The sheer meaninglessness of all things

According to modern western wisdom we are mere meat robots, with no free will, living out our purposeless lives in a purposeless Universe, marching to our inevitable annihilation. An annihilation that can occur at any time. All our actions, all our thoughts, all our emotions, all our hopes, all our fears, everything we ever say, everything we ever do, is ultimately to no avail. In a million years time, each and every one of us will have long been forgotten, as if we had never existed. And, perhaps, the human race itself will have long since disappeared and will have been forgotten, as if it too had never existed.

Moreover, the Universe itself is dying. Eventually, all conscious creatures will die everywhere in the entire Universe. And eventually, nothing will ever happen ever again . . not anywhere and not ever.

Let the sheer meaninglessness of our existence and the Universe suffuse through you!

But wait! Richard Dawkins has some words of consolation:

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.

We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here...

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?" (Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder p6)

Now doesn't that make people burst with happiness? Let us spring forth from bed with alacrity and enthusiasm for the forthcoming day! To savour the sweetness of existence. To know that you're one of the infinitesimally small proportion of potential people who have been granted the miracle of being alive! To be bestowed this gift of a momentary window of existence before entering into eternal nothingness. Oh, how fortunate we all are!

That's one way of looking at it I suppose! Ha Ha!

Natural Selection

All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics . . . A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If if can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

 From "the blind watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins.

So the organised complexity of our bodies was not designed, it was purely the blind forces of physics operating. I'm not in a position to say whether this is possible but I'll trust those evolutionary biologists like Dawkins here who claim this.

But when Dawkins says that the complexity of living creatures is achieved in an entirely different way to human inventions such as a watch, he concedes there is design in nature -- namely human artefacts such as watches. Darwinian evolution surely entails there is no design whatsoever. So human beings cannot be part of nature, or alternatively the mainstream evolution position is falsified?

I confess though I haven't read Dawkins' book. Or any of his books although I've read articles by him. But he just bangs on about God in those articles and doesn't address the shortcomings of naturalism/materialism.

Quote from Richard Dawkins

An interesting quote from Richard Dawkins book "Unweaving the Rainbow".

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.


We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here...

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

I've never regarded his philosophical ability in high esteem but he expresses himself very well. The quote is of course only applicable for those who believe that's there's no ultimate purpose or goal in life and this life is all we have. Which I don't personally subscribe to, but if I did I would share Dawkins' sentiments.