Answering life’s big questions may not be as significant an accomplishment as Christians think.

This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):

13. Because “Christianity answers life’s Big Questions!” is irrelevant

Christians like to claim that their religion can answer the Big Questions, the questions that are fundamental to all of us. (It’s often just one Big Question, some variation of “What is the meaning of life?”) However, the power of this question and Christianity’s claim to answer it crumble under closer inspection.

This is a special case of C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire. Sure, we can want things—a blissful afterlife, a big brother to watch out for us, or God-given meaning for our lives—but that doesn’t mean that those things exist. The same is true with any big question: just because we can think up supernatural answers doesn’t mean that they’re valid.

Lots of people have answers. Jim Jones had answers. The Westboro Baptist Church has answers. The Mormons who knock on your door have answers.

Alister McGrath, a priest and professor of theology who wrote a book about his journey from atheism to Christianity (which I’ve responded to), explains the motivation of his quest to faith this way: “I began to realize that human beings need existential answers about meaning, purpose and value, not just an understanding about how the universe works.” We find a similar drive from apologist William Lane Craig, who traced his life’s work back to the “fear and unbearable sadness” he had as a boy when he first learned about death (which I’ve also responded to).

Can we find common ground? Perhaps we must retreat to something as obvious as this: fear of death is no evidence of the afterlife. And I doubt that even this straightforward observation is agreed to by all Christian apologists.

Christians’ big questions (“Why are we here?” or “What is my purpose?”) are actually childish questions. Few people ask why a dog is here or what its purpose is, and science makes clear that humans are just another animal. If there’s no profound supernatural reason or purpose for dogs or badgers or mosquitos, why imagine that there should be for humans?

Think of some other biggish questions. Questions like “Why can’t I fly like Superman?” or “Why can’t I move things with my mind?” are frivolous, not important. Most of us accept that this just isn’t how reality works and move on. Questions like “Is this the right person to marry?” or “Should I take that new job?” are individual, not universal. We know that there is no perfect answer.

“Why are we here?” is both universal and important, which gives it few peers, but it’s still childish. Let me clarify that asking this question, which many of us wrestle with, is itself not childish. The problem comes when we see that this is a widely asked question and conclude that it must have a bigger-than-us answer. It’s as if they imagine that this question is powerful enough to create a God-shaped vacuum that will suck a supernatural answer into existence if asked by enough people.

Let’s grow up. It doesn’t work that way.

See also: Christianity’s Bogus Claims to Answer Life’s Big Questions

McGrath explains his frustration with science: “The epistemic dilemma of humanity is that we cannot prove the things that matter most to us. We can only prove shallow truths.” But McGrath has it backwards. Show us that there’s more than life here on earth, and then we can worry about those unanswered questions. Until that point, science is the discipline that’s tackling issues that actually exist rather than chasing pink unicorns that don’t.

What McGrath labels as “shallow truths” are the fruits of science that prevent and treat disease, feed billions, and teach us about the workings of the atom, the cell, the solar system, and the universe. Religion can’t even get its act together enough to tell us how many gods there are or what their names are.

That Christians have the luxury of pondering these existential questions is proof of how comfortable their life is. These Western Christians don’t worry about their next meal or staying warm. They can think that food is created in the back room of the grocery store, that their favorite sitcom is real, or that Jesus invisibly walks next to them when life is tough. Contrast this with people who have real problems—boys used as soldiers in Congo or girls used as sex slaves in Cambodia. The “Big Questions” are the ultimate #FirstWorldProblems in a society with air bags and training wheels.

Many Christians ignore this and return, like a dog to his vomit, to insist, “Yeah, but I have the answers!”

Uh huh. Lots of people have answers. Jim Jones had answers. The Westboro Baptist Church has answers. The Mormons who knock on your door have answers. Are your answers worth listening to? Why should I listen to your answers over theirs?

You ask what you say are the most profound questions of all, and yet the answers are location specific. In Pakistan, Muslims will give you one meaning for life; in India, Hindus will give you another; and in Mississippi, fundamentalist Christians will give you another. What kind of truth depends on location?

Let’s return to the legitimacy of the question itself. To the Christian who pouts, “Yeah, but what is the purpose of my life?” I wonder if someone needs a hug. Stop being a baby and answer it yourself. You’re an adult—if your life needs a purpose, give it one!

If you want answers to these questions, they’re right in front of you. Maybe you just don’t like them. What is the meaning of life? It’s the meaning you assign to it.

Why are we here? For no more eternally significant reason than why a dog or badger or mosquito is here.

Where did we come from? Big Bang explains the matter, and evolution explains the biology.

Science does a good job at answering questions about reality, it’s just that Christians don’t always like the answers.

Continue: Not even CHRISTIANS take Christianity seriously

Religion convinces you you’re poisoned, when you’re not,
and then offers you the homeopathic remedy.
— Matt Dillahunty

What’s God’s problem? Why can’t he just make himself available to explain his plan for humanity? All we get are his minions, who have botched any actual divine message into a contradictory mess.

This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):

11. Because God is absent from where we’d expect him

Victor Stenger makes the Argument from Absence, which observes that we don’t find God where we’d expect to. This is a direct response to a popular Christian argument that goes something like this: “You say God doesn’t exist? Well let me ask you this: have you looked everywhere in the universe? How do you know he doesn’t exist if you haven’t looked everywhere?”

This is simply the “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist” argument, which is off topic because the typical atheist isn’t arguing that. However, when you look in places where you’d expect to find evidence of God, and you find none, that is evidence against God.

Stenger explores eight areas.

1. Cosmology. We should find evidence for God in cosmology, but natural laws are sufficient. We find no data that needs a miraculous violation of laws. “Well-established cosmological knowledge indicates that the universe began with maximum entropy, that is, total chaos with the absence of structure. Thus the universe bears no imprint of a creator.”

2. Evolution. We should find God in the structure of living things, but evolution is a sufficient explanation. Complex organisms evolved from simpler ones in a variations-on-a-theme way. Life forms are marvelously complex, but elegance is what we’d expect to find in a designed lifeform, not mere complexity. Far from being evidence of a Creator, the junk in DNA argues for the opposite conclusion.

3. Souls. We should find evidence that God gave humans souls, but the supernatural isn’t necessary to explain consciousness, memory, or personality. There is no evidence that souls are anything more than wishful thinking.

4. Revelation. The Bible claims that God communicates through revelations, but we can’t verify this. In particular, there’s no reason to believe the supernatural claims. Even many of the un-supernatural claims like the Exodus and David’s empire now appear to be false.

5. Prayers. Jesus in the Bible claimed that prayers are reliably answered. The Bible has no qualifiers like “if you’re worthy” or “if your prayer lines up with God’s plan.” Christians make billions of prayers, but there is no convincing evidence that God answers any. Prayer is easy to study scientifically, but the comprehensive Templeton Study found no evidence of the value of prayer.

6. Inhospitable universe. The Bible makes clear that the universe was created with man in mind, but the vast majority of the universe (even the majority of the earth) is inhospitable. The universe has 200 billion galaxies, but earth was the actual purpose? There’s no evidence pushing us in that direction.

7. New information. If God communicates with people through prayer or revelation, there should be evidence of people having information they could only have gotten supernaturally. Instead, no such claim has checked out, and the Bible has no information that wouldn’t have already been available to the people who wrote it.

8. Morality. Is God the source of morality? Given the barbaric morality God displays in the Old Testament, it’s clear that he is no moral authority. For example, God said that slavery was fine, but we say that it’s abhorrent. Both can’t be right. Christians must pick.

We find no data that needs a miraculous violation of laws.

This relates to Hitchens’ Moral Challenge: identify a moral action taken or a moral sentiment uttered by a believer that couldn’t be taken or uttered by an unbeliever—something that only a believer could do and an atheist couldn’t. There is nothing.

But now think of the reverse: something terrible that only a believer would do or say. Examples from the Bible easily come to mind—Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac, for example. Today, Christians justify lots of things, from Westboro Baptist Church’s “God hates fags” to any hateful or selfish conclusion justified by “because God (or the Bible) says” such as condemning homosexuality, blocking civil rights, prohibiting stem cell research, and so on.

Could God be hiding under a rock somewhere that we haven’t peeked under? Sure, but this secretive god isn’t the Christian god who’s eager for a relationship. These are eight places where we would expect a god to be, and our searches have come up empty.

Here’s a bonus reason we don’t live in a world with a god.

12. Because physics rules out the soul and the afterlife

This is a related argument by another physicist, Sean Carroll. He notes that there is plenty of physics we don’t understand, but the physics of the everyday world is very well understood. If a soul exists, it would need to be housed with particles, and it would need particles to convey it into the afterlife. No such particles exist. Unlike “Have you looked everywhere in the universe?” we have looked everywhere for particles that interact in our daily lives. We’ve found them all, and none could explain the soul.

Here’s his critique of hiding places for the soul particle(s):

Could new particles hide from our view? Sure, but only if they were (1) very weakly interacting or (2) too heavy to create or (3) too short-lived to detect. In any of those cases, the new particle would be irrelevant to our everyday lives. (Source)

The Christian god needs physics to build a soul, but physics isn’t cooperating. This doesn’t offer much hope for the afterlife, either.

Continue for more reasons here.

It ain’t supposed to make sense; it’s faith.
Faith is something that you believe
that nobody in his right mind would believe.
— Archie Bunker, All in the Family