Ah, Sweet Mysteries of Life

Okay, here we are on this planet, living our lives, wondering what it all means - you know: birth, death, life, eternity, good, evil - all of that.  The answers to these questions are important.  They determine our worldview, which guides our behavior, our relationship to the world around us, what we strive to accomplish, what we teach our children.

The vast majority of people turn to religion to answer questions like these, but I have a problem with that approach.  Whatever you may believe about the validity of the thousands of holy scriptures, not one was actually directly written by a God.  Every single one of them was written by one or more people.  Most of these authors claim (or it is claimed for them) that they were divinely inspired.  But what evidence is there for that?  Not. A. Shred.  If I told you that God dictated to me the words I am typing right now, that they are direct from His divine mind, you would reply, quite rightly, "Bullshit.  How do I know you're not lying, or deluded, or just crazy?"  My words could be wise or foolish, true or false; you could agree with them or not.  But divinely inspired?  I can't prove it.  There's nothing I could say that would convince you.  And yet the world is full of scriptures, each making exactly the same claim.

Most people believe in one out of these thousands of books, believe it is the word of God, passed down to a prophet or scribe who wrote it down.  The ideas in these books are almost entirely mutually exclusive.  If you believe in one, the others are self-evidently fraudulent and the millions who believe in them are in error.  But I see no criteria for selecting which one is right.  Almost no one ever reads and compares the various scriptures and chooses the one they believe is true - they simply accept the one taught by the community into which they were born.  This seems like a totally arbitrary way to find the truth about the meaning of life.  If you had been born in the house next door, you would have an entirely different worldview and believe in it just as fervently.

So until someone can convince me that their book can be proven to be correct, I reject them all.  I believe they are all some other fallible human's attempt to formulate a worldview.  I'm not saying that every word in those books is false, but I don't think any of them can be taken as the true word of God.

So if we reject the multitudinous scriptures, with what are we left?  We do have some tools - our reasoning minds, the accumulated knowledge of millennia, our ineffable consciousness, and our subjective experience.  These are not inconsiderable.  Let us then make a start.

What do we know?  First, all things seem to have a beginning and an end.  For things like stars and planets, even the universe itself, their period of existence is immense, measured in billions of years; for mountains and continents, millions of years; for living things, anything from seconds to centuries.  This all-encompassing truth certainly applies to us animals.  Each organism had an origin, and each one will die, or has already.  We see this on every hand.  Like it or not, each one of us will soon cease to exist.  Life is a temporary organization, a momentary back-current or eddy in the stream toward entropy.  Many believe that something survives after death - a soul possessed by all living things (or perhaps just humans, or maybe just my coreligionists, or people of my race, or maybe just the people I like).  This is a matter of faith (magical thinking) alone, as no experiment has ever found evidence of a soul.  In spite of anecdotal stories, no trace has been found of a person (or anything else) surviving its own death.

Science and our own experience tell us that all living organisms are temporary things, momentary back-eddies in the inexorable flow of entropy.  When they die, their components lose their organization and are recycled back into the environment, to be later reused by another organism.  We die, but life endures.  It is a comforting thought and requires no magical thinking.  Some religions embrace it as the goal of life - to rejoin the great universal and eternal pool, though they think of it as a pool of sentience, not of organic chemicals.  My own feeling is that even that pool is not eternal.  One day the Earth will cease to exist, and that pool of organic material with it.  Still, that's a long time off, and I'm fine with that.  Perhaps by then, we'll be seeding the stars with our colonies. Until the stars die, of course.

So that's one great mystery of life cleared up.  What's next? 

Well, to my mind, it's the question of why.  Why are we here, and what should we be doing with our brief lives?  Again, I think science has a clear answer.  We should be having sex - again, a conclusion I am fine with.  The one activity that separates living organisms from the inorganic world is that we can reproduce.  Crystals are highly organized, can grow, and can influence their neighboring molecules to follow suit.  But they cannot reproduce.  That's a trick only life can do.  [Brief digression - some scientists believe universes can and do reproduce through producing black holes that generate new universes.  But even if true, their reproduction isn't as much fun as ours.]

Reproduction is not only a cool trick; it's what life is all about.  Not all organisms use sex, of course, but every one, from the tiniest microbe to the largest blue whale, strives to reproduce others like itself.  The old chicken-and-egg conundrum applies to everything living. Many insects survive in their adult form for only a day.  A mayfly is not really a fly at all - it's a larva for years, going about its business (which is solely eating).  Then, when it's about to die, it transforms into a flying thing to mate, lay eggs, and die, all in a day.   It is just as valid to say that the human race is a bunch of sperms and eggs trying to make more sperms and eggs, and occasionally they generate these large complex bodies for the sole purpose of achieving that.  That is why we exist, not just how we exist.  Like the hokey-pokey, reproduction is what it's all about.

If a mayfly is eaten by a trout before it can lay eggs, it is a dead-end for the eggs and sperm that went to so much trouble to produce it.  Every one of its parents, on both sides, through all the generations, going back three billion years to the first living cell on Earth, succeeded in reproducing just to make that single mayfly, and it ended up in a trout.  Biologically speaking (and what else matters for a biological organism?), it was a failure.

That said, of course, many people lead productive, fulfilling lives and never have children.  Just because you don't have kids doesn't mean your life is meaningless.  But in the larger sense, you have failed to fulfill your purpose.  If everyone did that, the human race would cease to exist in a few decades.  Fortunately, most people love sex (evolution has seen to that), so we continue to roll along.

So what does all this mean?  What guidance does it give us for leading our lives?  Well, not a lot.  For most animals, they go about acquiring food, avoiding becoming food, and if lucky, mating and making more animals to do the same thing.  We humans make it all infinitely more complicated and interesting, but in the end, that's what we do as well.

We, like everything else on the planet, got here by an infinite series of incredibly unlikely events - the right chemicals, the right distance from the sun, asteroid impacts at just the right time, etc.  We weren't put here for a purpose, and we aren't advancing toward any goal.  Like the grass, we just are.  Evolution doesn't necessarily drive life toward increasing complexity or intelligence or anything else.  If an adaptation allows us to reproduce, we do; if not, we don't.  Our intelligence, like a tiger's claws, allowed us to compete and survive.  It has no other function or purpose.

Essentially, I don't think life has meaning.  That will shock many people, and most will find it existentially depressing, but I don't see it as a downer.  We are an accidental, ephemeral, manifestation of the forces of nature.  Our species, like our individuals, will one day cease to exist.  No one will cry over us.  The world will not miss us.  Millions of species have gone extinct before us.  Few exist for more than a few million years, and we're getting to that age now.

As for good and evil, I think they are purely human inventions.  The other animals don't waste a second on such nonsense.  To them, good is getting what they want and evil is not getting it.  And I think, buried beneath miles of cultural detritus, it is the same for us.  We call actions good if they result in benefit to us and evil if they result in our harm.  If we are wise, we extend those values to others.  Actions that benefit others are good; actions that harm others are evil.  We make our laws and social mores to conform to that basic metric.  There is no need for commandments or divine laws.  It's all summed up in the Golden Rule, the only rule we really need.

So that covers life, death, good and evil.  That should be enough mysteries of life for one brief essay.

In spite of being mayflies without a purpose, we have achieved much.  Our achievements - our art and science and music and architecture and literature, our thoughts and languages and cultures and religions - are great achievements.  We are just animals - meat machines - yet we have walked on the moon and written books and symphonies that bring generations to tears.  And although our lives are brief, they are important to us as we go through them.

I am old now and will be gone in the next few years, but I look back on a long life of adventures and loves and beauty and experience, and I am thankful for it.  No, I don't thank God because I don't believe in gods, but I thank the non-sentient, uncaring, totally indifferent universe for letting me have this life and these experiences.  I've enjoyed the ride.