The Meaning of Life (Chapter 3): Religion as Meaning

Religion: noun. The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Most of us are given the meaning of life as soon as we are born – the meaning of life for many, if not most, people is their parents’ religion.

Fourteen days after my birth, I was baptized a Roman Catholic by Father Michael J. Healy at St. Augustine’s of Canterbury Church in Montreal – the same Father Healey who would marry Anne and me on a cold Friday in February 28 years later. In first grade at the local (public) Catholic school, Saint Antonin’s, I was taught the Catechism – a catalogue of everything Roman Catholics believe. I remember some of it by heart:

Who made me? God made me.
Why did God make me? God made me to know, love and serve Him.

At age 7, I went to Confession for the first time and made my First Communion. At age thirteen I was “confirmed” by the bishop. Through the sacrament of Confirmation Catholics reaffirm (as adults of sorts) the faith into which they were baptized as infants and are given a third name – in my case, David. It is the Christian version of the Jewish Bar Mitzvah. So, by age 13 I had all the meaning anyone needed. The Catholic Church, like all of the great religions, has all of the answers. As Pope John Paul II said to 19,000 students in New York City on October 3rd, 1979:

When you wonder about the mystery of yourself, look to Christ, who gives you the meaning of life. When you wonder what it means to be a mature person, look to Christ, who is the fulfillment of humanity. And when you wonder about your role in the future of the world … look to Christ.

It is all very reassuring. And it did work for me – for a time. I was particularly pious, if not religious, as a child. I remember that in elementary school I would walk to seven different churches on Holy Thursday (the day before Good Friday), as per the Catholic tradition. It took me about three hours. In retrospect, I probably liked the obsessive-compulsive quality of the task!

But somewhere in my mid-teens, I began to have serious doubts about my faith. I found myself pretending to go to Sunday Mass. I would leave the house at 8:30 – in plenty of time to get to 9 o’clock Mass at St. Malachy’s Church. But I would not go to church; I would wander the streets and return home at 10:30, so that my mother wouldn’t be any the wiser (my father wouldn’t have cared one way or the other). I felt ashamed of myself but not ashamed enough to actually sit through Mass. By the time I was 18, I was openly disdainful of believers. I mocked the pilgrims who, on their knees, climbed the hundreds of steps to St. Joseph’s Oratory on Queen Mary Road. I saw my mother’s piety as ignorance. At age 27 I returned to the Church because by then my fiancé, Anne, was the only meaning in my life and she was a devout Catholic.

There are two problems with inheriting your parents’ religion as the meaning in your life:

1. You don’t have a chance to properly examine all the alternatives, including agnosticism and atheism, and then make a free choice. Until my first contact with the Jesuits, at age 18, the teachers and priests in my life did not encourage me to study the tenets of the world’s other great religions. All of the great religions operate in this way. Like the Juggernaut of Hindu myth, the idols of the great religions are dragged along in procession atop an impressive carriage under whose wheels all questions and doubts are crushed. It is my view that if an individual discovers meaning in life, instead of being given it, that meaning will be far more robust. According to Viktor Frankl, “Meaning must be found and cannot be given”.

2. The other problem with inheriting your parents’ religion (or even choosing a religion) as the meaning in your life is more serious. It is the high probability that your religious beliefs are in fact false. There are four major religions in the world today: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism (the fifth largest, Judaism, is only 1/25th the size of the fourth largest so I am not including it). These four religions are not compatible with one another; indeed some of the varieties of Christianity and Islam are incompatible with each other. With my apologies for greatly oversimplifying, here are the tenets of the four religions:

• Christianity is the most populous and widespread religion in the world, with about 2.1 billion adherents in 260 countries. Christians believe that Jesus Christ was (and is) God and that mankind was reconciled to God through Christ’s death on the cross.
• Islam, with 1.4 billion adherents in 184 countries, is the second largest religion in the world. Unlike the Hindus, Muslims believe that there is only one God, called Allah in Arabic, and that the last and greatest of God’s messengers (greater than Jesus Christ, who was definitely NOT God) was the Prophet Mohammad. Islam is obviously not compatible with Christianity. If the Christians are correct in their beliefs, then the Muslims are misguided. And vice versa. (Many people may be surprised that Muslims love Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary (peace be upon her) is the only woman specifically named in the Quran. The Quran discusses Mary’s miraculous conception as well. She asked the Angel Gabriel: “How shall I have a son, seeing that no man has touched me, and I am not unchaste?” (Quran 19:20). The Angel Gabriel said: “So (it will be): thy Lord saith, ‘That is easy for Me: and (We wish) to appoint him as a Sign unto men and a Mercy from Us.’ It is a matter (so) decreed.” (Quran 19:21). Mary then becomes pregnant. )

• Hinduism, the oldest of the big four religions, has about 837 million adherents worldwide but is found almost nowhere outside India. Hinduism has many gods, the greatest of which are Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Hindus believe that all creatures go through a cycle of rebirth (reincarnation). The cycle of rebirth can only be broken by spiritual self-realization – the union of self with the Brahman or Godhead. Hinduism is totally incompatible with the two most populous religions. If either of the other two religions is correct in its beliefs, then the Hindus are wrong. And vice versa.

• Buddhism. There are an estimated 350 million people in 92 countries who adhere to Buddhist beliefs and practices. Like the Hindus, Buddhists believe in reincarnation but that is where the similarity ends. The cycle of rebirth can be broken but not by union with God (The concept of a personal God does not fit into the Buddhist system of religion. In general, Buddhists are pantheistic in their view of God. Many view God as an impersonal force which is made up of all living things and holds the universe together); the cycle can only be broken by achieving Nirvana, the extinction of all desire. Buddhism, a religion without a god, is as different from the other three as it is possible to be. In fact, having no God, it does not even meet the Oxford English Dictionary’s criteria for a religion (see above).

My point in describing the tenets of the four most populous religions is that if the meaning in your life comes from your religion, the meaning in your life has, by definition, a very high probability of being meaningless. The best-case scenario is that the most populous religion, Christianity, is factual (Jesus Christ is God), in which case a little over 2 billion people embrace a meaning in life that, in fact, is real. But even in this best-case scenario, it means that the majority of people on earth, namely two and half billion Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists – not to mention the Jews, Confucians, and Sikhs, etc. – cling to a meaning of life which is, to put it bluntly, misguided.

Thus, we have here a true dilemma: on the one hand, only religion – not science – has anything to say about the purpose of life, but, on the other hand, most people who find meaning in life in their denominational religious belief are, by definition, wrong.

Of course, it is possible to believe in God without joining any particular religious sect. This is sometimes referred to as spirituality (as opposed to religion). The central defining characteristic of spirituality is a sense of connection to a much greater whole which includes an emotional experience of religious awe and reverence. But as meaning goes, the belief in God, by itself, is pretty thin gruel. The reason people search for meaning is that such meaning has implications for how one should live and the purpose that derives from such meaning makes it easier to bear the suffering that is inevitable in life. When you are all alone and it’s late at night, the thought that Jesus Christ is your personal Lord and Savior, may help you through the night. The thought that there is probably an unknowable Force that guides the universe is not much of a consolation.

Another way out of this dilemma is the Baha’i faith. There are approximately 6 million members of the faith and the center of the Baha’i faith is in Haifa, Israel. Founded in Iran in 1844, Baha’i teaches that the revealed religions of the world are in agreement and that the respective prophet-founders (Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ, Mohammad and the Baha’i prophet, Bahá’u’lláh) of each of the religions revealed the will of God for a particular time and place in history. Boy, that’s a stretch! Well-intentioned, maybe, but a stretch. By this account, 2006 years ago God sent a messenger (Christ) who told us He was God, then, 570 years later, God sent us another messenger (Mohammad) who told us that Christ was not God after all. According to the Baha’i account, God keeps changing his (or her) mind or he (or she) has a strange sense of humor!

The bottom line (for me) is that the kind of meaning I am searching for cannot be found in religion. But who am I to say? Many people brighter than I am believe. The Jesuits who were my teachers at Loyola of Montreal are the most intelligent group of people I have ever encountered and they believe. Similarly, many of the Existentialists (see next chapter), like Kiekegaard, Tillich, Buber, Maritain, even Frankl, who admit that life, per se, is apparently meaningless, impose religious meaning on their own lives.

All I’m saying is that it doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t get me through the night.
So science and religion have not been helpful in my quest for the meaning of life. Maybe philosophy will provide some answers.

The Meaning of Life (Chapter 2: Scientific Theories)

Science: Those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws, sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics. (Oxford English Dictionary)

The question “What is the meaning of life?” means different things to different people. The vagueness of the question is inherent in the word “meaning”, which opens the question to many interpretations, such as:

• “What is the origin of life?” and “What is the nature of life and of the universe in which we live?” – scientific questions

• “What is the purpose of life?” – a theological question.

• “What is valuable in life?” – a philosophic question.

Let’s look first at what science has to say. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, this is science’s answer to the question: “What is the meaning of life?” (Isn’t Google a wonderful thing!):

The origin of the universe:

The Big Bang Theory is the dominant scientific theory about the origin of the universe. According to the theory, the universe was created about 15 billion years ago from an explosion that hurled matter in all directions. This explosion is known as the Big Bang. When this event occurred all of the matter and energy of the universe was concentrated in a mass the size of a golf ball. Where that golf ball came from no one has a clue. The Big Bang Theory is credited to Edwin Hubble. Hubble made the observation that the universe is continuously expanding. He also discovered that a galaxy’s velocity is proportional to its distance from us. Galaxies that are twice as far from us move twice as fast. This observation provided the foundation for the Big Bang Theory because it confirms that it has taken every galaxy the same amount of time to move from a common starting position (the exploding golf ball) to its current position. The Big Bang Theory received its strongest confirmation in 1964 when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, using a radio telescope, heard radiation from the farthest reaches of the universe. This discovery of what is assumed to be the radioactive aftermath of the initial explosion (which took a long time to reach us) lent much credence to the Big Bang Theory. Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

The nature of the universe:

The universe may be infinite in size, or it may be of only finite size. Strange as it may seem, the universe could be finite, a finite universe would not have to have any edges or an end, it could ‘wraparound’. The universe may be a curved three-dimensional space that wraps around and closes on itself. If you set out in a spacecraft heading in one direction, you could eventually return to the same spot from the opposite direction.

The entire universe, or just the visible portion of the universe if it’s infinite, is roughly 27 billion light-years across. That’s 159,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.
The universe is full of stars, arranged in enormous groups called galaxies. Our Sun is one star among 100 billion in the Milky Way Galaxy. And there are about 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each with a comparable number of stars.

The origin of life:

There are four competing theories as to the origin of life on earth:

• Life arose spontaneously. And the first organism was able to grow and reproduce, which led to the evolution of the diverse life forms that now exist on Earth. But under this scenario the original organism would have appeared by the random and serendipitous coming together of all the necessary materials under exactly the right conditions. This is somewhat like believing that because while digging you found a rock that looked like a brick, if you dug long and hard enough you would eventually find something that looked like the Sistine Chapel!

• Life evolved from simpler organisms. Some scientists feel that life originated spontaneously as a much simpler organism than any now found on earth. A difficulty with this idea is the absence of any current examples of this “much simpler organism”. In general, appearance of more complex organisms has not resulted in disappearance of simpler forms. We still have cockroaches. We still have fruit flies.

• Its unknowable. Some scientists take the view that the origin of the primordial organism is “unknowable”, meaning that not only do we not know but we are unlikely to ever know and that the subject is therefore more appropriate for philosophy or religion than science.

• It came from outer space. Some believe that life originated elsewhere in the universe and was then somehow carried here – perhaps on a meteor. Of course, this theory suffers from the same deficiencies as the first two.

The origin of human life:

Once you had some form of life on earth, more and more sophisticated forms could evolve by a process called natural selection. The modern understanding of evolution is based on Charles Darwin’s theory popularized in his 1859 book, The Origin of Species. Natural selection is the process by which individual organisms with favorable traits are more likely to survive and reproduce, thus passing on those traits to their offspring, with the result that beneficial heritable traits become more common in the next generation. Thus far, humans are the most sophisticated form of life produced by this process.

Actually, I like to think of myself as a scientest. I think that science is the only way to the truth about anything and everything. But the problem is that science cannot go beyond the data available, and most of the really important questions cannot be addressed using the scientific method.. With respect to the question, “What is the origin of the universe?”, I am sure that the Big Bang Theory is correct. Hubble’s observation that galaxies which are far away are travelling much faster than galaxies that are close to us is consistent with an explosive beginning. If all the pieces exploded from the same point, then the pieces that are now farthest away must have been travelling faster than the pieces that are still near the point of explosion. And the two guys that got the Nobel prize for hearing the radioactive aftermath of the initial explosion are, I’m sure, deserving of the prize. The problem for me is that no one has any idea how that exploding golf ball got there in the first place. Now, that’s a question that really interests me! Similarly, regarding the nature of the universe, I know why the scientests say that it may be finite or it may be infinite. The problem, again, is that scientests cannot go beyond the data available and if the leading edge of the exploding universe is too far away from us for the light from there ever to reach us (light travels exactly 186,000 miles per second relative to the observer – the only constant in nature) then the scientests cannot know if what they see is all there is or if there are pieces of the universe beyond the furthest one they can see. Still, the answer is disappointing. The scientests answer to the origin of life is even more disillusioning. There are four theories, one of which is that the origin if life is unknowable. Again, I understand that science is limited by the data available but I am disappointed still.

The only piece of the science answer that I find totally credible and satisfying is the Theory of Evolution. The theory adequately describes (at least for me) how primitive life evolved into higher life forms and finally into human life but it too is somewhat unsatisfying in that it fails to account for the origin of the first microscopic life form.

To put it bluntly and with all due respect to the Nobel prize winners who came up with it, I find science’s answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life” both pathetically incomplete and profoundly unsatisfying?

When I’m all alone and it’s late at night I take no consolation from the knowledge that the universe originated 15 billion years ago with an exploding golf ball. Nor am I impressed with the fact that the scientists know that, if the universe is not infinite (it may be infinite) it is 159,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across. Science’s four competing theories on the origin of life (one of which is that it is unknowable) I find, again with all due respect, sad and silly.

There are people who do not need any more meaning in their lives than what science provides. The husband of a friend of mine believes that he will survive death because the atoms in his body, after it decomposes, will not be destroyed but will eventually be reconstituted into other molecules. Some of his atoms will eventually be contained in rocks or trees, others will migrate to the bodies of other living creatures – even humans. Wordsworth expresses this notion in one of the “Lucy” poems, written in homage to a three-year-old girl who died:

Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, ‘A lovlier flower
On earth was never sown;
This child I to myself will take,
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.

‘Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.

I remember reading somewhere that my body may well contain a few of the atoms that constituted Shakespeare’s body. So, in that sense, Shakespeare, who died in 1616, survives in me! And several hundred years from now most humans will have in their bodies a few of the atoms of my body. The husband of my friend, finds this thought consoling. Not me.

So, scientific theories are really of no help to me in my search for meaning in life. I’m looking for more than that. Let’s turn to religion, which for many people – perhaps most people – constitutes the meaning in their lives. Maybe religion will fare better.

Many great scientests were also very religious. Albert Einstein was one:

“…To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men…”

He pointed out that the two domains, science and religion, do not overlap:

“…science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and ouside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships beween facts…”

But he also said:

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”.

Let’s see what religion has to say about the meaning of life.

Man’s Search for Meaning (The Meaning of Life:Chapter 1)

I have been searching for meaning in my life for at least 35 years. In October of 1969, I began my collection of quotes, Words to Remember, and the very first entry was the last sentence of Thornton Wilder’s novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey: “There is the land of the living and the land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only meaning, the only survival.” Obviously, in October of 1969, at age 29, married for just 20 months and father to a one-month-old son, I was still interested enough in the views of others as to what constituted the meaning of life that I started writing down anything I read on the topic.

I am not alone. I think most people, once they discover that all paths lead but to the grave, ask themselves:

“So, what is the meaning of life?”
“Why are we here?”
“How should I live my life?”
or similar questions.

Why do we do this?

Many writers think that the search for meaning is a natural reaction to the feeling of emptiness and the experience of absurdity that is part and parcel of being human.

The Russian playwright, Anton Chekov, in his play, “The three sisters”, puts these words on Masha’s lips:

But man has to have some faith, or at least he’s got to seek it, otherwise his life will be empty, empty…How can you live and not know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why the stars shine in the sky!…you must either know why you live, or else…nothing matters…everything’s just nonsense and waste…

Albert Camus, the French-Algerian novelist, dramatist and philosopher, agrees completely with Chekov:

Losing life is a trifle and I will have that courage when I need it. But to see the meaning of this life vanishing, our reason for existing disappearing, that is what I cannot stand. No one can live without reason.

Another playwright (and the first President of the Czech Republic), Václav Havel, puts it even more forcefully:

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning—in other words, of absurdity—the more energetically meaning is sought.

The American philosopher, Eric Hoffer, says we need meaning to make sense of our suffering:

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.

The writer who had the most to say about man’s search for meaning was the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, who wrote a best-selling book called Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl postulated that the search for meaning is the primary motivation of humans. He compared his theory with those of two other Viennese psychiatrists, Freud and Adler. He noted that whereas Freud proposed a will to pleasure (Libido) as the root of all human motivation, and Adler a will to power (the drive for superiority), he (Frankl) assumes that a will to meaning is our primary motivation.

As evidence for this view, Frankl points to research that shows a strong relationship between meaninglessness (as measured by “purpose in life” tests) and such behaviours as criminality and involvement with drugs. He says that watching violence and drug use on television, in movies, even in music, convinces the meaning-hungry that their lives will improve if they imitate their “heroes.”
He says that people often become anxious on Sunday afternoons because all of the distractions that keep them from confronting the meaninglessness of their lives are unavailable then. “Sunday neurosis”, he calls it.

He then goes on to explain how many mental and emotional disorders are caused indirectly by a lack of meaning in one’s life. The hypochondriac, for example, not understanding that his anxiety is due to a lack of meaning, focuses the anxiety on the possibility of contracting AIDS; the agoraphobic sees her anxiety as coming from the world outside her door; the person with a social phobia focuses on performing in public. All anxiety neurotics thus try to make sense of their discomfort with life – without even realizing that the source of their anxiety is what Frankl calls the existential vacuum in their lives.

Similarly he describes the trio of aggression, addiction, and depression as symptomatic of the feeling of meaninglessness or existential vacuum that exists in our society.

In the first lecture of my Theories of Personality class I say to the students: “One test of any one of these personality theories is whether it is true for you. Has the theory matched your own experience? Does it explain what you have done and felt and thought?” If you use that test on these three views of the human motivation, many of you will probably come to the conclusion that I did, namely, that Frankl is closer to the truth than are Freud or Adler.