Really enjoyed this. I love how practical, humble, and respectful (even of religions, which I really appreciate) uncompromising nihilists tend to be. I happen to be a Christian, so I could go on all day about meaning, but if I could say one thing, it's this:
We all die, and it's more than likely even humanity will die out as well (even if it's at the heat death of the universe). You've pretty much rejected the possibility of true objective meaning, focusing instead on various ways of measuring subjective meaning. But at the end of the day, anything times zero is zero, which is fine if you're a nihilist, I guess. The focus in this framework is on you and your "meaning graph", but cool thing about knowing an ultimate God, is that he's a connection to your graph (both investing in your meaning, and pulling from your meaning via worship), that sticks in a way nothing else can. Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus, nihilism is essentially true; Romans 4:17 says, God "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." From what I can see, He's the only thing/idea/person that has the potential to provide any kind of objective meaning, so however delusional religion may appear (and I'll admit lots of it is deluded), there's only one God, and he is "the rock that is higher than I".
I think the (seeming) existence (or open question) of meaning hints at least at something "spiritual," but I think it's an extra stretch to paint it as some proof of theism and by association religious beliefs, some of which are (in a secular context) ethically debatable (but which are unable to be debated simply by nature of being deemed "sacred" and the debating of which is considered "blasphemy")
Personally, I think "music" is probably the most succinct example that our existence may not be purely materialistic in nature (... as I crank up my techno of debatable quality lol)
Laws have survived secular debate and been made stronger by it; medicine has survived secular debate and been made stronger by it; why would religious beliefs (if indeed they have something true and useful, nay, meaningful about the world to say) not potentially be made stronger by seeing "what remains standing" after fierce, intellectual, honest, secular debate? They could even start with "the puzzle of 'meaning'" and work from there. Sacrifice the more extreme/intellectually-weak beliefs to save the others, I say! ;)
But beware, there is a rocky road there, which you elect to base religion on: a very interesting blog post linked directly off of this one (http://meaningness.com/nebulosity-of-meaningness) talks about "intense meaning" in the context of an affair.
Funny to apply evolutionary principles to a critique of religion ;) But I do think you're making the incorrect assumption that religion hasn't already undergone that sort of strenuous debate. Jesus is probably the most discussed/doubted/critiqued figure in history - certainly we've had more time to find out his flaws and the flaws of his followers than we have of science. And yet he hasn't been relegated to the dust heap of history like Baal and Thor.
> Jesus is probably the most discussed/doubted/critiqued figure in history - certainly we've had more time to find out his flaws and the flaws of his followers than we have of science. And yet he hasn't been relegated to the dust heap of history like Baal and Thor.
Well, to be fair, Jesus was the central figure of the religion of the people you're talking about and for a long time outing yourself as a non-believer was "problematic" for your well-being and status in society. Even today in the US politicians know they need to demonstrate their Christianity to become president -- I doubt we'll see an atheist, Jewish, Hindu or even Muslim president within my lifetime (I'm 31).
Also, religious dogma largely lives separate from science and philosophy. It is true that many aspects of what "Christianity" is have been defined by consensus in the Vatican Council (including what scripture -- and which specific version of that scripture -- is considered canonical) and some Christian churches have been adjusting their dogma since (e.g. the CoE has become more accepting of homosexuality, the Catholic church has accepted evolution as factual). But saying "religion has undergone strenuous debate" is a very romanticized view of history.
Not to mention that much of Christian theology/philosophy foregoes the possibility that any other religion might be true to the point where Pascal's Wager only works if you supply the premise "All other religions and sects are definitely wrong" (i.e. you can't accidentally insult the "True God" if you submit yourself to the Christian God and turn out to be wrong).
> Well, to be fair, Jesus was the central figure of the religion of the people you're talking about and for a long time outing yourself as a non-believer was "problematic" for your well-being and status in society.
Not before many, including the earliest Christian leaders, were killed for their belief in Jesus. Christianity has proven to be a determined startup.
Prove what point? Take off your retrospective determinism glasses for a second and note that for any alien species, there's probably going to be a few religions which have double-digits of the population. These religions started from nothing at some point, so of course they look extremely tenacious in retrospect, when in fact any other equally viral religion could have taken their place if history had played out slightly differently.
While what you say is true to some extent for Western Christianity, the fact remains that Christianity has taken deep root in a number of places in the world that were free of western biases, e.g., China, Korea, Africa, and South America. A huge diversity of cultures have had their own struggles with Christianity.
In most of these cases, Christianity did not organically spread. It was brought in and forced upon local populations by mostly western colonial powers. Colonial powers always export their cultural beliefs and identities in an effort to bring those subjugated in line with their own ideas and expectations. Where religion wasn't brought in by colonialism's force, it was exported and introduced by typically western missionaries, yet another example of using a different kind of force to help it take root and spread. After some time, it's true that Christianity began to evolve with its own localized flavor, but it's not like these non-western cultures discovered Christianity via their own Damascus Road experiences with local prophets.
While I can't speak about every culture, in W. Africa, Christianity took root because the colonial powers brought missionaries who established religious schools wherein the practice of traditional religion was impossible. For the longest time, these were the only schools available so the educated became Christian, and thus the powerful and well-connected were all Christian as a result.
An even more interesting comparison is the Eastern Christians of Greece, Russia, the Middle East, etc. Their theology and relationship with science has been fundamentally and increasingly different than the West since the Great Schism.
> While what you say is true to some extent for Western Christianity
Its just as true of Eastern Christianity.
> the fact remains that Christianity has taken deep root in a number of places in the world that were free of western biases, e.g., China, Korea, Africa, and South America.
All of those examples are largely a consequence of imperialism (largely, on the part of societies comprising Western Christendom.)
That's not to say that there aren't a few cases of durable Christian communities in regions (IIRC, particularly in the Middle East and East Africa, and some in South Asia) where they aren't a result of the heritage of ties between the common ancestor of modern Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christianity and the Roman empire, including those descendant churches ties to imperialist European states, these isolated communities are notable as exceptions within Christianity.
While religion in ancient Greece had great debate, anything that happened during and after the fall of the Roman empire had effectively zero critical thought to it for the next several hundred years. Christianity was ultimately thrust on western populations by force. It stayed there for generations until it became so engrained in European culture (and American culture, as a consequence) that nobody questioned it anymore until modern day.
It is a coincidence of history that Greece happened to have a a Christian faction that was good at converting people right around the same time that that Roman empire was collapsing.
Many other religions that tried to similarly gain traction were met with destruction before they hit critical mass, so you must be careful to acknowledge some survival bias here for your religion of choice. Christians, by pure chance, got the timing right.
I don't think you can include apologetics or even theology as part of having a fierce, honest, secular debate on Jesus or religions. Apologetics and theological discussion already implicitly involve the assumption of truth, which prevents a truly strenuous, secular debate. As soon as you bring the claims of religions, with all their impossible-to-prove truth assumptions, into the debate, you're no longer having a secular debate. You have to leave the assumptions of divinity, faith, gods, afterlives, etc. None of these things can be adequately defined outside their self-referential religious contexts, and thus the very concepts that ought to be discussed in secular debate can hardly be given adequate definition to inform and frame the debate.
Comparing the persistence of Christianity to Baal and Thor is, I think, just this side of intellectually dishonest. If you're going to discuss comparative religions and their place in the dustbin of history, then like with other such comparative discussions, you shouldn't be making comparisons to things long since dead, especially myths. Instead, you're up against other extant religions with their own rich and ancient histories—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.
More importantly, the persistence of any of these religions provides no informative or measurable proofs of their truth claims. At best, we'd be delineating the ways in which they provide subjective meaning—but that tells us nothing at all about their objective truths. We cannot really say we've identified any of Jesus' flaws, given that the sole information available are stories written long after his alleged existence, all of which claim a god-man free of flaws. We can critique the flaws of his followers, but that still doesn't inform any objective and secular discussion of the truths and meanings of religion.
It's true that billions find meaning in their chosen religions. Millennia of effort has provided no conclusive evidence this is anything other than subjective, though.
> given that the sole information available are stories written long after his alleged existence, all of which claim a god-man free of flaws
I'm not sure that all of those stories claim that; only four of these stories were accepted as canon by the later consensus of Christian churches, but others are known to exist, which have somewhat different contents.
Also, Christian churches reached some kinds of consensus about what they say the canonical gospels said about Jesus, but not everyone who has read those gospels agrees with those interpretations; there have continued to be some debates about what Jesus said about himself and what his early followers believed about him. Some of those interpretations have been considered heresies in mainstream Christianity for a long time, but there have been a lot of such views which people have held to quite strongly, and often claimed were supported by their readings of even the canonical gospels.
After all, one of the reasons that Christianity even had all of those ecumenical councils and promulgated those creeds was that there were lots of people who claimed to be followers of Jesus and didn't believe some or all of those things. (And maybe there would be more today if there had been a separation of church and state throughout the Middle Ages.)
I am exceedingly aware of the history of Christianity, its sects, its texts, and the many variations therein. I thought it was obvious the exchanges the parent was involved in were, from the parent's side, only referencing the canonical scriptures used by the church today. Thus far, the parent has given no indication that non-canonical texts or sects held authority. Moreover, non-canonical texts and discarded heresies hold little relevance to the primary matter being discussed. The multiple Christianities of history are a fascinating subject in their own right, but strike me as of little concern here.
Oh, no apology necessary. I find the points you brought up to be incredibly fascinating, and have spent quite a lot of time studying them myself. I probably erred in omitting mention of only referring to canonical scriptures. If this were a discussion on the subjective meanings found in various heresies—as deemed by the councils that won their debates—that'd be quite a fun conversation.
I don't think I would call someone well-critiqued when until roughly the 1700s to 1800s, critiquing him in the Western world, and also in parts of the East, would get you murdered.
>And yet he hasn't been relegated to the dust heap of history like Baal and Thor.
Neither has His Divine Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, from a pulp science-fiction franchise. The popularity of a character as a character does not indicate their historicity.
>Personally, I think "music" is probably the most succinct example that our existence may not be purely materialistic in nature (... as I crank up my techno of debatable quality lol)
Could you describe that in more detail? How is music not materialistic? I would consider it hedonistic and nihilistic, just like recreational drug use for example.
It's nothing like a drug, in my opinion. And it seems to serve detrimental evolutionary purposes, which makes no sense (anyone distracted by music is fodder for predators or accidents).
I was once in USAF basic training. One of the peculiarities of that 2 month existence was a total absence of music. This is not normally something people encounter in their lives. I found out that after a while I literally craved music. ANY music. I distinctly remember leaning into a passing car which had its windows rolled down and music pouring out, while I was marching. Around the 1.5 month mark we had to wait in an auditorium for a speaker and he was an hour late. The A/V crew (this was 1993, by the way) decided to put on the Black Album by Metallica, and the ENTIRE auditorium was jamming, metal fan or not. It was really something. It was one of the sweetest (and yes, most meaningful) musical experiences I've ever had. They ended up playing the entire album before the speaker finally showed.
Anyway, I'm here to tell you that something strange is up with music, and it is NOT materialistic in nature (at least, according to out current understanding).
And it's not like I don't think about materialism a lot, being a programmer who was once a Physics major. But try to come up with an objective evaluation of music and you will fail to. It is one of the most subjectively sublime values we have. I mean, all it really is, is sound wave patterns, but somehow it is much more. (Perhaps, just like the Mona Lisa is much more than the sum of ink, paper and wood frame it is made from.)
First you say it's not a drug. Then you say that after 2 months without it, you were craving it like an addict and desperate to get it however you could.
From your description, it still sounds like a hedonistic experience.
Well, barring space transit, humanity will be wiped out by the Sun long before the heat death of the universe, if not by some other catastrophe first.
I am Christian as well, but I didn't think the article handled religion well. In Christianity, "God's chosen people" are the tribes of Israel, not Christians. In Christianity, the meaning of life is love, something you don't have to be a Christian to believe or understand, so you certainly wouldn't have to cling to Christianity to hang on to this meaning.
Buddhism is about relieving suffering. Something that you don't have to believe in Buddhism to understand. You don't have to cling to Buddhism to believe that your meaning in life is relieving the suffering of others.
Anyway, the paragraph about religion and meaning didn't ring true for me.
Technically the entire "love thy neighbour" stuff seems to largely be based on the understanding that "thy neighbour" is a fellow Christian (or Hebrew, considering Christianity wasn't yet a thing when most of it supposedly happened).
The Old Testament alone is full of double standards about how you should treat your fellow tribespeople compared to what is allowable to be done to outsiders or enemies of the tribe.
If Christianity had consistently interpreted these rules as universal, there probably wouldn't be many Christians around.
This is similar to Islam's claim of being the "religion of peace": Islam certainly expects Muslims to treat fellow Muslims well, and actually goes to some lengths to make sure non-believers shouldn't be directly killed, but it has fairly strict rules about apostates and people trying to convert believers away from Muslim faith.
Except when asked who is my neighbor, Jesus responds with the parable of the good samaritan (the samaritans and jews were enemies) which basically says, everyone, including your enemies, are your neighbors. It's the whole "do good to those who hate you".
On a more serious note: while that is true, there are a lot of conflicting views on how those passages interact with the rest of the gospel. Especially considering that Jesus literally said he didn't want to abolish the old laws but then contradicted them. A lot of it can't be taken logically as absolute commands (otherwise the commands would conflict with each other) yet it isn't clear how contradictions should be resolved.
EDIT: Also Samaritans are generally considered Hebrews, even though their claims of origin were disputed by the "real Jews" at the time.
> Especially considering that Jesus literally said he didn't want to abolish the old laws but then contradicted them.
There are two distinct laws found in the Bible. One is the ceremonial law, which applied to the Israelites and revolved around the sacrificial system which pointed to and culminated in Jesus' death on the cross. After this event, the old, ceremonial law (animal sacrifice, circumcision, etc.) was no longer necessary, as the type had met antitype [0][1][2].
The second, everlasting law, which represents the character of God Himself, is the moral law, found in the 10 commandments. These were summarized when Jesus said to love God and love your neighbor[3].
So there was no contradiction in Jesus' words. He came not to abolish the law, meaning the moral law, but after His death, the purpose of the old ceremonial law was fulfilled, and thus was no longer necessary. The moral law, however, was and will be forever necessary, as evidenced by the writing of New Testament authors[4][5][6].
After the Jews rejection of Christ was complete, all people were granted invitation to join the figurative, spiritual Israel[7]. Not coincidentally, if you study it out further, you will find that almost everything found in the Old Testament in literal Israel, events which led up to the death of Christ on the cross, were a figurative type of what spiritual Israel would go through after Jesus' death and ascension into heaven.
This evidence also goes a great length in explaining away most other apparent contradictions Christians and others find in the Bible.
What Jesus said was that he came not to abolish the old laws but to fulfill them.
Another thing Jesus said about the Old Testament law was that it was a lowered standard. "You have heard it said" not to murder, but Jesus said being angry (unjustly) is committing murder in your heart. In the same way, lust is like adultery.
And again, in conversation about divorce, the religious leaders of his day told Jesus that Moses allowed them to divorce, but Jesus said "Moses gave you this law because your hearts were hard".
So it's clear that in Jesus' eyes, the OT law was not the ultimate moral standard, which he said was summarized in "love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength" and "love your neighbor as yourself". If we truly did those things, of course we'd not murder, etc.
It's a bit like rules for children. I tell my toddler not to pull his sister's leg, but I want him to someday mature to the point where he doesn't need that rule, because he loves her and wants what's best for her.
The OT law, with its low standards, was still too hard for humans to keep, pointing to the need for Jesus to fulfill it for us - and He fulfilled not just the low-standard law, but the true one.
>Especially considering that Jesus literally said he didn't want to abolish the old laws but then contradicted them.
Not to be a pedant, but what literally happened is someone, likely well after after Jesus' lifetime, claimed Jesus said this and that. No one actually knows what Jesus literally said.
Well, depending on which Christian sect you subscribe to, the biblical accounts contain the direct words of Jesus Christ and Yahweh respectively. So I'll cede that if we're already going to treat the Bible as if it were objectively factual.
Otherwise we'd have to get into an argument who "Jesus" even was (assuming we accept the majority interpretation of history that there was someone who at least vaguely matches the biblical character of Jesus of Nazareth -- specifics aside).
The parent said "depending on which you subscribe to." There are millions of people who believe the phrase you quoted. So it is a counter argument, regardless of its objective true-ness.
Exactly. If we were discussing Harry Potter lore I would treat those books the same way. I honestly don't see any meaningful distinction between religions and fandoms of other creative works (except maybe that fewer people have been killed in the name of Harry Potter).
That said, I was really just making a witty remark. I have no reason to treat biblical accounts as factual (especially given the long and complex history of why biblical canon is what it is and the unreliability of narrators with questionable identities who weren't even alive at the time of the events they're describing).
The direct speech of Jesus in the bible is not necessary the literal word of Jesus of Nazareth the (possible) historical person, but under various interpretations of Christianity it is the literal word of Jesus Christ, the (fictional) character in the biblical narrative. The only difference is that Christians generally seem to think the biblical character is an exact description of the historical person -- for which there doesn't seem to be any reliable basis.
Love thy neighbor isn't what I was talking about, and as someone else pointed out, your interpretation of that to be fellow Christians is incorrect (although in real life a lot of Christians behave how you say and worse).
Similarities between Islam and Christianity are to be expected. Islam is an appendix (The Quran) to Christianity (The New Testament/Covenant), added about 700 AD. And both are appended to Judaism (the Old Testament/Covenant).
Are you saying you think we have to completely deplete all resources in a stellar system to colonize the next? There is way more energy to harvest in a star system than that.
It can take more energy than it's worth to transport energy from one star to another. Entropy is a pain, because it's like we're trying to find a relatively dry tree to hide under in a rainstorm and none of them stay that way for long.
If the cost of transporting mass and energy from one star system to another are sufficiently high, another problem is that only the people on the ship get a benefit, whereas everyone else is throwing away mass and energy for no conceivable personal benefit.
It would take a very dictatorial sort of government to overcome this kind of negative incentive.
> Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus, nihilism is essentially true
Some Christians believe this. Some Christians don't. And some Christians believe something which technically agrees with this, but doesn't actually hold that knowing Jesus by name or having any contact with formal Christianity is essential, which makes it functionally more like the reverse ("people for whom nihilism is true don't know Christ").
Christians, even by the narrow creedal definition, believe lots of different things.
> Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus, nihilism is essentially true
If nihilism is "essentially true" (whatever that means) for "folks who don't know Jesus" (whatever that means) then it is essentially true for people who do know Jesus. We're all in the same boat. Whatever the objective truth is, it's the same for everyone. The only question is who is burying their heads in the sand, and whether or not that's a good thing, or if it even matters at all. (Personally, I think it does matter, but I can see how a reasonable person could disagree.)
All worldviews start with assumptions. Secular materialism relies on circular arguments as much as Christianity, they just explain less (see Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton). The only difference is that materialists often refuse to admit their assumptions - which is why, as a Christian, I admire nihilists - they're not afraid to admit their axioms and follow them to their logical conclusions.
Really, only the last paragraph of that post are relevant here. Secular materialism and Christianits share reason in common. The difference between the two is their explanation of why it works, where it came from, and why it matters. That's where circularity starts to happen.
No. This is what a circular argument sounds like: "The Bible is the Word of God, and we know this because it says so in the Bible." There is nothing like that in secular materialism. Secular materialism is a conclusion based on evidence. It might be wrong but it is not circular.
And, BTW, if secular materialism is wrong, then the way to demonstrate that is to show evidence that it is wrong. And if you want to claim that secular materialism is circular then the way to show that is to show how it is circular (which you won't be able to do because it isn't) rather than just to say that it is with no supporting argument.
> Secular materialism is a conclusion based on evidence.
No, its not. Secular materialism is an epistemology in which conclusions based on externally-verifiable empirical evidence are held to be the only justified claims of knowledge.
> And, BTW, if secular materialism is wrong, then the way to demonstrate that is to show evidence that it is wrong.
This rests itself on the assumption that secular materialism is correct (that is, it assumes tthat conclusions based on externally-verifiable empirical evidence are the only justified claims of knowledge.)
> And if you want to claim that secular materialism is circular then the way to show that is to show how it is circular
Secular materialism itself is not circular.
The claim that secular materialism is true because it is not shown to be wrong within the epistemological framework which secular materialism defines is, OTOH, circular.
"Secular materialism relies on circular arguments as much as Christianity,"
> Secular materialism is an epistemology
No, it isn't. Secular materialism is "the theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena." (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Secular+materialism) It is a falsifiable scientific theory.
> The claim that secular materialism is true because it is not shown to be wrong within the epistemological framework which secular materialism defines is, OTOH, circular.
But that's a straw man. You're right, that would be a circular argument, but that is not the claim that secular materialism makes.
You are confusing secular materialism with science. These are not the same thing. Science is a set of assumptions, including the assumption that any theory that is at odds with evidence must be wrong. Secular materialism is a conclusion that follows from those assumptions plus the currently available evidence. There is no circularity. Science does not assume secular materialism. Science readily takes on board the possibility that dualism might be correct, that deities might exist, even that Jesus may have died on the cross to save us from everlasting torment in the afterlife. All of these theories are rejected not because they contradict scientific assumptions (which would be circular) but because they are at odds with the evidence.
BTW, science does not claim that secular materialism is true. No scientific theory is ever true, merely the best available explanation at any point in time. Scientific theories are always subject to revision based on new evidence or better arguments. That's one of the big differences between science and religion: in science, the discovery and correction of mistakes is considered progress. In religion, it's heresy.
No, its not. There's no conceivable empirical test that could refute it, even in principal.
> You are confusing secular materialism with science.
No, I'm not. Secular materialism and science are closely related but different. Science is a method for justifying knowledge, secular materialism is the belief that that method is the exclusive method for justifying knowledge.
> There's no conceivable empirical test that could refute it, even in principal.
Of course there is. Communication from the afterlife conferring information that could not otherwise have been acquired. Greater efficacy of prayer to one deity versus a different deity. The Second Coming.
> secular materialism is the belief that that method is the exclusive method for justifying knowledge.
Then you are using the term "secular materialism" to mean something different than what the dictionary says. I refer you to the following passage from Tom Stoppard:
> Communication from the afterlife conferring information that could not otherwise have been acquired.
Any such communication (and any such afterlife from which communication was possible) would itself be explainable as physical processes. (Obviously, it would require new understanding of what the laws of physics are, but that's not unusual.)
Any phenomenon that involves an observed and predictable relationship between an observable action and an observable result can be explained physically (though it may require new physics.) Any phenomenon that does not is rationalized within a secular materialist viewpoint as either (1) random, or (2) an effect of some as-yet-unknown cause.
Nothing observable can falsify secular materialism.
But that is exactly what falsification means. When you "require new physics" you have falsified the old physics.
> an effect of some as-yet-unknown cause
Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity. Science does not rule out that possibility a priori.
BTW, here is an example of an unfalsifiable theory: God is real, but He will not reveal Himself to you unless you believe in Him. If He has not revealed Himself, then you just don't have enough faith.
> When you "require new physics" you have falsified the old physics.
Sure, there lots of things that could falsify our current understanding of physics (and elements of that understanding are falsified all the time without any negative impact on Secular Materialism).
But all that says is that the current models of physics are falsifiable, which wasn't in question. Falsifying them, however, doesn't falsify Secular Materialism.
> Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity.
Not in any non-physical sense.
> Science does not rule out that possibility a priori.
Science does not admit any entity that cannot be reduced to physical mechanism, nor does it need to admit any such entity since its framework allows explaining any predictable relation between observable cause and observable effect as such a mechanism, and it doesn't concern itself with anything other than such relationships.
(Whether this is all there is "in truth" is a question that goes beyond science -- secular materialism is the affirmative answer to that question -- and which is irrelevant to science.)
> Falsifying them, however, doesn't falsify Secular Materialism.
That depends on how they are falsified. If your "new physics" is just a minor tweak to the Standard Model -- a new particle, say -- then you're right. But if you can demonstrate something observable that isn't made of matter then that would falsify secular materialism.
Dark matter and dark energy could potentially do this. Notwithstanding that we're calling them "matter" and "energy" the truth is we have no freakin' clue what they are.
> > Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity.
> Not in any non-physical sense.
Sorry, I have no idea what that means.
> Science does not admit any entity that cannot be reduced to physical mechanism
Not true. It just happens to be the case that everything we observe appears to be reducible to a physical mechanism. But that's not an a priori assumption, it is an a posteriori observation. And it's also a pretty recent development. For example, whether or not life could be reduced to a physical mechanism was an open question until Darwin. Whether altruism could be reduced to a physical mechanism was an open question until Dawkins and Axelrod. The jury is still out on abiogenesis, but again, I'll give you long odds that that, too, will turn out to be physical.
> it doesn't concern itself with anything other than such [predictable] relationships
Again, not true. A phenomenon does not have to be predictable to be amenable to scientific inquiry. There are hard limits on our ability to predict, say, the weather. That does not mean that weather is beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. Quite the contrary, it is because of science that we know that there are fundamental limits on our ability to predict the weather.
BTW, weather presents the perfect example of how secular materialism could be falsified: if tornadoes, all else being equal (i.e. controlling for things like geographic location and construction quality), selectively destroyed the houses of worship of one denomination over another.
Burying heads in sand works when you can't take the data feed coming into said head. Christians make circular arguments to substantiate their beliefs, and those arguments are typically based on fairly trustworthy lessons. The only problem is, those circular arguments substantiate a singular all knowing god who is represented through the lense of a book a bunch of humans wrote 2,000 years ago. Marketing changes, but base concepts remain the same.
I'm seeing a recurring theme in this thread (and others) accusing Christians of using circular / irrational arguments to substantiate their beliefs.
I'm a Christian and here is my assessment of the nature of faith.
Everyone lives by faith. When you decide to get in an airplane, you go by faith that the plane is sound, the pilots are skilled, etc. Same idea with driving to work, picking a job, getting married, conducting an experiment. By virtue of the fact that no one knows the future, we all must at the most basic level, live by faith.
Faith is commitment without knowing (with 100% certainty).
Of course that does not mean faith has to be blind and irrational. You make observations about the world, hear testimony of people you trust, think through the issues and come up with your conclusions.
Atheists weigh the evidence (e.g. if God exists, why is there so much evil? Or why does God not reveal Himself more clearly?) and don't see God.
Theists weigh the evidence (e.g. why is there something instead of nothing at all? or observe the improbability for the conditions that allow life in Earth) and see God.
Blanket accusations that theists having no rational basis for their beliefs are not fair. There is rational basis for either camp if one is open to honest researching and listening.
Throughout the ages there were and are great rational thinkers who profess faith in God. (e.g. Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton)
This is to say again, everyone lives by faith. I have great confidence that God exists, but can not 100% prove it. The atheist can not prove He doesn't. I concede that I could be totally wrong. A rationally honest atheist will concede the same about their own beliefs.
So we all make a decision.
Our death is the day of reckoning. Only then will there be the possibility to know for certain if what you have chosen to believe was right or wrong.[0]
TLDR; In issues of existence of God, afterlife, etc and therefore meaning, we cannot know for certain either way. So make the best choice you know how and we'll all find out if we were right later.
[0] Technically, in the case that I'm wrong (about the afterlife), we won't know much of anything.
>Throughout the ages there were and are great rational thinkers who profess faith in God. (e.g. Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton)
This form of argument could quite easily be used to justify other beliefs. Newton, for instance, was also a practitioner of the occult and alchemy. Pascal regarded medicine as unholy. Even purportedly rational thinkers have their blind spots.
That is true. Some of the most evil people in history were rational/logical to a fault. I will not follow them or believe in their ideologies.
However, I mentioned them (Pascal, Newton) not to justify faith in God, but to dispel the false notion that theists are all irrational and/or theism cannot be rational.
Right. I think I agree with the general thrust of your previous comment: all worldviews/metaphysics ultimately require leaps of faith of various magnitudes.
"You've pretty much rejected the possibility of true objective meaning..."
This depends on what you're trying to give meaning to. The 'god' perspective gives meaning to life (i.e., why are we here??). But why is it necessary to ask that question in the first place? Asking it implies that there is a meaning to life and you're trying to figure out what it is. It's not inconsistent to say that "life" doesn't have meaning (nor does it need to) but that "our individual" lives do have meaning. That meaning is defined for us by our genetic blueprint...it gives us the motive force individually to seek out the things that fulfill our individual lives. Once we die, the show simply ends.
Meaning is something that is imposed by an observer. For something to have meaning, there has to be someone it has meaning to.
Religions typically offer a supernatural observer (usually but not necessarily a creator god) to play that part.
Atheists don't have the luxury of simply defining such an observer into existence, so they fall back to that which already exists or has a reasonable chance of existing if things go as planned: themselves, friends and family, their offspring, other humans, whatever comes after humans, maybe even some other species that is luckier than us and stumbles upon our remains.
But because meaning is subjective, it is also contextual: ultimately everything may be meaningless because there is no absolute observer ("ultimately" kind of implies there is no observer left anyway), but in the meantime there are potentially billions of people whose lives you can affect -- and many billions upon billions more if we as a species survive that long.
Talking about religions as if they were all the same or at least similar enough to lump them on a single pile is dishonest. That's often how apologists try to define their deity of choice into existence (drawing semantic arguments that define "god" in such a way it becomes a logical necessity) but there's no path from "there is something I shall call 'God'" to "everything in the Bible/Quran/Talmud/Necronomicon is true" short of circular reasoning ("because the Bible/Quran/Talmud/Necronomicon says so"), special pleading ("of course all the other religions are just superstitions") or "divine revelation" (i.e. non-repeatable personal anecdotes).
Speaking of "the meaning of (human) life to a rock" would be patently ridiculous: rocks don't have a capacity to impose meaning on anything humans do and even if they did we wouldn't be able to tell nor have any incentive to care.
Speaking of "the meaning of (human) life to Bob" likewise is only worth anyone's attention if we have any reason to actually care what Bob thinks.
Even foregoing the impossibility of proving the existence of a god or gods (given how awkward they are to define consistently across religions and how being able to actually demonstrate their existence would by definition refute their supernaturality) why should anyone care what they think about life, human or non?
Many religions like Christianity solve this problem by making their god vengeful. Don't do what Yahweh wants? Experience unpleasant things for eternity (whatever "experience" or "unpleasant" means in eternity). Do something he likes? Experience eternal bliss (whatever "bliss" means if it is eternal). Various sects disagree on the exact nature of the punishment/blessings and what is necessary to deserve them.
Either way, you have to wonder what difference it ultimately makes: if we're talking about some kind of post-physical eternal state of "being" without bad things, what's the value of good things? If there is none, what difference does it make whether you're blessed, punished or simply cease to be? It almost seems like an elaborate con based on all living things' natural fear of death and non-answers ("What was before the universe?" -"Turtles." "What was before turtles?" -"Turtles were always there. It's turtles all the way back.").
Also, with regard to the Christian god in particular: going by the Bible, Yahweh is not exactly the kind of character whose opinion I would value. The Old Testament is full of him commanding his followers to murder, pillage, rape and enslave others, not to mention the bloodshed and terror he allegedly inflicted directly. Even the New Testament paints a less than rosy picture of him. If Yahweh is real, he would be worse than all human tyrants of history combined and a perfect example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It seems to me you're thinking of Christianity in terms of its popular atheist parody, in contrast to the respectful, thoughtful view of the OP. A number of things you've said are simply not true, others are not in proportion.
There are a lot of problems to grapple with in epistemology and ontology, some of which you've identified. This isn't the place to debate them, though. A great book to start with though, is Miracles, by C.S. Lewis. It blows through a lot of shallow thinking about God and the nature of reality, as well as a number of things you've referenced: which god is the true one? Why is God so mean?
Also, I'd like to point out that if God has revealed himself to us in history (via Jesus and the witnesses of his resurrection), we don't need to simply theorize about him. There's actual evidence, which we can weigh against our own personal experience.
I'm an atheist, yes, but I'm hardly living in an echo chamber where I'm only exposed to parodies. I was raised as a Christian (although I was never a believer), live in a majority Christian country and my family as well as many people I interact with in my life are still Christian -- whether they actually believe in it or merely identify as Christian socially.
Most Christians I know are either religious because of personal anecdotes ("I felt like something protected me") or wishful thinking ("There has to be more to it than this") or fear of death ("Death is not the end"). Incidentally, few of them literally believe in the Bible although most of them have apparently accepted it as the window dressing for their own personal convictions.
I have merely skimmed most of the criticisms because as you say, this isn't exactly the place to have in-depth discussions. But it is also not the place to make blanket claims based on your pet religion.
> I'd like to point out that if God has revealed himself to us in history[..]. There's actual evidence[..].
This isn't evidence. This doesn't even qualify as an eye-witness account. This is what I mean by circular logic: you can't use biblical anecdotes to qualify the validity of biblical anecdotes. You can contrast them with independent data to see whether they are consistent, or you can look at them within the context of the scripture to determine whether they are internally consistent. But you can't validate them.
The Lord of the Rings is internally consistent. Many alternative history novels are internally consistent as well as consistent with a large subset of actual history (at least if the author cared to fact-check). But that doesn't mean they are "true".
The trivial truth about religion is that believers don't believe because of logical arguments. Logical arguments are only used to justify belief after the fact. If there was a consistent argument that "worked", there wouldn't be any atheists left -- and no, the cosmological argument doesn't work either.
The difference to me is in being satisfied with an answer that you accept on faith vs one you can prove, though things like many-worlds possibly confound this exploration.
The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.
Science provides tentative answers that iteratively home in on the truth: Newton's theory of gravity wasn't wrong, it was incomplete, so it was replaced by Einstein's, which covers all the corner cases we've since learned about.
In science a failure is considered progress. If we can disprove a theory, it increases our understanding of the universe by telling us what isn't true.
Also, a scientific theory must be falsifiable: it must be able to make predictions (which is why string theory despite its name is often not considered an actual theory).
Religion on the other hand offers absolute truth statements. Since the dawn of man religion has been how we explain things we don't have an answer to: lightning, the tides, the origin of life, what happens after we die and so on.
As our understanding outside of religion has improved some of these answers have become ridiculous enough to make it socially awkward to retain them as dogma (though there are still Christians who will loudly tell you natural disasters are divine punishments).
>The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.
>Religion on the other hand offers absolute truth statements.
See my other comment here for another perspective on faith and religion[0]
In particular, the what happens after you die issue is applicable as it is one where we may never have conclusive evidence for the answer this side of life.
>The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.
As a Christian, my answer is I'm confident in my beliefs, but not 100% certain. I could be wrong as could you.
> The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.
No, you don't.
To be a strict empiricist, you have to be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer, and there's other approaches to knowledge which also require that, but, while empiricism (and some of the others) may overlap with atheism, there is no requirement of willingness to accept uncertainty attached to atheism (agnosticism, which by the conventional definition of "atheism" usually used now, is a subset of atheism, certainly requires a willingness to accept "I don't know" on at least one point.)
>From what I can see, He's the only thing/idea/person that has the potential to provide any kind of objective meaning, so however delusional religion may appear (and I'll admit lots of it is deluded), there's only one God, and he is "the rock that is higher than I".
How does the one god have any more potential to create meaning than a pantheon of gods, or one of the many "we are all part of god" spiritual ideas?
Another question for another day. Off the top of my head I can't think of a reason they wouldn't be able to create some form of objective meaning. My problem with lies more in the problems of evil, ontology, epistemology, and a compelling narrative to history.
That's the thing; having a whole pantheon of gods, each of differing levels of 'goodness' neatly solves the problem of evil. (so does postulating one true god who isn't entirely good or entirely evil.)
The problem of evil is only a philosophical problem insofar as you postulate a god of infinite ability, infinite knowledge and infinite goodness. Obviously, such a god contradicts the world as we see it. remove any one of those three pillars, and the contradiction goes away;
Further, I think, once you start knocking one of those three pillars out, so that we get a god who matches observable reality, I question if that god can create any more meaning than the traditional "What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power"
I mean, would you worship an insufficiently good god? one who intentionally chose some people for very good lives and others for very bad lives? My argument is that worshiping such a god would be either an act of fear or a grasp for power. What about an insufficiently powerful god? a god who really was doing his best?
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
The flaw with this logic is it presupposes a standard of good that may be applied to a god. Under most monotheistic systems, the god is the definition of good. So anything that it does, including not preventing evil, is still good.
If god is omnipotent and anything it does is good... then there isn't any evil. So making the distinction between good and evil seems to not have any value.
>There are a number of readily plausible accounts of metaethical naturalism that are available to the atheist. See, for example, Firth 1952, Railton 1986, Boyd 1988, Brink 1989, Smith 1994, or Foot 2001. My point is not that any of these accounts are correct (although I think that some of them are fairly likely to be true). Rather, my point is that if they are false, they are not obviously false. This means that they present the atheist with plausible accounts of objective morality that feature only natural facts, overturning claim (c) and, therefore, claim (a) as well.
>Claim (d) fails on two fronts. First, there are non-natural facts that can serve as truth makers for moral claims that are available to atheists and, second, any problem that the atheist faces with regards to these facts the theist faces just as badly. I take the first horn to be supported by the possibility of irreducibly normative properties, Platonic or otherwise, that are available to the atheist. Recent defenses of such views include Shafer-Landau 2003, Cuneo 2007, Wedgwood 2007, Enoch 2011, and Cuneo & Shafer-Landau 2014.
>On the latter point, that the theist faces the same problems as the atheist when it comes to non-natural normative facts (if there are any such problems), I agree with Heathwood 2012 that there cannot be any coherent theistic moral constructivism which does not refer to some irreducibly normative properties. Properties that are equally available to the atheist.
In religious discussions, people go around in circles arguing within the narrow space of each person's belief system. When even simple terms like "objective" are used in radically different ways, the conversation is doomed from the beginning.
This happens in politics too. And cross gender arguments. I don't think it's particular to religion, although I suspect the tendencies of religions to have a lingo makes it worse.
I agree. In any discussion where you have a great deal of difference between positions, you have this problem. The more emotionally charged or wound up in groupthink a person is, the worse it gets because the very language that could be used to bridge the gap provides less useful traction. It's not about higher-level concepts, it's about basic building blocks of communication.
I didn't have much time for posting yesterday, so I was a bit too terse - but my intent in making the point that I did was to try to get the original poster to think about the very words that he was using.
Often when I join in on heated discussions, I find that people are talking past each other. They throw out words that mean something to them that I don't think mean the same thing to other participants in the conversation. I normally encourage participants to slow down and either pick different words or settle on a common definition for some words that are causing the confusion. It's amazing how quickly some disagreements can effectively evaporate, or at least get whittled down to essentials, when everyone is communicating more effectively.
One can find much more objective meaning to existence without outsorcing it to some imaginable friend.
> Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus,
> nihilism is essentially true
And folks who don't give a rat ass about what Christians believe do know that nobody has monopoly on meaning and don't see the need to reduce everything else to nihilism. It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside.
> It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside.
In my experience, they do focus most of that measurement internally. Christians attend Sunday morning sermons, weekly Bible studies, confess their sins to one another, read the Bible, read books on Christian living, etc. all in an attempt to measure themselves against the tenets of their faith. The Christian faith even talks about the ways in which Christians should be more strict on fellow members of the Church than on outsiders.
But if you genuinely think you've found salvation and meaning, isn't it kind of selfish to keep that to yourself?
In my experience[0], most religious people use their religion to create and foster a sense of difference with Others, and do not keep the focus internally. American politics is a crucible of religious sources of obligational determinism locked in combat with secular forces.
If you genuinely think you've found meaning, it's not selfish to keep it to yourself, until such time as someone asks for your thoughts in their own search for meaning. Which means it's likely to only happen with people you've grown close enough to that they open their private selves to you.
[0]: A born-and-raised ethnic Christian who helped start two churches, whose family is still extremely religious, and who lives in the still very religious southeastern US.
>In my experience[0], most religious people use their religion to create and foster a sense of difference with Others, and do not keep the focus internally.
Having lived in both religious and secular communities, it seems to me that tribalism is a human universal. Secular people have no trouble judging the religious by secular standards. I'm not saying that's bad, I'm just not clear about what the secularist complaint is at that point.
Also, my point was not that Christians (and religious people in general) never pass judgement on the rest of the world, but that most outsiders don't see the investment Christians make in subjecting themselves to scrutiny by the standards of their beliefs.
Complaints about religious hypocrisy are sometimes relevant, but sometimes they are a red-herring.
> American politics is a crucible of religious sources of obligational determinism locked in combat with secular forces.
Could you clarify what you mean by "obligational determinism"? The only google search results I could find lead me back to this thread.
> If you genuinely think you've found meaning, it's not selfish to keep it to yourself, until such time as someone asks for your thoughts in their own search for meaning. Which means it's likely to only happen with people you've grown close enough to that they open their private selves to you.
I'm as annoyed by the door-to-door evangelists as the next person (I think there are better approaches) but if you genuinely think other people might be missing out on eternity, then isn't it a bit schadenfreude to not reach out to them at all?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I can respect a secular person who says to a religious person "please don't talk to me about religion". Assuming the secularist agrees to do the same, the theist should generally respect that wish. I can also respect the secularist who engages theists and attempts to dissuade them of their beliefs. It makes no sense to me that secularists should ask theists in general to keep their beliefs private, as if they were talking about the color of their underwear or something.
Apologies for missing your reply till now, first of all.
> Having lived in both religious and secular communities, it seems to me that tribalism is a human universal.
Unfortunately, this is all too true. I did not mean to imply the non-religious were excluded from being tribal and differentiating themselves from Others, as well. I was only responding from my experience that, particularly within the public sphere, religion occupies just as strong a force in identity politics as other personal features.
> Could you clarify what you mean by "obligational determinism"? The only google search results I could find lead me back to this thread.
Thanks for asking. You've caused me to go back to an old text and discover I had, somewhere over the years, inadvertently mis-remembered a particular phrasing. The phrasing I should have used is "sources of religious obligation" or "religious sources of obligation". Basically, minus the determinism—too much time between studying and recalling philosophy led to a pretty boneheaded error. I draw the phrase from the excellent debate between Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff in Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate. My error, over the years, is rooted in a careless recollection of the role religious sources of obligation play in determining what a person thinks should or should not be done, particularly where coercive public policies are concerned.
Thank you for the response, and for finding the reference.
> I was only responding from my experience that, particularly within the public sphere, religion occupies just as strong a force in identity politics as other personal features.
That is true. In contrast, one of my main points was that there is a significant amount of private, sincere religious practice that is not (primarily) political in nature.
I did not wish to downplay the role of religion in politics (which you correctly point out is significant) but rather the role of politics in religion.
Now, the question of what role religion should play (or should be afforded) in politics is an interesting one; one that I don't have a clear position on at present. I read some Wolterstorff while I was studying philosophy, but I don't recall that specific book. From what I have sampled so far it seems quite interesting.
> Now, the question of what role religion should play (or should be afforded) in politics is an interesting one; one that I don't have a clear position on at present.
I definitely recommend the Audi-Wolterstorff book. They both tackle this specific issue from opposing perspectives, and I found it highly illuminating at the time. It has remained with me to this day—even in misremembered form.
That depends. If your definition of epistemic justification is some variant of Positivism, then my answer is "no".
If your definition of epistemic justification is not so utterly self-defeating, then "yes", but then we can no longer automatically infer that religious beliefs are unjustified.
> It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside.
Only speaking for Catholicism here, but the fact that official Catholic doctrine touches so heavily on so many areas of life, making objective and universal claims about human nature, means that Catholicism can't help but make assertions about people who aren't Catholic or even Christian. This tends to deeply piss off a lot of people, even when no individual Catholic is actually applying those principles to specific non-Christian individuals. In other words, many people tend to not it when religions have anything to say about people who aren't in that religion.
There's a certain amount of amusement to be found when differing religions' assertions conflict.
I'm thinking specifically of a certain elderly Irish Catholic gentleman's response to the LDS' efforts to retroactively save ancestors by means of genealogical research. He was more upset than I thought he would be, given that the process was completely off the wall from his viewpoint as I understood it.
Aesthetics is one possibility. When someone straitens a picture frame they don't need that to last past the heat death of the universe for it to be worth it. Expanding this to say a painting or poem which also has a finite lifespan and you can even learn to appreciate a Mandala. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala
Keep going in that direction and a life well lived is it's own reward. And by well lived I mean occasional cliff diving not devoting oneself to charitable giving.
There is a lot of pressure for 'success' but I suspect many people are happier with a career in dog grooming than they would be as CEO of IBM. High status can be fun, or endless drudgery.
The issue is defining what it is to be "well lived". With out a sky daddy, you're pretty much unable to declare anything good or bad.
Some men want to watch the world burn. Tell me why that is wrong? You will say that human life has value. I will ask, honestly, why? From a purely reductionist perspective it doesn't. It's all just atoms. I kill cockroaches without a negative thought. There is no reason to not have the same view of people in a purely materialistic worldview.
Again, if one's aesthetics is gruesome, but enjoyable to that person, you cannot tell them they are wrong. You cannot interfere with them from an ethics perspective. They want to kill, steal and rape, you have to let them. Otherwise you're forcing an external model that you deem good onto them. We've already established that there is no actual good model.
The result is that we must accept hypocrisy. We must all realize that might makes right. The most powerful, flawed group of people are correct. They are the law.
You are presupposing a suicide bomber somehow had a bad life. I am rejecting that assumption and saying a swat team and the person their shooting could both have lived a great life.
Following the rules of society results in lower friction, and is generally a net positive trade off. That does not mean it's always the correct path. After-all George Washington could easily have been shot as a traitor.
It may seem the strange for a hangman to respect the hanged, but morality and rules need not be 1:1.
PS: This also set's up an interesting freedom duality where someone is free to impose rules and others are free to break them. With the right set of rules you end up with a Darwinian system with huge pressures to enjoy conforming. And a safety valve of people rebelling if the rules are unacceptable. Oddly enough this actually maps fairly well to the real world.
No, I make no assumption about the the suicide bomber. I'm say he didn't do anything bad. He could kill thousands. Not bad. The reason is that "bad" is meaningless. There is no such thing as right or wrong in a materialistic view. Aesthetics doesn't get you there. If the bomber things that the death of thousands looks good, it is. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
You are trying to add morality where there is zero need for it. "Tell me why that is wrong? ... You cannot interfere with them"
My point was you don't need to say what someone did was "bad" to stop them. As long as more people prefer an ordered world then the dissidents can be dealt with.
If majority rule says giving to the homeless is a capital offense then so be it. Physics and thus biology are going to impose a few rules. Further, completion kicks in at the social level. But, that does not mean Anarchy is "bad" just out competed.
Thus, while morality does not impose any rules collective groups of people do. Not because might makes right, but might exists and there is no right.
PS: At the extreme at one point I realized I was being paid in part to help maintain nuclear weapons. Not because I believed in them instead I liked money and other people want them.
Philosophy has many different shades and colors (Philosophy of language, science, mathematics), and there is also a "branch" asking questions related to the meaning of life.
I can't tell you where you could/should start, because I feel like I would already influence you too much by taking some sort of choice away from you.
I will link a few essays I could find that are available for free and are not too long. I'm already influencing you a little bit by making this selection, but I urge you to do your own research: If you like one of the stories, try to find out who was influenced by whom (e.g. Kafka doesn't directly address meaning but influenced Camus; Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer), and consider reading things challenging the author.
While I'm writing this gutenberg.org seems to have some problems, but just search for "Metamorphosis Kafka", and you should find plenty of other sources.
Interesting that you seem to be like me in wanting people to find their own path instead of influencing them in one direction too much. My meta is that this gives them more ownership over their chosen path, from which they'll potentially derive more pleasure and more meaning :)
Trying hard to have people make up their own mind can be hard for dating, though.
That's rather hypocritical though, right? Athiests measure religious people with their conceptions of science and reason, why can't it go the other way?
I agree. I did not agree with everything he wrote, but everyone of his articles were insightful and I came out a better person for having read and thought about them.
Speaking entirely for myself here as an atheist, I think most of us just want to be left alone to believe what we believe without having religious people constantly approaching us with "Well, you don't know Jesus, that's why you believe X,Y, Z." As if they're somehow certain that a God exists and that we simply aren't enlightened enough to see it.
Well, the devout most decidedly are certain a god exists and that everyone else aren't enlightened enough to see it—where it is the given devout person's chosen god.
At most you can encapsulate the world you have perceived (+ stuff you imagine) which is much smaller then the whole world, and even that is a stretch, because we have limited computation available to us, so there is a lot you might be unable to account for due to limited time for accounting.
We all die, and it's more than likely even humanity will die out as well (even if it's at the heat death of the universe). You've pretty much rejected the possibility of true objective meaning, focusing instead on various ways of measuring subjective meaning. But at the end of the day, anything times zero is zero, which is fine if you're a nihilist, I guess. The focus in this framework is on you and your "meaning graph", but cool thing about knowing an ultimate God, is that he's a connection to your graph (both investing in your meaning, and pulling from your meaning via worship), that sticks in a way nothing else can. Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus, nihilism is essentially true; Romans 4:17 says, God "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." From what I can see, He's the only thing/idea/person that has the potential to provide any kind of objective meaning, so however delusional religion may appear (and I'll admit lots of it is deluded), there's only one God, and he is "the rock that is higher than I".