meaningful stuff

I’ve already touched on what I perceive to be the reason for the enormous and ongoing popularity of belief in souls and spirits, namely that there seems to be a near universal human desire to transcend or avoid the implications of physical death. I’ve also argued that the human ego vis-à-vis this issue is a more powerful force than all the laws of nature combined. No doubt some would find this a hostile and cynical approach to the serious, profound and multi-faceted subject of religion. For example, it’s been argued that religion is the only thing that gives life meaning, that without religion we are as the brute beasts, simply driven by instinct, living lives devoid of any purpose higher than survival and proliferation of our kind.
To cast religion in this light seems, on the surface of it, to remove the egotistical elements that I’ve claimed are inherent in religious belief. However, I’m not so sure about that. There’s no doubt that ‘the meaning of life’ question is more often than not central to religious discussion, but this enormously fraught and difficult word, ‘meaning’, is almost invariably considered in human terms. Indeed, it is often considered in direct contrast to the supposed meaninglessness of non-human life.

This is the problem. The religious-minded, when they talk of meaning, are always seeming to infer some sort of ultimate meaning – the Higher Purpose already referred to. All other meanings are insignificant, hence the disdain for mere animal existence. However science tells us that we are animals, no more and no less. It also tells us that our disdain for mere animals is misplaced, to put it mildly – though we could just as well tell ourselves that by simple observation. Of course it’s terribly bruising to the ego – and therefore to most people just plain unacceptable – to be told that our lives are no more essential, in some ultimate sense, than that of our pet moggie. The more sophisticated or determined religious thinkers try to get around this by claiming that science really tells us nothing about religion (and many scientists have colluded in this view) because science is only able to ask how questions and not the why questions intrinsic to religious speculation. They often use this distinction to delimit science, to render it irrelevant to the kind of questioning that leads to the development of religious belief.

However history, as well as some pretty basic reflection, tells us that science and religion have explanations of the world that do in fact clash, and continue to compete for the hearts and minds of individual seekers after truth. There are some people, for example, who have argued that Adam and Eve were in fact the first humans on earth, and as such were God’s models to us all, and that their heterosexual, necessarily monogamous relationship was a sign to us of the type of relationship we should have, the only relationship that is pleasing to the eyes of God. The scientific theory about the origin of the human species, based on all the available evidence, contradicts this account of a spontaneously created heterosexual couple. The account it gives is of a gradual evolution of the homo sapiens species, with complex traits which cannot easily be defined in terms of hetero- or homosexuality, or as purely or predominantly monogamous.