A Meaning to Life by Michael Ruse

Author:Michael Ruse
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

3

Darwinism as Religion

“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). Well, natural selection has done its fair share of taking away. Can it also do some giving? Less metaphorically—although my quoting of the Bible was deliberate and, as you will see, contains a hook—if we do not take the religious route, and if natural selection seems to point to the bleak world of Thomas Hardy, is there any case for saying that natural selection can nevertheless contribute positively to an alternate world picture? A world picture that gives meaning to life? We shall see that there is. To tackle the problem properly, however, we need to make and follow a division made generally by those asking about the meaning of life. Religious approaches—Christianity and Buddhism are our examples—posit an extra-human reality. Followers are not extreme idealists, as George Berkeley would have been without his God—no small qualification, although of course, Berkeley’s God was all spirit and not matter. What makes for meaning is not all in the mind. This is true even for a religious pluralist like John Hick. It is true that he is committed to allowing a relativity (cultural bias) about the divinity of Jesus, but he strongly affirms an underlying, good, ultimate life force, one that we may not be able to comprehend but is absolutely and completely real.

So let’s say simply that religions take an objectivist approach to meaning. To advance on from this world, it is not your choice that you ought to do X, Y, and Z. It is an objective truth, because that is the way things are. So let us frame our first question in this mode. Can a natural-selection-governed or -inspired world picture give an objectivist understanding of meaning? Can natural selection impose upon us a set of rules for right conduct and point to a worthwhile end to which we should aspire and labor? Thinking of the contrary, our second question must be that if achieving an objectivist understanding proves impossible, and hence in some very real sense we are thrown back on ourselves, can natural selection contribute to such a subjectivist world picture? Can it help us to find meaning after all?

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