This is an important question because some New Atheists have pointed to McEwan's work as proof that meaning is possible in the absence of God. In this thesis I suggest that, although McEwan makes a strong case for the possibility of meaning through aesthetic experiences, he also complicates meaning by suggesting that it is only attainable in the context of belief in the irreducibility of ideas such as love, beauty and wonder Parry does not think that meaning is possible in the absence of God, and finds meaning through his religion.
However, because this desire for meaning is universal, it necessarily affects even those who do not believe in the supernatural. In her book The First Philosophers, Robin Waterfield suggests that Hesiod's Theogony marks a "paradigm shift" in thinking, suggesting that instead of Homer's capricious gods and chaos, "there is order in the world." Meaning does not necessarily have to be ultimate (Nietzsche recognizes this, suggesting that accepting the inherent nihilism in the universe, and yet “not [collapse]).
In Journey Through Despair, a study of "Transformations in British Literary Culture" in the decades after Darwin, John A. Christopher Hitchens wrote in the acknowledgments of his God Is Not Great: "[McEwan's] body of fiction shows a extraordinary ability to elucidate. the numinous without yielding. Aesthetic experiences, while they begin in the natural world, point to intangible – and meaningful – ideas in which we choose to believe.
In the chapters that follow, I argue that while McEwan shows that meaning is accessible within an atheist framework, it can only be found in the context of a belief in the irreducibility of ideas of love, beauty, and morality.
Love
Love is a combination of other elements (like a carbon atom, which is made up of atomic particles), but the moment it is reduced to. Even though Joe is not a total materialist – he does not try to think about why the evolutionary history of the smile leads to wonder, but enjoys the experience of wonder without breaking it down further – he does reduce love so that he no longer speaks not. about love, and misses the greater meaning Clarissa is looking for. Parry's love for Joe is not considered legitimate by anyone in the novel due to its pathological nature.
Parry's love is reduced to its biological factors, and when reduced, it is no longer considered meaningful. Reducing Parry's love brings Joe comfort; Joe thinks that if he understands the pathology, he will be able to make. Joe reduces Parry's love of biology for a different reason than that for which he reduces the baby's smile.
Reductive explanations make Parry's love less meaningful - he suffers from a mental illness and does not experience true love. He thinks of Parry's love—which he terms a pathology—to understand his love for Clarissa.
Beauty in Art
Baxter's fate will not be changed by "love, drugs, Bible lessons, or prison time" (217). However, Baxter's experience with the poem suggests that beauty overcomes the hopelessness of his genetics and godlessness by making sense through aesthetic experience. He responds to the poem—which suggests that the world seems to have only beauty—by exclaiming, "It's beautiful!" and he "appears suddenly elated" (230).
While Baxter's initial confrontation with Perown—they meet on the morning when Perown's car crashes into Baxter's—suggests that he has the capacity for some hope, that hope is short-lived compared to the poem's effect. It was beauty, not a predisposition to hope, that led to Baxter's change of heart. He seems to have decided that it was the song that changed Baxter's mood, or at least that Baxter's mood wouldn't have changed without the song.
Perowne's suspicion that the poem may not be a source of transformative beauty suggests that Baxter's experience is highly subjective. Perowne's distrust of poetry leads him to suggest that Baxter's reaction has a biochemical explanation that complicates the meaning found in beauty. Perowne realizes that Baxter's instability complicates the idea that the poem alone could have brought about a change in Baxter because of him.
Even if it is possible that beauty is so important as to catalyze a complete transformation, there are so many confounding variables in Baxter's situation that Perowne does not give the poem's beauty much credit for changing Baxter's mood. Perowne sees Baxter's prolonged euphoria not as a result of the song's beauty, but instead as a symptom of Baxter's illness. But beauty becomes meaningless if Baxter's perception and reaction to it can be reduced to mechanism.
While Perowne does attempt to reductively explain away Baxter's response to the beauty of the poem, his response may be less in response to beauty itself than to the source of beauty - literature. The beauty of the music – when everything comes together – leads to meaning for Perowne which he does not, as for Baxter's encounter, reduce to chemical reactions. Some responses to beauty are reduced to biochemical processes (as Perowne does to Baxter's response to the poem) and some are not (as Perowne's experience with the blues).
Wonder in Science
As McEwan writes in his essay “End of the World Blues,” which was published in The Portable Atheist by Christopher Hitchens. When Perowne says that he “regularly penetrates the skull,” the adverb reduces his job—which requires years of training and has only recently been achieved with “modest success”—to something routine, almost mundane (281). He tells the story of a patient, his future wife, and her surgery that he loved: “[the patient's] exceptionally beautiful face was put back together without a single disfiguring mark.” That something so complicated could be done to the brain – a tumor was removed from her pituitary gland – without leaving any visible markings.
The beauty of the garter belt is a testament to the wonderful process that created it, a reminder that it exists. As Perowne begins to prepare the antiseptic on Baxter's skin - which is "pale" as a blank canvas - he makes a "stroke." The word stroke brings to mind the stroke of a brush instead of a smear of antiseptic. Baxter's skin is "split open" and "a long gash stretched out like a wide-open mouth" (258).
Perowne has many available options; "It is difficult to name a famous harpsichordist or a Bach specialist pianist who has not ... recorded the Goldberg Variations" (Davidson). In addition to marveling at the beauty of the brain, Perowne finds meaning in the beauty of natural selection and the origins of life and consciousness. As Robert Hazen, a research scientist and professor of earth science at George Mason University, writes in Genesis, “The epic history of life's chemical origins is woefully incomplete.
Then, by the millionth millionth chance - what a tragic irony - the conditions at some point in space and time bubble up into the little ferment that is the beginning of life. He later suggests that even the end of the story—the inevitable death of our sun—imbues the myth with "grandeur." The theory was "already in the textbooks" thirty years before there was "indisputable experimental verification." There was a "desire" to "embrace" the idea before it was ever empirically proven because the theory was beautiful.
Joe finds an example of an unaccepted theory—a theory of quantum electrodynamics—and suggests that "the theory was unattractive, inelegant, it was a song sung out of mind. In McEwan's work before The Children Act, the problems of finding meaning without any absolute—the problem of arbitrariness in deciding when love matters, the difficulty of understanding what is a true response to beauty, and the potential for a tendency for wonder to obscure scientific progress.—have not been terminal. "Performance his look of strained devotion' and the 'unexpert scratchy sounds he made, so expressive of relentless desire', touch Fiona so deeply that 'to contain the emotion she felt' she mentions a mistake Adam made in reading music (120).
You never told me what you believed in, but I loved it when you sat with me and we did 'The Sally Gardens'." (145). For McEwan and all the New Atheists who argue forcefully for meaning, it is not.
