Why do people expect life to have a meaning?

Question

When you look at it from the atheist perspective, the fact that we are alive needs no reason. It's just wonderful to accept that we ARE alive.........and one day we'll die.

Why should it need meaning?

I've never understood why people expect life to have a meaning, even as a young kid.

If you're looking for a REASON to be here, isn't survival of the species enough?

Answer 1

I agree with you. In the atheistic, evolutionary worldview there is no meaning or purpose in life. I would add that there is no such thing as right and wrong. Right and wrong must come from an ultimate standard. If it just comes from you or me then it's just our opinion. Why should anyone else follow those rules. If it's just cultural, Our culture says you should love your neighbor. Some cultures down in the amazon say you should eat your neighbor. If there's no ultimate standard, Who's to say one is more right than the other. Whatever you say is just your opinion.
What does atheism tell us about life? It tells us that everything came from nothing and it came about just by random chance. 'Nothing' just 'blew up' or should we say 'started expanding' like a balloon(the big bang). It expanded for 15 billion years and is still expanding. Fifty years ago no one knew you or I were coming. All of a sudden we appear on this earth and 99.99999% of the world still doesn't know we are here and will never know. We live our 70 years on this earth in a life that is filled with problems, one after another. There's no God to help us in our problems. All there is out there is matter, molecules in motion and cold dark space. We're just 'cosmic orphans'. We are the accidental by-product of nature. A result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no real reason for our existence. With no hope of immortality our life leads only to the grave. Our life is but a spark in the infinite blackness, a spark that appears, flickers and dies forever. Compared to the infinite stretch of time, the span of mans life is but an infinitesimal moment, and yet this is all the life he will ever know. If life just ends at the grave then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Hitler or as a Mother Theresa. Since one's destiny is ultimately unrelated to one's behavior, you might as well live as you please. You die, go into the grave and the worms eat you. That's it. You're gone. Mother Theresa isn't sitting up there on a cloud looking down at Hitler and saying "you should have been more like me".There's no more consciousness. Why live like Mother Theresa. She spent her whole life living in a garbage dump because that's where the people she ministered to lived. Hitler had fame, women, money, lived in mansions, had power and total authority, was loved in his own country. Then when he knew the allies were closing in and his glory days were coming to an end he took a gun and blew his brains out. He had nothing to lose. He lived to be almost 60 and he had everything. If there's no God there's no final accountability. You tell me who had a better life. One hundred years after we're dead, very few, if anyone, will know that we ever lived. Then the universe will go on for another 15 billion years and die a heat death. Mankind is a doomed race in a dying universe. Because the universe will eventually cease to exist, it makes no difference whether it ever did exist. Mankind is no more significant than a swarm of mosquitos or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same. No wonder Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of America's most famous legal minds(and also an atheist), once said that he saw no difference between a man, an ant and a rock. The same blind cosmic process(evolution) that coughed them up in the first place will eventually swallow them again. Atheism says that man is just a lump of slime that somehow evolved into rationality. No wonder that even in this country, the suicide rate is is in the stratisphere and 25-30 million people are clinically on drugs for depression. That's the bi-product 40-45 years since we changed our culture from a christian culture to a secular culture back in the 60's during the sexual revolution. You could also throw in education scores that have fallen through the floor, divorce rates that's in the stratisphere, crime rate that's in another dimension,......drug, alcohol and sexually transmitted disease rates that are in outer space along with aids rates and you might also throw in 40 million dead babies(abortions).
Yeah, you are right, from an atheist perspective, there is no meaning in life.

Answer 2

I don't think we're here for anything, we're just products of evolution. You can say, “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose,” but I'm anticipating a good lunch.
— James Watson (Nobel Prize winner, co-discoverer of double helix structure of DNA).

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience [[or religion]] and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What have we to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity!
— Isaac Asimov

Life has no meaning beyond this reality. But people keep searching for excuses. First there was reincarnation. Then refabrication. Now there's theories of life after amoebas, after death, between death, around death. Now you come back as a shirt, as a pair of pants. If Shirley MacLaine tells some brilliant guy, "There's an ethereal planet that sits right next to a delicatessen in Ethiopia and if you go shop there twice a day, you'll live forever," this putz believes it because he needs an answer from somebody. People call it truth, religion; I call it insanity, the denial of death as the basic truth of life. "What is the meaning of life?" is a stupid question. Life just exists. You say to yourself, "I can't accept that I mean nothing so I have to find the meaning of life so that I shouldn't mean as little as I know I do." Subconsciously you know you're full of sh*t. I see life as a dance. Does a dance have to have a meaning? You're dancing because you enjoy it.
— Jackie Mason

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
— Bertrand Russell

Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.
— Carl Sagan

Life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.
— Marjory Stoneham Douglas

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
— Douglas Adams

Answer 3

Because life hurts so much and is so joyous yet difficult, we cling to the hope that it's all for a reason and that somehow we can figure this out or that there is someone/something that knows all the pieces to this puzzle. Why is life such a paradox? the question arises from the innate and universal condition of having a human mind and body. you may not question now but you are questioning the questioning, what does that indicate? Maybe when you stop questioning and simply embrace the facts, you are finally closer to seeing the truth.

Answer 4

Why would survival of the species be a reason?

From a purely rational perspective why should I care?

After all when I am dead it will not impact me. So I might as well do everything in life to get the most pleasure out of it until I drop dead... at least from an Atheist perspective.

Answer 5

Well thre are two different aspects to the question.

Is there an over-arching reason for us to be here, clearly the answer is no.

Given that, what purpose should we give ourselves in life, well that one can be answered in a number of life affirming ways.

Christians et al focus in the first aspect, those with less insecurity the second.

Answer 6

People are looking for a set of guidelines. That's why religion is so comforting: it provides those clear guidelines as to what we should be doing on Earth and why (eternal reward).

This question seems to kick in for many people around age 13 or so, which, incidentally, is the age that most humans are ready, biologically, to reproduce. That, in itself, suggests your answer is the correct one.

Answer 7

I think that it is because some people look for a reason behind being alive because they need to know what they were meant to do. If they don't they may feel insignificant or like they don't have to do anything because they do not have a clear view of what they should or can do.But that's just me.

Answer 8

If survival of the species is enough for you , why even ask this question? And why SHOULDN"T life have meaning? What is wrong with that??? -- Is survival of the species enough? -- Sure, if you are a lower functioning life form -- in other words an animal.-- Are humans just animals that can speak? Nope---we are human beings who reason, have a conscience, feel guilty when we do wrong, possess morals (hopefully), are able to think on a higher frequency than other mammals and are aware of our own mortality. -- Live without any meaning in your life if you want to---that is your right --- As for me, my life has MEANING and I am so glad it does!

Answer 9

To have a sense of 'purpose of being', I suppose.

I agree with you, though. I don't really care much if my life was simply created out of a night of pure lust and desire. I'm going to live, laugh, and have a fun time.

Answer 10

because if you look at life with no meaning...you just live and die...then whats the point in living at all? Pretty stupid to me..life deffinently has meaning.