The Myth of Meaning: How Theology Haunts Our Theories of Significance

In our previous series, Physics Without Divinity, we traced how modern science remains haunted by theological residues: laws as commandments, conservation as providence, origins as creation myths. Stripped of their theological aura, these concepts dissolve into relational processes: actuality emerging from perspectival constraints, possibility flowing into patterned relation.

But physics is only half the story. If physics inherited theology’s dream of divine order, our theories of meaning inherited theology’s dream of divine purpose.

The promise of an ultimate “why,” the idea of a transcendent guarantee of significance, still echoes through philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and even secular humanism. Meaning is cast as something given, grounded, or guaranteed — by God, by truth, by reason, by human essence. These are the myths we must now excavate.

This new series, The Myth of Meaning, undertakes that excavation. It asks:

• Where do our theories of meaning still carry theological afterimages?

• How do ideas of destiny, transcendence, or eternal significance sneak back into secular frameworks?

• What happens to “meaning” once we strip away its hidden gods?

Just as Physics Without Divinity showed that matter does not obey divine law but actualises relation, this series will show that meaning does not rest on divine purpose but emerges through relational construal. Significance is perspectival, fragile, and collective — no less real for being contingent.

The aim is not to banish theology, but to see clearly: to distinguish where meaning is projected as eternal ground, and where meaning arises as relational construal. Only then can we move beyond both the promise of transcendence and the abyss of nihilism, toward a frame where significance belongs to relation itself.