The argument seems to be:
1. Human beings can only be said to have a purpose if they are created by a non-human entity that itself has purposes (Have I got that right? Please suggest another short phrasing if you think that is an unfair summary of Beckwith's premise)
An intelligent creator who himself has a purpose and overarching plan regarding his creations is necessary, yes. Even more to the point would be the idea that the universe itself was created for his children, and that the purpose of the universe and of existence is inextricably bound up in that.
But atheists deny that human beings are created by a non-human entity that itself has purposes.
Yes, they do. That's what makes them atheists.
3. Therefore atheists have to admit that they deny that human beings have purposes.
As Dude pointed out, they may very well concoct subjective meaning out of whole cloth to justify their continuing existence and keep existential despair at bay. What they do have to admit is that human beings have no purpose or meaning in any way beyond the meaning they attach to existence within their own subjective mental universe. In other words, existence is meaningless beyond that meaning ascribed to it within my own mental thought world. In this sense, Hugh Hefner can attach meaning to existence: sexual experience and material affluence. The carnal "good life". "Meaning", as Beckwith is using the term, transcends our subjective thought worlds. Its a overarching meaning external to us and imposed upon the universe by its creator. Teleology exists in the universe as a major structural component of it, but this does not preclude each of us from constructing our own, even when it is at variance with the teleology embedded within the universe itself.
4. Therefore an atheist would be incoherent in expressing regret that by making certain life-choices (as, to advocate 'young-earth' creationism) a talented person
has failed to fulfil his or her purpose.
Correct. It doesn't matter by any standard other than Dawkin's own time and culture bound predjudices. Several billion years from now, then the earth is gone, why will it have mattered, in any serious philosophical or ontological sense, whether Wise was a creationist, a scientist, a Nazi, or a wino in the street?
But the argument fails at the first step. Why on earth should we believe in (1) at all? The idea that purpose has to come from a non-human source is a mere assertion without foundation, and in any case leads inevitably to the question of where the non-human entity's purposes come from. You can give an answer to that by saying something like 'My favourite non-human entity is the ultimate source of all purpose', but that is saying no more than the second child in this dialogue:
Cut and thrust. The claim that purpose need not come from a divine creator (human or not), or, indeed, has not come from a creator, is mere assertion as well, and is nothing that flows from scientific data or knowledge. The further question of where the creator's creator came from is, while interesting philosophically tangential to the issue at hand, and using it as a red herring doesn't save you from the fact that general materialist claims are, themselves, nothing more than
mere assertion without foundation. Unlike these, however, the Gospel does provide us with a means of certain knowledge on these matters, but that, of course, requires human beings remove their masks of intellectual pretense and self deification and realize that there may be ways of knowing and means of perception than the purely intellectual or scientific.
The whole trick here is to seize hold of a notion (in this case 'purpose' in the sense of potential function) that comes from our fuzzy-edged human world, and insist that it belongs in a special superior world where it is the exclusive property of a 'god' (whatever one of those is). Then we are told that if we deny the existence of that special superior world, we can't have purpose any more. (The same goes for ideas of right and wrong, though that is not the argument here).
Your going around and around the sugar bowl very well chap, but as yet you haven't done a thing to alter the reality that if the universe is purly accidental and random, then human existence is meaningless in any objective or ontological way. We exist because of a incomprehensibly vast fortuitous set of accidents that just happened to have ended with us. It need not have. In this kind of metaphysical conception, meaning is obliterated by blind chance. Not your personal, subjective meaning, but any overarching meaning that could be ascribed to
human existence per se, that would elucidate whether or not it is better to be a young earth creationist or a postivistic geologist, or whether it is better to be Mother Teresa or Rudolf Hess.
Getting our feet back on the ground and clearing our mind of the god-talk, it is in fact clear that in normal life we are perfectly happy with the notion that human beings confer purpose on each other:
You're avoiding the issue, as I thought you must. Conferring purpose on each other is a purely subjective mental activity that, despite its psychological effectiveness in negotiating the present world, tells us absolutely nothing regarding any intrinsic, innate, or essential value human existence has beyond one's private mental constructs and conference of such upon others. What this means, of course, is that at Red Giant time, it will not have mattered morally, or in any other sense, that Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and the Great Terror happened any more than that the Civil Rights movement happened or that I was kind to my children or beat and abused them. There are no objective standards beyond the ones we create and ascribe to each other, and therefore, there may be a plethora of moral and ethical systems, many of which may be bent to your suffering and destruction. But neither you nor Dawkins has any moral or philosophical template upon which to base objection to any of them save your own subjective self interest.
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hus for instance, I have taken immense care over the education and upbringing of my children with the purpose that they should become happy, fulfilled and socially useful adults. And of course in so far as they become autonomous (which is my wish, being fulfilled more and more every day), they will confer purpose upon themselves by the choices they make and the aspirations they form. That is good enough for me,
And all utterly and incomprehensibly meaningless outside of what, as a homo sapien, is your internal mental fantasy world. For the education, fulfillment, and happiness of your children to have meaning, the concepts of fulfillment and happiness must have meaning. However, in a universe in which death ends all meaning for each individual, and in which existence itself is a blind, random stroke of luck, these concepts appear as little more than defense mechanisms against the stark inevitabilities of a cold, harsh, uncaring universe. In other words, fantasies. When religious people speak of meaning, they speak of an intrinsic, innate meaning inherent within the universe itself and conferred upon it by its designer and creator (and without which, an organized, coherent universe wouldn't exist at all). This means that existence has an intrinsic, cosmic worth quite outside of our personal, self constructed mental structures used to negotiate the physical world and psychologically postpone the inevitable collision with nihilism (persona extinction, and the collective extinction of all humanity at some point in the future evolution of the solar system).
What this all means, of course, is that the greatest works of art, philosophy, music, literature, religion and science, along with the deepest loves and dreams, are nothing but epiphenomena of the human cerebral cortex, and when extinguished, will have meant utterly nothing. It will be as if they had never existed at all. My arguent here is really quite simple. One cannot impute meaning to anything that has an absolute end in time. That which will be extinguished and annihilated; which will cease to be and to provide meaning to some conscious entity, is, by definition, meaningless as much now as it will be countless billions of years from now. Meaning is a function of teleology, and teleology is a function of the existence of intelligent beings capable of understanding and enjoying the meaning inherent in purpose.
Creatures created by random chance and bounded by time such that death completely obviates the subjective meaning you make so much of, cannot lay claim to any meaning to their existence in any sense beyond the defensive mask they wear during this life that allows them to get through life without collapsing in the face of the inevitable meeting with utter extinction, not only of physical life, but of their deepest values and bonds.
Purpose is, on this view, merely a human thing - but then, we are merely humans, and I have no problem with that.
This kind of attitude is part and parcel of what is created by many succeeding generations swimming in material affluence, peace, luxury, and leisure. Talk about cultural conditioning, but people like Chap talk about it as if its really deep philosophical reflection that has led them to this point.
No one's fooled on that point except people like Chap and Dawkins.