The Fallible Gospels, Part 103: Perspectives: What about the Meaning of Life?
By: Graham Lawrence
Tags: Christianity, Bible, Atheism, Culture, History

We are human beings and we have the power of reason. It has brought us a long way, e.g. to democracy from tyranny and to evidence-based medicine from witch-doctors, from brutal societies to ones that have rules against torture and capital punishment. Yes, we can make mistakes, but we do not any longer have to surrender our abilities to fear and dogma and superstition, or we shall go backwards instead of forwards.

Conventionally religious people usually have no sense of perspective about the scale of their universe, and do not confront any of the associated implications. At the time it was originally decided that the God of the Hebrews, even before he was regarded as the One God and the Creator of all things, had “chosen” the Jews, one primitive desert tribe a few thousand years back, these pre-scientific people believed that the Earth was probably seventy or eighty per cent of all creation. The stars and planets were just little lights in the sky, mostly embedded in a dome over their heads. Of course man was important in the overall scheme of things.

The true scale of the universe does not really connect with the humble level of concepts that we can cope with. People do not honestly appreciate a number as big as a million. If you had been born at the same time as Jesus, and you had spent one dollar a day, every day through the centuries of the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, the Crusades, the colonizing of North and South America by European invaders, World War II, the invention of the internet and the smartphone — you would not yet have spent even three quarters of one million dollars. But if you had a craft that could travel through space at a million miles an hour, it would take you nearly three thousand years to reach even the nearest star (to the Sun, a star itself of course, another thing which the ancients did not know). It would take you thirty thousand years to visit one hundred-billionth of all the stars in one single galaxy. And there are billions of galaxies.

The universe contains at least a billion trillion stars. Our Sun is actually a fairly average star. We have now observed, with some difficulty at these distances, that many stars have planetary systems. It might be the case that it is extremely difficult for life to get going anywhere. Suppose only one per cent of planets were suitable for living organisms of some kind (perhaps the right distance from their star, possibly needing water). That would still mean there could easily be a billion billion planets with life.

Suppose that on 99% of those worlds, life remains at the level of bacteria, or never develops intelligence. We are being fairly hard on life here, considering what we know of the persistence and flexibility of life-forms in harsh environments and so on. Let’s not get lost in counting zeros here. This would still leave us with billions of planets with life. So many billions that this universe could contain billions of species developed enough to have religions, all claiming to be true. In this universe the ebb and flow of the existence of intelligent species, of whole civilizations, could be like the flow of waves on a beach. It is not just that the human race itself, with all its dignified pretensions, is less than a speck of dust. Our entire galaxy could disappear in some cosmic cataclysm and the universe would not even be disturbed. It would be a drop of rain falling on the Atlantic Ocean.

And the creator and sustainer of all this used to find his responsibilities a bit much, so he would take the odd coffee break to chat with Moses and Isaiah and Paul. Are we still expected to be such children?

At this stage, it could be objected,

(a) There is, at the moment, zero evidence for my reasoning here about billions of planets with life and religions. I agree. It might be disproven, even within my lifetime. It might not; life could be so rare that it only appears once in every ten or a hundred galaxies, so far away from each other they would possibly never even know about any of the others.

(b) If we have no life elsewhere, in fact, then surely this makes the appearance of life on Earth a “miracle”. Well, it sure makes it unusual. That doesn’t mean it could never happen, given the laws of physics and chemistry. We’re not that far away from putting it together in laboratories — and not because we had instructions in any Holy Books, but because, in the face of Church opposition, we developed science. It also is the most staggering leap of imagination from this “miracle” to having anything to do with the alleged inspiration, of primitive credulous people, in making their claims and writing their Holy Books, none of which give us the slightest indication of the true scale of the universe or start to say that it is our responsibility to exploit these off-planet resources as well as destroying our own environment way before we’re even technologically ready to “emigrate” to other worlds. It would be a gigantic leap to say that because we can’t detect life elsewhere in the universe, there was a Creator who incarnated himself in the body of a human being two thousand years ago, rather than, say, waiting until he could have a TV channel, a YouTube channel, and a Facebook page, using which he could explain himself much more clearly than through hysterical “prophets” having visions under a desert sun.

© Surely if we are the only world in all this vastness with intelligent life, and it was “just” some chemical accident and we could be wiped out in the cosmic virtual blink of an eye, then our entire existences are completely meaningless. No, it’s just the opposite. Instead of finding meaning “out there” in the world, we have this fantastic — I won’t call it a gift, that makes it sound like somebody did it deliberately — this fantastic wonder of consciousness and intelligence; and unless and until we prove it can be found elsewhere, this gives us a gigantic responsibility. It means that we give meaning to the world, and even to the universe, instead of taking it or finding it. It is, at the moment, only us that can save our environment and spread civilized values, and then can take life itself — all that consciousness and intelligence — out into that otherwise fabulous, but mentally oblivious, universe, so that it becomes more and more aware. And I’m not really talking about spreading reality television and Coca Cola, although that will probably go along for the ride. And, imperfect as democracy is, I’d prefer it to be that rather than tyranny that is spread to other planets.

You give meaning to life, with who you are and what you do and what you create and what you leave behind. (I just wish somebody could explain that to the current leaders of China, Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and one or two other places.)

I appreciate that myths are not “lies”, they are meant to communicate profound meanings. They arise from the desire, the burning need, of consciousness to impose pattern and order on the randomness of the universe. The universe is so indifferent to man that it can seem vicious, and to be both scientifically ignorant and at the mercy of natural catastrophe would have been unbearable without anything to hold on to in the way of myth or “explanation”. Events, in their chaos and indifference, had to be part of the meaning of existence, the interaction between man and supernatural forces. Apart from getting enough food and the other problems of sheer survival, the peoples of the ancient world were completely absorbed in trying to understand and placate these forces. It is easy to imagine early people cowering in caves or tents before the fury of lightning or the terror of an earthquake, or a strange and powerful dream. They had no concept of electron discharges or meteorological cycles, or of tectonic plates, or of the subconscious mind. It “had to be” the actions of angry gods, so they had to “reason” about why the gods were angry. Okay, we understand. We just don’t have to think like them any longer.

It is all very well to intellectualize about the place of myth. To give it too much respect, from our perspective, can also lead to a failure to confront the implications of what you say. It is also so easy for the less intelligent or educated to be excessively impressed by the articulate obscurity of theologians. This is from “On Being a Christian” by Hans Kung:

“It must be remembered that truth is… not equivalent to historical truth… there are different forms of truth… a newspaper report of a traveller attacked on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho would perhaps leave us quite cold… On the other hand, the invented story of the Good Samaritan on the same road stirs us immediately, since it contains more truth… a truth significant for me, a relevant (‘existential’) truth for me… The question of what is historically true or false is inadequate, without interest. The poem, the parable or the legend has its own rationality. It underlines, stresses, brings out, gives concrete shape: the truth announced can be more relevant than that which is contained in a historical account. The Bible is interested primarily not in historical truth, but in truth relevant for our well-being, for our salvation, in the ‘truth of salvation’.”

Well, it’s a good job that people who test antibiotics and the safety of vehicles don’t think like that. Let me rephrase it, in an admittedly cynical way. “It doesn’t matter what rubbish it is objectively as long as it really means something to you subjectively.” You could use the same justification and be talking about a biography of your favourite pop singer, or explaining the significance of the Star Wars movies. These thinking processes have no sustainable intellectual connection with the nature of the universe or the existence of God, or of life after death, or whether singing hymns of worship to Jesus makes more objective sense than talking to the spirit of Amy Winehouse through a local medium.

The problem in the modern world is that millions of people still think that these myths are literally and historically true, that given a time machine and a camcorder they could go back and tape pictures of thousands of people being fed with a handful of loaves and fishes, or of Pilate washing his hands, or of Noah, collecting and being able to feed and preserve two each of all those species of animals, and then re-establishing the entire human race after God had, rather petulantly, and spitefully I think, drowned the entire planet (rather than just upsetting Mesopotamia with a local flood while leaving still unknown continents untouched).

Next, in Part 104: Perspectives: Irrationality and Persistence