Free Inquiry Feb/March 2011 - The Labyrinth: God, Darwin and the Meaning of Life by Philip Appleman

Free Inquiry is a bimonthly magazine published by the Council for Secular Humanism, a program of the Center for Inquiry. In the February/March Vol. 31 No. 2 edition, the esteemed writer, Philip Appleman, wrote an article titled The Labyrinth: God, Darwin and the Meaning of Life.

The essay is a diatribe against religion and the institutions that support religion. Those that are religious and not open to other ideas may find this piece offensive. Those that can get past this may find that Appleman actually has very insightful and even very poetic realities to share with us. First and foremost, we're biologically evolved creatures shaped by natural selectin that can get caught up in labyrinths of our own making. Those labyrinths and abstractions include religion, the afterlife, societal structures, love, and more. Not all of those abstractions are harmful, but some can be and have been.

For many, religion gives their lives meaning. For Appleman, evolution negates this and he argues that life actually becomes more valuable without the prospect of an afterlife or immortality. The fleeting nature and fragility of our existence only makes what we have all the more precious and irreplaceable. In fact, he would go on to argue that when confronted with immortality, people have and will continue to cheapen this existence and not live life to the fullest. With religion removed, Appleman suggests that this opens the door for us to create our own meaning in life, and that is an amazing and wonderful thing, but misguided, could be a dangerous thing. As he would go on to state: So here we stand, after billions of years of stability and billions of years of change: human beings, upright and cerebral, capable of anything, the most admirable and despicable animal on Earth, making symphonies and sadism, medicine and malice.

Appleman would further go on to reason that morality is a result of an evolved survival strategy constructed within social groups. That is, morality isn't something that is gifted through a set of commandments, or rules, or guidance from a divine being, but rather, something that we as a species developed ourselves, and that is a beautiful thing.

What we can see in this article is that Appleman isn't necessarily providing us an answer to the question, but rather a pathway towards finding our own answers to the question within our social groups. There is no preordained meaning to life, rather we find meaning through the things we value, through our relationships, through the finiteness of life, and through morality.

Appleman further expanded this essay into a book, also titled, The Labyrinth: God, Darwin, and the Meaning of Life. The book is not reviewed here.

Great quotes throughout the essay:

A beast condemned to be more than a beast: that is the human condition.

Evolving from an earthy past, from a family line that was hairy, tailed, and arboreal, how can we presume to ponder the meaning of life? Yet the large brain is a restless organ, and it will not stop asking questions, even presumptuous ones.

“The earth is degenerating in these latter days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, and it is evident that the end of the world is rapidly approaching.” That is from an Assyrian tablet about five thousand years old—but similar laments are common throughout recorded history and under every political and religious regime.

Face to face with death, we realize: the meaning of life is inside our lives, not outside them. We cannot impose on our experience a meaningfulness that we have not ourselves built into it.

Doomed to extinction, our loves, our work, our friendships, our tastes are all painfully precious. We look about us, on the streets and in the subways, and discover that we are beautiful because we are mortal, priceless because we are so rare in the universe and so fleeting. Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves, is all we will ever have—and that, in its profound simplicity, is the meaning of life.

Did you read the article? If so, what did you think, what did we miss? If you also read the book, how does it differ from the article?

#religion #evolution #relationships