In a recent paper, Guy Kahane asks whether God's existence is something we should want to be true. Expanding on some cryptic remarks from Thomas Nagel, Kahane's informative and wide-ranging piece eventually addresses whether personal anti-theism is justified, where personal anti-theism is the view that God's existence would make things worse overall for oneself. In what follows, I develop, defend, but ultimately reject the Meaningful Life Argument, according to which if God's existence precludes the realization of certain goods that seem to an agent to constitute a meaningful life, it is rational for an agent both to believe that personal anti-theism is true and to prefer that God not exist.
Kirk Lougheed has argued that the Objective Meaningful Life Argument establishes a type of anti-theism, the view that a theistic God’s existence would make things worse and thus it’s rational to prefer that God not exist. The objective version of this argument is said to be an improvement over my subjective version of the Meaningful Life Argument. I argue that Lougheed’s version fares no better than the subjective version.
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