The Futility Of Existence Without God

Without God, nothing matters.  Some people choose to respond to this by embracing what they call "faith" as a way to escape the nihilism that logically follows if God does not exist.  Some people choose to disbelieve in God and yet live as if something can or does matter.  Some people choose to deny both God and meaning, possibly leading to acts of psychopathy, internal despair, or even suicide.

It's time for me to present the utterly futility of existence without God.

I want to state up front that this post is merely for proving that an existence without God is one devoid of any significance, fulfillment, or purpose.  This is NOT a post where I will prove that a generic theistic entity exists or where I will argue for a more specific deity like Yahweh.

If God does not exist, there is no such thing as right or wrong.  Our moral ideas are either the results of social conditioning or subjective personal preferences or emotions, not a conscience implanted by a moral being--and there is no such thing as any higher reality for these moral longings, feelings, preferences, and consensuses to align with; we merely have or inherited these tormenting longings for a way we think the world should be, even though relatively few humans have the same ideas about this.  Conscience is a futile and cruel condition that leads us to believe an illusion or long for something that isn't real.

If God does not exist, then our sense of beauty does not tap into anything but our own delusions.  There is nothing beautiful about any location, object, person, or idea.  Every instance where someone finds a member of the opposite gender physically attractive and thus initiates emotional and physical bonding with him or her, every instance where someone listens to music that stirs a longing for something more, whatever that may mean, every instance where someone socializes with a close friend, and every instance where someone pauses to admire landscapes or scenery serves as nothing but a cruel mirage--they are all things that tease an illusory hope or meaning that vanishes when we reach for it.

If God does not exist, then there is a way things are but no way things
 should be; there is no such thing as human rights, justice, beauty, salvation,
 or purpose; truth itself has no value, nor do we have an obligation
 to seek or protect it; there is only darkness, absurdity, and chaos outside of
 us and darkness, absurdity, and chaos within us.  If God does not exist,
 then we are organisms with a misguided tendency to think ourselves
 valuable who by happenstance are inhabiting a cold, pointless cosmos
 with nothing to look forward to but death and the extinction
 of our consciousnesses.

The willingness of atheists like Sam Harris to cling to things like morality while denying the only possible ontological basis for them has been demonstrated repeatedly.  In fact, even Richard Dawkins, who in one of his books blatantly claimed that there is no such thing as meaning or morality (now how does he know that?  I sense a non sequitur AND the fallacy of begging the question!), yet spent a significant number of pages in his (hilariously fallacious) book The God Delusion claiming that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is objectively evil.  Individuals like the New Atheist Lawrence Krauss are either deniers of purpose or skeptical of what any purpose for the universe may be, but they still act as if things like science (in the case of Krauss) have meaning.  In short, few people live as if these things like morality and purpose are illusions even as they reject the only basis for them.  But as you can see, the ramifications of God's hypothetical nonexistence extend into every crevice of philosophy and reality.

If God does not exist, then there is no justification or payoff for our suffering, nor is there anything wrong with inflicting suffering on other beings, be they humans or animals.  One of the largest difficulties some people have in embracing either general theism or a specific religion is the so-called "problem of pain".  If God loves us, why does suffering exist--especially suffering that seems so gratuitous to us?  Not only does this question erroneously assume that if a god exists it must be one with a loving and benevolent nature that will oppose suffering (a huge instance of begging the question), but if there is no god at all then our suffering is nothing more than something that only subjectively disturbs us, with suffering itself having no moral dimension and no good to arise from or after it.

If God does not exist, our yearnings for emotional, personal, social, and even intellectual fulfillment are absurd fantasies.  We may have billions of other people on the planet metaphorically alongside us, but we remain utterly alone in our anguish and despair.  We may pride ourselves in our intellects, only to eventually realize that because of our intellects we can apprehend the absolutely meaningless nature of existence and truth itself.  In a universe without God, there is no purpose, and yet that does not alleviate or remove our insatiable longing for meaning and fulfillment; we simply orient our lives around different pursuits that we all subjectively find appealing, thoroughly deluding ourselves in the process.  Whether we react towards this with rage, despair, sadness, or indifference reflects nothing more than our subjective mental states that do not change anything about reality or conform to any higher reality at all.  No matter what we choose to live for--survival, success, sexuality, power, philanthropy, a sense of self-fulfillment--in the end we cannot escape reality.

Without God, existence is just a desolate state that is no better than
 nonexistence and no worse.  We are beings that enter this existence
 without choice, with our only options being to either pointlessly endure
 our lives of pain and longing with no ultimate reason for doing so or to
end our own lives in order to escape the futility of them.  Either way, we
 are like fog that inevitably dissipates, to be forgotten and forever gone.

Now, never once did I argue that life without God is meaningless and that therefore God exists because without him there is no purpose; I would never use such an obviously fallacious argument!  As I stated in the introduction, this post is merely designed to show the logical ramifications of God's nonexistence.

It is difficult to imagine any person honestly wanting such an existence as this to be the one we live in if he or she truly comprehends the ontological and personal ramifications.  Nor is it "insane" or "taboo" for people to honestly confess the horrors of human life and the fact that God alone can ground meaning.  If God does not exist, then there is only darkness, absurdity, and chaos outside of us and darkness, absurdity, and chaos within us.  Let us all, theists and atheists, skeptics and modernists, postmodernists and fitheists, moralists and sociopaths alike, solemnly reflect on these truths as we acknowledge the complete futility of life without God.