The Question That Remains After Atheism
After becoming an atheist, a viewer formed a long argument. Humans do not differ greatly from other animals, but a more developed cerebral cortex produced higher intelligence; intelligence produced the self; and the self’s hunger for the cause, meaning, and purpose of existence produced superstition, religion, mysticism, and philosophy. He asked whether humanity gained intelligence only to become trapped in metaphysical dilemmas and suffering.
The question is profound, but it connects many conclusions at once. I asked “Is that really so?” at each link. Scientific explanations express current knowledge and may change. The relation between cortical development and intelligence, and even the definition of intelligence, are not simple. Above all, before saying that intelligence produced a self, we must ask what that self means.
Do Dogs, Cats, and Monkeys Have No Self?
If we assume that only humans have a self, questions immediately arise. Do dogs, cats, monkeys, dolphins, and cattle have none? Does an ant have no operation that distinguishes itself from its environment? The answer changes depending on whether the self means saying “I” in language or distinguishing body from environment and expressing attraction and avoidance.
Human beings ask about existence, but that fact does not prove that selfhood and suffering belong only to humans. We cannot directly know the inner experience of another creature. An animal’s inability to compose philosophy does not prove the absence of attachment, loss, fear, or satisfaction.
Is Religion a Cause of Suffering or Consolation for It?
The viewer saw superstition, religion, and philosophy as causes of human misery. I suggested that cause and effect might also run the other way. Life is impermanent, and parents, children, lovers, and friends separate even when they do not want to. People may have imagined souls, afterlives, and reunion because they wanted to reduce the pain of death.
Animism and the soul may be guesses rather than observed facts. Yet if we call them merely errors of intelligence, we miss the process by which people seek consolation because direct confrontation with loss is difficult. Religion has created new suffering, but it may also have arisen as avoidance and relief from suffering already present. It is also too broad to call philosophy as such a cause of pain.
A Mother Monkey Unable to Release Her Dead Infant
I described a documentary in which a mother monkey carried the corpse of her infant for a long time. Nonhuman animals grieve separation and display attachment. Dogs, cattle, pigs, and cats show attraction, fear, stress, and pain when separated from their young.
The picture in which animals live happily without a self while only humans suffer is therefore too simple. Fish and other creatures may show self-destructive behavior after extreme stress. Human suffering may be amplified by complex language, memory, and imagination, but pain and attachment are not exclusively human.
Does Intelligence Only Increase Suffering?
With high intelligence, humans repeatedly imagine unfulfilled desires, regret the past, and fear futures that have not arrived. In this respect, the viewer is right: we can intensify our own suffering. Yet the same intelligence can observe the mind, understand a cause of suffering, and stop a repetition.
Intelligence complicates satisfaction and dissatisfaction, success and failure, desire and hope, reward and loss. That complexity creates pain but also makes creativity, relationship, play, and wisdom possible. Because I can step back and make even the “I” an object of thought, a human can both torment himself and awaken. Intelligence is a multidimensional condition, not a one-way curse.
A Religious Form of Question Survives Atheism
The viewer abandoned religious belief but continued asking whether humans possess an objective meaning and purpose. Even after a worldview collapses, its form of questioning may survive. If I reject the claim that God created humans for a purpose but continue searching for where that purpose is hidden, I may still be operating inside the old religious frame.
I said that he had connected sentences learned from books and videos but may not have asked “why,” “really,” and “on what grounds” at every step. Deep questions can be shorter than finished arguments: “Does intelligence torment me?”, “What is the self?”, and “Why do I need meaning?” Each link must be held separately.
From Humans and Animals to Life and Nonlife
If humans do not fundamentally differ from animals, we can take another step and ask how different life is from nonlife. Just as viruses blur the border, the border itself may be a conceptual division. The human body is matter composed of cells, molecules, and elements. Life can be understood as matter operating in a particular structure and network of relations.
Stones and humans differ in many ways. Humans feel, think, and reproduce. But when the body is analyzed, no transcendent substance appears; we find arrangements of matter. I am not saying that water, stones, and humans are identical. I am questioning the assumption that humanity alone was assigned a special cosmic meaning.
A materialist view does not automatically mean nihilism. The fact that we arise from nature, return to nature, and live briefly as a particular arrangement of matter does not make life meaningless. It clarifies that present relations, feelings, and actions will not recur forever. The absence of an eternal purpose does not erase present joy and pain or our relations with other lives.
Nor does the absence of transcendent meaning automatically imply that anything is permissible. Understanding that I arose through conditions within the same material world as other beings can weaken the idea that humans possess a right to dominate nature and animals. Recognizing oneself not as a specially chosen master but as part of an interdependent world expands responsibility rather than abolishing it.
Why Does a Stone Exist?
When asked, “Why do I exist?”, I asked why a stone exists and what its meaning is. Why are there water and the sun? We do not ordinarily assume that a stone must have an objective mission. The demand that humans alone possess a purpose assigned by the universe may be a residue of an anthropocentric worldview.
We should distinguish “why” from “how.” If “Why does the sun exist?” asks for purpose and meaning, an answer is difficult. “How did the sun arise?” asks about causes and conditions that can be investigated. “How did I arise, and how do my body and mind operate?” can likewise be explored by science and Buddhism.
The Buddhist answer is dependent arising. Through countless conditions and combinations of matter, I temporarily arise, operate, and disperse. I did not appear for one preassigned reason; this form emerged because conditions gathered. Moving from purposive “why” to conditional “how” allows deep inquiry without inventing transcendent meaning.
Questioning Meanings Given by Others
I am not telling anyone to stop seeking meaning. The issue is who determined it. We grow up hearing that people must live in certain ways, that men and women have fixed roles, and that marriage, sex, killing, and lying carry absolute meanings. The speakers may not have thought deeply either; they may simply pass inherited conditioning forward.
We must ask “why,” “on what grounds,” and “is it really so?” If the collapse of religion is followed immediately by importing a new answer from philosophy or Buddhism, only the object of belief changes. By holding a question and internalizing it through experience, I can reconstruct a direction rather than follow one assigned by others.
Do Not Rush to Manufacture a New Conclusion
When a Christian system of meaning collapses, an empty space appears. Its uncertainty produces a desire to fill it quickly. I did not judge meaning-seeking as either good or bad. I advised against concluding too fast. The viewer’s question was more important than my answer, which was only a third person’s reference.
A question held for a long time may open a new view. Becoming an atheist does not end questioning; it makes previously forbidden questions possible. Conventional Buddhism may offer another superstitious structure filled with rebirth, karma, future lives, and mystical meaning. We should not use those answers to fill the space hastily.
Happiness and Misery Must Also Be Questioned
Finally, I questioned the conclusion that humanity is an unhappy species. Is an ant happy? Is a tree happy? Can happiness and misery be divided into two boxes and all humans placed in one? Human experience contains not only satisfaction and dissatisfaction but many overlapping emotions, relations, and changes.
A Buddhism of questions does not hand over a new answer called “the meaning of life.” It examines again the borders between self and intelligence, human and animal, life and nonlife, purpose and cause, happiness and misery. After leaving belief, we do not need another belief. We need the capacity to endure questions, observe how we arise and operate, and rebuild a direction of life through that process.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.