On Nihilism and Atheism

I was talking with a friend and entrepreneur yesterday which brought up this thought on blind faith.

Faith is something that has gotten incredibly politicized over the last ~10-15 years and one thing that I’ve felt sort of viscerally is that this nihilistic attitude towards the world has taken hold in a way that is a blind faith in something negative which is equally, if not more, irrational than blind faith in something positive. I think the root of this is how polarized our political view of the world has gotten in the US, and the outward displays of injustice that happen without true understanding - mostly driven by social media and the internet (for another essay, but with all powerful tools there is great responsibility).

The root of what everyone is thinking about comes down to the question of: what’s the point of all of this existence stuff? People have been trying to answer this for tens of thousands of years. Wars have been fought, religions and ideologies invented, and lives lost over little tangible benefit.

My general answer to this question is: we don’t know what this is all about, but wouldn’t it be great to find out?

It’s hard to imagine how much we don’t understand, but it basically rounds to zero. We don’t understand 99.99 - 99.999% of how the universe works, and if you consider all of the possible unknowns with that, we don’t really know anything.

In a situation like that it’s equally, if not more, irrational to assume that everything is meaningless and that all of the cruelty humans do to each other is for nothing. It’s the same thing as blind faith in something positive, it’s just the negative form of blind faith which might contribute to the injustices more than solve them. In fact, it’s more likely that because we don’t know so much that there’s a BUNCH of meaning out there that we have yet to discover! So let’s go discover it!

The kicker is that I will likely not live to see it, but my kids or my kids kids will and that gives me a lot of meaning. It better to live life being Team Humanity rather than Team Carl, so that’s what I choose. I’d challenge all of the nihilists and atheists out there to lean into the world with more curiosity instead of just assuming we know everything already and that concludes it all means nothing. However unsatisfying this answer is, the truth of the matter is that we just don’t know yet.