absolute." This is one of those terms philosophically naive people love to throw around. It's very, very unclear what it means. Sometimes it is used just for emphasis "Is this a table? Yes. Yes, absolutely!" Sometimes it is used to mean "unqualified", as in "absolutely no exceptions!" But neither of these fit the way it's used here, and I venture to say that it really doesn't mean anything clear at all. [more on PS here and here]I recognize how long it has taken me to see the non sequitur between saying that something lasts forever versus saying that this property automatically renders a thing with value, or the lack of this property nullifies the value of a thing. As I read more about meaning and value in life I hope to see more things like this more clearly.
