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By Root 588 0

philosophers, who realized that science rules out meanings or purpose and so insisted that we each had to create them for ourselves. In pursuit of this misguided idea, there emerged existentialists of many different kinds: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Zen, and every other kind of religious existentialist, as well as communist, socialist, fascist, and humanistic existentialists—existentialists for every kind of meaning or purpose that people wanted their lives to have. Existentialists didn’t see the fatuousness of trying to create something that nature had ruled out as impossible. Creating purpose in a world that can’t have any is like trying to build a perpetual motion machine after you have discovered that nature has ruled them out. Of course, it takes scientism to see this. Existentialists, like almost all philosophers, would have rejected scientism had anyone offered it to them. But secular humanism doesn’t reject science. So, if it needs to vindicate an intrinsic value, goal, or purpose, such as revealing, or reveling in, the beauty of science or the beauty of the universe science uncovers, it’s out of luck.

Luckily for us, Mother Nature has seen to it that most of us, including the secular humanists, will get up most mornings and go on living even without anything to make our lives meaningful. The proof is obvious. There is nothing that makes our lives meaningful, and yet here we are, out of our pajamas.

The notion that we need something to make life meaningful in order to keep living is another one of those illusions fostered by introspection.

For a long time now, Mother Nature (aka natural selection) has been operating on organisms to make them keep on living. The number one design problem that natural selection faced was how to maximize their chances of reproducing. By the time it got to mammals, the optimum solution was longevity. So it arranged their brains to keep their bodies out of trouble as long as possible, or at least till they stopped having offspring. By the time it got to us, natural selection had gotten the solution to this longevity design problem down so well that it wouldn’t qualify as entirely quick and dirty anymore. Like other mammals, we are programmed to get out of bed in the morning, to keep on living. That raises for introspection the persistent question of why we do so, especially as it has the mistaken impression that with free will it’s up to us whether we keep on living or not. Introspection can’t provide a good reason to go on living because there isn’t any. This is the one thing that at least some of the existentialists got right. But introspection keeps hoping, looking, trying to find a reason to go on. Since there really isn’t one, those who look hard eventually become troubled.

Fortunately for our genes, introspection by itself can’t often overcome natural selection. Even when it comes to the conclusion that there is nothing that makes life worth living, the result is almost never suicide or even staying in bed in the morning. Just ask Jean-Paul Sartre.

As with a justification for core morality, when it comes to making life meaningful, what secular humanists hanker after is something they can’t have and don’t need. What they do need, if meaninglessness makes it impossible to get out of bed in the morning, is Prozac.

People who stay in bed all day or who engage in self-destructive behavior or commit suicide don’t do it because their lives lack meaning or even because they think their lives lack meaning. They commit suicide because the neural circuitry in their brain responds to intractable pain, feelings of depression, and all the other slings and arrows flesh is heir to. Often the circuitry responds by producing suicide notes along with and prior to the fatal act. These last gasps may even complain of the meaninglessness of the victim’s life. Scientism assures us that such notes, as well as the conscious introspections they may report, are just by-products, side effects, produced by the brain, along with the self-destructive act itself.

Secular humanists recognize