On the plus side, let’s accept that the universe is endlessly expanding and will never snap back down into nothing.  Let’s agree that the whimper accompanying its expansion like a shadow, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is what gets crushed instead.  From above, by the multiverse, which assures us that we live in an open system, not the closed one required for entropy to inexorably loosen our grip (though none of us are likely to get funhouse-mirror immortality out of this reality).  From below, by complexity, matter’s relentless determination to self-organize, that we see most humbly in sewage lagoons, and most primally in the Big Bang itself.  And from all sides by emergence.  Let’s further take pleasure in the realization that scientific concepts like “the uncertainty principle” and “chaos theory,” waved about in the popular press like distress signals for mindless randomness, are actually revelations of a deeper order underlying all existence.

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Why all this positing and assuming? Why re-create–or try to create–the dank nervous excitement of a college dorm room?  The older among us can look back with nostalgia to Monty Python days when the question of the meaning of life went from earnest to punch line in the flicker of a screen.  But we now live in an end time in which the generations we’re depending on for a resounding reply to this query are increasingly asking, instead, whether it would be morally right to bring children into the world they are inheriting at all.  And they are increasingly not looking to God for an answer.

Which brings it into our purview. We could just recommend that everyone break out some Victor Frankl, but we are above all, a new media community–that’s the promise we believe in, and we believe the best way to address fundamental questions is the way the first communities did it, by call and response.  So we’re going to pick up this philosophical IED, aggressively, through some positing on our lonesome–that there is a scientific, rational answer to the question of the point of it all, and therefore an objective reason why we should keep fighting for our ideals, no matter how nasty, brutish, and short the future looks–proceeding with faith that you, our friends and fellow citizens of the world, will have our backs and help us shake the woo woo out in the comments section below.  In any case, we’re confident we can do better than this.

First, we should propiate the gods of all whim by acknowledging that we’re playing with metaphysical fire in bringing together science and meaning.  I’ve personally known this for most of my life.  When I was a high school debater (cue mournful head shakes) as a sophomore (more), the national topic of the year was scarce world resources.  The affirmatives that year were endeavoring first, to prove that scarcity was a problem, and second, that they had an effective plan to deal with it.  Affirmatives generally and annually win the first part of this argument; the battle really gets joined when it comes to the blueprints.  But I was a First Negative that year, which meant I had the unenviable task of disputing the need to do anything at all, and the modern Republican Party had not yet emerged as a source of inspiration and ideas.  Out of an odd combination of desperation and deep love of the natural world, I came up with a gambit that I, my teammates, and even our coach were all certain was, in some ways, literally a nuclear option.

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Fundamental to the affirmatives’ burden was and is an elucidation of the harm the problem they identified was causing.  Drawing on my relatively deep adolescent knowledge of natural dynamics in particular, and the dramatic example of lemmings in even more particular,  I breathlessly prepped myself to show that death, even if it claimed the lives of millions around the world, was not a “harm,” because, after all, nature uses death as a vehicle to control populations and maintain a healthy environment for all life, all the time.  As it happened, the first–and last–time I trotted out this line of attack, the judge for the encounter was a Catholic nun, in full habit.  I was not deterred; it would be fair to say I was oblivious.   As expected, the affirmatives had no answer to my argument; they decided instead to completely ignore it, and my partner and I were sure we had won a resounding victory.  Which we had, as it turned out, for the other side.  If you’re familiar with traditional debate scoring, you know that each debater is typically given a score between 0 and 30.  My partner that day earned a 23, which was quite good at the time and place.  I, on the other hand, was carefully awarded, point for point, a -23 on the scoresheet, resulting in an unprecedented shutout victory for our opponents.  Like them, the judge made no comment on my line of thought; like them, none needed to be made.  We got the message, and “the lemming argument” was quietly retired to the back of my file box for an emergency use that never came.

The New Atheists have certainly picked up their own version of the torch since–by the business end, though they don’t seem to know it–carefully constructing evolutionary explanations of why religions exist and persist, with the not so-veiled intention of reducing the holy of holies to paramecium size or smaller. The problem with every version of these arguments I’ve seen? The exact same reasoning that they roll out in metaphysical alleys (with a contemptuous shove) can be used to explain why we believe in science; thus their great chain of being disappears up its own derriere like an ouroboros.  Personally, I find more compelling evolutionary explanations of phenomena that were actually far more adaptive in our cave days than they are today, like worrying, or the average human male’s high level of self-regard.

What’s that you say, Mssrs Dawkins, Harris, et al, the difference is that we can see science, we can prove science?  Who can see it?  And who can prove it? Leaving aside that we seem to be living in a universe that becomes ever more idiosyncratic the more we learn about it, within which replication of research results has become such a problem in so many fields, both “hard” and “soft,” we find ourselves contemplating previously unimagined macroscopies of the Uncertainty Principle, what scisplainers don’t seem to realize is that for virtually everyone, including the vast majority of scientists, religious experience is more real, more empirical than science, and in religion, as Elaine Pagels observes, experience matters more than belief.  Almost everyone has had experiences religion says are real, even if it’s only the uplift we feel after a church service, but of the scientific laws we deploy to explain even basic phenomena such as gravity, how many people, even scientists, have actually observed the science behind these laws for themselves, to the point of rational conviction, rather than take someone else’s word for it because their explanation makes sense to us, or because we trust their expertise?  And how is that different from religious faith?

Belief in particular faiths may wax and wane, but faith itself is as real as any other entity shaped by evolution, as we’ll discover if it’s ever subject to a mass extinction event.  In fact, 21st century science is providing aid and comfort to the faithful in many facets.  If everything is, in the end, just information, for example, what does it really mean to die?  Death on the installment plan doesn’t even necessarily mean the bundle of information that is you stops growing or begins receding, since, if you are colorful or interesting enough, or performed heroics of one kind or another, or leave works behind, people may well continue to continue to embellish and otherwise add to ‘you’.  The essential difference might seem to be that ‘you’ can no longer participate in your own creation or self-replication, but given how much of ‘you’ in life is water or other organisms, and the extent to which, social beings that we are, that the creation and replication of ‘you’ has never been as much in ‘your’ control as you might have imagined, the oneness experienced on hallucinogenic trips might be more lucid than our sober sense of self.  And as viewers of Black Mirror know, even such boundaries that still appear to exist, however artificial or arbitrary, could well disappear in the near-future as well, at least for ‘you.’

Still, this could be of very cold comfort when the light of the sun goes out, at least for the many “heroes, saints, sages, artists, poets…madmen and criminals,” as Cziksentmihalyi describes us, for whom setting “sensible” goals and purposes for life based on the needs of our bodies is not enough.  One scientific blanket that can be thrown over this blackest mirror, and over our eyes as well, is the bedrock of the oldest and, to us, purest faiths: mystery.  For the last one hundred years, at least, it’s been a truism of science that the more we learn about the universe, at any level, the less we understand, or at least the less certain we are that we do, and the more we realize how much we still have yet to learn–final answers only seem to recede, to the point where 42 seems to be as good an answer as any. Nor is there any reason to believe this will change.  In a universe where potential knowledge is x times as infinite as the universe itself, any light shed on any aspect of what can be known invariably generates a murky penumbra on a much wider, broader, and deeper range of what we don’t know, and likely never even thought we should be questioning.

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So one way to look at what seems to be our inevitable annihilation is to declare that if science has taught us anything in our lifetimes, it’s that we have no idea how our story ends, or if it ends at all.  The only thing we seem to be able to count on is that whatever we’re certain of today, there will be a study coming to a website near us, likely in six months or less, that debunks it. Conventional wisdom has become the unwed mother of all oxymorons, and as great philosophers of science like Kuhn and Popper have been telling us (between the lines) at their nexus, it’s scientifically rational to ignore literally all reasons for despair, secure in the knowledge that the scientific method will perpetually challenge itself at least as much as it does the certainties of religion.

To be more precise, by requiring the isolation of one aspect/ element of the reality of the whole so as to reduce the number of variables down to the possibility of certainty, science guarantees itself a steady stream of paradigm shifts, celebrated as endless progress, that really just represent the yielding of the floor by one blind man to the next as they examine and pronounce on the gestalt of the elephant.

Of course, you can also choose to believe you’re immortal, secure in the knowledge that you’ll never be proven wrong.  Yet if you’re aligned with the disciple who Dawkins considers the patron saint of scientists, Thomas (whom Christians, tellingly, consider patron saint of the blind), mystery may just not be enough for you.  If we’re being honest, for many of us the unknowable is only a healthy (and therefore not particularly potent) form of self-medication that gets squeezed out in beads of sweat by the weight of darkness in the witching hour of our times, 3 AM.

Perhaps in a site called Creative Politics, it might help to think of the meaning of our existence (and those who would follow us) as something like voting.  Why do we vote, really?  There’s really no chance that our vote alone is going to decide any election broader in scope than our neighborhoods.  And let’s even suppose it did–the chance that this would happen again is even closer to zero, if that’s possible.  And if it happened twice, the chance it would happen again nearly infinitely smaller again.  Yet we’d still continue to vote, wouldn’t we?  There’s something in us that tells us it makes a difference, that it’s right (and how can it be right if it’s pointless?), even though no one except us can ever know for certain we did it.  To sublimate from science again, it’s tightly woven into the particle-wave complementarity of the individual and community in American life, with its nexus at the unparalleled individual choice of the groups we belong to we Americans enjoy.

Beyond this, I find myself thinking of the daydream lemmings of my youth.  And the cicadas that boil out of the ground in such fecundity every seventeen years that predators can’t possibly eat them all, seventeen years of dark, quiet certitude that ends in a week of random heaven or hell.  Even more, the swarms of drones that emerge annually from a hive of ants or bees, only one of whom will get to mate with the queen.  Why is there more than one drone if only one will succeed?  A few extra can be explained as precautionary redundancy, but hymenoptera have been in the making by nature for hundreds of millions of years; every micron of waste, fraud, and abuse has been evolutionarily scraped or whittled away from their doings.  Evolutionary biologists might just-so that the hundreds, even thousands wafting to their doom generate the combination of competition and variability necessary for every queen to find the best possible match, which doesn’t make much sense when one considers the dynamics of the event itself, but whatever the reason, does anyone really think the drones who fail are pointless, meaningless, should never have existed at all?

And yet they continue.  Why?  It’s often been observed how strongly the human body resists death, how often those with terminal illnesses outlive their prognoses, even though they know they’re going to die anyway.  Why?  Because living things want to continue to live? Because human beings have hope? Because we are good at deceiving ourelves, one and all?  If so, why, why, and why?  And why, why, why to the next volley of just-sos, and the next, and the next.  When our whys can only be met by “because,” we have reached axiomite, scientific bedrock.  That’s where we get, rather quickly, like the short trip from the ground to the emptiness of space, when we try to explain our most existential behavior, grasping at rationalization and hating ourselves for it because we view rationalization as the perversion of higher rationality, the intellect for the sake of lower nature, our base instincts.  We think we’re closest to truth when we’re on some supposedly higher artifice/plane, buffeted on all sides by fickle gusts of input and content, but it’s when we’re literally grounded, on the earth, in nature, that we can experience gnosis, and realize that rationality is whatever is natural, and what’s natural is what’s rational, scientific.

As accompaniment or spiritual traveling companion, perhaps Pascal’s wager needs an update, especially for the determinedly or hopelessly godless.  “Fake it till you make it,” the apparent key to navigating the modern world, so clichéd because it’s so true, seems like a worthy substitute. Or, rather than betting on the existence of God, why not consider betting, all-in, on our creativity, each and every one of us, the only faculty through which, especially at its fullest (including procreation), we’re each guaranteed to leave a legacy, however large or small, that would not exist had we not existed as well, which is the ultimate testament to the meaning of our lives, come what may, is it not?  Why not be emboldened by the irony that the same fullness of time guaranteeing our death also grants us immortality–everything we leave behind that can be built upon will be, and everything we think dies with us will eventually recur in a form at least as similar as we are to ourselves from moment to moment, year to year, birth to old age¹, so long as there is life.

It’s now believed that there are billions of earth-like planets in the universe, enough to make all but the zaphods among us hang our heads in meaninglessness, but only fifty+ have actually been found so far, and even if there really are billions more, they will still be but as drones in a swarm compared to a vastness of time and space so empty it cannot even be said to be dead, so alien is it to life. In fact, a compelling case can be made that the laws of physics in general, and their embedded symmetries in particular, make the universe actively hostile to life, to the point where the existence of life at all should give us deathless hope and the faith of an extended middle finger.  Like every drone in every hive, every planet, every species, has an evolutionary part to play in the real war of the worlds, the battle of life to to prevent the universe from becoming an unfathomably vast vacuous vacuole, never to seen or heard from again.  And while diversity is life’s greatest weapon, it’s at best the sufficient condition in the conflict; the necessary is that which binds all life forms, the literally vital uniting the two planets we ourselves inhabit today–above and below the waterline–those universal qualities that enable us to see ourselves literally and figuratively reflected in the sapiens of the deep, that define our common cause so that we can take comfort in it and take it up, even if only as foot soldiers in complexity and evolution’s army. We are, as individuals, as a species, but a molecular ripple in the sea of life, and that’s a good thing.

Look around you.  Do you love the trees that envelope you as they dress the sun? Do you love the sounds and songs of the birds, like children before they lose their wings?  Do you delight in the endless creativity in form and function of the insect diaspora, evolution’s masterwork on our tiny orb?  Are they not preferable to the void, even if accompanied by Holst, which it assuredly won’t be?  If you believe, as many of our disconsolate younger citizens do, that man has set in motion forces that could destroy life on earth as we know it, then isn’t our purpose to mitigate this in any way we can, for as much of life as we can, living ‘one day at a time’ nature’s way, acting as if saving a butterfly could change the world and, more broadly, investing as much as we can in the youngest and poorest, for they have the greatest potential return on the future for every incremental hour or dollar expended.  This is the saving grace of desperate times, is it not? That we’re considered, defined by, judged more for our good deeds than our mistakes. That when the odds seem most stacked against us, the little things are, at last, allowed to thrive, and what was not enough before becomes enough.

Written in honor of Baker, my only son; part of our Ideaology and Tree Talks series

Creative Politics is the world’s first community-based political incubator, synthesizing the best of liberal and conservative ideals with technology and history to generate policies, strategies, applications, and actions for the post-modern era that are well outside the beltway, and well beyond just talk. All Creative Politics blog posts are collaborative, living documents, the way Madison and Hamilton would create them if they were writing The Federalist today.  We welcome, nay urge, your feedback in the comment/discussion section below, and will be using it (with credit) to make what you just read more and more real–thanks much for your time and insights; they will go unpunished!

¹ And anything that does not recur would have been lost within even if we lived forever. Back