When it comes to thinking about atheism and the potential consequences of it being true, one of the biggest questions for me personally has been whether anything we do in life matters at all. Hence, this "investigation" of mine.
Let me begin with a few assumptions which well be assumed throughout this post:
A1: There is no God.
A2: After death, there is nothing.
Just for the sake of comprehensiveness, I will cover the case where humans are mortal (and death is a certainty) as well as the immortal case (where it is somehow possible to live forever).
It is very important to define "value" for this discussion to have any meaning. Value for me is defined by the following:
P1: Something has value, if it has an effect/impact on a person's eventual state [mortal scenario] or has an everlasting effect/impact on all of the future states of a person [immortal case].
Mortal Case:
P2: Every person's eventual state is eternal nothingness
P3: Nothing anyone can do in life can impact eternal nothingness
Conclusion: Nothing we do in life has any value for us as individuals.
Immortal Case:
P2: An immortal person's eventual state is always undetermined
P3: X is an action/event that happens in Y's life at a given point that affects all the future states of Y (or affects all the future states of any other person not necessarily Y).
Conclusion: X has value
If this definition of value (P1) is taken to be accurate, then from this reasoning it becomes clear that in mortal case (which I hold to be the real world scenario), any we do in life has zero value. The only way anything can have value is in immortal case (which is hardly realistic), and even then only a subset of actions are likely to be found to have real "value".
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