No god doesn’t mean life is dull, monotonous or pointless

Let’s take it a step further. Plenty of people claim to have met god or had a short stay in heaven during a phenomenon known as Near Death Experience or NDE. While these people are often vehemently positive that their experiences are/were real, the human brain becomes completely unreliable when deprived of a simple and abundant (on this planet) little molecule; oxygen. Our body is reliant on a steady supply of this tasteless, odourless gas, which is the by-product of the respiration cycle of plants. When the brain becomes hypoxic, and if it is sustained for more than a short couple of minutes, you’re dead.

Furthermore, our atmosphere is composed of a mix of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen - and myriad other molecules, but these are the main ones – and at a neutral atmospheric pressure (sea level), you inhale the mixture and your lungs take what is needed into the blood stream and filter out and exhale the rest. Something interesting happens, however, when the pressure increases, say, during a scuba dive, nitrogen, usually simply exhaled, is forced into the blood stream. At deeper deaths, or during longer dives, the nitrogen begins to inhibit cognitive ability. Acting like a drug, the effect is aptly named, ‘nitrogen narcosis’ and is actively exploited, quite beneficially, as an anaesthetic – laughing gas or nitrous oxide (N2O) – albeit in a controlled dilution.

Do you have an iPhone? Look at it closely. Within that little piece of mechanical brilliance are elements that were, along with the iron in your blood, formed in the cores of the super-massive stars that formed soon after the big bang. When they went supernova, their mass of rich elements were strewn all over the cosmos. This process, called nucleosynthesis, accounts for the heavy molecules in the universe.

A lump of coal is little more than a lump of carbon molecules. Subject that carbon to immense pressure and heat, such as those found in the centre of our planet, and you have a lump of diamond. Almost 99 per cent of the mass of the human body is made up of the six elements oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, 65-90 per cent H2O (water) and around 18 per cent carbon. All of this, and so much more correlates rather unequivocally with us, the universe, everything, being cold, unthinking and mechanical.

Does This Depress You?

When one probes the reasoning behind this aspect of the question has almost always had its foundation in the theistic belief in an immortal aspect of oneself; a soul. As mentioned previously, the atheist/non-theistic proposition is quite terrifying to many theists because, among other reasons, it accepts that there is no evidence for a soul.

So, would it surprise you to learn that I, an atheist, believe in eternal life? Of the 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms that comprise your average 70kg human, around 200 billion atoms once belonged to William Shakespeare. This is because atoms are inconceivably long lived and travelled, and continually recycled. Every one of those atoms have almost certainly passed through several stars – some exponentially larger than the gravitational focal point of our solar system, some smaller – on their way to you.

When you die, irrespective of whether there is some unknown component of you that you believe ‘lives on after death’, your body will decompose and your atoms will be, eventually, recycled. Superficially, your chemically rich body will be used as food for food, insects, worms, parasites, bacteria, and in the long term, everything that used to be you will become something else. Physically speaking, while you will no longer be you, everything that once encompassed you, will live on, effectively, forever!

In a more ethereal and subjective sense, your knowledge, aptitude, intellect, demeanour, emotions, reactions, beliefs, culture, and even physiology, are all the sum of the people who have come before you. While it’s unlikely that you’ll remember the first time you learned that sharing is socially advantageous; understanding that we learn from everyone and everything around us is a powerful realisation. This process, referred to as enculturation, is an intrinsically substantial factor in your every belief and thought and will shape most decisions that you make throughout the entirety of your life.

Your parents and their friends, aunts and uncles, cousins and siblings, your friends, your school and university teachers, employers and piers, advertising and media, will make some form of impression on you. Much of that stimulus will be filtered and discarded by that great big beautiful cortex between your ears, and some will stick.

While it is indeed a philosophical position, bordering on existentialism, it is a rational summation that a great many of the traits which we exhibit are remnants of traits from those we’ve interacted with. For example, the same way that we inherited the extent to which we share food with our parents or friends or partners or children – from our parents or friends or partners or children – we, inturn, pass on these traits to everyone that we encounter. This will continue ad infinitum, or at least until the Mayan calendar ends and the world implodes in 2012.

While this has been a long and roundabout way of answering “no”, to the above question, it was important that we take the time to acknowledge that a naturalistic interpretation of the universe is both valid and far from depressing. Disbelief in a god or an immortal soul does not preclude belief in an immorality (of sorts). Just as your atoms will live on indefinitely – being utilised trillions of times, in trillions of different ways – the personality traits that you owe to the influence of others, will influence countless others. How could anyone be depressed by such a realisation, naturalistic, cold and mechanical, as it is? Sure it is slightly existentialist, but it is honest and reconciles with an evidence based view of the universe; a far cry from the cosmology presented by the myriad religions.