Quote from: CoinCube on March 13, 2016, 10:17:06 PM

Nihilism or existential nihilism argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2013/09/could-nihilism-be-true-in-principle.html?m=1

Quote from: Bruce Charlton

Could nihilism be true? (in principle)
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If nihilism was true - if there was no meaning in anything - then we could never know it to be true because we could never know anything.

Any evidence that nihilism was true, would refute nihilism - because if there is no meaning in reality then there can be no evidence.

What is peculiar is that people behave (and speak) as if there could be evidence in favour of nihilism - for example that the 1914-18 war or the Nazi Holocaust revealed that life was meaningless or whatever - but this is non-sense for the reasons above.

If there really was no meaning in existence - if it really was all random, contingent, purposeless - then we could never know this. We might suspect it, we might even believe it - but we could never know it and could never point to anything at all as evidence in favour of it.

Even one single piece of knowledge or evidence about anything at all would refute the idea that the universe had no meaning.

How, then, could so many people come to believe that the universe was meaningless and also to believe that they had strong grounds for believing that the universe was meaningless?

How could they believe this?

Yet this is the mainstream contention in the modern West.
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Existential nihilism does not imply epistemological or moral relativism, nor does ontological contingency imply everything is random. Sure, there is no piece of empirical knowledge that would say anything about whether or not the universe has meaning, there is however empirical knowledge of true congingency at the quantum level and a priori knowledge against the universe having a meaning. And nihilism is far from being mainstream in any form.