I have no belief in a god or gods or an afterlife. I often struggle with the question of being. Why are we here, is there a reason or purpose or is it just chance? Tony Ross

If you mean by "is there a reason or purpose?" did someone have a reason or purpose in creating the world, that presupposes that someone did create the world. All the evidence we have shows that this is not true. Reasons and purposes presuppose beings that can have them. Whether you came about through chance or because your parents loved each other and wanted to have child together is something that only they can answer. Some children were the result of planning and some were not. None of this is relevant to the question of whether you now have a reason to do various activities. As an intelligent being you do have strong reasons to help others and to try to prevent bad things from happening. Whether these reasons motivate you to do these things depends primarily on how you were brought up. If you were a planned child, there is a good chance that you have been brought up to act on these kinds of reasons. Even if there were a creator, that would not make any difference to helping others and preventing bad...