I've written a number of articles on this (links below). The question goes back at least to Nietzsche. He said the death of God is a nightmare for secularists, which flies in the face of the humanist's blase optimism. We think we're free to progress if there's no God. But if nature is godless, that means our social intuitions and preoccupations are myopic.
It means, for example, there are no natural laws. "Law of nature" is only a deistic metaphor. Nature isn't an artifact of any personal creator. Instead, nature somehow creates itself and evolves on its own, pointlessly, with no intelligent guidance, simulating purpose but having none. We project social categories onto the inhuman, impersonal, amoral wilderness.
Nietzsche thought we need substitute myths and atheistic religions to deal with the horror of that confrontation with the abyss, with the paroachiality of our intuitions. HP Lovecraft called this existential viewpoint "cosmicism."
Anyway, what I argue is that civilizational progress presupposes some such dark philosophy. We build and retreat to our artificial, meaningful, human-centered refuges precisely because nature is no such refuge.
