I don’t speak of nihilism as a personality or an attitude (as it’s often colloquially used), as but instead, as its formal definition as a philosophy.
As my good friend Google puts it, “the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless”.
Science has yet to prove the existence of any deities or morals, or even a probability that they exist, and so, as good skeptics, nihilism states that if we don’t have any evidence that anything has meaning, then we should assume that nothing has meaning.
Being a nihilist, especially just an implicit nihilist, doesn’t automatically mean you’re endlessly swimming in a sea of despair and melancholy. It just means you don’t believe in any inherent meaning.
Hitchens can be both narcissistic and nihilistic, as nihilism isn’t a personality.
Dawkins getting excited about his books and positions is, again, a matter of personality, rather than philosophy. He’s not injecting any sort of inherent meaning, purpose, or divinity into his lectures. He’s just getting pumped about science.
Tyson isn’t mentioned in my article at all, but while we’re on the topic, he refuses to explicitly label himself an atheist and mostly steers clear from religious debates. And I would, of course, call the flag-bearer of a pantheistic tradition a pantheistic atheist, and not a nihilistic one.
You can be a philosophical nihilist — that is, you can reject all principles not rooted in scientific fact, including all religious and moral ones — and be content with that. It gives you the freedom to spend your life in whatever ways you find most fulfilling, even if you don’t believe in any higher purpose or order to that. You can have nihilistic tendencies, or even be a full-blown nihilist, and still be happy, kind, funny, and all that good stuff.
The group I label Nihilistic Atheists can call themselves whatever they want. I made up that term to make a distinction, and that distinction is between those who strictly follow science and those who think that, even if there are no deities, there may still be something beyond science’s reach. Either group can call themselves anything under the sun — I just don’t think the two should both be called the same thing.
