For once I was succinct: “Happen[ing] for no reason”

Someone sent a follow-up to a spammy religious email (to which I had responded snarkily) explaining that he first “contact[ed] me by accident”.  He didn’t really, but never mind that.  The interesting line in the email was:

Not to get too personal but you mentioned on your site how you love spending time with your son.  You have to look at him and know that he and this whole world didn’t just happen for no reason, right?  [emphasis in original]

Usually I go on and on and on about this.  But maybe for the first time, I have something short and useful to show for it.  I responded:

The existence of the universe is an occasion for wonder and humility, no doubt.  It just isn’t evidence for a creator.  But awe is not the sole domain of religion: an atheist is able to look at the heavens and realize that, however they came into being, it wasn’t something I did.  This sort of humility in the face of the infinite (or near-infinite) I think is more flattering to atheists than to theists: Christians believe that the world was created specifically for them, their species, and their children, by a sometimes-jealous-and-sometimes-beneficent god.  Atheists have no illusions: the world is worth saving for the world’s sake, not my son’s sake.

As for “reason”?  I’m unsure whether you mean causal reason (i.e., what chain of events led to its creation) or some kind of “what it’s there for” reason.  I of course have an interest in the former, but I believe that the second is a non-question.  “Why did the whole world happen?”: just because you can phrase a proposition doesn’t mean it has an answer.  Dawkins’s great line is “Why are unicorns hollow?”  You have to unask the question to begin in a meaningful place: we can’t legitimately ask why unicorns are hollow because there are no unicorns; we cannot ask for the “meaning of the world” because there is no meaning.  We, as agents, have the ability — and, I believe, the imperative — to make meaning out of the void.