Does Atheism Lead to Nihilism?

[Esquilax]

So, there is no intrinsic meaning, value or purpose to anything? We have to make it up? So...the "noble lie"?

The claim that personally derived meaning and, to some extent, meaning and value derived by the people who care about us is, somehow, invalid or less valuable has not been demonstrated. You yourself are just assuming it to be true and, in fact, it's not a "problem" that is solved by your own beliefs, if you wish to continue this argument further.

If my meaning and purpose is self derived, and you have a problem with that, why is that? What are the actual issues at play here? I read the WLC article you cited, and he too seems to skip over actually explaining why what he says is true; he just asserts that it is, in a series of appeals to consequences that are rooted in baseless, unjustified fiat demands. One gets the feeling that no matter what we would produce in response, Craig would find that unsatisfactory, merely because it's not the god he's already hitched his wagon to. In fact, I recall a debate that demonstrates this quite clearly, where Craig makes essentially the same points he makes in his article, that without god we're just physical components, and his opponent replies by asking, essentially, how god makes that better. Craig's response was to repeat his original point.

The point is, what's the actual difference? In both cases, god-derived or human-derived, the meaning is resolved from a subjective mind and applied to reality; is there an actual difference between the two states that you can point to that wouldn't seem petty and insignificant without front-loading it with a lot of assumptions?

Is it that god's meaning comes prior to the existence of the thing, while human meaning comes after? In that case, the quality of the meaning is just temporal, and the content is irrelevant. Is it that the meaning comes specifically from our creator? Then it's dependent on the ability to create stuff, and the content is similarly irrelevant. In both of those cases, god could have decided to give you all no meaning, to purposefully give you nihilism, and you'd just be bound to that.

I don't think either of those points are why you're arguing this, though they do handily demonstrate what I'm getting to, which is that the reason you think godly meaning is superior is because it comes from god. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, if you have some actual reason that god meaning is better then just say so, but if all this comes down to is that it's better because it's god, then you have no case at all. It's just the authority you've imbued in god, making that meaning worthwhile, and you certainly can't justify giving that authority to him.

That's the problem with these discussions: the theist argument only stands if you assume a whole lot of hidden premises to be true. Taken from actually neutral ground, the theist can hardly justify their own meaning any more than the atheist, it's just that they've taken it upon themselves to be the interrogator rather than the interrogated.