Well I certainly have doubts sometimes. Any honest Christian with half a brain does. Mother Theresa had doubts. What we believe is pretty incredible.
So are the things a lot of other people (including atheists) believe though.
Is it conceivable that heaven is some hoax and when we die we’re just gone? Maybe. I don’t think so, but it’s possible.
Either way, our time on earth is certainly temporary and with or without the threat of nuclear war any of us could go at any moment.
So I’m just going to keep living my life as best I can. Plan for tomorrow, but be aware that it might not come. Be as kind to people as I can (easier said than done sometimes), spend time with my loved ones, and try to make the world a better place in the hopes that it’s around a while longer.
Oh, hey, if a topol 800 kiloton Russian bomb explodes above the nearest major city, i am a little outside the “light blast radius”. Um, i guess that means i get to worry about fallout and starving to death and similar fun stuff.
To be honest the more I learned about the history of Christianity the more clear it was how indisputably manmade so much of it is. I can get myself around believing there’s something out there, but the notion that it’s THIS thing? We just have so little evidence to believe that, and honestly I think I prefer the thought we don’t have an interventionist god, because otherwise he chose to not intervene in times he/she really should have. Thanks a lot for helping me pass Exam 6 but maybe we should have done something about the Holocaust. Better to believe it triggered the big bang and took a nap.
I think most atheists wouldn’t say they can be certain there isn’t anything, just that they think it’s unlikely. It’d similarly be impossible to prove there isn’t a teapot orbiting Mars.
“A device which will destroy all human and animal life on earth.”
“Cobalt thorium G has a radioactive halflife of ninety three years. If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety three years!”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand something. Is the Premier threatening to explode this if our planes carry out their attack?”
“No sir. It is not a thing a sane man would do. The doomsday machine is designed to to trigger itself automatically.”
Until the End of Time by Brian Greene basically killed the idea of leaving the world better off for me since he makes it pretty clear that the universe isn’t going to remember any of it once the all atoms rip themselves apart and shit.
A version of this is that information can actually, apparently, not be destroyed:
I thought this was an open question, but based on that wiki page, maybe it’s not anymore.
I understand this to mean that in some sense evidence of what we have done always exists since information cannot be destroyed.
I think you maybe are talking about something else though. It seems like the universe will be nothing but background radiation for a very long time, possibly forever.
That can make this feel like it makes everything that happens now absurd.
In some ways it is like the christian argument turned on it’s head. Christianity uses the symbols of resurrection and eternal life to represent the infinite importance of life. If “eternity” is just background radiation, this seems to undermine the importance of our lives.
This doesn’t really follow though. People intrinsically matter or they do not, which does not depend on the the state of the universe 1billion years from now. If they matter, then our lives matter.
I mean: is the universe better for having people? If a child is able to grow up, is the universe better for the sole reason that another person has existed ?
This seems like begging the question to me. I don’t think there is enough agreement on the metric we should use to pass this kind of judgement for the answer to have any meaning. If we’re all just atoms anyway then why is the question even relevant?
I agree with you that we cannot definitely answer this question.
I’m just commenting that the (probable) “heat death” of the universe does not mean that the answer to this question is: no we do not matter. And i don’t think there is really any good reason to think it does mean this.