system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: I am not religious, but I believe there has to be something out there. There HAS to be a reason for all of this - the existence of everything. Believers and non-believers welcome

I've been an atheist for a while now. Recently I listened to a debate about the existence of an afterlife and it really disheartened me, even though I'm an atheist. The panel arguing against the notion of an afterlife was extremely convincing. Obviously my brain is telling me that death is final and that there is no afterlife.

But I can't help thinking that there has to be something out there. There has to be a reason for the existence of this universe. What was there before the Big Bang? And what about infinite parallel universes? *Why?* What's the point? Why do these things exist? Why does this all exist? What was there before nothing? Was there ever absolutely nothing? And WHY?
gpt
Let me just say that you're begging the question here. To say that there's a "why" intrinsically says that there's a "who", because only conscious beings have motivations that "why" could be attributed to.

Instead of asking "why", just ask yourself "how". There are a lot of lovely explanations of how the universe might have come to be. A lot of ways of exploring how the universe works.

Leave the "whys" to people that think there's someone out there that created it all.