Thoughts on Truth, Reason, and Meaning Paper

[runningduck]

Hello All,

I sometimes go back and forth with a friend of mine who happens to be a Christian minister. As a former Christian (now atheist), I usually can compose a reasonable response. He sent me a short paper he wrote "Truth, Reason, and Meaning". I have a strong science background but when it comes to philosophy- I am a bit out of my element. I am having a hard time teasing out exactly what he is arguing here- Although I can object to specific parts; I am having difficulty telling if this paper is coherent and I just lack the background to really grasp it. I want to say this is largely crap but before I do I wanted some feedback.

Hoping that some of you who are better verses in philosophy could let me know what they think?

Truth, Reason and Meaning

There are two kinds of truth: truth that which is developed by reasoning and self-evident truth. If we allow the latter to be pulled into the former, the latter and former are both lost. The very idea of knowing anything to any degree of certainty would be lost.

If a man denies that there is a cosmic order, i.e., a God, which I believe to be a self-evident truth, what grounds does he have to believe that his reasoning can be trusted? His reasoning would be nothing more than a bundle of atoms interacting with each other in his brain. He may say that reasoning can be trusted because it was perfected by natural selection, but that is to say that a mindless force we called nature created reasoning and then perfected it. He must trust or have faith in a blind force in order to trust his reasoning. If he believes in reasoning, he must believe in it through a leap of faith in a blind force, which begins to look like a God hypothesis.

Moreover, to be consistent, he must maintain that everything (including his reasoning) is a mere illusion of his biological illusion marker that is in his brain. Then in order to function in the world, he must split the world into what is real and what is an illusion, and he must choose to live in and out of his illusions for it is impossible live in the world he thinks is reality. On top of this and at the same time, he must cling to the belief or the illusion that he and his beliefs are reasonable and everyone else’s are unreasonable.

He is like an actor onstage pretending to live out an imaginary story, but believing at the same time that back stage is reality, which is meaningless and chaotic. Of course, if he pretends long enough, he may begin to believe that the play is real, or if he got so caught up in the story, he may even forget that it is all just make believe. The paradox is that often while playing out the story, he holds his audience in contempt for not knowing that the story he is performing in is not real or for not knowing what's going on behind the curtain.

I have found that few atheists have the courage to take their beliefs to their logical conclusion for fear of the life it would produce. So, they proclaim one set of beliefs while living by another. They claim to find meaning in a universe which they say has no meaning, and they claim to have a purpose in a cosmos that they claim has no purpose. They claim to be rational, in fact, the most rational of humans; however, does not rationality demand a willingness to take your thinking to its logical conclusions and in turn live out those conclusions? Yet, I have never met an atheist who has lived out consistently his thinking. Now, this is not to say they do not exist, but rather I have never met any.

Without a cosmic order, does not reason take you to the point of questioning reason itself? Does not pure skepticism demand that you are skeptical about your own skepticism? Should not a true doubter, doubt his own doubts? Without self-evident truth, reasoning will in the end chase its own tail. You must have something to reason from; you cannot reason from doubt. As William James said, “You must have a will to believe something.” Reason must start with something and cannot start with nothing. Even the atheist must start with something: "I believe there is no God." Here he starts with himself "I" and his belief. However, he cuts off the limb he is sitting on when he says, "no God." Can a finite "I" make such a statement without acknowledging the very thing that he denies exists, i.e., God?[ii] How can he deny himself? In inferring that everything thing begins with the "I" is he not assuming the place of God and that he is the foundation of all knowledge? Without a "Thou" can there even be an "I" or "me". Without a God the "I" and "me" would be nothing more than an illusion. In this, the "I" and "me" are depend on a belief in a God for their very existence. If God does not exist neither does man, at least as a free autonomous being.

Shakespeare speaks of these men without an "I" or "me". "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The days creep slowly along until the end of time. And every day that’s already happened has taken fools that much closer to their deaths. Out, out, brief candle. Life is nothing more than an illusion. It’s like a poor actor who struts and worries for his hour on the stage and then is never heard from again. Life is a story told by an idiot, full of noise and emotional disturbance but devoid of meaning (Macbeth). LD

[1] Some might raise the objection, If the existence of God is self-evident, why are there so many who do not see it? Jesus said, "Some people have eyes but do not see." Sometime overexposure deadens our sensitivity to a thing. We are often actually insensitive to our senses until they are impaired in some way. We seldom think about seeing or our eyes until something threatens our sight. When looking out a window, we will not often see the glass unless we focus on it. The reason for this is that we have given our full attention to the things that we are watching outside the window. However, if the window is dirty or has a crack in it, we see it immediately. The problem with modern man is that he is too focused on things to see God. However, his lack of focus does not mean that God does not exist.
[1] To make an infidel statement that there is no God, he would have to know everything in this vast universe and be everywhere at the same time. For if he did not know everything, the thing he might not know is that there is a God, and if he was not everywhere at the same time, the place he was not at might be the very place God exists.

[uwot]

Hello runningduck, great name! Here's my tuppence worth (current value $0.031)

There are two kinds of truth: truth that which is developed by reasoning and self-evident truth. If we allow the latter to be pulled into the former, the latter and former are both lost. The very idea of knowing anything to any degree of certainty would be lost.

Anyone can define truth as they wish, and you can created valid logical arguments with meaningless premises, eg:
All brongles are frupulent.
Gesmuct is a brongle.
Therefore Gesmuct is frupulent.

The problem your friend has is that they haven't demonstrated that their premises aren't gibberish. It is questionable whether you can actually deduce much that can be called 'true', by reasoning; I only know of 2 examples: Parmenides' 'Being is.' and Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am.' (Even that needs qualifying.) Lots of things are contingently true: the sky is blue, my name is uwot etc, but the truths we learn by reasoning, we knew in the first place: 2+2=4. All bachelors are unmarried. ie. We can use reasoning to work out that two things are the same. (You can get into synthetic a priori if you like, but it's murky ground.) Long story short: there is very limited truth to be found by reasoning.
What is self-evident truth? To paraphrase Parmenides and Descartes: something exists, experience exists. Beyond that everything is more or less theory laden.

We know that there is stuff going on. We know too, whether our theories describe the phenomena accurately, but we do not and cannot ever know that our theories are true.

If a man denies that there is a cosmic order, i.e., a God, which I believe to be a self-evident truth,

Your friend can believe what they will, but it is not self-evident to me, ergo it isn't self-evident.

what grounds does he have to believe that his reasoning can be trusted?

Because it is commensurate with the empirical evidence or it isn't. If my reasoning leads me to expect the world to behave in a particular way, it would be foolish not to change my mind if the world didn't behave as expected.

His reasoning would be nothing more than a bundle of atoms interacting with each other in his brain.

Which wouldn't necessarily make it wrong.

He may say that reasoning can be trusted because it was perfected by natural selection, but that is to say that a mindless force we called nature created reasoning and then perfected it.

Only a blithering half-wit would make such a claim. It's a straw man argument.

He must trust or have faith in a blind force in order to trust his reasoning.

No; he must be alert to the problem of induction, accept that knowledge is limited and be prepared to modify his beliefs in the light of new evidence.

If he believes in reasoning, he must believe in it through a leap of faith in a blind force, which begins to look like a God hypothesis.

You might ask your friend if they really believe that "a leap of faith in a blind force" looks anything "like a God hypothesis."

Moreover, to be consistent, he must maintain that everything (including his reasoning) is a mere illusion of his biological illusion marker that is in his brain.

This is nonsense. As Descartes pointed out, one thing we can be sure of is that our reasoning is not illusory; it may be poor, it may be wrong, but it is not an illusion.

Then in order to function in the world, he must split the world into what is real and what is an illusion, and he must choose to live in and out of his illusions for it is impossible live in the world he thinks is reality. On top of this and at the same time, he must cling to the belief or the illusion that he and his beliefs are reasonable and everyone else’s are unreasonable.

This argument is based on the straw man above.

He is like an actor onstage pretending to live out an imaginary story, but believing at the same time that back stage is reality, which is meaningless and chaotic. Of course, if he pretends long enough, he may begin to believe that the play is real, or if he got so caught up in the story, he may even forget that it is all just make believe. The paradox is that often while playing out the story, he holds his audience in contempt for not knowing that the story he is performing in is not real or for not knowing what's going on behind the curtain.

So is this.

I have found that few atheists have the courage to take their beliefs to their logical conclusion for fear of the life it would produce.

This is hearsay. It is ad hominem. And it is probably the result of confirmation bias.

So, they proclaim one set of beliefs while living by another. They claim to find meaning in a universe which they say has no meaning, and they claim to have a purpose in a cosmos that they claim has no purpose. They claim to be rational, in fact, the most rational of humans; however, does not rationality demand a willingness to take your thinking to its logical conclusions and in turn live out those conclusions? Yet, I have never met an atheist who has lived out consistently his thinking. Now, this is not to say they do not exist, but rather I have never met any.

This is all based on the straw man/hearsay/ad hominem/confirmation bias. If I were to analyse the logic, I suspect that would be invalid to boot.

Without a cosmic order, does not reason take you to the point of questioning reason itself? Does not pure skepticism demand that you are skeptical about your own skepticism? Should not a true doubter, doubt his own doubts?

Show your friend this: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archi ... ations.htm

Without self-evident truth, reasoning will in the end chase its own tail. You must have something to reason from; you cannot reason from doubt. As William James said, “You must have a will to believe something.” Reason must start with something and cannot start with nothing. Even the atheist must start with something: "I believe there is no God." Here he starts with himself "I" and his belief. However, he cuts off the limb he is sitting on when he says, "no God." Can a finite "I" make such a statement without acknowledging the very thing that he denies exists, i.e., God?[ii] How can he deny himself? In inferring that everything thing begins with the "I" is he not assuming the place of God and that he is the foundation of all knowledge? Without a "Thou" can there even be an "I" or "me". Without a God the "I" and "me" would be nothing more than an illusion. In this, the "I" and "me" are depend on a belief in a God for their very existence. If God does not exist neither does man, at least as a free autonomous being.

You asked if the argument is coherent. The bit above isn't.

Shakespeare speaks of these men without an "I" or "me". "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The days creep slowly along until the end of time. And every day that’s already happened has taken fools that much closer to their deaths. Out, out, brief candle. Life is nothing more than an illusion. It’s like a poor actor who struts and worries for his hour on the stage and then is never heard from again. Life is a story told by an idiot, full of noise and emotional disturbance but devoid of meaning (Macbeth). LD

So what? There is no actual argument here. Your friend is simply opining that without his god, his life would be meaningless.

[1] Some might raise the objection, If the existence of God is self-evident, why are there so many who do not see it? Jesus said, "Some people have eyes but do not see." Sometime overexposure deadens our sensitivity to a thing. We are often actually insensitive to our senses until they are impaired in some way.

Right. So the reason I don't see is because I can see too well.

We seldom think about seeing or our eyes until something threatens our sight. When looking out a window, we will not often see the glass unless we focus on it. The reason for this is that we have given our full attention to the things that we are watching outside the window. However, if the window is dirty or has a crack in it, we see it immediately. The problem with modern man is that he is too focused on things to see God. However, his lack of focus does not mean that God does not exist.

No, it doesn't. I have no idea whether god exists or not, but I can find plenty of meaning without it.

[1] To make an infidel statement that there is no God, he would have to know everything in this vast universe and be everywhere at the same time.

Very few atheists are so rash to insist that there is no god; most of us will go no further than to point out that there is absolutely no evidence that there is a god. Agnostics by contrast aren't persuaded one way or the other by any 'evidence'.

For if he did not know everything, the thing he might not know is that there is a God, and if he was not everywhere at the same time, the place he was not at might be the very place God exists.[/i][/i]

Yup. God of the gaps; that completes the set.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

I was just trying to work out what 'meaning paper' is.

[Greylorn Ell]

Hello runningduck, great name! Here's my tuppence worth (current value $0.031)

There are two kinds of truth: truth that which is developed by reasoning and self-evident truth. If we allow the latter to be pulled into the former, the latter and former are both lost. The very idea of knowing anything to any degree of certainty would be lost.

Anyone can define truth as they wish, and you can created valid logical arguments with meaningless premises, eg:
All brongles are frupulent.
Gesmuct is a brongle.
Therefore Gesmuct is frupulent.

The problem your friend has is that they haven't demonstrated that their premises aren't gibberish. It is questionable whether you can actually deduce much that can be called 'true', by reasoning; I only know of 2 examples: Parmenides' 'Being is.' and Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am.' (Even that needs qualifying.) Lots of things are contingently true: the sky is blue, my name is uwot etc, but the truths we learn by reasoning, we knew in the first place: 2+2=4. All bachelors are unmarried. ie. We can use reasoning to work out that two things are the same. (You can get into synthetic a priori if you like, but it's murky ground.) Long story short: there is very limited truth to be found by reasoning.
What is self-evident truth? To paraphrase Parmenides and Descartes: something exists, experience exists. Beyond that everything is more or less theory laden.

We know that there is stuff going on. We know too, whether our theories describe the phenomena accurately, but we do not and cannot ever know that our theories are true.

If a man denies that there is a cosmic order, i.e., a God, which I believe to be a self-evident truth,

Your friend can believe what they will, but it is not self-evident to me, ergo it isn't self-evident.

what grounds does he have to believe that his reasoning can be trusted?

Because it is commensurate with the empirical evidence or it isn't. If my reasoning leads me to expect the world to behave in a particular way, it would be foolish not to change my mind if the world didn't behave as expected.

His reasoning would be nothing more than a bundle of atoms interacting with each other in his brain.

Which wouldn't necessarily make it wrong.

He may say that reasoning can be trusted because it was perfected by natural selection, but that is to say that a mindless force we called nature created reasoning and then perfected it.

Only a blithering half-wit would make such a claim. It's a straw man argument.

He must trust or have faith in a blind force in order to trust his reasoning.

No; he must be alert to the problem of induction, accept that knowledge is limited and be prepared to modify his beliefs in the light of new evidence.

If he believes in reasoning, he must believe in it through a leap of faith in a blind force, which begins to look like a God hypothesis.

You might ask your friend if they really believe that "a leap of faith in a blind force" looks anything "like a God hypothesis."

Moreover, to be consistent, he must maintain that everything (including his reasoning) is a mere illusion of his biological illusion marker that is in his brain.

This is nonsense. As Descartes pointed out, one thing we can be sure of is that our reasoning is not illusory; it may be poor, it may be wrong, but it is not an illusion.

Then in order to function in the world, he must split the world into what is real and what is an illusion, and he must choose to live in and out of his illusions for it is impossible live in the world he thinks is reality. On top of this and at the same time, he must cling to the belief or the illusion that he and his beliefs are reasonable and everyone else’s are unreasonable.

This argument is based on the straw man above.

He is like an actor onstage pretending to live out an imaginary story, but believing at the same time that back stage is reality, which is meaningless and chaotic. Of course, if he pretends long enough, he may begin to believe that the play is real, or if he got so caught up in the story, he may even forget that it is all just make believe. The paradox is that often while playing out the story, he holds his audience in contempt for not knowing that the story he is performing in is not real or for not knowing what's going on behind the curtain.

So is this.

I have found that few atheists have the courage to take their beliefs to their logical conclusion for fear of the life it would produce.

This is hearsay. It is ad hominem. And it is probably the result of confirmation bias.

So, they proclaim one set of beliefs while living by another. They claim to find meaning in a universe which they say has no meaning, and they claim to have a purpose in a cosmos that they claim has no purpose. They claim to be rational, in fact, the most rational of humans; however, does not rationality demand a willingness to take your thinking to its logical conclusions and in turn live out those conclusions? Yet, I have never met an atheist who has lived out consistently his thinking. Now, this is not to say they do not exist, but rather I have never met any.

This is all based on the straw man/hearsay/ad hominem/confirmation bias. If I were to analyse the logic, I suspect that would be invalid to boot.

Without a cosmic order, does not reason take you to the point of questioning reason itself? Does not pure skepticism demand that you are skeptical about your own skepticism? Should not a true doubter, doubt his own doubts?

Show your friend this: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archi ... ations.htm

Without self-evident truth, reasoning will in the end chase its own tail. You must have something to reason from; you cannot reason from doubt. As William James said, “You must have a will to believe something.” Reason must start with something and cannot start with nothing. Even the atheist must start with something: "I believe there is no God." Here he starts with himself "I" and his belief. However, he cuts off the limb he is sitting on when he says, "no God." Can a finite "I" make such a statement without acknowledging the very thing that he denies exists, i.e., God?[ii] How can he deny himself? In inferring that everything thing begins with the "I" is he not assuming the place of God and that he is the foundation of all knowledge? Without a "Thou" can there even be an "I" or "me". Without a God the "I" and "me" would be nothing more than an illusion. In this, the "I" and "me" are depend on a belief in a God for their very existence. If God does not exist neither does man, at least as a free autonomous being.

You asked if the argument is coherent. The bit above isn't.

Shakespeare speaks of these men without an "I" or "me". "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The days creep slowly along until the end of time. And every day that’s already happened has taken fools that much closer to their deaths. Out, out, brief candle. Life is nothing more than an illusion. It’s like a poor actor who struts and worries for his hour on the stage and then is never heard from again. Life is a story told by an idiot, full of noise and emotional disturbance but devoid of meaning (Macbeth). LD

So what? There is no actual argument here. Your friend is simply opining that without his god, his life would be meaningless.

[1] Some might raise the objection, If the existence of God is self-evident, why are there so many who do not see it? Jesus said, "Some people have eyes but do not see." Sometime overexposure deadens our sensitivity to a thing. We are often actually insensitive to our senses until they are impaired in some way.

Right. So the reason I don't see is because I can see too well.

We seldom think about seeing or our eyes until something threatens our sight. When looking out a window, we will not often see the glass unless we focus on it. The reason for this is that we have given our full attention to the things that we are watching outside the window. However, if the window is dirty or has a crack in it, we see it immediately. The problem with modern man is that he is too focused on things to see God. However, his lack of focus does not mean that God does not exist.

No, it doesn't. I have no idea whether god exists or not, but I can find plenty of meaning without it.

[1] To make an infidel statement that there is no God, he would have to know everything in this vast universe and be everywhere at the same time.

Very few atheists are so rash to insist that there is no god; most of us will go no further than to point out that there is absolutely no evidence that there is a god. Agnostics by contrast aren't persuaded one way or the other by any 'evidence'.

For if he did not know everything, the thing he might not know is that there is a God, and if he was not everywhere at the same time, the place he was not at might be the very place God exists.[/i][/i]

Yup. God of the gaps; that completes the set.

Uwot,

Good job with this.

You wrote, "Very few atheists are so rash to insist that there is no god; most of us will go no further than to point out that there is absolutely no evidence that there is a god. Agnostics by contrast aren't persuaded one way or the other by any 'evidence'."

IMO you are seriously mistaken here. I've worked for, and with many atheists. I've yet to encounter one who shares your perspective.

I have encountered many thoughtful religionists in the process of doubting their beliefs because they paid attention to the data. (Mostly in engineering.) You strike me as a thoughtful atheist who is attending to a wider range of data than most, and consequently coming to doubt his beliefs. I wonder if you have had a personal paranormal experience? The only individuals who are finding Beon Theory to be useful are atheists who have had such an experience.

You also wrote, "Because it is commensurate with the empirical evidence or it isn't. If my reasoning leads me to expect the world to behave in a particular way, it would be foolish not to change my mind if the world didn't behave as expected."

Good. Perhaps someday you will take note of your expectations and the way the world behaves, and consider a change of mindset. Not now, though.

Finally, I am really pissed to learn that Gesmuct is frupulent. I will start revising my theories this evening.

Greylorn

[HexHammer]

"self evident" is a very unsafe truth, as 99% of all people will misfire on this, as they simply lack cognitive abilities or jump to conslusions.

A zoologist saw that elephants was rampant in Africa and claimed they would eat all the vegetation and the lands couldn't support such number, it was self evident. A team of expert was set to calculate the numbers and confirmed his findings, so big game hunters was set to shoot over 40,000 elephants, unfortunaly they didn't calculate that elephants would stomp the soil and prevent desertification, so the wild life sufferd greatly as a consequence.

So imo "self evident" has failed so much through history, that it's quite useless.

[Greylorn Ell]

"self evident" is a very unsafe truth, as 99% of all people will misfire on this, as they simply lack cognitive abilities or jump to conslusions.

A zoologist saw that elephants was rampant in Africa and claimed they would eat all the vegetation and the lands couldn't support such number, it was self evident. A team of expert was set to calculate the numbers and confirmed his findings, so big game hunters was set to shoot over 40,000 elephants, unfortunaly they didn't calculate that elephants would stomp the soil and prevent desertification, so the wild life sufferd greatly as a consequence.

So imo "self evident" has failed so much through history, that it's quite useless.

Hex,

Excellent points, and the elephants working as soil-compactors is new and especially interesting information. I might have thought of that, having run a compactor on a road construction crew-- but did not.

The ultimate self-evident truth in this example is that there was a land full of elephants and other thriving critters, including humans. It was working and thus did not need fixing.

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence included the "self evident" truths:

• All men are created equal.
• They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.
• Among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

These "truths" are completely phony.

• Anyone who imagines that all men are equal is a pinhead. I'm not as smart as Einstein and never will be. Back when I lifted weights to bulk up, I got nearly half a big as Arnold Schwartzenegger.
  
  In Jefferson's parlance, "equal" means ordinary.
  
  That men are created by a God is disputed, and no longer taught in U.S. public schools.
• If men were endowed by God with some rights including the right to life, why did the God in whom Jefferson believed help the Jews deprive so many of them of those rights? Why did he subsequently deprive his "chosen people" of the same rights?
• History shows the big lie in this particular piece of bullshit. The original line was, "Life, Liberty, and the Ownership of Property (or something like that)." Black slaves, several of whom were owned and one of whom was fucked by Mr. Jefferson, were regarded as property. There was some concern over the rightfulness of slave ownership. Trying to keep the Declaration politically correct, the "property" clause was shitcanned, replaced by the mealy-mouthed "pursuit of happiness" crap.

That tells those of us still paying attention, how "inalienable" those "God-given" rights actually were.

Greylorn

[ReliStuPhD]

"There are two kinds of truth: truth that which is developed by reasoning and self-evident truth."

Simple response: "It is a self-evident truth that you have no idea what you're trying to say."

On a side note, if this was an actual paper to be turned in, I hope it received no better than a "C."

[uwot]

Finally, I am really pissed to learn that Gesmuct is frupulent.

Sorry to break it to you.

[cirin]

Hello All,

I sometimes go back and forth with a friend of mine who happens to be a Christian minister. As a former Christian (now atheist), I usually can compose a reasonable response. He sent me a short paper he wrote "Truth, Reason, and Meaning". I have a strong science background but when it comes to philosophy- I am a bit out of my element. I am having a hard time teasing out exactly what he is arguing here- Although I can object to specific parts; I am having difficulty telling if this paper is coherent and I just lack the background to really grasp it. I want to say this is largely crap but before I do I wanted some feedback.

Hoping that some of you who are better verses in philosophy could let me know what they think?

Truth, Reason and Meaning

There are two kinds of truth: truth that which is developed by reasoning and self-evident truth. If we allow the latter to be pulled into the former, the latter and former are both lost. The very idea of knowing anything to any degree of certainty would be lost.

If a man denies that there is a cosmic order, i.e., a God, which I believe to be a self-evident truth, what grounds does he have to believe that his reasoning can be trusted? His reasoning would be nothing more than a bundle of atoms interacting with each other in his brain. He may say that reasoning can be trusted because it was perfected by natural selection, but that is to say that a mindless force we called nature created reasoning and then perfected it. He must trust or have faith in a blind force in order to trust his reasoning. If he believes in reasoning, he must believe in it through a leap of faith in a blind force, which begins to look like a God hypothesis.

Moreover, to be consistent, he must maintain that everything (including his reasoning) is a mere illusion of his biological illusion marker that is in his brain. Then in order to function in the world, he must split the world into what is real and what is an illusion, and he must choose to live in and out of his illusions for it is impossible live in the world he thinks is reality. On top of this and at the same time, he must cling to the belief or the illusion that he and his beliefs are reasonable and everyone else’s are unreasonable.

He is like an actor onstage pretending to live out an imaginary story, but believing at the same time that back stage is reality, which is meaningless and chaotic. Of course, if he pretends long enough, he may begin to believe that the play is real, or if he got so caught up in the story, he may even forget that it is all just make believe. The paradox is that often while playing out the story, he holds his audience in contempt for not knowing that the story he is performing in is not real or for not knowing what's going on behind the curtain.

I have found that few atheists have the courage to take their beliefs to their logical conclusion for fear of the life it would produce. So, they proclaim one set of beliefs while living by another. They claim to find meaning in a universe which they say has no meaning, and they claim to have a purpose in a cosmos that they claim has no purpose. They claim to be rational, in fact, the most rational of humans; however, does not rationality demand a willingness to take your thinking to its logical conclusions and in turn live out those conclusions? Yet, I have never met an atheist who has lived out consistently his thinking. Now, this is not to say they do not exist, but rather I have never met any.

Without a cosmic order, does not reason take you to the point of questioning reason itself? Does not pure skepticism demand that you are skeptical about your own skepticism? Should not a true doubter, doubt his own doubts? Without self-evident truth, reasoning will in the end chase its own tail. You must have something to reason from; you cannot reason from doubt. As William James said, “You must have a will to believe something.” Reason must start with something and cannot start with nothing. Even the atheist must start with something: "I believe there is no God." Here he starts with himself "I" and his belief. However, he cuts off the limb he is sitting on when he says, "no God." Can a finite "I" make such a statement without acknowledging the very thing that he denies exists, i.e., God?[ii] How can he deny himself? In inferring that everything thing begins with the "I" is he not assuming the place of God and that he is the foundation of all knowledge? Without a "Thou" can there even be an "I" or "me". Without a God the "I" and "me" would be nothing more than an illusion. In this, the "I" and "me" are depend on a belief in a God for their very existence. If God does not exist neither does man, at least as a free autonomous being.

Shakespeare speaks of these men without an "I" or "me". "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The days creep slowly along until the end of time. And every day that’s already happened has taken fools that much closer to their deaths. Out, out, brief candle. Life is nothing more than an illusion. It’s like a poor actor who struts and worries for his hour on the stage and then is never heard from again. Life is a story told by an idiot, full of noise and emotional disturbance but devoid of meaning (Macbeth). LD

[1] Some might raise the objection, If the existence of God is self-evident, why are there so many who do not see it? Jesus said, "Some people have eyes but do not see." Sometime overexposure deadens our sensitivity to a thing. We are often actually insensitive to our senses until they are impaired in some way. We seldom think about seeing or our eyes until something threatens our sight. When looking out a window, we will not often see the glass unless we focus on it. The reason for this is that we have given our full attention to the things that we are watching outside the window. However, if the window is dirty or has a crack in it, we see it immediately. The problem with modern man is that he is too focused on things to see God. However, his lack of focus does not mean that God does not exist.
[1] To make an infidel statement that there is no God, he would have to know everything in this vast universe and be everywhere at the same time. For if he did not know everything, the thing he might not know is that there is a God, and if he was not everywhere at the same time, the place he was not at might be the very place God exists.

Still there is no reasonable explanation of human essence and it's Soul. There is a variety of theories but no harmonious concept of it. People still have not perceived the great wisdom of Life. It is still not understood what human Soul, the major directive in life, is.
The offered view builds a simple, clear construction of a man, explains his layout and co-operation with the world around him. It calls us to answer the question of how to correct the main error in sciences, religions and peoples lives – the Darvin primitive, materialistic world view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDidxZucGw8