Is Nihilism the Logical End of Atheism?

What happens when nihilism is taken to its logical and philosophical conclusion? “Human rights are just like heaven and like God. It’s just a fictional story that we have invented and spread around. It may be a very nice story… but it’s just a story. It’s not a reality.”

So says Noah Yuval Hariri, a historian and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of Homo Deus (“Man God”), along with many other bestselling publications, including children’s picture books.

...be warned: There is no redemptive story arc; no happy ending—either in Harari’s TED Talk or his nihilistic worldview.

Harari couldn’t sound more assured in his assertions that both God and human rights are fictional.

But his remarks are just that: assertions. Harari is asking us to believe him but offering no evidence for his assertions.

Worse, he is exposing the dangerous and nihilistic logical endpoint of this worldview. Namely, that if there is no God or higher power, then even the most fundamental moral boundaries that the vast majority of human nations have subscribed to are null and void. No moral evil is ultimately out of bounds in a world without a higher power or objective moral foundation. Not terrorism, not pedophilia, not murder. Not only that, but if God is fictional and human rights are fictional, then so is mathematics, reason, and love, not to mention human meaning and purpose.

Noah Yuval Harari faces a predicament known as the is-ought problem—and it’s not the first time he has stumbled on this point, as previously highlighted by Intellectual Takeout.

Specifically, in the realm of morality, unless there is a moral standard that transcends human cultures, we could justify many terrible deeds as our human tastes shift from one era to the next. Moral relativism might be a convenient framework for people who want to live without moral restraint, but over the long haul, it has no power to hold people or civilizations back from the most wicked deeds imaginable.

While many secular philosophers see this as a problem, Harari promotes it as some kind of triumph. So did his intellectual antecedents—men like Friedrich Nietzsche. The horrors of the 20th century loom in recent history as examples of what this line of thinking can justify.

What of the argument that human rights are secular, not theistic?

Actually, human rights, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and similar documents, have distinctly Christian origins…Nick Spencer, author of The Evolution of the West, agrees. He says, “In the sense that the Declaration of Human Rights doesn’t draw explicitly on any religious doctrines of course it’s thoroughly secular, but if you lift the lid you find an awful lot of Christian workings underneath the bonnet.”

So while Harari, an atheist, might gleefully credit atheism or nihilism with “freeing” us from the obligation of human rights, what he actually does is the opposite.

https://intellectualtakeout.org/2024/01/nihilism-logical-end-atheism/