Does Atheism Lead to Nihilism?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Existential and ethical nihilism go hand in hand. The logical progression from one to the other follows directly from the foolish abandonment of formal and final causes. Any ethical system requires people to identify essences, like that of a moral agent, based on the formal and final causes of moderate realism. Post-modern philosophy has exhaustively revealed the big gaping hole in modern alternatives to moderate realism: nominalism and conceptualism. The post-modernists have shown that only convention links signs to that which is signified. Thus there is no conceivable solution to the Problem of Universals. Without a solution to the Problem of Universals, people lack the means of concept formation needed to even form a theory of ethics. This is why Western cultures have become obsessed with issues of identity and power-dynamics.