We can make our own world. We can make our own purposes, our own warmth, our own affections, our own loves, and we can lead a life that’s anything but bleak. Richard Dawkins
Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. Richard Dawkins
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
Why should Life have a Meaning other than by a miracle of Evolution we are here to ask, Why should Life have a Meaning? Perhaps the hardest acceptance of all is that Life has no hidden Meaning, no happy ending, no invisible Sky-Daddy of a God sitting on a fluffy cloud ready to welcome us with open arms and seventy-two virgins. Perhaps this morbid instinctive hunt for a Meaning of Life is nothing more than the mad symptom of a species with the specious space-dust of God on the brain. esias, essay, ‘The Trouble With God’
For the sad, sunken under-race of spiritless wretches the grey, grainy texture of Life is an open grave and signifies nothing, no hope of a deliverance, no sense of God looming like Polonius behind the hanging veil, no purpose, no warm satisfaction of a Life fulfilled but a faint, fallow feeling of a threadbare tragedy that Life shouldn’t have to fall this way. ibid.
The common compulsion to ascribe a Meaning to Life is a human comforter, a bizarre trick of Evolution, a self-administered anaesthetic to ease the pain of Life. How hard we kick against the pricks rather than accept the rude reality at the end of the Yellow Brick Road of Evidence that Life has no magic Meaning, no surprise purpose. The consolation of evolutionary biologists that we derive from a long line of winners and that we have evolved against outlandish odds provides only the slightest succour. ibid.
Plato pursued the platitude of good,
Aristotle urged we do what we should.
The Cynics reject wealth, fame and power,
The Hedonists are a party-going shower.
Epicureans want a life pain free,
Stoics ware patient and sighed c’est la vie.
The Enlightenment taught natural rights,
Liberal wimps practised politics light.
Bentham’s ‘greatest happiness principle’
Utilitarianism is the title.
Kant can’t abide the unprincipled fool,
Nihilists think God is dead as a rule.
Pragmatists struggle through practical strife,
Existentialists create their own Life.
Absurdists expect a disharmony,
Secular humanists claim we are free.
Logical positivism doesn’t ask,
For Postmodernists scrutiny’s the task.
Pantheists nurture the environment,
Confucius was an ordinary gent.
Buddhists are hippies and seek nirvana,
Mohists give free love in their pyjamas.
Legalists pursue natural knowledge,
Christians on Sunday like to trim their hedge.
Catholics prefer love au natural,
The Mormons collect a harem of gals.
The Jewish God loves a wild killing spree,
The Baha’i faith seeks human harmony.
Zoroastrianism divides right from wrong,
Quakers are silent, never sing a song.
Islamists worship Allahu Akbar,
Hinduists seek karma and sansara.
Janists are veggies, never hurt a fly,
Sikhs wear headscarves but never wear a tie.
Taoists maintain natural truth in tune,
Shintoists watch sumo from April to June.
Don’t let the bastards tell you what to do,
Ask a computer you’ll get forty-two.
Never be hoodwinked, never bend the knee,
And most important — never give money. esias, Meaning of Life, 2012
Even atheists often betray a tendency to give purpose and meaning to events in their life that really they shouldn’t. Derren Brown: Fear and Faith, Channel 4 2012
About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough – and even miraculous enough if you insist – I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?
Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don’t believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart’s content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others – while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity – so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humour, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities … but there, there. Enough. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, Life is nothing. It’s up to you to give it a meaning and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose. Jean-Paul Sartre
All I wanted to say was this: so long as you can keep violently disagreeing with each other, and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourselves on the Gravy Train for Life. Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Universe, The Computer
Two old men: Deep Thought. Do you have ... Have you ...
Deep Thought: An answer for you? Yes.
Two Old Men: Well?
Deep Thought: You’re really not going to like it.
Two Old Men: Tell us.
Deep Thought: The answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything ... is ... Forty-two. ibid.
The answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe and Everything is ... forty-two. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 2005 starring Martin Freeman & Sam Rockwell & Mos Def & Zooey Deschanel & Bill Nighy & Warwick Davis & Anna Chanccellor & John Malkovich & Kelly Macdonald et al, director Garth Jennings; see also novel Douglas Adams, Deep Thought
Man must work by the sweat of his brow whatever his class, and that should make up the whole meaning and purpose of his life and happiness and contentment. Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters
Why am I still alive? Eh? Tell me. Why am I alive? What’s the point of it all? Chekhov: Comedy Shorts: A Reluctant Tragic Hero ***** starring Johnny Vegas & Mackenzie Crook, Vegas, Sky Arts 2010
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Between Birth and Death it’s always been the same thing: the violence of life. I always think they are images of sensation. After all, what is life but sensation? What we feel. What happens. What happens at the moment. We are born and we die. And that’s it. There’s nothing else. We are born and we die. But in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives. Francis Bacon, cited The Art of Francis Bacon
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. C S Lewis
However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Is there a meaning to life? Is there a reason we exist? Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design: The Meaning of Life, Discovery 2012