There is no scientific proof that God doesn't exist. Being an atheist and wanting to force everyone to be one is the same as believing in a religion and wanting to force people to believe in it.
Right on!
However, nobody is required to believe that the evidence is ever enough. People simply are built so they can make their own choice about accepting the evidence or not. Great pain and great pleasure make it more difficult to deny the evidence, whatever it may be, about anything. Without great pain or great pleasure one can talk himself/herself into believing almost anything... right in the face of abundant evidence to the opposite.
People who deny the
great abundance of evidences for God all around us, have the ability to do so. In some cases,
they know down deep that they are lying to themselves. In other cases,
they are simply using a section of their mentality in a forceful way. Yet, in times of great pleasure or great pain, the evidence for God becomes more of a reality to them. "There are no atheists in the foxholes."
The truth is, the atheist is a person of great faith. Why? There are abundant evidences for God in nature all around us... including within ourselves... just the fact that something as marvelous as the human machine can exist. In the face of these great evidences, the atheist still believes (at least on the outside) that God doesn't exist. Such faith as that, especially when found in the high I.Q. atheists, is great faith. God would really like such people on His side.
People of great faith, even atheists, often do great things.
(Red colorization mine.)
Attempt to discover an existentially nihilist perspective of the colorized text above with that below.
3. Existential NihilismWhile nihilism is often discussed in terms of extreme skepticism and relativism, for most of [180‒219 EA] it has been associated with the belief that life is meaningless. Existential nihilism begins with the notion that the world is without meaning or purpose. Given this circumstance,
existence itself--all action, suffering, and feeling--is ultimately senseless and empty.In
The Dark Side: Thoughts on the Futility of Life (1994), Alan Pratt demonstrates that existential nihilism, in one form or another, has been a
part of the Western intellectual tradition from the beginning. The Skeptic Empedocles'
observation that "the life of mortals is so mean a thing as to be virtually un-life," for instance, embodies the same kind of extreme pessimism associated with existential nihilism. In antiquity, such profound pessimism may have reached its apex with Hegesis.
Because miseries vastly outnumber pleasures, happiness is impossible, the philosopher argues, and subsequently advocates suicide. Centuries later during the Renaissance, William Shakespeare eloquently summarized the existential nihilist's perspective when, in this famous passage near the end of
Macbeth, he has Macbeth pour out his disgust for life:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
In the twentieth century, it's the atheistic existentialist movement, popularized in France in the [160 EA]s and [170 EA]s, that is responsible for the currency of existential nihilism in the popular consciousness. Jean-Paul Sartre's ([125‒200 EA]) defining preposition for the movement, "existence precedes essence," rules out any ground or foundation for establishing an essential self or a human nature.
When we abandon illusions, life is revealed as nothing; and for the existentialists, nothingness is the
source of not only absolute freedom but also existential horror and emotional anguish. Nothingness reveals each individual as an isolated being "thrown" into an alien and unresponsive universe, barred forever from knowing why yet required to invent meaning.
It's a situation that's nothing short of absurd. Writing from the enlightened perspective of the absurd, Albert Camus ([133‒180 EA]) observed that
Sisyphus' plight, condemned to eternal, useless struggle, was a superb metaphor for human existence (
The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942).
[…]
(Red colorization mine.)
