The Deist Miasma Part III -- The Tenacity of Purpose
I started writing the Deist Miasma series with high hopes, but little else. I was missing something, a crucial piece of evidence (as opposed to suspicion) that may have finally surfaced. It's a preliminary study that requires some expansion, but it reinforced the niggling thoughts that started this series enough to motivate me to finish it.
First, an anecdote. I used to share housing with a few friends from high school. One night, two of those friends and I were wandering the field next to the housing discussing philosophy. At one time I considered a degree in philosophy; Steve actually got a minor in the subject; and Dave, well, thought about stuff.
Steve and I were trying to understand Dave's certainty regarding the existence of God. I should note that the philosophical position on God's existence wanders all over the board and depends upon which philosopher one reads. There are those that not only wholeheartedly endorse His divinity but have gone so far as to use that assumption as the basis for all of our experience (I'm looking at you, Berkeley), to those that considered the very concept of God a denial of humanity's future. To avoid confusion, therefore, one should approach God's existence carefully, perhaps by outlining the reasons one might have for a positive belief.
Dave, as it happens, had such a belief. Steve and I were trying to find out why. Beers were being consumed, voices raised. Finally, the matter came to a crux -- Dave asserted that he knew God existed . . . because he knew God existed.
At this point, let me share a wonderfully effective refutation of such solipsism and circular logic
My improvised thought jerk got a great reaction from all involved. It did not, however, change any minds.
I've always wondered why.
For years, I've considered religious belief a wonderful motivator. If you believe beyond any doubt that just beyond that next ridge a land of milk and honey can be found, all you have to do is survive long enough to find it. Without actual proof that such lands exist, such beliefs might well be called delusional; that doesn't mean the lands don't exist, or that if they do the genetic jackpot won't be huge. Given that you may indeed find a verdant and fecund land on your delusional travels, your religious zeal might well give you the chance to propagate widely and well, passing on the belief gene to your offspring in the process.
What evidence did I have for assuming such a belief gene existed (other than observing drunk friends, of course)? Lately, quite a bit of evidence is mounting to suggest that many traits formerly thought obvious might have a hard-wire cause. Take the ability to see faces. Many people assume recognizing faces is just something we do naturally, something we learn to do. What few stop to consider is that doing something naturally and learning to do something are two very different phenomena. It turns out face recognition is a natural phenomenon simply because, thanks to the internet, there are folks out there who finally realize they are Face Blind:
For most of his childhood, Choisser thought he was normal. He just assumed that nobody saw faces. But slowly, it dawned on him that he was different. Other people recognized their mothers on the street. He did not. During the 1970s, as a small-town lawyer in the Illinois Ozarks, he struggled to convince clients that he was competent even though he couldn't find them in court. He never greeted the judges when he passed them on the street - everyone looked similarly blank to him - and he developed a reputation for arrogance. His father, also a lawyer, told him to pay more attention. His mother grew distant from him. He felt like he lived in a ghost world. Not being able to see his own face left him feeling hollow. . . .
In the medical literature, there were a few reports of head-injury and stroke victims who'd lost their ability to recognize faces. No one, as far as the doctors knew, had ever been born with the condition.
Conventional medicine, in other words, got him nowhere.
The condition, called prosopagnosia, has been known for years but always attributed to injury or trauma. Rare conditions tend to go unnoticed, since it takes a strong representative sample to note differences that cannot be explained through other means. Given the strong role faces play in our lives, the selective pressure to see and read faces is strong enough to keep the condition rare indeed. Once folks started gathering on a Yahoo community in 1996, though, that sample found itself.
To compare the ability to see faces to the ability to accept even the concept of God seems a stretch to many. To others, like myself, it seems perfectly natural. We, you see, can't see the point of a deity. We can't, to stretch the analogy, see his face.
This is exactly why I attributed the spiritual and diabolical sense of presence to possible brain damage in Part II, why I also speculated there about personality traits that make folks accept black and white models because their brains tire more easily. The behaviors these folks exhibit baffle and confound me. Don't get me wrong; I've been accused many, many times of having an exceptionally flexible imagination, of being perhaps too able to envision situations weird and wild. That I can't put myself in their shoes says, I think, more about them than me.
Still, something was missing.
The missing piece is something I've noted before. It's the same phenomenon, I believe, that popularized the term "evolution" to describe Darwin's theory of natural selection. Evolution originally meant the "unrolling of a book," a term applied to astronomy. Think of a jack-in-the-box. You turn the crank, listening to the tune, and know that eventually the Jack pops out of his box. In a like manner, a large grouping of hydrogen eventually coalesces, collapses upon itself, and ignites into a sun.
Natural selection, by contrast, involves a highly random element; nothing in our bodies knows beforehand what pressures will befall us and our offspring. Rather, random mutations (like those mentioned in the Lemski experiment in Part I), copying flaws in the genetic code that cause no untoward harm to the individual over time, modify the offspring's ability to succeed in future environments.
What's the difference? Natural selection is nothing like the sun. It's a difference of importance, an ordering of which is the cause and which the effect. What should come first, for example, the fact that we humans are the apparent apex of Creation, or the fact that tiny and inconvenient parasites appear just as adapted to their environment as we?
First, consider Herbert Spencer, the man who coined the term "survival of the fittest" and appropriated "evolution," both to describe Darwin's theory. From the wiki page on Spencer:
Spencer posited that all structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity to a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity, while being accompanied by a process of greater integration of the differentiated parts. This evolutionary process could be found at work, Spencer believed, throughout the cosmos. It was a universal law, applying to the stars and the galaxies as much as to biological organisms, and to human social organization as much as to the human mind. It differed from other scientific laws only by its greater generality, and the laws of the special sciences could be shown to be illustrations of this principle.
This attempt to explain the evolution of complexity was radically different to that to be found in Darwin’s Origin of Species. . . . Spencer is often, quite erroneously, believed to have merely appropriated and generalized Darwin’s work on natural selection. . . . (However) he only grudgingly incorporated natural selection into his preexisting overall system. Spencer believed that (his erroneous Lamarckian) evolutionary mechanism was also necessary to explain 'higher' evolution, especially the social development of humanity. Moreover, in contrast to Darwin, he held that evolution had a direction and an end-point, the attainment of a final state of 'equilibrium.'
(Emphasis mine.)
To review Spencer's perspective, someone who felt a principle applying "to the stars and the galaxies as much as to biological organisms" would probably feel inclined to use an astronomical term to describe natural selection. That bit about "human social organization" proves important too, since Spencer also created the "social Darwinist" model.
This might start to explain the sections I've emboldened for emphasis. Spencer could not completely accept the random and directionless implications Darwin himself constantly emphasized.
Take also British zoologist Ray Lankester, a man who not only, like Spencer, knew Darwin personally, but further regarded with disdain and contempt those who dismissed biology. He once declared, "We are no longer content to see biology scoffed at as inexact or gently dropped as natural history or praised for her relation to medicine. On the contrary, biology is the science whose development belongs to the day." (Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex, Touchstone, 2000, p. 16.)
Ah, but when it came to seeing just the evidence science presented without taint of his own Spencer-esque preconceptions, Lankester also succumbed to simply missing Darwin's main point. A Victorian gentleman of science himself, Lankester shared Spencer's belief about the role man played in the cosmos and on earth. "Progress" for him therefore involved continuing complexity. Those creatures which shed their complexity "degenerated" (though not in the biblical sense of the word), and degenerates were to be despised. He truly despised Sacculina carcini, a parasite that found degeneration a beautiful way to survive:
When it first hatched from its egg, it had a head, a mouth, a tail, a body divided into segments, and legs, which is exactly what you'd expect from a barnacle or other crustacean. But rather than growing into an animal that searched and struggled for its own food, Sacculina instead found itself a crab and wiggled into its shell. Once inside, Sacculina quickly degenerated, losing its segments, its legs, its tail, even its mouth. Instead, it grew a set of rootlike tendrils, which spread throughout the crab's body. It then used these roots to absorb food from the crab's body. . . .
Since there was no divide between the ascent of life and the history of civilization, Lankester saw in parasites a grave warning for humans. Parasites degenerated "just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organization this way." . . . "Possibly we are all drifting," he fretted, "tending to the condition of intellectual Barnacles."
An uninterrupted flow from nature to civilization meant that biology and morality were interchangeable.
(Zimmer, ibid, pp. 16-17, emphasis mine.)
Finally, take Friedrich Küchenmeister, a man who shared Lankester's thoughts. In the 1830s, Danish zoologist Johann Steenstrup speculated that certain creatures were actually not separate, but the same creature in different stages of its life cycle. He specifically did research on intestinal parasites called bladder worms suggesting they were an early stage development of another, yet undiscovered creature. He was proven right; bladder worms proved to be stunted tapeworms. This observation enraged Küchenmeister, a Dresden doctor, who wrote of these speculations,
It would be contrary to the wise arrangement of Nature which undertakes nothing without a purpose . . . . Such a theory of error contradicts the wisdom of the Creator and the laws of harmony and simplicity put into Nature."
(Zimmer, ibid, p. 8, emphasis mine.)
"Which undertakes nothing without a purpose." For Küchenmeister, that purpose was that every creature created by God had a purpose, that God created no "dead ends." For Spencer and Lankester, it was the steady march from simplicity to complexity, always struggling to attain "higher" status amongst other creatures. The common thread; purpose.
Purpose. Finally, we get to the evidence. Today's feed from New Scientist had a study that attempted to quantify our tendency to seek purpose. Though preliminary, it noted:
Religion might not be the only reason people buy into creationism and intelligent design, psychological experiments suggest.
No matter what their religious beliefs, college-educated adults frequently agree with purpose-seeking yet false explanations of natural phenomena - finches diversified in order to survive, for instance.
"The very fact of belief in purpose itself might lead you to favour intelligent design," says Deborah Kelemen, a psychologist at Boston University, who led the study. . . .
"What her work suggests is that the creationist side has a huge leg up early on because it fits our natural tendencies," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University. "It has implications for why most people on earth are creationists, I think."
For this reason, it's not surprising that non-religious, college-educated adults fall back on purpose-seeking explanations.
(Emphasis mine.)
We humans tells stories. We use these stories not just to entertain ourselves, but to instruct our children, to pass on information to others. Stories that stick, stories that get told time and time again, fall into certain patterns that make them easily recognizable and memorable. The good ones have beginnings, middles, and ends; the good ones reveal a trait everyone can recognize, share a lesson all can find valuable.
This study exploring the tenacity of purpose suggests how very much our story telling and hearing brains are adapted to lessons derived through story, how very much our Ptolemic selves see our post-Coppernican universe. Some of us can see bananas and peanut butter as a gift from God and proof that evolution fails simply by forgetting the agricultural selection pressure that may have formed the banana's shape and a little thing called "Pasteurization."
This doesn't mean that stories are bad, that they mislead us. Far from it. It only means our ability to perceive the facts of the universe might be overwhelmed by our tendency to order these perceptions in a manner evolved over the millennia, an ordering designed to be simple and easily administered. It only means we must keep those tendencies close in our minds when we read something we find puzzling, something like a worldview that claims we might be just as evolved as crab parasites or bladder worms; that life might only bear the purpose we personally give it; that we might indeed be alone in this universe, but that behind that seemingly devastating thought one can find solice beyond imagination:
What meaning can any of our struggles and triumphs have? What point is there?
And that attitude, tragically, misses the point entirely.
For you see, if we were made a brief time ago in God's image and put here for the sole and express purpose of worshipping and exalting God, then what we are now is what we will always be. There is an upward limit on the things we are capable of. We are born disgraced, pale shadows of the original models who fell from that grace, and our job is to struggle through this brief life of misery and tears hoping we somehow manage to do and say the right things so that god will rescue us. We have no purpose other than that which is given to us by god--and looking around, I gotta say it's not much of a purpose.
But if we are evolved monkeys...
Ah, now things are different. If we are evolved monkeys, if we are the result of natural processes that conspired across a vast sea of time to give rise to sapient, self-directing entities capable of understanding themselves and the physical world, then all bets are off. Now, there is no limit to what we can become. Now, anything within the physical laws of the universe is potentially within our grasp. Now, we have the power we once reserved to our gods; now, we can, through the application of our will, make of ourselves anything we choose to be.
And now we have meaning and purpose far beyond that of crawling around chanting to some insecure creator-god about how great and magnificent he is, and would he please please not strike us dead? Now, we are the part of the universe capable of understanding itself. We are of the universe; we are a part of it, not above it; but we are unique in all the universe we know in that we can understand it. We are aware. We are the universe's way of understanding itself.
We are the universe's way of understanding itself. For me, that is perhaps the greatest purpose any of us can have.
First, an anecdote. I used to share housing with a few friends from high school. One night, two of those friends and I were wandering the field next to the housing discussing philosophy. At one time I considered a degree in philosophy; Steve actually got a minor in the subject; and Dave, well, thought about stuff.
Steve and I were trying to understand Dave's certainty regarding the existence of God. I should note that the philosophical position on God's existence wanders all over the board and depends upon which philosopher one reads. There are those that not only wholeheartedly endorse His divinity but have gone so far as to use that assumption as the basis for all of our experience (I'm looking at you, Berkeley), to those that considered the very concept of God a denial of humanity's future. To avoid confusion, therefore, one should approach God's existence carefully, perhaps by outlining the reasons one might have for a positive belief.
Dave, as it happens, had such a belief. Steve and I were trying to find out why. Beers were being consumed, voices raised. Finally, the matter came to a crux -- Dave asserted that he knew God existed . . . because he knew God existed.
At this point, let me share a wonderfully effective refutation of such solipsism and circular logic
- Grabbing your beer (bottled Guiness works wonderfully) by the bottle's neck, place your thumb over the bottle's mouth as you move the bottle toward your midsection.
- Squint your eyes.
- Give the bottle a few masturbatory shakes as you say (in this case), "I believe God exists, so therefore . . . "
- Remove your thumb as you finish the phrase, ". . . He EXISTS!" punctuating your fallacious declaration with an arcing spooge of beer jiz.
My improvised thought jerk got a great reaction from all involved. It did not, however, change any minds.
I've always wondered why.
For years, I've considered religious belief a wonderful motivator. If you believe beyond any doubt that just beyond that next ridge a land of milk and honey can be found, all you have to do is survive long enough to find it. Without actual proof that such lands exist, such beliefs might well be called delusional; that doesn't mean the lands don't exist, or that if they do the genetic jackpot won't be huge. Given that you may indeed find a verdant and fecund land on your delusional travels, your religious zeal might well give you the chance to propagate widely and well, passing on the belief gene to your offspring in the process.
What evidence did I have for assuming such a belief gene existed (other than observing drunk friends, of course)? Lately, quite a bit of evidence is mounting to suggest that many traits formerly thought obvious might have a hard-wire cause. Take the ability to see faces. Many people assume recognizing faces is just something we do naturally, something we learn to do. What few stop to consider is that doing something naturally and learning to do something are two very different phenomena. It turns out face recognition is a natural phenomenon simply because, thanks to the internet, there are folks out there who finally realize they are Face Blind:
For most of his childhood, Choisser thought he was normal. He just assumed that nobody saw faces. But slowly, it dawned on him that he was different. Other people recognized their mothers on the street. He did not. During the 1970s, as a small-town lawyer in the Illinois Ozarks, he struggled to convince clients that he was competent even though he couldn't find them in court. He never greeted the judges when he passed them on the street - everyone looked similarly blank to him - and he developed a reputation for arrogance. His father, also a lawyer, told him to pay more attention. His mother grew distant from him. He felt like he lived in a ghost world. Not being able to see his own face left him feeling hollow. . . .
In the medical literature, there were a few reports of head-injury and stroke victims who'd lost their ability to recognize faces. No one, as far as the doctors knew, had ever been born with the condition.
Conventional medicine, in other words, got him nowhere.
The condition, called prosopagnosia, has been known for years but always attributed to injury or trauma. Rare conditions tend to go unnoticed, since it takes a strong representative sample to note differences that cannot be explained through other means. Given the strong role faces play in our lives, the selective pressure to see and read faces is strong enough to keep the condition rare indeed. Once folks started gathering on a Yahoo community in 1996, though, that sample found itself.
To compare the ability to see faces to the ability to accept even the concept of God seems a stretch to many. To others, like myself, it seems perfectly natural. We, you see, can't see the point of a deity. We can't, to stretch the analogy, see his face.
This is exactly why I attributed the spiritual and diabolical sense of presence to possible brain damage in Part II, why I also speculated there about personality traits that make folks accept black and white models because their brains tire more easily. The behaviors these folks exhibit baffle and confound me. Don't get me wrong; I've been accused many, many times of having an exceptionally flexible imagination, of being perhaps too able to envision situations weird and wild. That I can't put myself in their shoes says, I think, more about them than me.
Still, something was missing.
The missing piece is something I've noted before. It's the same phenomenon, I believe, that popularized the term "evolution" to describe Darwin's theory of natural selection. Evolution originally meant the "unrolling of a book," a term applied to astronomy. Think of a jack-in-the-box. You turn the crank, listening to the tune, and know that eventually the Jack pops out of his box. In a like manner, a large grouping of hydrogen eventually coalesces, collapses upon itself, and ignites into a sun.
Natural selection, by contrast, involves a highly random element; nothing in our bodies knows beforehand what pressures will befall us and our offspring. Rather, random mutations (like those mentioned in the Lemski experiment in Part I), copying flaws in the genetic code that cause no untoward harm to the individual over time, modify the offspring's ability to succeed in future environments.
What's the difference? Natural selection is nothing like the sun. It's a difference of importance, an ordering of which is the cause and which the effect. What should come first, for example, the fact that we humans are the apparent apex of Creation, or the fact that tiny and inconvenient parasites appear just as adapted to their environment as we?
First, consider Herbert Spencer, the man who coined the term "survival of the fittest" and appropriated "evolution," both to describe Darwin's theory. From the wiki page on Spencer:
Spencer posited that all structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity to a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity, while being accompanied by a process of greater integration of the differentiated parts. This evolutionary process could be found at work, Spencer believed, throughout the cosmos. It was a universal law, applying to the stars and the galaxies as much as to biological organisms, and to human social organization as much as to the human mind. It differed from other scientific laws only by its greater generality, and the laws of the special sciences could be shown to be illustrations of this principle.
This attempt to explain the evolution of complexity was radically different to that to be found in Darwin’s Origin of Species. . . . Spencer is often, quite erroneously, believed to have merely appropriated and generalized Darwin’s work on natural selection. . . . (However) he only grudgingly incorporated natural selection into his preexisting overall system. Spencer believed that (his erroneous Lamarckian) evolutionary mechanism was also necessary to explain 'higher' evolution, especially the social development of humanity. Moreover, in contrast to Darwin, he held that evolution had a direction and an end-point, the attainment of a final state of 'equilibrium.'
(Emphasis mine.)
To review Spencer's perspective, someone who felt a principle applying "to the stars and the galaxies as much as to biological organisms" would probably feel inclined to use an astronomical term to describe natural selection. That bit about "human social organization" proves important too, since Spencer also created the "social Darwinist" model.
This might start to explain the sections I've emboldened for emphasis. Spencer could not completely accept the random and directionless implications Darwin himself constantly emphasized.
Take also British zoologist Ray Lankester, a man who not only, like Spencer, knew Darwin personally, but further regarded with disdain and contempt those who dismissed biology. He once declared, "We are no longer content to see biology scoffed at as inexact or gently dropped as natural history or praised for her relation to medicine. On the contrary, biology is the science whose development belongs to the day." (Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex, Touchstone, 2000, p. 16.)
Ah, but when it came to seeing just the evidence science presented without taint of his own Spencer-esque preconceptions, Lankester also succumbed to simply missing Darwin's main point. A Victorian gentleman of science himself, Lankester shared Spencer's belief about the role man played in the cosmos and on earth. "Progress" for him therefore involved continuing complexity. Those creatures which shed their complexity "degenerated" (though not in the biblical sense of the word), and degenerates were to be despised. He truly despised Sacculina carcini, a parasite that found degeneration a beautiful way to survive:
When it first hatched from its egg, it had a head, a mouth, a tail, a body divided into segments, and legs, which is exactly what you'd expect from a barnacle or other crustacean. But rather than growing into an animal that searched and struggled for its own food, Sacculina instead found itself a crab and wiggled into its shell. Once inside, Sacculina quickly degenerated, losing its segments, its legs, its tail, even its mouth. Instead, it grew a set of rootlike tendrils, which spread throughout the crab's body. It then used these roots to absorb food from the crab's body. . . .
Since there was no divide between the ascent of life and the history of civilization, Lankester saw in parasites a grave warning for humans. Parasites degenerated "just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organization this way." . . . "Possibly we are all drifting," he fretted, "tending to the condition of intellectual Barnacles."
An uninterrupted flow from nature to civilization meant that biology and morality were interchangeable.
(Zimmer, ibid, pp. 16-17, emphasis mine.)
Finally, take Friedrich Küchenmeister, a man who shared Lankester's thoughts. In the 1830s, Danish zoologist Johann Steenstrup speculated that certain creatures were actually not separate, but the same creature in different stages of its life cycle. He specifically did research on intestinal parasites called bladder worms suggesting they were an early stage development of another, yet undiscovered creature. He was proven right; bladder worms proved to be stunted tapeworms. This observation enraged Küchenmeister, a Dresden doctor, who wrote of these speculations,
It would be contrary to the wise arrangement of Nature which undertakes nothing without a purpose . . . . Such a theory of error contradicts the wisdom of the Creator and the laws of harmony and simplicity put into Nature."
(Zimmer, ibid, p. 8, emphasis mine.)
"Which undertakes nothing without a purpose." For Küchenmeister, that purpose was that every creature created by God had a purpose, that God created no "dead ends." For Spencer and Lankester, it was the steady march from simplicity to complexity, always struggling to attain "higher" status amongst other creatures. The common thread; purpose.
Purpose. Finally, we get to the evidence. Today's feed from New Scientist had a study that attempted to quantify our tendency to seek purpose. Though preliminary, it noted:
Religion might not be the only reason people buy into creationism and intelligent design, psychological experiments suggest.
No matter what their religious beliefs, college-educated adults frequently agree with purpose-seeking yet false explanations of natural phenomena - finches diversified in order to survive, for instance.
"The very fact of belief in purpose itself might lead you to favour intelligent design," says Deborah Kelemen, a psychologist at Boston University, who led the study. . . .
"What her work suggests is that the creationist side has a huge leg up early on because it fits our natural tendencies," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University. "It has implications for why most people on earth are creationists, I think."
For this reason, it's not surprising that non-religious, college-educated adults fall back on purpose-seeking explanations.
(Emphasis mine.)
We humans tells stories. We use these stories not just to entertain ourselves, but to instruct our children, to pass on information to others. Stories that stick, stories that get told time and time again, fall into certain patterns that make them easily recognizable and memorable. The good ones have beginnings, middles, and ends; the good ones reveal a trait everyone can recognize, share a lesson all can find valuable.
This study exploring the tenacity of purpose suggests how very much our story telling and hearing brains are adapted to lessons derived through story, how very much our Ptolemic selves see our post-Coppernican universe. Some of us can see bananas and peanut butter as a gift from God and proof that evolution fails simply by forgetting the agricultural selection pressure that may have formed the banana's shape and a little thing called "Pasteurization."
This doesn't mean that stories are bad, that they mislead us. Far from it. It only means our ability to perceive the facts of the universe might be overwhelmed by our tendency to order these perceptions in a manner evolved over the millennia, an ordering designed to be simple and easily administered. It only means we must keep those tendencies close in our minds when we read something we find puzzling, something like a worldview that claims we might be just as evolved as crab parasites or bladder worms; that life might only bear the purpose we personally give it; that we might indeed be alone in this universe, but that behind that seemingly devastating thought one can find solice beyond imagination:
What meaning can any of our struggles and triumphs have? What point is there?
And that attitude, tragically, misses the point entirely.
For you see, if we were made a brief time ago in God's image and put here for the sole and express purpose of worshipping and exalting God, then what we are now is what we will always be. There is an upward limit on the things we are capable of. We are born disgraced, pale shadows of the original models who fell from that grace, and our job is to struggle through this brief life of misery and tears hoping we somehow manage to do and say the right things so that god will rescue us. We have no purpose other than that which is given to us by god--and looking around, I gotta say it's not much of a purpose.
But if we are evolved monkeys...
Ah, now things are different. If we are evolved monkeys, if we are the result of natural processes that conspired across a vast sea of time to give rise to sapient, self-directing entities capable of understanding themselves and the physical world, then all bets are off. Now, there is no limit to what we can become. Now, anything within the physical laws of the universe is potentially within our grasp. Now, we have the power we once reserved to our gods; now, we can, through the application of our will, make of ourselves anything we choose to be.
And now we have meaning and purpose far beyond that of crawling around chanting to some insecure creator-god about how great and magnificent he is, and would he please please not strike us dead? Now, we are the part of the universe capable of understanding itself. We are of the universe; we are a part of it, not above it; but we are unique in all the universe we know in that we can understand it. We are aware. We are the universe's way of understanding itself.
We are the universe's way of understanding itself. For me, that is perhaps the greatest purpose any of us can have.