The re-meaning of life

Why are we here?

What is the purpose of life?

This is not a question that adults readily ask of themselves.  It is more a question that may keep a sensitive eight year old awake at night.

But in developing a contemporary belief system from first principles^[1] it is a question we must ask.  Everything else follows from it.

The Muslim fundamentalist has it relatively easy.  He has all the answers, and the Islamic State follows naturally from them.  The laws, institutions, and behavioural precepts he subscribes to are all prescribed or implied by his faith.

Similarly, most "born-again" Christians will have little doubt as to the meaning of life, and on what is right or wrong.

Unfortunately many of us have not been privy to any cosmic or religious revelations^[2].  We are unaware of God or Satan.  We have no certainty of an afterlife.  We have no conception of sin - a transgression against an absolute moral code.

Each of us only has one absolute.  That is that WE ARE RIGHT NOW.  Each of us lives for the time being.

The rest is subject to widely varying probabilities - some getting very close to 100% certainty, many a lot less^[3].

This does not mean that the existence of God or an eternal afterlife is denied.  It is possible that both exist absolutely as conceived of by any of our great religions, but in a rational intellectual sense we will never know.

It is beyond our capacity as human beings to understand any absolute meaning of life, should there be one.

Since the earliest human times religions have satisfied people's need for a purpose to life, and have assuaged the dreadful finality of death.  Most religions posit an eternal afterlife of some description and this seems to ease the fear of death of their adherents.

But why is the prospect of an eternal life no matter how blissful any less horrible than a full stop at the end of a mere seventy or so years of existence?

In the context of eternal life the quest for meaning and purpose has no possible conclusion.  The temporal concepts of `meaning' and `purpose' have no meaning in or applicability to eternity because a finite period of time is inherent in both concepts and eternity is infinite.  What "purpose" could an eternal life possibly have?

Positing a life after death whether eternal or not does not answer any question as to the meaning and purpose of our lives; it merely moves the insurmountable hurdle out of the sight of those who are happy to enquire no further.

It is the same with the notion of God^[4].  There may or may not be such an entity.  However how is the existence of an omnipotent, paternalistic, perhaps implacable entity more comfortable or intellectually satisfying than the notion of a random and chaotic Universe?

If God is needed to explain our existence and that of the Universe, why do we stop asking the question when we get to God?  How do we explain the existence of God?  And if that explanation is deemed not to be necessary or within our capacity as human beings to understand, why can we not adopt that same response just prior to the point where we bring God into the picture.  In other words, the absolute reason, if there is one, for our existence and that of the Universe is beyond our capacity to understand.

By creating the notion of God we are once again moving an insurmountable barrier out of sight rather than overcoming it as we pretend we have.

The human brain understands and explains events in terms of causes and effects; everything has an origin in something else; nothing arises out of nothing; everything has a time dimension with all things coming to an end and transforming into something else.

Such axioms are fine when seeking to understand the natural world as we perceive it.  They will work for us far beyond the confines of our Earth and will allow us to reach out to the limits^[5] of the detectable Universe both along the dimensions of time and of space.  But they break down at infinity and eternity.

Items no matter how big, events no matter how major, and periods of time no matter how long are insignificant in the context of eternity and infinity which are both indivisible.  Eternity is timeless, and if you take away time you take away our capacity to interpret the natural world as a chain of cause and effect relationships.

Science will not yield up the answers to the ultimate questions.  Already, by an elaborate and circuitous route, it has brought us to the same point of Creation from which all major religions commence.  After all, what is the Big Bang, a point at which the Universe is thought to have had zero size and to have been infinitely hot, other than a scientific colloquialism for Creation?

We cannot understand God or any absolute meaning of Life.

Is there then no meaning that can direct and give purpose to our lives^[6]?