Nature Is Enough

Religious Naturalism and the Meaning of Life

Loyal Rue

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781438438016
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Athéisme

Nature is enough: enough to allow us to find meaning in life and to answer our religious sensibilities. This is the position of religious naturalists, who deny the existence of a deity and a supernatural realm. In this book, Loyal Rue answers critics by describing how religious naturalism can provide a satisfying vision of the meaning of human existence. The work begins with a discussion of how to evaluate the meaning of life itself, referencing a range of thought from ancient Greek philosophy to the Abrahamic traditions to the Enlightenment to contemporary process and postmodern philosophies. Ultimately proposing meaning as an emergent property of living organisms, Rue writes that a meaningful life comes through happiness and virtue. Spiritual qualities that combine evolutionary cosmology and biocentric morality are described: reverence, gratitude, awe, humility, relatedness, compassion, and hope. Rue looks at why religious naturalism is not currently more of a movement, but nevertheless predicts that it will become the prevailing religious sensibility.

1

Introduction

What Is a Human Being For?

Questioning the Question

For several years I have made a practice of subjecting my introductory philosophy students to a pop quiz on the first day of class. The assignment is to write an essay in response to a simple question: “What is a human being for?” This is obviously a variation on the more familiar question, “What is the meaning of life?” But the form of the question is sufficiently odd to leave students in a state of bewilderment. They know perfectly well what chairs and cups and backpacks are for, but it has never occurred to them that human beings might be for anything in a similar way. An odd question, perhaps, but eventually the students manage to compose themselves with varied and predictable results. A human being is for:

Learning and solving problems

Preserving and beautifying the earth

Serving God

Loving and being loved

Whatever they choose to be for

Realizing their potential

Survival and reproduction

Feeding decomposers

Etc.

I engage students in this exercise because it gives them a whiff of the sort of questions that might come up in philosophy, and also because it gives me a whiff of the values and attitudes I will encounter during the course of the semester. Yet it must be admitted that asking students to answer this question on the first day of class is a particularly unphilosophical thing to do. This is because the first step in philosophy is always to scrutinize questions, not to answer them. Indeed, one of my own college professors used to insist that philosophy has no business answering questions at all, but should confine itself to rendering critiques of questions.

Is the Question Answerable?

Before we can hope to make any progress on the question about life's meaning we must determine whether the question itself is problematic. Many questions are. Some questions are problematic because they are unanswerable, either because they are incoherent or because we lack sufficient means to answer them. For example, take the old standard from theology: Can God create a stone too heavy for God to lift? This question was designed to demonstrate that God cannot possibly be omnipotent. If we say that God can create such a stone, then it follows that there is one thing God is powerless to do: namely, to lift the stone. But if we admit that God cannot create the stone, then ipso facto God is not omnipotent. Any answer to the question implies that God is not all-powerful. On the surface this question has the appearance of legitimacy, but in fact the question is incoherent because it creates a logical monstrosity: a stone too heavy to be lifted by a being presumed capable of lifting any stone at all amounts to a logically impossible stone.

Some philosophers have maintained that the meaning of life question is incoherent in a similar way, not because it creates a logical monstrosity but because it creates a grammatical one. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, believed that human life is the context of meaning—the setting wherein things take on meaning—and cannot therefore be a candidate for meaning itself.¹ By this reasoning, to inquire about the meaning of life is absurd in the way that voting for the voting booth would be. Wittgenstein's suggestion that our question is illegitimate rests on the claim that it is a recursive question of the sort, “What is the meaning of this question?” But is it? It is not obvious that “What is the meaning of life?” constitutes the same kind of grammatical monstrosity as “What is the meaning of this question?” Does the fact that entities and events in life can have meaning imply that it makes no sense to ask whether a life itself can have meaning? It's hard to see why. It seems perfectly sensible to ask, “What is the color of the box containing red things?” If there is no logical or grammatical monstrosity in that question, then it seems logically and grammatically permissible to inquire about the meaning of life.

It appears, then, that our question is not rendered unanswerable on grounds of incoherence. It might, however, be unanswerable on other grounds. Some questions are theoretically impossible to answer. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us it is impossible to determine both the velocity and the location of an elementary particle at the same time. A choice to observe one necessarily prevents observation of the other. Similarly, it may be that the meaning of life is just inaccessible in principle. If it were supposed, for example, that knowing the meaning of life required information that has been irretrievably lost, then it would be futile to pursue an answer. Or consider the possibility that the question is unanswerable due to our own limitations. When asked about the existence of God, one of Woody Allen's characters dismissed the question with, “How should I know? I get lost in Chinatown.” Perhaps the meaning of life is like that—no matter how desperately we need the answer it might be completely over our heads. Contemporary physicists find themselves in this condition with respect to quantum theory. They use the theory as a tool all the time, and with impressive results, but they do not pretend to comprehend it. As Richard Feynman famously quipped, “I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics.” If we are incapable of comprehending even the simplest events in nature, then what makes us think we can comprehend the meaning of life?

Another of my college professors used to say that philosophy amounts to a series of questions that cannot be answered, but must be answered. Like quantum physicists, perhaps, we might manage to get on in life even though its true meaning is forever beyond us. This may very well be the case, but the fact remains that no one has yet shown it to be so. We have no equivalent to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that can be applied to the meaning of life. And without such a demonstration we need not feel compelled to dismiss the question as unanswerable—at least not before completing our attempt to see more clearly what sort of question it is.

Is the Question Misleading?

A question may be problematic even though it is legitimate and answerable. Our question, “What is the meaning of life?” appears to be misleading in problematic ways. A question would be misleading if it made unwarranted assumptions, or if it were ambiguous. For example, the question, “Who is the emperor of New York?” is obviously misinformed because it makes the false assumption that there is an emperor of New York. It appears that our question makes a similar assumption: it asks about the meaning of life as if it were obvious that life has meaning. But this is certainly not obvious to everyone. In fact, many would object to the assumption, insisting that “What is the meaning of life?” should be read to ask, “Is there any meaning to life?” In the pages ahead it will be important to keep both readings of the question firmly in mind. We might accomplish this by reformulating the question to read: “Does life have meaning, and if so, what is it?”

But even this reformulation of the question is misleading because it assumes that the meaning of life is singular and objective. Many people may be satisfied with (and even insist upon) the assumption that there is a one-size-fits-all meaning to life, but others would find reasons to object strenuously. Some, for example, might insist on a distinction between multiple meanings in life and a singular meaning of life. The fact that many particular things in a person's life may be meaningful in various ways does not make it obvious that life in general is meaningful. We have already seen that Wittgenstein's objection relies on this distinction. He believed that things in life could be found meaningful, but that it made no sense to ask whether life itself is meaningful.

Of course, it might make sense—Wittgenstein notwithstanding—to affirm the meaning of life as a whole if we assume that it is derived from particular meanings in life. When I say, in a general sense, that I enjoy my mother's cooking I mean that I find a majority of her meals enjoyable. Analogously, a person might judge that life as a whole is meaningful simply because it contains an abundance of objects, events, and relations that are themselves meaningful. But if this is the case, then we might extend the same principle to declare that life as a whole is always meaningful in a potential sense, regardless of whether it contains particular meanings. For example, if I reject the meaningfulness of life as a whole because I find nothing in life particular meaningful, you might respond by accusing me of a failure of insight or imagination, and insist that I would find life meaningful if only I got my thinking straight. The meaning of life in this sense would be grounded in the perpetual possibility for meaningfulness, that is, the meaning may be found, whether or not we succeed in finding it.

It should be apparent that our question may be misleading in various ways, and for that reason we must take care to clarify our assumptions along the way and to identify any possible ambiguities. The following variations on our question illustrate just how open the question is to multiple readings:

Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?

What is the purpose of creation?

Why should I go on living?

How should I live my life?

Does anything matter?

What is the nature of the life process?

Is the Question Authentic?

Rhetorical questions are generally taken to be inauthentic. They merely pretend to be questions, whereas they are really assertions or exclamations masquerading as questions. “What are friends for?” really means “This is what friends are for!” If I were to ask whether you had purchased a lottery ticket and you responded, “What's the point?” I would not consider telling you that the point is to win a lot of money. We both know perfectly well what the point of entering the lottery is. Rather, your rhetorical question is really a commentary on the folly of wagering good money against bad odds.

Perhaps questions about the meaning of life are not genuine questions at all, but merely veiled complaints, or expressions of confusion, or pleas for sympathy. We have good reason to expect that questions about the meaning of life will be far more likely to arise in the context of adversity or uncertainty. Suppose your neighbor has just lost her family in a senseless accident and cries out, “What's the point of existing?” In this case it would be foolish to suppose that she is expressing an interest in doing some serious reading in philosophy. That would be the farthest thing from her mind. The point here is that the adverse circumstances in which questions about the meaning of life frequently arise might suggest that such questions are intended for effect, in which case they would be rhetorical questions and therefore not genuine.

Questions about the meaning of life may in fact often be rhetorical, but there is no reason to accept the view that they are always or even primarily so. The question might just as well arise in a philosophy class, or on vacation, or in a supermarket. But even if the question is used rhetorically it remains a serious and important one. It would be a grave error to conclude that the significance of questions may always be reduced to their particular contexts. In the case of our grief stricken neighbor the question may have taken the form of an emotional outburst, but this does not imply that it lacks independent merit as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. It would be easy to assume that the poor woman is just not thinking clearly in the circumstances and that nothing she says should be taken seriously. But maybe she is thinking more clearly than ever; maybe her loss is the occasion for her deepest insights about the meaning of life. Perhaps the emotional force behind the outburst should be seen not as invalidating the question, but rather as providing strong warrant for taking it seriously in the intellectual sense.

Is It a Philosophical Question?

Not all questions are philosophically significant. Our question about the meaning of life might qualify as answerable, coherent and authentic but still be lacking in philosophical interest. According to a popular conception of philosophy, the meaning of life shows up as the quintessential philosophical problem. Readers of the New Yorker may take this impression from cartoons featuring a philosophical sage seated on a mountaintop (or in a cave) receiving seekers after the meaning of existence. But this popular impression is slightly misleading, for it turns out that relatively few philosophers have bothered to address the question directly, and a majority would agree that the meaning of life is no more central to philosophy than questions that arise within science, politics, religion, and the arts.

Traditionally, philosophy has concerned itself with three principal problem areas: epistemology (the foundations, scope, and limits of knowledge), metaphysics (the ultimate nature of reality), and value theory (the grounds and norms for ethics and aesthetics). Any inquiry becomes philosophical to the extent that it traffics in one or more of these problem areas, which our question appears to do. For example, it is not self-evident that the meaning of life can be known, so any assertion or assumption one way or the other must be supported by argument, and to provide such arguments is to engage in epistemology. The same holds for metaphysical assertions and assumptions. Many discussions of the meaning of life posit (or reject) the existence of God, or immortality of the soul, or freedom of the will, or a universal purpose—all of which involve metaphysical commitments and argumentation. And finally, philosophers have occasionally tried to show that inquiry into the meaning of life does not ask for metaphysical explanation at all, but merely seeks a justification to show that life is worth living. But any attempt to provide (or critique) such justifications places the inquiry squarely in the domain of value theory.

It appears, then, that the meaning of life qualifies as a legitimate concern for philosophy, but it should be emphasized that while the question is sufficiently philosophical it is neither central nor exclusive to the discipline. In the chapters ahead I will not assume that the question of life's meaning belongs exclusively to philosophy, yet it is one that should be extensively vetted by philosophical critique. In particular, philosophy should be able to provide some guidance in shaping the question. But perhaps even more importantly, philosophy might help to clarify what is meant by “meaning.”

The Meaning of Meaning

The meanings of words and the significance of objects and events are normally taken for granted. It is only when problems arise, when we fail to apprehend or to express meaning, that the nature of meaning becomes an issue. If this is so, then important clues to what we mean when we declare that life is meaningful might be found where meaning is conspicuously absent.

Consider der Muselmann

Human existence was scraped raw in the Nazi death camps of World War II. Conditions in the camps were carefully constructed for the systematic degradation of human lives. The majority of prisoners lived in absolute squalor, forced to endure terror, uncertainty, humiliation, hunger, fatigue, frostbite, disease, and injury, while constantly facing the threat of extermination. Anything resembling faith, hope, charity, or a sense of dignity would, under these circumstances, bear the mark of unreason. Fear, disgust, resentment, suspicion, and an overwhelming sense of injustice prevailed. Having lost their will to live, many prisoners exercised the option for suicide, but most somehow found the means to struggle on, one terrifying day at a time.

A remnant of these Holocaust victims survived the death camps to produce a chilling literature of testimony, recording unthinkable atrocities and their impact upon victims. Strangely enough, the most disturbing figures among holocaust victims are given relatively little attention in the testimonial literature. These were die Muselmänner.² Der Muselmann was the ultimate victim of the death camps: a mere cipher, a zombie, a profoundly dehumanized nonperson. Jean Amery describes der Muselmann as “the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, [he] no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts of good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions.”³ Ryn and Klodzinski render the following horrific picture of der Muselmann:

The SS man was walking slowly, looking at the [Muselmann] who was coming toward him. We looked to the left, to see what would happen. Dragging his wooden clogs, the dull-witted and aimless creature ended up bumping right into the SS office...