If your concept of God is confined to the subjective experiences you have of it, then God is as real as pain, pleasure, joy, and sorrow. That's fine, it's just placing God in the subjective realm. To argue that it's incoherent to say that anything exists subjectively is to deny the existence of the most ancient sensations our nervous system has evolved to produce. I'd like to see someone seriously deny the existence of pain.
There is a brand of materialism that very much does deny the reality of subjective experience: eliminativism. If I were a materialist, I would have to side with them and write off those ancient sensations as being in some sense illusory, our brains tricking themselves into thinking that the targeting computer is actually real. Anything that cannot be described objectively does not exist. It is just conceptual confusion and folk psychology.
If you want to see someone come close to denying that pain exists, here's Daniel Dennett to the rescue:
Why You Can't Make a Computer that Feels Pain
You are asking very, very good questions in regards to what "meaning" really is and how we can create it on our own. Better men than I have made it their life's work to answer these questions. In my own words, I'd say it refers to a personally self-justifying motivation to continue on living and work towards one's goals. Psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson has a whole lecture series called Maps of Meaning that explores how each person can create meaning for themselves, but the main takeaway is that we create meaning by taking on responsibility.
I really need to read Jordan Peterson at some point. From what I've seen of him, I'm a far more convinced theist than he is, but his pseudo-Christianity is pretty familiar.
I'm not sure it really works, though. You can take on responsibilities and find meaning through them, but if you start examining the purpose of those responsibilities, you're going to fall into a ditch. This is how I always looked at it: you try to do well in high school to get into a good college, you try to do well in college to get a good job, you try to succeed at your job in order to... make money? Feel important according to the (ultimately meaningless) standards of your society? Games within games within games. That's all it seems to be in the end.
These statements seem to contradict each other. Either there are moral facts or not, right? How is "nihilism at the heart of atheism" if this statement is true:
No contradiction. An atheist can believe that there are moral facts and thus be a moral realist. This does not mean that their theories are right or complete.
At the end of the day on Friday I earned enough money to buy some more chocolate ice cream (with brownies in it this time!). So the point of going to work was to get chocolate ice cream, so this statement is demonstrably false.
Seriously, it's like you're broadcasting from
within that nihilistic heart of atheism with responses like this. If this is where meaning is to be found, stop the world. I want to get off.
