No he's not. He's asserting that the universe has meaning if it was created with a specific purpose. One of his arguments is that human-created things (even if we think they have a purpose) don't accrue meaning because the humans that created them themselves have no meaning, and something meaningless (in his argument) cannot create meaning in something else.
This is only partially correct. I'm not simply asserting, but pointing out a logically necessity that limits what either atheists or anyone else can actually rationally claim about the concept of meaning as it applies to the universe and their place within it. The secularists and atheists here stubbornly refuse to face the music here because doing so puts the kibosh on their entire world view. I understand that this is threatening, for a number of reasons.
There is no bare assertion about it. It must be the case that if the universe is nothing more than a product of blind, random chance, then any meaning we ascribe to our existence here is a subjective fantasy that may have meaning
to us, but has no
intrinsic meaning or transcendent value beyond that subjective ascription. It is a fantasy because it has no actual relation to the actual universe, which is a cold, uncaring,impersonal place created through fortuitous accident and which will eventually return to the chaos from which it came (or end as a cold, dead universe devoid of light, heat, or activity).
The subjective fantasy that says "I have meaning" is in this world a psychological defense and mediator between oneself and the random, accidental cosmos. It works as long as we believe it, but it is, in the final analysis, a fiction. The reality still presents to us the fact that each individual death ends everything that individual ever though, said, dreamed, or achieved, and the collective death of the species ends humankind and everything it ever thought, said, dreamed, or achieved.
Nothing matters in any sense external to our personal subjective illusions of meaning, and that is what matters.
This is logically implied by the metaphysical materialist conception of the universe, and is hardly simply a baseless assertion.
His universe gets to have meaning because God created it, and he asserts that God has meaning, therefor something can get meaning because it was created for a purpose by a meaningful entity. However, he is simply asserting that God himself has meaning, without any proof, or evidence, that he does. That doesn't work.
Again we see the holy grail of "evidence" and "proof" used as a mechanism to avoid doing the hard work required by the principle of faith. Secularists can hide behind this hobby horse until the cows come home, but regardless, cannot escape the inherent philosophical consequences of what they do believe; a world in which all moral and ethical systems are arbitrary and in which this very conversation has no meaning whatsoever since neither of our positions exist in a universe in which
meaning provides a context within which our positions could be relevant.
His argument is really baseless until he can demonstrate that God has meaning, and that the purposes for which God creates things can then have meaning.
He also cannot just assert that something (a human) that has no inherent meaning, by his definition, cannot create something meaningful. His just saying so doesn't cut it.
Seth is just stalling for philosophical time here. The very concept of God implies teleology, and teleology explicitly implies meaning (teleology is purpose, and purpose (what something is for), must imply meaning (actualizing that purpose).