Pardon me for jumping in rather late to the discussion (and into the middle of what may be a fractious argument). This thread has raised some very interesting posts (especially at the start, from Stile). Although I haven't read all the posts, I hope I can contribute without being redundant. This last post of yours, Agobot, is as good a place as any for me to start:
Agobot writes:
Too bad you don't have the mental capacity to understand that if there is no God and we are here by chance, by complete randomness in this cage called Universe, we will NEVER EVER figure out what's outside the "box".
Why so pessimistic? Do you really think humanity has reached a point of stagnation? (I see no evidence of that.) Are you assuming that evolution has stopped altogether?
Just as the first self-aware generations of our species could not have envisioned their living environment as part of a globe, let alone as a planet in a solar system in a galaxy in a vast universe at least 14 billion years old, so too the brighter members of current generations, who do understand these things and take them for granted, are still not close to knowing what can and should be known about reality. There's a lot inside the "box" we haven't seen yet, and just getting to know more of it could change us drastically.
We've made a lot of progress, just with our species staying more or less as-is over a span of (I'm guessing) not more than a million years (perhaps half that) -- a mere milli-fraction of geological time, let alone universal time. And most of that progress has actually been made in just the last 500 years, with the advent of tools that extend our senses (primarily sight) into ranges far beyond what evolution could bestow on us.
And progress is still being made in the right direction. We continue to extend the ranges and domains of what is humanly perceivable, and we're not even talking about where evolution might take us next, because there's no way yet to know what capacities might be introduced by mutations, let alone how they might interact with the many environments we now inhabit.
Why is it essentially bad that the universe around us started with no purpose? As a self-aware species that emerges "in due course" within this overall setting, it seems incumbent on us to establish a purpose, to determine what really makes sense as a goal, and to figure out the paths to pursue that. The overall process is meaningless only to those who say it is meaningless. For the rest of us, the meaning extends as far as we are able to extend our awareness.
Maybe our species is the only life form in the universe ever to attain self-awareness, ever to develop the capacity to perceive beyond the range normally available to physical senses. And maybe we'll all be wiped out in 2039 by a planet-killing asteroid. Then again, maybe before that wipe-out occurs, we'll have figured out how to control things just enough to keep that asteroid from killing us all (proving once and for all the value of scientific progress).
But then there may be other asteroids, and/or there may be drastic changes in climate and/or ecology, whether man-made or not. The important lesson in terms of "the meaning of our existence" is that while we are natural products of the universe, this does not entail that there is anything in (or beyond) the universe that is purposefully looking after us and protecting us. To the best of our knowledge, we're on our own, and we've just been remarkably lucky so far.
Our development as a social species, our inherited method of reproduction, the necessities built into bearing and raising children, our seemingly unique capacity for language -- all of that creates meaning. We compulsively assign meaning, even to things that can be easily, readily understood as non-purposive. We are happiest when we are able to create order out of disorder. Many of our activities in playing and recreation are built around this drive: organizing a random assortment of cards into suits and straights, assembling puzzles, discerning patterns.
"God" "exists" because "He" has been a way for people to see everything as meaningful. But this approach has been causing a lot of problems, and we've reached a point where there are better approaches to satisfy our need for meaning.
Do we really need to have some sort of externalized sense of meaningfulness assigned to us? No. We create meaningfulness -- we define it. The universe is not meaningless or purposeless while we (or some species like us) exist in it.
Who cares "who started it"? Why should that matter to us now, when we have climate change and planet-killing asteroids to worry about? Anyone who honestly believes there's a God who will save us from all that will be rightly considered missing the point (and fooling themselves)
unless and until one (or both) of two things happen:
1. We really do witness some supernatural intervention that saves humanity from oblivion.
2. The people holding this belief actually apply it in a way that materially, constructively and effectively contributes to actions that eventually lead to saving humanity from oblivion (e.g. the faithful who are pushing hard for ecological responsibility on "religious" grounds)
(Of course, there are those believers in God who seem to be looking forward to the point at which our physical existence is fully obliterated. Let's just wait for those few to die out, shall we?)
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
™ Version 4.2
