Imagine for a moment that there is nothing of worth in this world, as worth has no intrinsic meaning. Each human, like each worm or bacterium, is simply a product of chemical reactions occurring over millennia – biological mass. Eventually, inevitably, they end up replicating certain patterns, as almost any alternate configuration decays its structure, returning it to a chemical soup. Movement of charged particles between some cells results in contraction of others, or avoidance of nearby objects once in motion, or a state within our neurons that increases potential to preserve the pattern and replicate it. At its complex level in humans, we term this ‘thought’.
The state that enhances preservation and replication we can call ‘self-gratification’. It is also called greed – a drive to enhance oneself through the use of other objects. If we are simply chemical constructs, then this is all that matters. Those objects can be anything – rocks, plants or other humans. The object does not matter in itself – other humans become meaningless chemical constructs unless closely sharing the same genetic code. What matters is that their use makes replication of the genetic code that determines our patterns more likely, so that it will persist through further generations. Codes that express greed most effectively may replicate more effectively. This means accumulating wealth and power to safeguard descendants. In this view, our relationship with all other matter only has meaning through its enhancement of ourselves. We are programed for short-term gratification.
The other consequence of viewing humans only as biological mass is that when a body’s internal environment deteriorates to an extent that it can no longer maintain itself, it ends as a specific entity. It is not death, as ‘life’ never really existed. A highly complex set of chemical reactions ceased to be self-sustaining and another cascade took over, breaking down the physical structures the former had produced. The neuronal circuitry we call the mind disintegrates, and what we call thoughts stop. This end seems like looking into a void of blackness, except there will be nothing to look. The horror or fear this may induce is not meaningful in any way – just a product of more chemistry tuned toward persistence for self-replication.
However, it is horror and fear to the extent that a body perceives it or feels it, and many people do every day. We feel a horror when staring into the void, and that has made humans wonder for millennia whether there is more than emptiness and self-gratification. Such thoughts can be put aside by doing things that distract us – numbing our brains with drugs, concentrating on the pursuit of money or using and disposing of any other object to satisfy our drives. These may include humans on an Epstein Island, families in the way of a pipeline, or children in a mine digging rare earths for smartphones. It really does not matter who or what they are, if there is no real meaning to existence. Any abuse to enhance the self is rational. It is just nature playing itself out.
The only viable alternative to staring into the void is the opposite: total unmeasurable meaning. If absence of meaninglessness is a possibility, then there is no middle ground. Meaning implies infinite and omniscient presence, and an absolute absence of irrelevance. If we have glimpsed both the void and the infinite, we see they cannot be reconciled. Recognising meaning beyond ourselves makes possible all we cannot understand directly – demons, angels, evil and unrelenting love. Because reality is no longer bound by deterministic processes, it implies realities beyond physics and time.
If we see life that way, then we have a perspective that is incompatible with the perspective of those who see us all as temporarily complexities. The concept of ‘we’ itself is incompatible between these two viewpoints. We may have experienced the black horror of emptiness, but we cannot be limited to a path that ends in it. We can only understand the fear of those who have seen no further, and recognise the implications of suppressing the infinite from our thoughts. We are all tuned by our chemistry to be capable of that.
The impossibility of reconciling these two world views is the only way to make sense of an omniscient presence appearing as a baby to socially non-conforming parents in a subjugated population, and then being killed off early with no legacy beyond local memories of what he had said and done. An infinite presence living and dying in relative obscurity in the Middle East means the power humans seek must be irrelevant compared to the value of life itself, the value of simply being as a human. The value of any person must be immeasurably greater, and have immeasurably more meaning, than the power and wealth of a corporation, country or cause. A being who must rationally have understanding infinitely greater than ours has demonstrated entirely different values.
Those that recognise this and seek to act accordingly, however inadequately, can never look smart or rational to those who see only the void. Even those who glimpse the infinite can never expect to well understand it, as we are limited by the vessels we inhabit. We can only understand the incompatibility of the two possible world views, and perhaps begin to see why things then play out in this world as they do.
The Christmas story, beyond the current themes of presents, food and self-gratification, provides a window on how distant the world’s dominant value system is from that which a recognition of meaning in life represents. And why these two value systems, or understandings of reality, cannot be reconciled. An image of a baby lying in a borrowed haybox is so far removed from the world’s view of success that it can only come from another place, and mean something completely different.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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Why should life have meaning?
‘Consider the lily….’
The one who coined that phrase has the answer.
Consider the birds, do they have jobs?
They do all right for themselves.
Good luck to them, they’re very nice
All right then consider the lilies
Oh! He’s having a go at the flowers.
Taken from Life of Brian.
‘And there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are….’
‘And the young shall not know where lieth those things that their fathers put there only just the night before at about eight o’clock…’
Scientism and science explain very little.
Metaphysics, the immaterial, the spiritual, the human, objective truth, meaning…science has nothing to offer. Even on basic scientific matters it is usually wrong or corrupt.
The modern world is suffused with the material and the mechanical, but it has no wisdom, no purpose, no truth.
Christ, God, divinity, reality, the why, the when, the how of life and the cosmos, are all lost in the materialist fantasies of human error and blind egotism.
According to Wikipedia: “Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe.”
Seems like a reasonable definition.
I don’t see how science could possibly “tell us the meaning of life”. That’s not what science is concerned with. “The meaning of life” is surely something that is in the eye of the beholder and as such how I don’t see what or who could possibly “tell us” what it is.
Yes, that is the classical definition of science, when it had integrity, but science has been updated for political purposes, with horrors such as “conservation scientist”, “scientists are worried/concerned about …” and “Follow The Science”.
You come with nothing (of material value).
You go with nothing of material value so the meaning (purpose) of life must be beyond the material.
There is a Mount Everest volume of (many verifiable) accounts of Near Death Experiences that point unerringly to the reason we are here.
Once you understand this you can feel only pity and not hatred for those engaged in selfish and evil actions (here’s looking at you W.E.F and your ilk)
Given that, based on an atheist or scientific world view, we come from nothing, exist for a period of time as the result of millions of complex chemical reactions, then return to nothing it’s easy to see why some people think this world view has no meaning.
The most important reply to these people is that the world is the way it is whether you like it or not and hoping that there’s a god to give life meaning doesn’t make that god any more likely to exist.
In the absence of a god, if this is the case, it’s up to us to give our lives meaning, maybe by helping other people who, just like us can suffer or experience happiness, simply trying to do no harm, or just enjoying your brief period of existence.
Or as a friend once put it ‘We’re all just blimps (sic) on the oscilloscope of life’.
Many thanks for trying to cheer me up, David.
You call it should last
Every minute of the future
Is a memory of the past
‘Cause we all gave the power
We all gave the best
And everyone gave everything
And every song everybody siiiing
Live is life! ( na-naah-na-na-na )”
It can’t.
Scientia = knowledge, not wisdom, not understanding, not discernment.
That knowledge is useful, but continually evolves over time, constantly changes.
Ergo, science is not truth.
The humanist religion treats it has all the ‘nots’ above.
Life means nothing without a relationship with its creator.
Find Jesus this Christmas.
He is The Truth.
I usually find David Bell’s articles interesting and well written. Either I am experiencing extreme brain fog or this is not up to his usual standard of clarity. Sorry!
Ha ! Something meaningful at Christmas. Whatever next !
It seems to me that life is meaningful. It is only when we delegate sentient understanding to thought and knowledge that we acquire the continuity of time, and come to see life as integrated within that context. Then we have the conceptual problem of death, and invent a life hereafter to make ourselves feel better. The beginning of time is always now and death is the understanding of death and not the death of understanding
Science is only a system of representational meaning, and can only explore the representational universe. The system pursues efficiency while thinking about “meaning”
First define ‘Life’.
Then define ‘Meaning’.
Then we shall see if the ‘Meaning of Life’ is a reasonable item to investigate scientifically, or even spiritually.
This article reminds me of a study by Pfizer (https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/how_genetically_related_are_we_to_bananas) that we are genetically related to bananas.
What an excellent article. It really summed up the two alternatives neatly. We’re either a collection of atoms that comes together in a certain way for a period of time before dissipating, or our life and everything has more meaning and purpose than we can even imagine. (And love is more than a chemical reaction). I feel David’s point that there’s nothing in between is very powerfully put. I’d even compare it to CS Lewis. David, rather cleverly, didn’t say which side he came down on but I hope the hint in the last paragraph indicates that he is celebrating the coming of Christ this Christmas.
Happy Christmas to Will and all my Daily Sceptic friends.