Andrew Sullivan linked to my conversion story recently, and there’s been some interesting discussion in response. It was this particular part of my essay that generated the most controversy, and I can’t say I’m surprised:

"If everything that we call heroism and glory, and all the significance of all great human achievements, can be reduced to some neurons firing in the human brain, then it’s all destined to be extinguished at death. And considering that the entire span of homo sapiens’ existence on earth wouldn’t even amount to a blip on the radar screen of a 5-billion-year-old universe, it seemed silly to pretend like the 60-odd-year life of some random organism on one of trillions of planets was something special. (I was a blast at parties.) By simply living my life, I felt like I was living a lie. I acknowledged the truth that life was meaningless, and yet I kept acting as if my own life had meaning, as if all the hope and love and joy I’d experienced was something real, something more than a mirage produced by the chemicals in my brain."

Will Wilkinson disagreed with my methodology for deducing meaningfulness, saying that “the best reason to think ‘life is meaningful’ is because one’s life seems meaningful. If you can’t stop ‘acting as if my own life had meaning,’ it’s probably because it does have meaning.” Over at the New York Times, Ross Douthat responded to Wilkinson by saying that we need to look at that idea a little more closely. Douthat offered a thought experiment in which he described soldiers in the trenches who feel like the overall war is meaningless, yet find purpose in their bonds with one another. Ultimately, he concluded:

"This is a very natural way to approach warfare…and it’s a very natural way to approach everyday life as well. But the part of the point of religion and philosophy is address questions that lurk beneath these natural rhythms, instead of just taking our feelings of meaningfulness as the alpha and omega of human existence. In the context of the war, of course the battle feels meaningful. In the context of daily life as we experience it, of course our joys and sorrows feel intensely meaningful. But just as it surely makes a (if you will) meaningful difference why the war itself is being waged, it surely makes a rather large difference whether our joys and sorrows take place in, say, C.S. Lewis’s Christian universe or Richard Dawkins’s godless cosmos. Saying that “we know life is meaningful because it feels meaningful” is true for the first level of context, but non-responsive for the second."

Exactly. That’s smart-person speak for the point I was fumbling around to make: All of the atheistic arguments I’ve heard in favor of the meaningfulness of human life assume that our experiences are valuable. “I volunteered at a soup kitchen this weekend, and that brought others happiness and gave me a sense of fulfillment,” the thinking goes. “That gives my life meaning right here, right now, whether or not there’s a soul or an afterlife.” It sounds lovely. But I don’t think it works.

Let’s say we have the following equation, and I have the freedom to make X whatever I want it to be:

X * 0 = _____

I could do something cool like make X = (21 + 2 + 10 + 28 + 22 + 14 + 7), adding up the days of the month for family and friends’ birthdays so that their total is a number that represents the month and day my husband and I were married. Or I could carefully craft some other combination of numbers that was deeply significant to me. But the equation would still look like this:

(21 + 2 + 10 + 28 + 22 + 14 + 7) * 0 = _____

No matter how many or how few numbers I use, it would still yield the same result: Zero.

If consciousness is just a mirage produced by chemical reactions in our brains, and if the mirage permanently flickers out on the day those reactions cease, then do any of our conscious thoughts really matter? Sure, you can have an impact on others who will live on after you die, but one day they will disappear into thin air too. To my mind, all this talk of valuable life experiences adding up to something meaningful is like talking about how to make X add up to something meaningful in the above equation. In the end, it’s all for naught.

This, of course, does not necessarily mean that the atheist materialist worldview is false. Whether or not life has any meaning if atheism is true is a separate question from whether or not it is true in the first place. My intent here is simply to point out that you can’t have it both ways: Modern atheism denies that human consciousness is rooted in anything other than the chemicals in our brains, thus rejecting the idea that any of our experiences will last outside of time; yet it also tries to say that our consciousness and experiences are meaningful. I don’t see how both of those assertions can be true.

Interestingly, this is a debate I’ve had with atheists when I was an atheist, and with Christians now that I’m a Christian. It’s not only nonbelievers who argue that you can find meaning within the atheist worldview: I’ve talked to quite a few Christians who say that if there were no eternal life for the soul, they would still find life to be meaningful. Maybe there’s some gene that allows you to sense meaning even if you believe that you’re faced with complete annihilation? If so, I don’t have it, because that mindset is not one I’ve ever understood.
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Psychologies)

When something stops working, our first reaction is often to find someone who knows how to fix it. Whether it’s a car, a computer, or a toaster, most of us aren’t inclined to try and tinker around with some machine that we are just as likely to make worse as better. We are all pretty good at telling when something isn’t working right, but it’s far more difficult to discern why. Clearly this piece of technology is designed to do some useful task, and when it stops doing that task, we need someone to reorder its parts to get it working again.

In certain ways this is exactly how many people look at the natural world as well. Many natural things obey observable patterns or standards. Squirrels tend to gather nuts for the winter; apple seeds tend to grow into apple trees; and water tends to flow downhill. If one of these normal trends fails, we notice, even if we don’t call a mechanic to look under the hood of the withered apple tree. While we may have some inkling as to what might have gone wrong to interrupt the process, true knowledge of the process is left to the experts. And for a long time, those experts have been telling us that nature, just like the machine, is simply a matter of understanding the parts.

We are basically told by these experts that our intuition that natural things move towards some end or purpose is just a convenient way of looking at things—a pretty picture to dress up our ignorance. The alternate model proposed is that one simply break the natural process down into its parts to see how each works, both individually and with the other parts, to produce the apparent purpose. By this process we can banish any talk of natural ends from our discussion of science.

There are a whole host of philosophical and scientific problems that this trend in modern thought raises and ample grounds to question the reasonableness of the project of denying natural ends. For instance, if you are going to explain away something that looks like a natural end by claiming that it is simply the purposeless motion of its parts, then you had better hope that the parts themselves don’t demonstrate motion to an end. Inevitably, parts are broken down into other smaller parts and the question only temporarily forestalled. The apparent purpose of the apple seed growing into an apple tree is slowly stripped away as we descend down to more and more fundamental layers of explanation. The descent passes through organs, cells, molecules, and atoms until we get to the fundamental particles of nature at which point the claim is that any semblance of a natural end has been seemingly ground into nothingness.

The problem is that the ends never actually go away. Electrons and quarks and any other particles we care to consider may not act like any normal macroscopic objects, but that does not mean they do not have natural ends. Quantum Field Theory is far from intuitive, but the motions and interactions it describes follow a coherent order and structure, despite the fact that it comes with a good dose of quantum “weirdness.”

One great example of the weird teleology of particle physics is the quark. As best we can tell, the protons and neutrons that make up the nuclei of all atoms are themselves made up of smaller particles that we call quarks. One particularly odd thing about the quarks is that, while we are confident they exist in abundance, we have never directly observed them in the way we have observed the particles they make up. The problem is that the “strong” force that binds several quarks into a “bound state” like a proton or neutron gets stronger as you try to separate one quark from the rest, unlike the electromagnetic or gravitational forces, which weaken with distance. At some point, as more and more energy is expended trying to keep hold of that one quark in the proton, there is enough energy in the system for new quarks to be created. Some of these new quarks will form a new bound state with the escaping quark and one will replace it in the original proton. We simply never find a lone quark, only bundles of quarks

Whether quarks are truly fundamental particles or are themselves made up of something smaller, one thing should be clear: they have a natural tendency towards something beyond themselves—a bound state with other quarks. That is to say, they have a natural end. So, for all the efforts of some people to explain away natural ends, modern science simply won’t oblige.
 
 
This article first appeared on DominicanaBlog.com, an online publication of the Dominican Students of the Province of St. Joseph who live and study at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. It was written by Br. Thomas Davenport, a Dominican student brother of the Province of St. Joseph. He graduated from Stanford University with a PhD in Physics. Used with permission.
 
(Image credit: Vwamlausanne.com)