If everything matters, then every decision and every moment has weight and also matters. The "existential hope" you are talking about sounds just like "do what thou wilt" or the new, more modern adaptation of that phrase "do what you want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else". That first phrase is an Anton Lavey quote (a satanist) and the second is a nonsensical libertarian version of the same premise. "Do what thou wilt" is still nihilism. That viewpoint completely ignores that we are part of a community and that our actions affect those around us. It's also a poor foundation for trying to understand the world because it is still a relativistic worldview, which I have found to be very disastrous for individuals and for societies as a whole.
There's a book called Nihilism by Seraphim Rose that does a much better job of laying out and explaining the problems with nihilism (whether the "despairing" version or the "hopeful" or "liberal" version).
I didn't say that at all. You are referencing other thinkers (if they can be called that based on their poor intellectual rigor) I couldn't care less about and incorrectly reinterpreting the point I made. I think you are pattern matching on the wrong pattern. Mine is a simple enough self originated position that it can be argued about it situ. Classifying it incorrectly as nihilism and then saying "here are books refuting nihilism" isn't a sufficiently interesting or engaged response to warrant attention.
My point is that there is real hope, and if there is hope than progress is real.
We live in a time of unprecedented exponential increase in both our quality of life and our ability to fundementally interrogate reality, I am confident that we have a good chance of cracking fundemental truths in the near future (maybe in my lifetime, maybe in the next 1k years.)
Far from saying "do what thou wilt", I would say, pursue peace, love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness & gentleness be kind to others and invest in as much tech development and other positive human interactions as possible. I think we can crack this if we don't wreck ourselves with hating our fellow man or pruning trees of humanities intellectual exploration for arbitrary reasons.
I have found among certain reformed and orthodox thinkers (though not all, many are very joyful) that they actually are nihilistic in spirit and thought but they avoid confronting this truth about themselves by just kicking the can down the road to the concept God, these types of theists often see nihilism everywhere as a result of it being the real underpinning of their position, and they often sigh and say things like "Lord come quickly" because they have in actuality given up and embraced oblivion and hope for death and "the next life".
I noticed in your original post that you didn’t address the objective truth of Christianity, only that it has helped you.
What does one do if one simply cannot believe in the supernatural because of the lack of evidence?
I think you’re being a bit uncharitable with the consequences of nihilism — or to be more precise, metaphysical naturalism. I haven’t met very many people, even non-religious people, who truly believe that they can just do whatever the hell they want because nothing matters. If I met people like that, I’d cut them out of my life. Even if you don’t have an intrinsic motivation to do good, you just can’t escape the fact that if you’re an asshole and not a sociopath, your life will probably suck.
The truth is that it’s possible to be a well-adjusted, loving human being while also believing that life is objectively meaningless. (Though ironically, in my anecdotal experience finding happiness as a metaphysical naturalist is harder if you grew up with religion and then left it, like myself). Today we can draw from stoicism, optimistic nihilism, secular humanism and others to help us along the way.
All this said, I do not know whether a worldview divorced from objective meaning is better for building a healthy society. I suspect it’s more difficult without religion, which is one of the reasons religion is so widespread.
"Nihilism" is a blank canvas (i.e. the substrate/backdrop/support underlying everything). Every other school of Philosophy/Religion is merely a "man-made painting" on that canvas. We cannot look at/enjoy a blank canvas; there is "no support to grasp" for our consciousness when it looks at it. But the moment we paint our chosen Philosophy/Religion over that canvas there is something concrete for our consciousness to "grasp and get itself lost in". Consciousness (and therefore life) now gets a "meaning" even though the painting is but just a veneer which can be changed as and when needed (hence the proliferation of various philosophies/religions).
PS: The above model arises from The Samkhya School of Philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya) which is an ancient system within Hinduism.
You've asked some very big questions that would require some unpacking to even start to answer, because there are a lot of assumptions and presuppositions and hidden definitions just in the first question of wondering about evidence with regard to supernatural things.
This might feel like a cop-out on my part (and it probably is, because I am at work), but the best response I can give to you is that if you really want to try to understand the issues you raise from a Christian perspective, "Miracles" by C.S. Lewis is probably the most succinct way I could answer your questions. He takes on the problems with nihilism and naturalism in a straightforward, but thorough manner.
I didn't read it until far into my journey back to Christianity, but he addresses the issue better than anyone else I've read.
I will leave you with one little thing that always goes around in my head when I'm talking with a nihilist or naturalist, however. "There is no absolute truth" is an absolute-truth claim, which means the whole foundation of that world view is based on a self-contradiction. That might not bother you, but it started bothering me when it was pointed out.
>"There is no absolute truth" is an absolute-truth claim, which means the whole foundation of that world view is based on a self-contradiction
This is mere sophistry and the phrase does not mean what you think it means. There is no contradiction here.
The phrase is almost always used when comparing/contrasting different schools of philosophies/religions to emphasize that while within the worldview proposed by each of them they may posit absolute truths, outside of their framework there is nothing i.e. the phrase itself has no meaning. There are two different frames of reference at play here.
James Tartaglia in his book (referenced in my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32920232) points out that our inability to make sense of reality from the outside in (i.e. Nihilism/no meaning) does not prevent us from giving meaning to reality from the inside out (i.e. as it is lived via any chosen philosophy/religion). The distinction is very important since it resolves a seeming contradiction i.e. how can life be both meaningless and meaningful at the same time?.
We were just sharing things thay helped us and the things that helped us differred, I'm glad you found something that helped you with despair.
At no point did I claimed there is no absolute truth. There is absolute truth, if you cannot rectify that I hold both positions intellectually without contradiction than there is no room for an honest meeting of the minds.
Many people do get poisoned in their ability to reason through others arguments because of overeager pattern matching after they are exposed to the field of christian apologetics and other sub-academic fields (in terms of rigour of logic) that tend to strawmanning.
Christian mysticism is a way of kicking the can down the road in a way that feels better but is more tied to an embrace of epistemological and emperical uncertainty than truth grounding.
Mysticism is a way of accepting the unverifiable unknown based on external authority statements.
It tends to subvert more truth than it embraces, it's why so many christian thinkers have written against it, when christian theists have spent so much time rebutting the traditional view (which I'm not sure if you hold) I'm not sure what I can add, since I can't speak to the details of how you hold your particular beliefs and what they are.
I say this as someone who has not only read C.S. Lewis extensively (I do hate when argument falls to these types of handwaving appeals to authority) but also better (though less popular because they were academic and didn't speak/write often for popular audience like he did during ww2) christian thinkers like Alvin Plantiga, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and frankly even Francis Schaeffer.
I wish you all the best, and again, you don't have to be right or have "grounded beliefs" for me to be happy that you have overcome despair and are living a more joyful life, I'm glad you found something that lifted you out. Calling myself a nihilist is a dead end for the discussion you seem to want to engage in though.
There's a book called Nihilism by Seraphim Rose that does a much better job of laying out and explaining the problems with nihilism (whether the "despairing" version or the "hopeful" or "liberal" version).