Created without purpose?

Nihilism is the view that human life has no ultimate meaning, that moral values have no real foundation, and that death cancels whatever significance a life seemed to have. It has grown as belief in God has weakened and as more people come to see human life as a brief biological accident.

This paper reads the modern crisis of meaning alongside Western thinkers who wrestled with it: Nietzsche, who announced the “death of God” and feared what would follow; Camus, who called life absurd and urged people to rebel against it; Sartre, who said we must invent our own meaning; and Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi camps and argued that people can bear almost anything if they have a reason to live. These thinkers describe the problem well, the authors argue, but none of them can say why life should matter in the end.

The Qur'an addresses the question directly: “Did you think We had created you in vain, and that you would not be brought back to Us?” (23:115). Read together with other verses, it gives a complete answer. People were created to worship Allah (51:56). Life and death are a test of who does best (67:2). The materialist claim that “nothing destroys us but time” is answered (45:24). And Surah al-‘Asr names the way out of loss: faith, good deeds, and urging one another to truth and to patience (103:1–3).

The authors conclude that the Qur'an does more than declare that life has meaning. It explains where that meaning comes from: a Creator, a moral test, and a return to Him in which every life is accounted for.