Cosmic Meaning, Awe, and Absurdity in the Secular Age: A Critique of Religious Non-Theism

Abstract The notion of a meaningful life in secular modernism is often caught between two worlds: a deep human yearning for cosmic meaning, on the one hand, and a seemingly random, impersonal, contingent universe on the other hand. This is often referred to as absurdity. One response to absurdity is classical theism, and another is scientific reductionism. A third response, and the subject of this article, is religious non-theism. This article: (a) explicates the primary tensions of absurdity, in relation to both human expectations and discussions of beauty in contemporary physics and cosmology; (b) analyzes the arguments and motivations of religious non-theists and the attitude of awe toward the cosmos as a rapprochement between—or at least alternative to—classical theism and scientific reductionism, as a sort of post-secular response to absurdity; and (c) begins a critique of the religious non-theist perspective, explicating four worries, expressed as the Commitment Problem, the Standards Problem, the Moral Problem, and the Awe Problem.