And are you not, then, actually giving a universal answer to the Meaning question, namely, that the meaning of life is to have the freedom to determine your own meaning? Are you not, then, doing the very thing you say should not be done?

To move from religion to secularism is not so much a loss of faith as a shift into a new set of beliefs and into a new community of faith, one that draws the lines between orthodoxy and heresy in different places.

If every individual seeks his or her own meaning, we will have fewer shared values and meanings, which will erode social solidarity and public institutions.

He couldn’t prove that the universe wasn’t an optical illusion, a trick played on him by some demon. He also couldn’t prove by what standard something was “proven.” He fell into a kind of intense, radical agnosticism, unable to know that anything existed outside of his own self and mind.

Exclusive rationality is the belief that science is the only arbiter of what is real and factual and that we should not believe anything unless we can prove it decisively using empirical observation. The things that we can prove are the only things worthy of being called “truth.”

Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline.

Why, for example, should you look at love and aggression—both parts of life, both rooted in our human nature—and choose one as good and reject one as bad? They are both part of life. Where do you get a standard to do that? If there is no God or supernatural realm, it doesn’t exist.

Without socially shared discovered meaning we have no basis for saying to somebody else: “You need to stop doing that!”

David Hume has extensively argued, our science is based on beliefs about the universe that can’t be proven or disproven.