Quantum Non-Linearity: The Meaning of Life

Monday, May 25, 2026

The Meaning of Life

Picture from Quantum Non-Linearity: The Fate of Man, by William Shakespeare

In this post by PZ Myers we find our grumpy atheist responding to a less than 60 second video by a cherub faced American Catholic who challenges atheists over their response to the question of the meaning of life. Here's PZ response to that video (My emphases)....

My answer to that question is simple: there is no meaning to life. We just are. We exist, and then we try to rationalize our existence, and everyone comes up with a different explanation because our brains will happily spin their wheels in the absence of anything of substance to grapple with.

Maybe you disagree, and maybe you have the one true meaning of life. That’s fine, go ahead and tell me what it is, but if you could, please also tell me what objective evidence you have to support your proposed purpose. Also tell me what makes this purpose a property of life — is it shared with spiders and clams and sugar gliders and ants? After all, they live, too.

That response aligns nicely with atheist Galen Strawson's response which I mention here:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Galen Strawson on "Why is there something?"

In the foregoing post I quote Strawson telling us that:

I don’t for all that think the universe has a purpose. I think it just is.

... which in turn aligns with Bertrand Russell who said that....

I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all [there is to it!]

So yes, atheists do hit an impenetrable logically contingent wall (*1) when it comes to the purpose of our highly organized cosmos, if indeed they can even give a coherent meaning to terms like "purpose".

But Myers is not at all being unreasonable in asking for objective evidence of anyone who (like myself) has opted for the search for meaning, purpose and the Divine (see Acts 17:23-28) I also agree that we instinctively try to rationalize and make sense of life. But as I said in a footnote to this post:

Christianity has a strong existential component in its evidences; that is, Christianity is partly dependent on the testimony of personal experiences. This slant toward anecdotal evidence, of course, cannot qualify as being on the same footing as the formal and sharable evidences of our science which depends on an a-priori high organization.

But in spite of that I don't think Christian conclusions are as variable, arbitrary and subjective as PZ makes out: I'm sure I've got a lot of common ground with Catholics and even with cultic fundies like Ken Ham. (*2) But I doubt I have very much in common with spiders who probably have no where near the minimum intellectual apparatus needed to formulate questions of meaning! Anyway, nice try PZ, but let's both keep searching for the truth and live the moral lives our superegos tell us we should live; at least we have that in common!

Footnote

(*1) And once again, we can write-off atheist Richard Carrier's attempt to explain order in terms of disorder.

(*2) However let me acknowledge that a crypto-cultist like Ken is likely to regard my faith as utterly inferior (See here for Ken's response to those who don't support his theme park)

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified. tvreeves@yahoo.co.uk

Quantum Non-Linearity

Monday, May 25, 2026

The Meaning of Life

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION