You call it a worst case, I call it the only absolute certainty -- god really might not be out there. Consequently everyone has a choice to base their meaning on a total uncertainty, or base their meaning on something actually tangible like their own life. In my way of thinking, basing meaning on things that are uncertain is inherently less valuable than basing meaning on things that are.
I can address the 'comparison' angle, too. (As an aside, the one thing that particularly bugs me about the god makes life meaningful angle are all the presumptions that go along with it. That god exists does not mean he loves us. Or that he has a plan for anything. He could be completely indifferent. Even evil. He's a naturally logical construct we've created to fill in the enormous gaps of knowledge that come along with existence. He's a wish fulfiller. There's been gods of brussel sprouts. In nearly all incarnations, we've shaped him into something that "makes" life infinitely more meaningful by virtue of his ability to counter strife. I digress)
What I don't get is why you assume human 'needs,' or the human condition in the abstract as self evident. You seem to place a lot of weight on permanence in various forms. We don't want to be erased, we want to live on in the cosmos, we don't accept that life can really be arbitrary, we want reasons. I can look at a sand castle and not love it any less once the ocean washes it away. In fact, knowing that the ocean WILL wash it away might even make me love it more. You ascribe universal human traits that don't apply to me and aren't universal.
I'm not pretending to understand your whole outlook, but it looks like you've constructed a massive argument to justify your own personal anxieties about existence.
OK, so I came late to this party.
So here's where I got to myself. No, I've not "seen" God in any communicable way, I have no YouTube video of Him I can post here. And no commonly "scientific" means of proving the case. But I realized I'm the one who's got the limited power of persuasion/demonstration. And I treasure my own right to "see" things as I wish. So for what it's worth I'm actually quite willing to leave anyone else undisturbed in their own visions, well, as long as they keep far enough away from me I don't have to deal with it--- say to protect my life against some crazed zealot---. . . . . It's actually "certainty" that we ought to fear and try to avoid, because of the things we do when we lose our reticence and stride out boldly to make the world "right".
I also realize that human cognition, including religion and philosophy and science, all occurs inside little skulls with incredibly complex associations of inputs and autonomous creations. . . . . and that the Universe is mostly "out there", and is in fact something else than whatever we think. . . . .but if anyone says I have no reason to believe in God I just know they don't know what I know. Or don't want to "see" what "is".
I couldn't persuade a determined unbeliever that there is such a thing as an egg on my plate. It takes open eyes, some kind of agreement on what the subject "egg" might be and the located "plate" means. So fat chance saying "God" is in Heaven, and considering the case proved.
In practical terms, I and most other people will be here a few years, maybe a hundred or so in some cases, and it's true that we just don't have the capacity to demonstrate "God" persuasively. And it's just wonderful. Because of that we get to practice our own, in my view hopefull individual rather than collective sort of "Art of Living" and find our own way to "live well" or "make life better".
Nobody really gets to conclusively/permanently "freeze" our creativity or our cognition to conform to some statist line of purpose/belief. Not that there aren't a lot of us who for some reason seem to think that would serve nicely to manage mankind from an elitist perspective.
I interpret the situation as one that could be designed by a truely wise and benevolent "God" who has given up on being a Supreme Dictator and who has decided living things are loveable in all their varieties.
I sometimes wonder why folks who delve deeply into the current scientific fashion with an intent to make "evolution" an answer that will relieve themselves of appreciating religion, or for that matter, art or any of the other irrational beauties of the human mind, can spend years looking for intricate associations of facts that can show something of an evolutionary action in living things across time, who invariably and undeniably see how living systems exploit variability in many aspects of their natures in order to ensure that some will survive almost any likely challenge . . . . can be so deeply disturbed that human activity or cognition trends to broadly diversify away from any scheme for "managing the herd".
Our best chance for survival is in being more largely "different" than in doing things in some rational "best" uniform manner. Corporations thrive on uniform simple patterns. Humans thirve on complex diversity.
