Living Fully in the Present

The denial of an afterlife follows from philosophical naturalism, the view that the universe is a natural system with nothing beyond it, and it shapes the humanist emphasis on making the most of the one life available and on securing human welfare here and now. It stands in clear contrast to the traditions that centre on salvation, rebirth, or eternal life. The affirmation gives secular and atheist ethics their strong this-worldly focus, and it is presented here as the conviction its adherents hold.

The mid-twentieth-century existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre pressed the implications of a single, finite life further than most classical naturalists had, arguing that existence precedes essence, that because there is no God and no predetermined human nature or afterlife, a person's meaning and values are not given in advance but must be freely created through choice and action; while Sartre's broader existentialism is not identical with secular humanism, his insistence that the absence of a hereafter places the full responsibility for meaning on human freedom rather than divine assignment has been influential on later humanist thought about how to live meaningfully within a single, bounded life.