The Meaning of Life

At one time, about 1985, I thought I had figured out the meaning of life. I thought I had figured out why there was suffering in a world governed by a good and all-powerful God. I eventually wrote an article about it, which was published by the American Scientific Affiliation; you can still find it on their website.

It was not a new idea, although I treated it as such. It was simply that blessings arise out of adversity. What made the idea different from what many people already believe is that I saw many scientific examples of this principle too. For example, a great diversity of species emerged on the Earth after the Cretaceous extinction. The extinction was a massive worldwide adversity, but it allowed the evolution of hundreds of thousands of new species of flowering plants, insects, birds, and mammals. (Obviously I was no longer a creationist by this time.) As I recall, I even found examples of this principle on the molecular level. Try not to laugh until you have finished reading this. Blessed chemical reactions occurred only after the harrowing adversity of having their bonds broken. Okay, now you can laugh. This idea is still sitting out there like a coelacanth stranded in the ocean depths, going nowhere but not actually extinct. The idea of “blessings out of adversity” was too vague to actually be disproved. Like some physicists say of string theory, my theory was not even wrong.

The problem with the idea is that there must be just the right amount of adversity in order for blessings to arise from it. You need just the right amount of adversity in your life to get you up off of your butt and strive for success, but not enough to overwhelm you. And I imagined that this was how God ran the world: he gave us just the right amount of adversity. Actually, this is what the Bible says. But we all know it is not true. At least most of us know it. Mitt Romney does not know it; he thinks that the only reason that 47 percent of Americans are not successful is because they are too damn lazy. But even I knew that many people were overwhelmed by bad luck. I just did not want to admit it. I did not want to admit that it was not T. rex’s fault that it became extinct, no matter how many new species of flowers evolved after his demise.

What I needed to understand, but did not, was what Qoheleth wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes. I have written about this in earlier blog entries, to which I will here direct you if you would like to read more. I needed to understand that the race is not to the swift or riches to the wise, but time and chance happen to them all. Only now can I see that Monty Python was closer to figuring out the meaning of life than I was.

A Word about Bias

We all have bias. We all love bias. We all hate bias. We all love to hate bias. We all hate to love bias. But we do not all have the same amount of it. This is because, while we all begin with the same germ of bias, this germ proliferates in some people and some situations more than in others.

We all want to believe that the ideas to which we have devoted our lives are true. I will use myself as an example. I am a scientist, and I want to believe that the scientific method reveals truth. But suppose that I am wrong. Suppose that it is not, in fact, possible to figure out the truth by observing and measuring the physical world. Suppose that everything we see in the universe really is a delusion created by an evil god who enjoys watching us suffer. There is no evidence for this idea, so I reject it. But suppose there was evidence for it. Suppose that unexpectedly, as unexpectedly as that asteroid came by a few weeks ago, this evil god appeared in the sky and told us that everything in our lives and that we thought we knew about the universe was a trick he was playing on us. I would reject this observation, assuming myself to be deluded for having seen this god in the sky. It would take a lot of evidence to make me change my mind.

We also want to believe that the sources of our money are good. I work in higher education. I want to believe that a college education improves the lives of graduates in almost every way, not the least of which is employability. But suppose that it turns out that college education is worthless—that we Americans would be just as well off working in unskilled jobs for companies owned by China or Singapore or Germany as we would be in creating our own innovations. Of course, there is no evidence for this. But suppose there was. It would take a long time before I would admit it.

Bias, therefore, proliferates where there is money. A professor with a doctoral degree at a small university, earning just a little more than the national median, is less likely to be biased than a petroleum engineer with less education but earning twice as much, when it comes to issues such as global warming. Certainly such a professor is less likely to be biased on this subject than oil company executives or the conservative politicians to whom they give uncounted millions of dollars. The money-stoked intensity of bias in conservative politicians blinds them to even the most obvious truths.

So, if you want to know whom to believe on any particular issue, ask not only what the evidence is, but also follow the money.