A life that only glows because God lit the flame was never burning on its own – and it is extinguished the moment one discovers the fire was imagined.
One of the common accusations believers throw against those who disbelieve in religion is the idea that life loses its meaning and purpose without God. They even insist that such a life must necessarily collapse into despair, understood here as hopelessness or inaction, since nothing anchors it to significance. At first glance, this charge sounds powerful. And indeed, it is partially correct. But the error arises when meaninglessness itself is painted in purely negative terms. For Sartre, this very absence of predetermined meaning is in fact the indicator of the abundance of freedom – a theme he would famously defend in his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, later published as a short book, and elaborated with greater philosophical weight in his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness.
First, let us be charitable to the accusation. Sartre would reference Heidegger’s notion of forlornness in this regard – since God does not exist, we must face the consequences of this absence. This is the fact that life is indeed meaningless without God. And this forlornness shows our thrownness and anguish. We have been thrown into this world without our own choosing and we have been condemned to be free. Nothing is inherently stopping us from doing the most unthinkable atrocity against others or from killing ourselves which showcases the horrifying abundance of our freedom. In referencing Dostoyevsky, if God did not exist, then anything is permissible.
As Kierkegaard would say, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. We stand before infinite possibilities with nothing to hold us back – no cosmic guardrail, no divine command, only the terrifying openness of choice. Anguish happens when we realize that we carry the responsibility of our actions and its consequences, that we are in the tension between the infinite and the finite. Our possibilities are endless yet we are bound to make a choice amongst these possibilities and such choices will shape reality. Once it does, there is no turning back. There is no cosmic ctrl + z. My past choices harden into facticity, and all I can do is move forward, transcend while carrying the burden of freedom into the next moment, again and again.
However, contrary to the accusation, this does not lead to inaction nor despair. As Sartre would say, humanity is a being whose existence precedes essence. In other words, man exists first and then only afterwards, he becomes something by defining himself through the choices he makes upon which he is responsible and the essence he creates for himself. There will be no such thing as human nature because at first, he is nothing – a nothingness to be filled through his choices. As what Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness, man is the being whose project is to be God. This is not meant to be taken in the literal sense. Rather, one of the aspects we have projected to our gods is their power to define and dictate meaning, values and purpose.
Atheism does not mean that one will succumb to despair if by this term, we mean hopelessness.
But since there is no god, we are “godlike” in the sense that we are the ones who will create this essence. We are like blank slates, the author of our own lives. Hence, the very starting point of existentialism is action: we create and define our meaning by writing on this slate with the choices we make and we are responsible for such choices since we cannot revert them. We can change however, the things we write for the future. Sure, man will face despair because he cannot depend on things that are outside of his control other than his own consciousness and choices which he has control over. But atheism does not mean that one will succumb to despair if by this term, we mean hopelessness. Hope is not something that one would then place upon a god. It is something we place upon probabilities or possibilities of things even if its occurrence only has the slightest chance not upon impossibilities.
The point with all of this is that meaninglessness and the inherent freedom that is tied to is also not just a burden, it is also a gift or a liberation worth celebrating. There is consolation in the fact that there is no god out there who will dictate your meaning, purpose, and how you should live your life. That role is yours, you are the creator of your own values and you will be responsible for what values you cultivate because every choice is a choice for all mankind. This idea will later be supported by Simone de Beauvoir in her Ethics of Ambiguity where she state this abundance of freedom is actually what will lead to authenticity because if God does not exist, there is no one who will hold man accountable for his mistakes or forgive him and no one to recognize his goodness or reward his efforts. Man then becomes inherently free and accountable only to himself.
Therefore, it will be his choice to be morally upright out of his own volition or to create his own purpose and meaning through his choices, not because something else outside of him is compelling and forcing him to do so thereby making his actions genuine. One will be acting out of bad faith if he intentionally deceives himself that he does not possess all these freedoms as an excuse to avoid responsibility for his choices (which is a topic for another time). As Dawkins would point out, if one is only good out of reward or out of fear of punishment in the afterlife then, he is a moral monster on a leash and his goodness was conditional and never really genuine in the first place. In a similar vein, if your life only possesses meaning because God declared it so, then it was never alive on its own and never truly yours to begin with. Its meaning is borrowed, fragile and it vanishes the instant you realize the lender never existed – the moment you see that God is not there, your meaning collapses with him.
Whether life’s meaninglessness demands that we invent meaning, or whether it should be left and embraced as meaningless, and whether this life is ultimately worth living – these are questions that stretch beyond the horizon of this article. Camus, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche each wrestled with them in their own ways, and their voices deserve a separate stage. For now, let us leave those questions suspended upon which we shall tackle for another time.
Works Cited
Dawkins, Richard., “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?,” The God Delusion (Boston: Mariner Books, 2008).
Beauvoir, Simone de., The Ethics of Ambiguity trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, Inc., 2018).
Kierkegaard, Søren., The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Liveright, 2015).
Kurtz, Paul., Exuberance: An Affirmative Philosophy of Life/Philosophy of Happiness (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2015).
Sartre, Jean-Paul., Being and Nothingness trans. Sarah Richmond (New York: Washington Square Press, 2021).
______. “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans. Bernard Frachtman and Hazel Barnes (New York: The Wisdom Library, 1957).
