Of course, if you deny that there is any creative intelligence behind this universe, that created it for some meaningful purpose, you may decide that life cannot have any meaning anyway, except for what we choose to give it in our own little world. Many settle for this option. A leading modern painter, Francis Bacon, said:

Life itself is a tragic thing. We watch ourselves from the cradle, performing into decay. Man now realises that he is an accident, a completely futile thing, that he has to play out the game without reason...Man can now only attempt to beguile himself for a time by prolonging his life-by buying a kind of immortality through the doctors...The artist must really deepen the game to be any good at all, so that he can make life a bit more exciting.

Jean-Paul Sarte, in his book Being and Nothingness, summarised the thoughts of many leading existential thinkers like this:

"Man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we live and it is meaningless that we die." Douglas Adams wrote four science fiction novels, the first being The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They tell the story of four time travellers who hitchhike across the universe from the Big Bang to its destruction. They build a giant computer designed to answer "The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything." The answers it comes up with are meaningless.

Ultimately, if you rule out any intelligent and creative mind behind this amazing universe, you are left with no alternative. Peter Kreeft, in his very thoughtful book Making Sense Out of Suffering, sums up the two options we face very well. He writes:

Make this issue simple and concrete. Look at anything. I'm looking now at a late spring snowstorm. A surprise, a gift. Is there a giver? Is it part of anybody's plan? Is it - ultimately, finally, in the long run - really meaningfully, a part of the plot of our life's story, part of a gift or task or a work? Is anybody there? Is the whole world, including every snowstorm and every star and every headache and every bug and every death and every cancer - is it all between God the storyteller and ourselves, so that this material universe is only the stage setting of the story? Or is the universe a meaningless darkness in which we desperately erect little artificial theatres, light them up with little artificial lights (our reasons), and put on little artificial plays (our lives), whose sole meanings are assigned by their sole authors (ourselves)? The really ultimate question, much more important than the scientific question, is: Who's there? That's why myth is more important than science. Myth is an answer, though an unsatisfactory one, to the deeper question, Who's there? Science only answers the question, How does it work? Or at the most, What's there? Science asks what and how, philosophy asks why, myth and religion ask who. Who's in charge here? Who's the author? That's what we really long to know.