The Eternal Question analyzes past ideas of the meaning of life:
• Life is about the pursuit of pleasure,
• Life is about the pursuit of success
• Life is about preparation for the hereafter
• Life has meaning because it is self-created.
The book concludes that there are only two intellectually coherent answers to the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’
One of these is that life is meaningless.
The second answer is that human life can potentially have meaning but to understand if it actually does, we would need to understand what it means to be human and what happened at the point of our origin.