In a recent interview, Richard Dawkins, one of our century's most outspoken atheists, was asked about the meaning of life.  "This is not a legitimate question," he  replied.
     Dawkins displays an acute grasp of the consequences of his life vision.  If, as Dawkins believes, God did not create the world, then the world is an accident, a random happenstance occasioned by, depending on the theories one uses, virtual particles, quantum fluctuations, a twist of a multi-universe, or something else altogether, a blop of matter in a universe that other than its apparent existence has no reason to be.  It's useless!
     And if it is useless, then, as Dawkins understands so well, it is wholly without meaning.
     And so are we.  Unless something bigger and more meaningful than we, finite creatures in a universe we did not make, affirms the fact and presence of meaning in the universe, we indeed have no reason to ask about life's meaning:  there is none!  Apart from an idea like God, the world as we love and experience it has absolutely no meaning.  There is no reason why it is here and, clearly, no reason why we are here, either.  We are, as Paul Sartre so cogently observed, nothing more than a "useless passion."
     Think about it.  Unless an cognitive intelligence brought this cosmos into existence, we really have no explanation for why it is here.  Simply saying that "it is here because it is here" solves little.  It misses the central point:  a world cannot be a meaningful world apart from an origin in a loving God.

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[1]              As quoted in Jesse Bering’s BeliefInstinct:  the Psychology of Souls,Destiny, and the Meaning of Life

(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).