I found it the opposite. When I was a believer there were so many questions: why do good people suffer and evil people often live happy lives? Which of the many religions is the correct one? Why are we here? What happens when we die?
All of these questions disappear when I stoped believing in God.
How so? There are ways of coming up with answers to those questions without appeal to a deity, but I don’t think that means those questions disappear. At least not in the sense that there is no longer a need to ask those questions. Do you mean that you were able to answer them to your own satisfaction once you stopped believing in God, and that they disappeared in that sense, or that you thought they were no longer questions whose answers you cared about?
Other than the question of which religion is the correct one. That one disappears. But the other questions you mention seem like a lack of belief in a deity doesn’t address them at all.
For me, lack of belief in deities and anything spiritual or transcendental does. Let’s see.
Because everything is ruled by natural processes, there is no correlation between being “good” and being prevented from bad things. Life can be cruel and mostly is accidental, that’s just a hard fact. Nature is blind to justice.
As the great philosopher Van Morrison put it, “it ain’t why, it just is”. When humans think there must be an inherit reason or even plan why we are here, they give much too much importance to our species. We are just specks in a vast universe.
We cease to exist and go back to the state before our birth.
Those questions are far from settled for me.
Why would our mass be directly proportional to our significance? That seems like an error in logic to me. There’s more empty space in the universe than anything else - does that mean empty space is more important than we are? Is Jupiter more important than Earth?
Am I really so radically different than other atheists that I am continually vexed by these questions? This has to be a difference in personality, not in the nature of belief.
There may very well be a why, but it’s unknowable to our feeble minds. However I love the refrain in Rush’s “Roll the Bones”
Why are we here?
Because we’re here
Roll the bones
Roll the bones
Why does it happen?
Because it happens
That’s as good as an answer as any of us are likely to get.
This reminds me of when I was trying to explain the concept of infinity to my son. I wanted to give him a sound mathematical answer. However, as best as I can tell from reading Wikipedia, different branches of mathematics are concerned with different properties of infinity, but it can’t really be defined, only described. Is my understanding correct? I was thinking of starting a thread about it. Anyway, “cannot be defined, only described” sounds a lot like people’s idea of God.
Which is interesting since Christianity answers that question from both Jesus and, far more importantly, Paul, there are no good people.
There is no such thing as importance as a platonic quality that things inherently possess. Things only have meaning when intelligent beings imbue them with meaning.
So Earth is more important than the vacuum or Jupiter because it is more important to yhe humans who love here.
Those answers do address the questions. Admittedly not in a way that would be satisfactory to most theists, but they’'re still answers to the questions.
I agree. Which is why “we’re not really all that important, we’re just specks in the universe” is not a very satisfying answer. Just because we are “specks in the universe” doesn’t mean we’re not important. It doesn’t mean anything.
We are important to ourselves. There is no meaning outside of that which we ourselves create.
Why do humans give ourselves importance? Why do humans give meaning to things? Why do humans continue to ask questions?
Just recapturing mine inner three year old. I don’t pretend to have answers to those questions.
Because we’ve evolved this way. Giving importance to ourselves and our species is a good strategy for survival and reproduction.
My guess is that the answer is, “because groups of humans who do these things behave in ways that provide a survival and reproductive advantage over humans who do not”.
Eta: @EinsteinsHund beat me to it.
2.4 million years ago a single mutation in a gene called MYH16 left us unable to produce one of the main proteins in primate jaw muscles. Lacking the constraints of a bulky chewing apparatus, the human skull was free to grow allowing a larger brain that could ask inner three year old well into adulthood . . . and discover the MYH16 gene.
Importance is a human concept, a concept of sentience. We are important to ourselves because we are our own universe. Effectively our lifetimes are forever. We humans have knowledge that everything will likely continue after our earthly death, but we won’t be here to be part of it and experience it.
Ants, grasshoppers, bears, dogs are also important to themselves and things are no different for them, just a different scale or a different experience.
Eating, breathing, having sex are important to humans. Whether they are important outside of being human really doesn’t matter. Because we don’t exist outside of being human. All of our beliefs also only exist within the scope of being human, being born and dying.
So the “speck of dust” argument I would reject as being irrelevant.
Why would one maladaptive mutation (inability to eat certain foods) survive long enough to result in a larger brain pan? I only raise this point because on the face of it I don’t think this is how evolution works. Assuming these two things are related (which makes some sense) the relationship between them would have to be more complicated than “first A happened, then B happened.” A simplistic model like this just encourages misunderstanding of evolution, especially by people who don’t want to accept it, many of whom are people who believe in God.
This (and similar responses from @Babale and @crowmanyclouds) is answering how we came to be this way. Which is interesting in itself, but doesn’t explain a purpose “why”.
A different approach (and again I don’t disagree with any more than the previous ones) but not responsive to why.
Why does there have to be a “why”? We are arguing that humans only ask “why?” because they evolved the way they are, but that the question itself is meaningless. The universe and thus life have no purpose, they just are.
There is no purpose. The how IS the why. The universe has basic rules that govern how matter and energy work, and everything else is an emergent property of that.
The rules may be “rational” to those living in the universe, but the existence of the rules themselves is irrational. In fact, the more ordered things are, the more irrational it all is.
My belief is that there are an infinite number of universes. There are an infinite number of us in all possible combinations of universes. We may not be able to reach any of these universes, but they do exist. That makes more sense to me than our universe being all that unique. If there can be one universe, it seems near certain that there are many others. In fact an infinite number of them. Infinity seems quite irrational. But our existence is irrational anyway.
Why does the universe have no purpose?
Let’s accept without argument that the scientific method does not find a purpose for the universe. And therefore any answer about what the purpose of the universe is is necessarily non-scientific. And that is why so many people still believe in God–because science does not answer their questions.