1) Seeking truth is the most important thing I could do.2) Seeking truth is about reconciling myself to reality.3) Therefore, reconciling myself to reality is the most important thing I could do.4) Ultimate reality is nothingness.5) Therefore, reconciling myself to reality is to reconcile myself to nothingness.6) Therefore, the most important thing I could do is reconcile myself to nothingness.7) Therefore, the most important thing I could do is choose death.
And yet atheists choose life. Contradiction!
This is similar to the (alleged) contradiction I talked about in my post on Yujin Nagasawa's new book. That (alleged) contradiction says that atheists must be optimists given their choosing to live, and yet their worldview entails pessimism. I argued that this argument doesn't work because an atheist can be optimist in a narrow sense (e.g., I am optimistic that I can live a life that is worth living) while pessimistic in a broad sense (e.g., I am pessimistic about the fundamental goodness of life). It seems perfectly reasonable for someone to choose to live when their life has more flourishing than suffering, and this distinction between kinds of pessimism helps explain that intuition in combination with the intuition that life is fundamentally tragic (= not fundamentally good) on naturalism.
Anyway, back to the email. I contrasted the above with the following Christian equivalent:
1) Seeking truth is the most important thing I could do.2) Seeking truth is about reconciling myself to reality.3) Therefore, reconciling myself to reality is the most important thing I could do.4) Ultimate reality is God.5) Therefore, reconciling myself to reality is to reconcile myself to God.6) Therefore, the most important thing I could do is reconcile myself to God.7) Therefore, the most important thing I could do is put my faith in Jesus and thereby allow Jesus to reconcile me to God.
JC Beall responded and did not answer my question as to whether there are any contradictions out there plaguing atheists. He just said my argument is interesting, he hadn't heard it before, and he suspects the atheist would deny step 4, which I also thought was the weakest step.
A couple immediate notes:
Step 5 can be deleted from both arguments for concision.
"Ultimate reality" is such an unhelpful phrase. I think I was thinking about what you will eventually run into. On Christianity, you will ultimately run into God, and you will have to answer to God. On naturalism, you will ultimately run into... an existential blank; pure nothingness. So it's about your ultimate fate. But this calls for some heavy modifications:
1) My ultimate fate is the most important guide to my life.2) My ultimate fate is an existential blank (or: being judged by God).3) Therefore, the existential blank (or: being judged by God) is the most important guide to my life.
I think this is pretty agreeable; I've long suspected that most people live as if this is their one life on earth and then that's it. And that explains the great urgency by which most people live their lives. You gotta get while the getting is good. And this also explains the religious urgency to get right with God before it's too late.
But what follows from this? It's not clear what having the existential blank as your guide entails. It's not clear at all that this entails despair or a rational obligation to choose death. In fact it might entail the opposite: you better do as much good in the world as you can while you still have time. The Christian urgency to do good is not because there's a shortage of time—there's an afterlife full of the stuff—but because you want to be in God's favor (think of the Parable of the Talents). So both worldviews instill in their adherents an urgency to do as much good as possible with their mortal life.
If the existential blank entailed that life was not worth living, then yes there would be a problem. But why think that? The fact all lives eventually cease to exist forever does not entail that all lives are bad. It does entail that all lives are not fundamentally good, and therefore life is fundamentally tragic (and especially disappointing to those who were brought up believing in eternal life), but tragic lives are worth living as long as their flourishing outweighs their suffering.
And so the absurdity of life without God argument, contra my younger self, fails.
***
The word "fundamental" might cause problems. Here's a way to cash out the surrounding terminology without it:
Good life = a life worth living; a life with more flourishing than suffering.
Bad life = a life not worth living; a life with less flourishing than suffering.
Mixed life = a life as much worth living as not; a life with equal flourishing and suffering.
Good world = a world in which everyone is guaranteed to live a good life.
Bad world = a world in which everyone is guaranteed to live a bad life.
Neutral world = a world in which there is no guarantee whether your life will be good or bad.
We can imagine a broad spectrum of good lives where some are vastly better than others, and we can imagine a broad spectrum of good worlds where some guarantee vastly better lives than others.
e.g., Compare a life that features periods of despair where suffering outweighs flourishing, but the life as a whole has greater total flourishing (say, a soldier who goes through hell in WW1 but returns home and lives an overall good life) to a life where flourishing always outweighs suffering.
We can also imagine different types of neutral worlds. For example, there's obviously the actual world, but then we can imagine the traditional Christian afterlife where you have some people in heaven and some in hell.
It doesn't seem fitting for a perfect being to create a neutral world over a good world, so we have here another intuition against infernalism.
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