This meme says "Oh, so you believe in God? Yes, then please tell me why my life as atheist is meaningless. " Hello this is Dr William Lane Craig and this is Whaddo You Meme?
? In answering this problem, I think it's important to distinguish between ultimate significance and relative significance Certainly the events and projects that we undertake in life can be relatively significant For example, if your goal is to become a great baseball player and hit 60 home runs in a season then it will be very meaningful for you to engage in practice and diet and workouts and so forth in order to achieve that goal But when you ask about the ultimate significance or meaning of something, why does it matter whether you hit 60 home runs in the season? What's the ultimate significance of that?
And whatever you pick, what is the ultimate significance of any event in human history if everything is doomed to end in death? Atheist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre argued that because atheism is true ultimately nothing really matters Ultimately everything ends up the same regardless of what you do Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding and as it does so it grows colder and colder Eventually all the stars will burn out there will be no light there will be no heat, there will be no life; just the carcasses of dead stars and galaxies ever expanding into the endless blackness This is not science fiction. This is the way reality is if there is no God.
Now since everything is doomed to end if death what ultimate meaning significance can there be to any of the events that we undertake in human history? Indeed, what is the ultimate significance of the human race as a whole since it is doomed to extinction? No matter what we do.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion of these atheist philosophers that life on atheism is ultimately meaningless So the next time that someone says to you that life without God is meaningful, help them to understand the difference between a mere subjective experience of meaning and an objective ultimate meaning in life. The claim here is that ultimately there is no objective significance or meaning the human existence. And that is a claim not made by religious conservatives.
That is a claim made by many atheists themselves So the next time that someone says that like without God is just as meaningful what should I say?
