Others had a different explanation. Voltaire satirised the Christian idea that the world was being ultimately organised by some benevolent Deity. In seeking to defend God in the face of human suffering, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had claimed that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. In other words, of all the possible worlds that God could create, this one, with all its pain and suffering, was the best one available. No one really bought this argument. Voltaire took Leibniz’s phrase and turned it into a sarcastic attack on the naively religious. The Lisbon earthquake is often pointed to as the moment the European intelligentsia lost its faith in God. Atheism entered the Enlightenment during the period of its conception. Reason and God were no longer compatible.

But suffering and pain are still with us. Mariupol is being starved and bludgeoned into submission as if it were some medieval siege. The innocent are blown up in their beds, maternity hospitals are targeted with high-tech missiles. And dark talk of nuclear war has returned, with nightmares of a Third World War. Has the age of reason really served us any better than the age of faith?

Back when I used to teach Philosophy of Religion in Oxford, I spent many hours sitting in tutorials with undergraduates discussing the “problem of evil”. If God is all powerful and perfectly good, then why is there great suffering in the world? One can, of course, discuss the difference between natural evil and that caused by human beings. But whatever the cause, great suffering is often cast as the slam dunk of atheism. Now that God is supposed to be dead, and suffering remains, I wonder if humanism could be said to have an evil problem too? It’s not quite the same problem, but it is adjacent: if human beings are good and increasingly powerful, how come there is so much suffering in the world?

Scrolling through humanist websites on Ukraine, one of the interesting things is that you can find a kind of defence of humanity in the face of human evil that is not unlike the defence that Christians sometimes use to defend the existence of God in the face of human evil. Consider this, on Ukraine, from the explicitly “humanist” Gold Foundation website:

“Still, through the scenes of rubble and destruction, we see humanity. Humanity in the healthcare heroes dodging artillery as they work tirelessly on the frontlines of the conflict. Humanity in those rising to defend their homes, their country, and democracy at large. Humanity in the charitable donations and mobilization here in the United States and around the globe.”

Compare it to Rowan Williams answering John Humphrys asking “Where was God?” the morning after the Beslan Massacre in 2004.

“The short answer is that God is where God always is, and that is with those who are trying to comfort and bring light in any situation. … I would guess that there must have been older children putting their arms around younger children, you might see God there.”

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These are remarkable similar responses, exonerating God or humanity by pointing towards what is best in the response of these respective actors. But this much is obviously true: evil and suffering have outlived the loss of faith. Once we had God to blame. But now that God has gone (… other explanations are available …) we have no one left to blame but ourselves. Not for earthquakes, but certainly for the horror of war. Humanists now own the problem of evil. So why don’t humanists more often experience some sort of loss of faith in humanity? Where is their existential crisis? I may be wrong, but it seems to me like it’s a dog that doesn’t often bark.

Yes, humanists disagree about the extent to which they think of human beings as intrinsically good. Though, in truth, they do dither on this. Nonetheless, they place human beings at the centre of their belief system. And indeed, why would you call your belief system after human beings if you didn’t think human beings are in some ways fundamentally good? For instance, I’m not sure that you could believe in some kind of secular equivalent to original sin and still call yourself a humanist, though I would be fascinated to be contradicted on this.

My own view is that the Enlightenment too often used human suffering as line in a handy argument against an all-powerful, benevolent Deity, but only feigned to be interested in suffering itself. Suffering was deployed as a part of a syllogism against God. But it felt existentially inert, absent of the kind of crisis that suffering created for faith. Humanist suffering always seems a bit too much like suffering at a philosophical distance. Indeed, the kind of crisis of faith that suffering causes for Christianity seems to be just the sort of perfectly appropriate response that suffering should create in all of us.

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With Easter round the corner, it’s worth saying that for Christianity, the proper response to human suffering and evil — and by proper, I mean the response that is internal to Christian theology — is the cross. This is not the sort of answer that was admissible in Philosophy of Religion tutorials, because it presumes faith rather than holding it up for critical scrutiny. But when Christians talk of suffering, they are not so interested in trying to reconcile the all-powerful, good God plus suffering “problem” — because people being murdered by Russian bombs isn’t first and foremost an intellectual “problem”. It is a crisis, a collapse of faith, a desolation. The cross is where all of that is carried, and — for Christians – overcome. Humanists will scoff that this doesn’t answer the question, and they are right. For Christians, the “problem of evil” is a very different kind of question. To call it a problem is too cold, too detached.

Humanists have responded to the crisis in Ukraine with generosity, as many have. Of course, I applaud them for this. But what I can’t quite figure out, is whether humanists ever experience what might be called a crisis of faith? Do they ever wonder whether human beings are ghastly creatures and that it makes no sense to follow a philosophy named in their honour? And if they don’t, then it seems to me that humanism is all the poorer for it. What we see on our TV screens should quite properly rock us to the core. It should make us question our deepest commitments, there should be a dark night of the soul.

The British Humanist Association offers a downloadable primer on humanism and suffering. They conclude: “For humanists then, the answer to the question why bad things happen is simply, because they do: that is just the way the world is.” In other words, shit happens. What I find most objectionable about all this is not the atheistic cosmology so much as the kind of detached emotional shrug that accompanies it. A world view that has become intellectually insulated from a crisis of faith is not one that has properly exposed itself to the horrors of the world.

That’s right, of all the teenagers on the planet, ours are among the least likely to agree with the idea that “my life has clear meaning or purpose”.

And yet, this unsettling news was pretty much ignored. The focus in the media was on the survey’s news about ‘modest improvements’ in reading and maths. The meaning of life stuff was left well alone.

The same survey suggested that the UK’s young people, while being in the middle of the pack in terms of happiness, also rank near the very bottom in terms of life satisfaction. Of all the countries surveyed, only the children of Turkey and the Macao region of China rate their life less highly than the British do.

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It seems that what the researchers themselves refer to as eudaimonia, the philosophical concept of human flourishing that the ancient Greeks considered to be the highest and most worthy, is in short supply among British young people. This feels like it might be worth thinking about.

Perhaps the commentariat ignored the research because these big philosophical questions don’t make easy news stories. The whole question of meaning is now considered entirely private — it’s almost rude to mention in public.

It is also interwoven with religion, which makes it an even less appetising subject for liberal-minded debate. The top of the OECD rankings are filled with more religious countries, and the UK is now one of the most secular countries in the world. Many people would no doubt think that a dose of existential lostness in your teens is a price worth paying for being liberated from arbitrary superstition. Where would you rather bring up your children, after all: Catholic Panama and Muslim Albania, at the top of the ‘meaning in life’ index, or secular Sweden and the Netherlands, towards the bottom?

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Others might argue that the real reasons for juvenile emptiness might be related to practical concerns about what the future holds for them: difficulties of getting on the housing ladder, surviving in the gig economy and anxiety about Brexit.

But while all these may be contributing factors, it is hard to avoid the sense that there is a wider crisis of meaning in our late modern society, and that the UK is particularly exposed. Already since the Brexit vote, hard-to-pin-down abstract nouns like identity, culture, community and belonging have forced their way into the political debate. If this report is right, ‘meaning in life’ could be next.

There are already energetic movements such as Extinction Rebellion which advocate thinking radically differently about how to organise our society, with less focus on economic growth and a greater attention on the Common Good and overall human flourishing.

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Even to refer to the Good in this way is still considered edgy. A central premise of Aristotle’s ethics was that eudaimonia is the highest good, the end point that needs no secondary justification. But it’s telling that the OECD report’s authors felt they had justify this area of questioning with reference to secondary effects: kids who have a greater sense of meaning in life are apparently less likely to play truant and more likely to succeed in reading and maths. As if they were the more important goals.

I think there’s a similar leap that has yet to be made in our politics. Part of the reason that the response to the Brexit vote has been so woeful is that politicians lacked the understanding or vocabulary to respond to the deeper, more inchoate aspects of people’s motivation. It takes a rare kind of leader who has the vision, and moral authority, to address these questions convincingly — clearly, none of our current crop of politicians are interested.

To give them their due, both Labour and the Conservatives have at least understood the need to bolster regional and local culture and empowerment in the UK, which is a good start. Looking down the ‘meaning in life’ rankings, once you get past the predominantly Catholic and Muslim-majority countries at the top of the list, you soon arrive at Switzerland and Austria. These are both European countries comparable to ours, which are only slightly more religious, and yet 71% of their 15-year-olds say they have discovered a satisfactory meaning in life, compared with just 52% of ours. It seems fair to speculate that their famously strong national, regional and local cultures play a part in giving their children a strong sense of place as they grow into adulthood.

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Strong culture doesn’t necessarily mean homogenous — Austria has a higher level of immigration than the UK, but rather like neighbouring Bavaria, its prominent local customs can make it easier rather than harder to assimilate newcomers. The OECD report actually singles out the UK as a country in which “students with an immigrant background were much more likely to report a greater sense of meaning in life than their native-born counterparts”. A combination of greater religiosity and stronger immigrant cultures seems a likely explanation.

Beyond religion and culture, there are other, equally controversial, areas that we should look at if we think this is a problem worth addressing: the damaging impact of technology and the internet, how values are taught in our schools, and how to better support families. Labour have now actively signalled their opposition to pro-family policies, and Boris Johnson steers well clear of family values, for his own delicate reasons. But absent religious faith or a stronger wider culture, the family is still the primary provider of meaning in life, and Britain has a high level of family breakdown: 28.5% of British 12-17 year olds live with only one parent, the third highest in Europe and nearly twice that of Switzerland.

Aristotle thought that eudaimonia was intimately connected to arete, or virtue — another word I don’t think we’ve heard once in this election campaign. Don’t hold your breath. Whoever wins on Thursday, the small matter of the meaning of life looks set, for now, to remain off limits.