Hey, my name’s Matt Fradd and I want to talk about the five most fundamental questions
that we all ask in some way or another throughout this life thing.
I remember as a teenager my friends and I would get together,
we would drink beer — this is when I'm like 14, 15 —
pretend to enjoy it ‘cause that's what you do
when you're 14 and 15 and somebody offers you beer,
and at one point at these parties
we would say “Let's go out on the road and have a GLUE conversation.”
What's that? Well, GLUE was an acronym
that stood for God, life, the universe and everything.
And so my friends and I, after a couple of beers
when everyone had become a philosopher
we walked out, laid on the road
— it was this dead-end street — and we’d look up at the beautiful star- studded sky
and we’d talk about things like God, and whether space came to an end
and things like that.
I'm really impressed that we had these questions because none of us were practicing Christians.
I would say, at the time, we were all probably agnostic:
we didn't know if God existed or not.
But it seems to me that at some point in our life
we all ask certain questions in one way or another
and for some reason it's that Latin phrase ‘et vino veritas’ —
where there is wine there is truth.
For some reason people, after a beer or two,
begin to ask these sorts of questions.
What I want to do in this video is share with you those five questions
and show why — if atheism is true,
that is, if God does not exist
that we have dogmatic answers to these questions.
This isn't meant to be an argument AGAINST atheism
or FOR belief in Christian theism,
but it's just to say, this is kind of my take
on these five questions if God doesn't exist.
So what are those five questions?
I think, in one way or another, we ask ourselves things like
“Where did I come from?”
“Why am I here?”
“Who am I?”
“How should I live?”
and “Where am I going?”
And, as I say, if atheism is true
we have dogmatic answers to each of these questions.
Let's go through them briefly.
So we might say, well where did I come from?
And the answer would be:
you, along with your friends and all the human race
as well as everything else,
has been coughed into existence by a blind cosmic process that didn't have you in mind.
Okay? All right.
And so you might say, okay well, who am I?
You are the result, you see, of time plus matter plus chance.
Or to put it less sympathetically, as one atheist put it:
we're just bags of chemicals walking around.
The third question, well, why am I here?
Well, to quote Richard Dawkins, in this sense, “Why?” is a silly question.
Why? *Laughs*
Well, why is because, if this entire thing is just one big cosmic accident,
if there is no objective — by which I mean ‘mind independent reason’ — for why we're here
and no purpose to the universe, and to our lives ultimately,
then “Why?” is a silly question because there is no reason, right?
If there's no actual objective reason for why the universe exists and where it's headed,
it follows, inescapably, that there's actually no objective meaning to your life.
Because when one asks the question “Why am I here?”
they're trying to get to that fact of meaning.
Now you might disagree with me there
and protest and say that's not at all true,
I mean, I find tremendous meaning — you might say — in fighting for this cause or for that cause
or for standing up for this or that or whatever.
But these — if atheism is true — aren't actually why you're here.
This isn't objectively the meaning of your life.
Rather, I would say these are self-imposed delusions, right?
We've come to believe these certain things —
they make us feel good, it helps us sleep through the night —
but it’s not actually your purpose, right?
It's sorta like children who are playing sword fight
and think they’re some superhero or something like that...
you know, it's cute, but it's not actually who they are.
Next question: well how should I live?
Well, how should I live? Well.
What might you say to that? You might say, well, however you want.
You might decide to live in a way that's conducive to your flourishing
and the flourishing of the species and the flourishing of your group.
But you might, just as equally, not decide that.
I mean, you might decide to live in a way that's conducive to your flourishing, but no one else’s.
Or, you might decide to live in a way that's conducive to your flourishing
to the flourishing of your group, but to the detriment of other groups.
And who's to stop you?
Someone might say, well if you do that people will hate you.
And you'll say, well I hate them anyway, it doesn't really matter.
It seems to me that, if there is no objective moral law giver,
that there's no actual objective moral law,
because a law only makes sense between two rational minds;
one to give it, one to receive it, and then either to obey or disobey.
And then, finally, where are we going?
Well this is a question that's quite depressing if atheism is true.
You see, you — sitting, standing, whatever you're doing watching this YouTube video —
are absolutely going to die.
Right? Like, you're going to die, and maybe sooner than you expect.
And when you die, they're going to rush your body to the ground, quickly.
Right? Before it becomes putrid.
And then the people that knew you and loved you
will speak no more about you than you speak about those who have gone before you.
How much time do you spend speaking about your loved ones who have died?
Like, your grandparents or your parents or your brother or sister or your friend?
Give me a word count. It's not much.
And so, people will say of you “God bless him” and that's it,
while your body is like rotting in the earth.
Matthew Kelly's here to make people feel good; I'm here to depress you. You’re welcome.
So that's the fate for every man, woman, child, living organism.
And not just that, right?
Cosmologists tell us that just as the universe began to exist
we are headed towards what they call “the heat death of the universe,”
and so the earth, the planets, everything — as the energy is being used up —
will eventually just be completely ruinous.
Dead, and floating throughout infinite — seemingly infinite — space, forever.
That's where we're headed individually and that's where we're headed collectively as a species.
So it seems to me that if that's true, then we should either face it and admit that.
Like, yep, this is where we're headed. This is the bleakness of it all.
But whatever, we’ve just got to get along with it.
That was the approach by atheist Bertrand Russell and some of the other great atheists.
Or we should begin to take the question of God's existence a lot more seriously, right?
And the arguments for and against God's existence.
So again, this isn't an argument for atheism; maybe atheism is true.
That is to say, maybe God doesn't exist and we just have to face the facts.
But this, I think these five questions, should at least wake us up and convince us
that we should, perhaps, put aside our trivial pursuits
like binging on YouTube videos, or Netflix, or porn, or whatever else we do
and begin to take questions of meaning and reality and God a lot more seriously.
I look forward to hearing your comments below.
Please follow me @MattFradd on Twitter and subscribe.
Chat with you next week.