Paula Kirby deals with a question often thrown at us atheists concerning how our lives can have value or meaning without belief in God. She writes:
It is true that in the absence of a divine plan our lives have no externally determined purpose: an individual is not born for the purpose of becoming a physician or creating a spectacular work of art or digging a well in an arid corner of Africa. But are the sick less cured, the pleasure to the art-lover less intense, or the thirst of parched villagers less slaked, simply because a man sought his own purpose rather than following a diktat from on high? Do we really need a deity to tell us that a life spent curing cancer is more worthwhile than one spent drinking in the gutter?
And she goes on to ask, 'Why should we not find satisfaction in alleviating suffering or injustice, just because we're all going to die one day?' The rest of what Kirby has to say can be read here, but it strikes me that the impulse to which she is responding - that universal mortality leads to meaninglessness if there is no higher providence - builds on something genuine, though it is not itself convincing. What it builds on is the sense most human beings have that they belong within some wider human context that gives what they do a meaning larger than themselves. You and your own efforts will one day cease, but if there are good consequences coming from what you do, these - or some of them - may outlive you, whether in kindnesses you have done, love you have given, help ditto, or lasting achievements of one kind and another from which others benefit. It may be possible for some to find contentment without such a sense of human continuities, but I suspect most people need it. Eternity, on the other hand, is not required by everyone.