Without religion, is life meaningless?
As someone who believes that the universe was not created by God, I do not believe in the idea of ‘special creation’. I believe that the universe and life exists simply because conditions happened to be right for them to exist. This means that I do not believe that there is a special ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’ to the existence of the universe or life inside of it. It simply is.
Due to this belief I am often accused by various followers of various religions of having a ‘bleak’ or ‘depressing’ outlook on life and existence. There are many different reasons for this of course, including the idea that I think that everything is ultimately meaningless. I believe that eventually everything will be destroyed and nothing will ever know that what is happening now ever came to pass.
However, just because I think everything is ultimately meaningless this does not mean that I don’t believe that the moment we exist in is meaningless. In fact I believe that the moment that we exist in, and the moment anyone in the future exists in, is full of meaning. I believe that it makes everything that we are and do incredibly special and full of meaning. I find the idea of ‘special creation’ by God to be the bleak and depressing idea.
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Hi, I’m Dave. As you can already tell, I’m one of the authors at AiR, as well as a member of the podcast. I’m also the Dave you see on our live streams on Twitch and YouTube. I am an atheist. I don’t use the ‘lack of belief’ definition though, and use the ‘belief God does not exist’ definition for me. I have always been an atheist, and have never been part of a religion.
While I do enjoy discussions around the existence of God, I try to post a wider range of content here. My focus is mainly on philosophy, as that is the topic I enjoy. I have a BA in Philosophy and Psychology, and am waiting on the results for my MA in Philosophy. Will find out in December whether I have been awarded the degree!
This is why my posts tend to focus more on the philosophy side of things. I try to post a wider range of topics than just those surrounding theism and atheism. You will also find articles discussing arguments from atheists that I find to be lacking, or poorly argued. This is mostly because I want to see the atheist community improve its arguments, and to see atheists give stronger and better arguments.
Hopefully you will enjoy some of my content, and I hope even more that it makes you look at certain arguments and ideas in a different way. Plus, hopefully some atheists that dismiss philosophy out of hand might actually see it’s more interesting than they first though. Philosophy is an awesome subject!
What this helps to reveal is that all value in the universe comes from feelings. Without feelings there is no value that can be assigned to anything.
Also any meaning must be felt internally- what good is a dictated meaning if you don’t agree with it. Deferring a source of meaning to another subjective being (even a god), is merely a case of deferring to authority and special pleading. It is the equivalent of claiming a slave master gives us value.