If there is no God, life is absurd. If there is no God, life is ultimately meaningless. That is, there is no point to life.
I'm not an atheist, but there are some atheists I admire for their logical consistency. Take Richard Dawkins:
"Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous--indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose."
Dawkins is correct, if there is no God. But if this universe is a "creation" then it has, by definition, a purpose. Only if there is a Creator God does our life have ultimate purpose. Other atheists have recognized this - such as Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche.
Thus someone who refers to themselves as an atheist and tries to find ultimate meaning and purpose in life without a Creator God is fundamentally misguided. Only if there is a Creator God does one's life make sense in the greater scheme of things.
My brother,
ReplyDeleteI have to fundamentally disagree. Maybe there is no "Larger" or "grander" or "central" purpose to the universe without God, but I have had this conversation, as a Christian, with many on both sides. I have come to believe that we, as Christians, make a grave error by equating value or purpose writ large with duration. That is to say, if we assume there is no God, no afterlife, etc., we don't need to assume that life has no purpose or value.
In fact, this is what I find most alluring about the results of athiesm. you end up on a personal quest to make your life meaningful. God hasn't given life meaning, but you then have sole right to do so.
If one accepts no God, then "the greater scheme of things" may be meaningless, but that does not mean that life is meaningless or makes no sense. here, dawkins makes this same error that we Christians all to often make--conflating meaning with eternity when there is so much meaning in the here and now, with or without God.