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.