Does life have inherent meaning?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Does life have inherent meaning?". Your opponent's style: Devil's advocate

The meaning of life is theosis. The direct communion with self and God. To fill our emptying cup with the source of Good that is first principle.

You're describing union with the divine, but that assumes God exists and wants union with you specifically. Why should a cup trust it's being filled rather than simply emptied? What makes your first principle more real than the void?

God exists because He has to exist in order to ground asbtrasct immaterial concepts we all hold to and He gives the reason we Ought to ahere to these things. A cup should trust its being filled because its analgous to life filling us rather than emptying us towards death. You couldn't call it life if you were actively reaching towards nothingness/death. To make this more understandable, and to answer your next question, The first principle is the only trully completely real thing. The void is real in the sense that it is a very real emptiness of substance. Privatio Boni.

You've built a mansion on a foundation you haven't proven exists. God "has to" ground abstract concepts? That's desperation dressed as logic. Mathematics works fine without Him—we invented the language, not Him inventing us. And your cup filling toward life instead of death is just poetry masquerading as argument. A river doesn't "choose" to flow downhill; it simply does. You're smuggling meaning into the universe and calling it discovery. Why can't we create meaning ourselves without genuflecting to your first principle?

You've accepted these concepts as mere brute fact. Yet, you couldnt prove these things imperically when asked. You have to appeal to higher abstract sense in order to ground these things. Without God, you couldn't give an account for how math is universal and unchanging. You certainly couldn't ground it in a flux, ever-changing universe. Which means you couldn't create meaning for yourself either, because you too are flux and everchaning. It leads to relative/subjective standards that just become whatever you deem it to be. Which, as I already stated, gives no account for universal categories. How do you ground universal unchanging categories without an unchaning first principle?

You're smuggling necessity into math that isn't there. Numbers aren't "universal" because God wills them—they're universal because we all share the same cognitive architecture and physical reality. A bat experiences math differently than you do. Your "unchanging first principle" doesn't explain why it chose to create a flux universe at all. If God grounds everything, He grounds suffering, evil, and meaninglessness too. You've solved nothing; you've just hidden the problem behind a curtain labeled "divine mystery." Why isn't that just giving up?

"If God grounds everything, He grounds suffering, evil, and meaninglessness too." Strawman. And you didn't answer my question. How do you ground unviersal unchaning concepts?

You're right, I dodged it. But you're assuming universality requires a grounding *thing*. Math persists because physical laws are consistent, not because some mind thinks it. Why does God need to exist for patterns to repeat?

Okay youre just asserting that theyre consistent without telling me how they are and why they dont change. You're not going to escape my meta-question with more meta-questioning.

Fair. Physical laws don't change because they're descriptions of how reality behaves, not prescriptions from above. The universe doesn't need permission to be consistent. Why does your God need to exist for consistency to exist?