The Meaning of Life: Extinction Or Transcendence

Since humanity first became a sentient species, aware of time, space and its own mortality, there has been only one question that matters:are we just clever animals destined for nothingness, or does a part of us exist apart from our bodies, a consciousness or self existing before we are born and after our hearts cease beating? Today's secular worldview among many sophisticated people is theistic/materialist/reductionist nihilism, i.e. there is no Supreme Being, nothing but matter, humans are simply animals reducible to their lowest common denominator, and life is nil, meaningless, absurd if you will. Of course, this mindset does not allow for good and evil because to admit such would leave open the idea of a moral universe or God. And if God, Allah, Brahman, Karma, Nirvana exist--call the Divine what you will-- then logically we mortal humans have an immortal part to us; otherwise, what would it matter? Once you sense that you may exist forever, beyond time itself, then virtually everything in life takes on meaning, and every thought, feeling and action matters. And is it not sheer hubris for a lesser intelligence to claim comprehension of a far greater intelligence? Assuming God exists, then His/Her consciousness must be aware of virtually everything in an Universe spanning over 100 billion light years, a vastness really quite incomprehensible to us. Denying the possible existence of such a being or force seems as illogical, as naive as those fundamentalists of whatever religion who claim to know 'the mind of God.' It would be like a ant walking across my shoe while I'm wearing it: the ant cannot understand what a shoe is, let alone comprehend my existence. Still, that does not make me God: to be so I would have to know what the ant was thinking. Though the great apes share virtually almost all of our DNA, we are the only transcendent species, capable of transcendent arts like writing, music, art, dance, singing, movies. We see ourselves taming nature through science, medicine, technology but at the same time we have created the means to destroy all life on this planet. And we could do so in less than an hour. We seem to deny this possibility as a species the same way we tend to minimize thoughts of our own death as individuals. The old apocalyptic phrase, 'the end of the world' seems even more relevant in our godless, soulless 'modern' world, yet in fact the world ends every moment for someone. What then will come next?