Does Atheism Lead to Nihilism?

[Mudhammam]

Perhaps a definition of nihilism is in order: the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.
synonyms: skepticism, negativity, cynicism, pessimism;
IN PHILOSOPHY: extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence.

Theism does in no way lead to nihilism since God would be the source of meaning and of course there would exist realities beyond the physical.

If God does exist and he did declare a "code" it would be objective for our perspective because our individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings would not affect it.

I reject all religious principles because I'm skeptical of claims that lack rational or experiential justification. I embrace moral principles because they establish the order which allows our species to thrive in a capacity that maximizes our distinctly human disposition for thought and the pleasures derived from a life of opportunity and social interaction.

Your appeal to theism fails in the same way it would if you were to proclaim God as the "source of nutrition" when trying to convince us that cow shit belongs in a healthy diet. God's "code" is no more objective than the Code of Hammurabi and sorry to burst your bubble, but it is every bit as subject to "individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings," otherwise we wouldn't have mutually exclusive claims within the same religion, to say nothing of the differences between them. Clearly then, using evidence, reason, and argument to establish moral guidelines is far less arbitrary than appealing to your feelings and citing their justification as the rules your invisible tyrant decided upon for us.

All the arguments based on "it is not really in our best interest to be selfish" only provides subjective morality and not any objective framework that goes beyond a certain sets of conditions. Depending on the society we live in, you can get wide variations of opinion between the "morality" of a host of actions.

Of course we have wide variations. Once again, your appeals to religious "morality" does nothing to abate that situation, although it does in fact worsen it by causing opponents to dig their heels in whatever absolutist faith they prescribe to and shun the reasoning process which is what actually sets us towards objectively better ways of living. If you simply admit that we can agree on some ways being objectively worse, then we can begin philosophy. And you can deny that's the case in speech, but not action.

How do you define "good" as in someone as a "good person"? In other contexts, we define something is "good" by how well it achieves its purpose. With naturalism, people have no intrinsic purpose--they are an assembly of atoms that experienced an unlikely chain of events. Morality becomes a matter of opinion and is relative and/or subjective. You can't leap from the "is" to the "ought".

This is all very redundant. "Ought" means "is" in the context of the objectively better ways I already (and hopefully rightly) said we could agree on. To say you ought not to murder your spouse means that there are consequences to such actions that if accepted would cause a society to denigrate into a state no one would find conducive to their well-being. Like everyone keeps repeating, your God doesn't succeed here either because we can simply keep pushing the question of purpose further and ask what God's purpose is that is different from chance. Your answer must be "I don't know," which renders it moot.

In our evolution, was it always wrong to murder, rape or steal? Animals do these acts every single day without being "evil". Did the unlikely leap to self-awareness suddenly endow us with a moral framework when a moment before it had not (or not to the same extent)? Would this not be proof of the subjective nature of morality.

Some of you have mentioned societal goals (or any goals) that can help get from the is to the ought. What if someone does not want those goals--has no desire to do what others consider "good"? There is no objective grounds for saying that person is "bad". Of course everything goes smoother when everyone cooperated and does not kill, harm or steal. But that does not define what is good and thereby create an "ought".

For these reason, atheism seems to me to lead you to moral anti-realism (moral nihilism).

However, we all ACT like there is objective morality. Baby studies indicate that we are born with a rudimentary moral sense. Why do people engage in self-sacrifice for others (even to the point of death)--sometimes for people he/she has not met? This is certainly not biological evolution speaking.

Do we all act like there is objective morality because it is convenient or expedient or is there really objective morality? If there really is objective morality, it did not come by naturalistic means.

There was no moral responsibility as there was no reasoning process to establish moral statements about human flourishing. It's like your asking if it's right for a person to murder because they did it while they're sleep walking, or for a small child to pick up his dad's hand gun and shoot him. Of course it's not right from the vantage point of intelligent subjects using logical thought to advance the good in life.

"If there really is an objectively better way for governments to rule their subjects, it did not come about from people trying different systems and figuring out which better achieved their desired interests... therefore magic."

Come on, man. THINK.