Humanist Author/Poet Jennifer Michael Hecht Chapter 1

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3 An abstract painting probably has meaning in the mind of its creator, and may have meaning (perhaps "subjective" meaning) in the mind of each person who sees it, but one painted randomly by a computer program, or painted by a simple animal, can't really be said to have MEANING apart from the meaning assigned by each observer.

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4 Returning to the natural world, theists like to think that they understand the thinking of the conscious mind of their infinite, omnipotent, omniscient deity. For example, sunsets are beautiful because god made them for us, to demonstrate his power and grace.

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5 For the atheist, the only conscious mind involved in the natural world is the mind of the observer, so only an observer can assign meaning to anything. This doesn't mean there aren't objective REASONS for things, just that there's no MEANING in them.

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2 In other words, if you FEEL that something has meaning, it (by definition) HAS meaning. I disagree. There are lots of REASONS in the natural world - we can explain WHY humans evolved to walk upright, for example, but to me, MEANING is related to PURPOSE, and they are both concepts that are only meaningful in the context of a conscious mind.

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6 Claiming that meaning is present in nature because we perceive meaning in nature is just magical thinking. I think she's being very vague on what constitutes MEANING, and the argument "meaning exists where you see it" is simply new-age-style undisciplined thinking.

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1 Interesting talk, after you skip the long boring intro that could've been replaced by a few pages of text. Ms Hecht says that theists see "meaning" in the natural world because they believe god created it, and atheists almost REFUSE to see meaning in it, because they know it came about naturally in an undirected way, and I agree with both claims. Then she says that we SHOULD see "meaning" because "the FEELING of meaning is sufficient to the definition of meaning".