Life has many big questions, questions about our origins, meaning, and morals. There are other questions, but these are the big meta-questions. I had observed in my own journey that each of the possible answers have absurdities, yet one of them must be the most right one.

Atheism and Meaning

Over the years I’ve had many conversations with atheists about both meaning and morals. I have also listened to countless lectures and debates by atheists where they stake out their positions. I seriously entertained atheism for myself in the early 1990s, so I examined these thoughts thoroughly. For me, meaning was one of several issues that eventually caused me to think through atheism and back to theism.

In the area of meaning, my atheist friends do not see a problem. They say that they find meaning or create meaning by the way they live their lives. Some of them call this an existential meaning.

The Historical Perspective

I must digress for a moment to look at philosophical history. History has the answer to many of our questions. I want to address this concept of existential truth. This will be grossly over simplified.

I’ve discussed ad nauseum in this blog about how fads in thinking swing back and forth over time, just as styles in clothing. These swings over the past two thousand years have oscillated between an emphasis on reason or emotion in the human experience.

The Enlightenment, (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), in my opinion was the greatest of human thinking movements. But like all thinking movements, it eventually went too far. Because reason and the scientific method had been so successful in finding truth, The Enlightenment proponents began to apply the same approach to all areas of life. If something wasn’t observable, like God, spirituality, or meaning, it was superfluous.

In reaction to The Enlightenment’s endgame, Soren Kierkegaard and others began to promote a different kind of truth, one which is known via experience rather than objective evidence. “Existential truth,” in other words.

In ways, as I’ve said before, Soren was the great, great, grandfather of today’s post modernism, giving rise to a variety of personal truths for the religious. But for the atheist, it gave permission to create meaning and the basis of morals from experience rather than a rational deduction. This is where I believe that atheism (and many religious thoughts) are absurd.

In classical logic, if the cosmos is a fluke of nature, it cannot carry a purpose. Nihilism is the only option. Meaningless cannot give meaning.

I am only scratching the surface here. If you do want to explore this more, here is a panel discussion about meaning and atheism (led by a theist-philosopher) and here.is a contra discussion by an atheist-philosopher.

In reviewing these pro and con philosophical discussions, I do recognize that there is also an issue of semantics. The word “meaning” can carry different connotations. Yes, we can create meaning for our lives. Someone can devote their lives to saving endangered elephants. Yes, that’s meaning. But the meaning I’m talking about is more akin to the word “reason.” Even though I can create my own meaning, I cannot create the reason I exist. A universe, which is a fluke, has no reason for our existence. We are flukes, mistakes, an existence without a reason.

A theist, on the other hand, can take solace that the creation of the cosmos and our selves was deliberate and while we may not know God’s reason, it doesn’t change the fact that there must have been a reason, purpose, or meaning.

Atheism and Morals

I remember having a discussion with an atheist and I raised the question of morals. He immediately became defensive and started listing how his morals were superior to religious people. He was faithful to one wife, he gave money to the poor, he volunteered at a hospital, and etc.

I think he confused me with those evangelicals who claim that atheists are atheists because they are immoral, and stupid. I do not hold those views whatsoever.

My point to this atheist was, I have no doubt that he practiced a greater morality than the religious or me, but what was the point? In an atheistic cosmos, there can be no absolute morals, no right, no wrong. Nihilism. Who says one action is better than another, that saving starving children, or gassing them to death and burying them in a landfill. It makes no difference.

I remember one atheist friend telling me that there is a natural law that he follows and the pinnacle of that was the survival of our species. But why is that moral in a atheistic system? Wouldn’t the cosmos be better off without humans? But why is saving the cosmos moral? If the entire cosmos exploded today, who cares? Meaningless.

In philosophy, this is why origins, meaning, and morals are so closely related. Our morals are tied to the why and purpose of our existence. If there is a god who created us, that reason then begs the question of how are we suspose to live. Our morality.

This is the absurdity of atheism, the pretense of meaning and morals, where there can be neither. Please spend many hours thinking about this.

Mike