As religion and science continue in failing to deliver their promises to provide satisfactory answers to the great questions of life, people turn to philosophy. but is there a philosophy suitable for dyed in the wool sceptics.

Think of philosophers like Soren Kirkegaad, Martin Heidegger, Freidrich Neitzsche, Karl Jespers and Ludwig Wittgenstein and existentialism might seem a complex and scary topic to get into. If fact, though these guys were wrestling with ideas about the meaning of life and what differentiates humans from other animals.

We don’t need to go there of course in order to find in Existentialism a way of approaching life that is compatible with both religious and humanist beliefs.

To sum up the essentials of Existentialism in a nutshell:

1.The universe is meaningless and chaotic.
2.Human beings need meaning and structure in our lives.
3.We will therefore create this meaning and structure the best we can either in the form of gods and rituals or in complex social structures based on rules, mores and hierarchies.

That’s it, existentialism. Nothing to be scared of there: If you change item 3 to:
“People turn to religious teachings as a source of meaning and structure in their lives.”.you have most modern religions (as they are practised) and a number of supposedly secular ideologies.

Add to that:
We have inside us a link to a higher meaning. Call it god, collective consciousness, the force, oneness, call it Joe the Divine Power or Lulu the Univeral Spirit whatever you like and you have spirituality along the lines of pagan, Hindu or Buddhist belief systems..

And if you take the view that there is nothing higher than humanity in the known universe you have humanism.

Secular humanism, it must be said is neither secular nor humanistic building as it does on a need for the state, the inner party, the Thought Police to assume the role of the higher power and provide an illusion that fearful individuals will be protected from the dangers, the risks and the uncertainty of everyday life.

Secular humanists only differ from followers of any faith or religion in that they cannot admit their need for a “higher power” to lean on stems from the same insecurity, the same need to feel they belong as leads others to embrace orthodox religions. It is noticeable however that "secular humanist" like to describe themselves as enlightened, naively unaware that God and Jesus in The Bible both describe themselves by saying "I am the light," while Ormazd (aka Aharu Mazda) the god of Zoroastrianism is actually called The Light (did you think it was coincidence that a brand of electric light bulbs was called Mazda?

Light also was important in all the pagan traditions which is why eternal flames were kept burning in places of worship.

Militant atheists are different again, these people are like religious fanatics in many ways, the difference being they have rejected existing gods and beliefs and created a new god, science. This god has all the requirements, a reputation for omnipotence and infallibility, unquestionable dogmas, an ineffable creed (the “scientific method”) which though often cited can never be defined in a few words as I have defined existentialism.

An existential lifestyle is not a choice for wimps. There is no great universal truth apart from: The answer to the big questions is usually “Sorry, no idea.” There are no comfortable certainties, no promise of life after death as with gods or of eternal life through drugs and surgery as with science. Existentialists know we are on our own, we must make our own choices (in fact we consider the making of our own choices to be a basic human right) without priest, politicians or government employees steering us as a sheepdog steers sheep to where the authority figure wants us.

Existentialists do not appreciate the finger wagging, hectoring advice of nanny state. How many billions of £$ have been spent on persuading people to give up smoking because smoking is offensive to non smokers and causes serious disease that place a financial burden on the state. An existentialist argument would be that by bringing on their early death smokers are behaving extremely responsibly.

Which is the greater burden on society, to provide palliative care to a smoker through two years of terminal lung cancer or twenty years of full time one-on-one care for someone who avoided smoking and alcohol and ate a healthy diet and still ended up with Alzheimer’s disease? I should say here that I am a non smoker but respect peoples’ right to make their own choice.

Like a true existentialist philosopher however I am also capable of arguing both sides of a case. There are no universal answers.

Because of the way our brains have evolved after millions of years struggling for survival against bigger, stronger, better armed rivals, there are common traits to the answers we choose. Because these answers influence our behavior, they in turn will be will be subjected to memetic evolutionary pressures. Put simply, the answers that help us survive will be the ones that catch on in the long run, so we might as well keep this fact in mind when we’re thinking about our answers in the first place.

This seems like a good time to end part 1 of this series by repeating the existentialist mantra.

1.The universe is meaningless and chaotic.
2.Human beings need meaning and structure in our lives.
3.We will therefore create this meaning and structure the best we can either in the form of gods and rituals or in complex social structures based on rules, mores and hierarchies.