Atheism: A Null Hypothesis on God

[Jim__]

10. Consider one concept of God that Piatt gives us.

Put another way, God is the impetus, the spark, the divine breath, the "inspiration," if you will from which all the rest of creation finds meaning. But God is not to be found "elsewhere." It's more like light in that way, conspiring with the physical world to create something that makes sense. Yet to borrow a scientific concept, when you're seeing an object, what you're actually seeing is the light, or more specifically, the result of the interaction between the light and the observed object.

Ronald Dworkin describes a similar concept and labels it religious values and says God is irrelevant to the concept ( excerpted from the abstract):

A religious attitude involves moral and cosmic convictions beyond simply a belief in god: that people have an innate, inescapable responsibility to make something valuable of their lives and that the natural universe is gloriously, mysteriously wonderful. Religious people accept such convictions as matters of faith rather than evidence and as personality-defining creeds that play a pervasive role in their lives.

In these lectures I argue that a belief in god is not only not essential to the religious attitude but is actually irrelevant to that attitude. The existence or non-existence of a god does not even bear on the question of people’s intrinsic ethical responsibility or their glorification of the universe. I do not argue either for or against the existence of a god, but only that a god’s existence can make no difference to the truth of religious values. If a god exists, perhaps he can send people to Heaven or Hell. But he cannot create right answers to moral questions or instill the universe with a glory it would not otherwise have.

Do you accept Dworkin's label of these things as religious values? Are we just arguing about how to label a belief that there is meaning to life? Is it this belief that there is a meaning to life that is the critical point?