¶ … Life in a Godless World For as long as mankind has contemplated its own creation philosophers have pondered the meaning of life largely within the context of humanity's relationship to the divine, from Aristotle's metaphysical conception of God as all actuality to Descartes' systematic attempt to develop a proof of God's existence. The dominance of Christianity throughout much the civilized world invariably constrained the ability of great thinkers to challenge many of the religion's most fundamental precepts, from the concept of free will to the nature of good and evil, leaving much of the early philosophical canon regrettably limited by a reliance on unquestioned faith. After the European Renaissance validated the structural foundations of scientific inquiry, the glaring inability to empirically observe God in any conceivable form prompted many to privately question the dogmatic assertions of the Pope and his church. It wasn't until the momentous contribution of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who first published his seminal treatise on the nature of existence The Gay Science in 1882, that one's refusal to believe in God was transformed from fringe idiosyncrasy to legitimate worldview. When Nietzsche answered the query "Whither is God?" By declaring boldly "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers..." (Guignon & Pereboom 143), his ability to rhetorically dispose of God as merely a human construction paved the way...

At the time Nietzsche made his infamous observation that "after Buddha was dead, people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave, -- an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow" (Guignon & Pereboom 132), his opinions bordered on the heretical. Just a generation later, the work of both Sartre and Camus expanded on the conceptual framework Nietzsche developed, positing that in a world devoid of divine influence all other meaning is necessarily lost. The unrelenting objectivity of rigorously applied logic laid bare the facade that underlies the human consciousness' interpretation of the physical world, and "Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus treats defiant, lucid self-awareness as the only realistic response to the absurdity of life" (Guignon & Pereboom 9). With the role of deity having ostensibly been deconstructed by Nietzsche, and the utter dehumanization inflicted by fascist dictatorships during World War, the thinking of Camus and…