Faith
Nature has no mind and so we have no purpose if we are the products of mindless nature, and all this stuff about this purposeless accidental life form's making choices and inventing purposes has always seemed like complete meaningless futility, or like some kind of mean trick to me.
It can only be considered mean in the context of a world where the point was to cause despair and grief rather than the result of a directionless physics that is totally neutral to the results of its unfolding the way it has. Still, it is a wonderous universe full of many incredible interactions and occurences, and I would be disappointed to look at it otherwise.
Futility, yes, lost in a world with no purpose and no direction except what we choose to make of our brief lives however we would in the little span of existence we have.
How much more "miraculous" it is being alive in a universe that need not have resulted in consciousness and understanding, yet here we are
"a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe." I find it satisfying and subtley precious that such a world is available where we can experience such a breadth of enchantment with life when we are faced with an eventual end to all of it.This makes it all the more valuable and rewarding.I would gladly trade the boredom of eternity for the brief run I have at having my time in the sun.
But hey that is just me.
But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.