Last week a gang of thieves shot and killed a fellow parishioner. The thugs were stripping the catalytic converter from a car, and he’d tried to stop them. At Sunday’s liturgy, our pastor spoke about the terrible loss and grief of the victim’s family. Many people in the congregation had known him personally and shared in the family’s sorrow.

When such outrages occur, we’re apt to raise hard questions about meaning: the meaning of a man’s life and death, the meaning of a family’s anguish. We can even find ourselves wondering about the meaning of the whole human enterprise. Is it, just maybe, all for nothing? The lament of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is haunting. “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Such a lament, whether phrased eloquently or mutely suppressed, challenges our faith.

This challenge can push us, however disinclined, into philosophy—stranger things have happened. Full disclosure: as a philosopher, I find myself thinking about today’s dominant ideology of evolutionary naturalism. A definition is in order. The contemporary, and often provocative, philosopher Thomas Nagel defines this naturalism as “the theory that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.” But let’s not issue a blank check, as it were, to even a familiar ideology. Can evolutionary naturalism even begin to answer our questions about meaning?

Note that questions about meaning soon become questions about value. Questions about value become, in turn, questions about what we seek. And simply seeking for its own sake isn’t enough. Even if we take the road less traveled because we’re lost, we have a destination, an end, in mind. Enter the concept of teleology, that is, of purpose. Evolutionary naturalism, however, denies teleology. It has no place for intelligent purpose. Accidental mutations and natural selection alone do all the explaining that’s to be done.

But Thomas Nagel, although he is an atheist, is a friend of teleology. In his Mind & Cosmos (Oxford, 2012) he argues that it is question-begging to assume that the biology of developing species—and there clearly is development—is subsumable under the mathematized laws of physics and chemistry. To suppose otherwise leaves us with what he calls “a dead environment” that has nothing to say about either the coming to be of life or its uniqueness. To this we might add that any plausible reductivist (that is, “nothing but”) account of life would first need to show that life is a property that admits of reduction rather than something far richer: an irreducible and fundamental activity.

Indeed, there is a further point to consider in interrogating reductive naturalists. Nagel thinks that we are hard pressed to make sense of value apart from life. “Value enters the world with life,” he writes, and teleology, he suspects, has value as its goal. If this is so, we cannot understand teleology without addressing the core questions of axiology, that is, value theory. But reductive naturalism eliminates the whole sphere of value. How, then, can it make sense of teleology?

For our part, we Christians believe that life, despite its wrenching tragedies, is the road to somewhere beyond our sin-seared imagination. So it is that the Good News of John’s Gospel reveals a staggering truth: “What was made in him was life. And that life was the light of men” (John 1: 4). This life surpasses the βίος of Aristotle, who was a biologist, and invites us to share in the ζωή of Scripture, the eternal life with which Christ identifies himself. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6).