Does Atheism Lead to Nihilism?

[Esquilax]

I was quoting the paper. This was the gist of address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in 1991 by Dr. L. D. Rue. It is also the conclusion of many (some famous) atheist philosophers. How is it that you do not come to the same conclusion. At what philosophical point do you part ways?

Here's the thing with all these "we should all just be selfish and act for our own self interest!" claims: they make a huge and confusing assumption, which is that in the hypothetical in which everyone just does what they want and discards the social contract entirely, our social structure and community will still remain intact. But it won't, which is the point: if we abandon the social contract, the society it was made to foster becomes untenable. That's the whole point of the social contract: it's the basis upon which society is formed.

Doing whatever you want and acting for your own self interest may grant you immediate satisfaction, but if you look further than the myopic few days of looting and murdering you'll enjoy, you'll see that your life is demonstrably worse off. It's kinda why people don't like living through riots, or in post-apocalyptic scenarios; when you strip away the trappings of society, you're left with a rudimentary, shittier existence. Don't believe me? Wait until you get sick and can't see a doctor because they're all just looking out for number one. Do you think it's better to just be able to go to the store and get food, rather than having to scavenge or grow your own? Do you like living in your own home, without generally having to defend it from roving bands of thieves?

So do I. I don't understand why people think that Mad Max is a superior world to the one we live in now. There's simply no need for a "noble lie," because it's just demonstrably true that we've made a better world for every last one of us by banding together and cooperating. We're the dominant species on the planet, present on every continent on Earth, because we were able to cooperate and use our intellect to form a functioning society, and we still need to have these conversations about why it's not better to just dismantle all that for no reason?

Others (Esquilax) seem to believe reality to be a sufficient objective framework upon which to hang morality. This I don't understand.

We have a real world that we share, full of predictable effects to causes, in which we share a uniform biological nature, within a set of well explained parameters. This is an objective fact: we live in a reality. We can use that reality to figure out what's good and bad for humans, and more broadly, for other thinking beings: dying is bad for us, as is injury. Pleasure is good for us, etc etc. It's trivial, but it's a thing we can do.

That right there is a sufficient framework upon which to hang morality: that which is good for thinking beings is morally good, and that which is bad is morally bad. These things can be ranked according to the severity of the effect, mitigating circumstances, and other things, and when they come into conflict with each other we can use reason- blind reason- to come to equitable judgments about this. In order for this to work fairly, we can apply the outsider test to it.

Why should morality be about what's good for thinking beings? Try to have a moral system without them, it's impossible. Inanimate objects perform no actions, therefore there is nothing to judge moral or immoral. Only thinking beings can be moral or immoral, and therefore morality requires them; they are the center of what makes a moral system... extant. That's more than enough reason to privilege their existence within the context of morality.