Instead of meaningless? How exactly did we get from “Alone” to “Meaningless” via eloquence from tenured pundits? Where do we buy return tickets?
A blogging neurologist asks this obvious question. From Steven Novella at The Ness:
Until, however, we detect actual aliens or their signals, the rest of the factors in the equation are likely to remain a mystery. Put simply – we have a sample size of one. We don’t know how likely life is to develop intelligence, and intelligence technology, and how long such civilizations tend to last. We won’t know until we encounter evidence of aliens.
And, if there are few or no other aliens out there, we will never know the full answer. We would only have increasingly negative evidence and the sense that we are alone.
This does not have to be a depressing thought, however, although it would be disappointing…
If we are the beneficiaries of a fantastically unlikely series of events, so unlikely that there is only one example in 2 trillion galaxies over billions of years, then we should take all the more care to value and preserve that civilization. More.
Novella is responding to a recent study of the 1961 Drake Equation (fill in the numbers yourself, aliens are everywhere) in light of actual study of exoplanets, which concluded, don’t wait up for the extraterrestrials. The Drake Equation was popularized by Carl Sagan (1934–1996) , among others.
See also: SETI reacts to the new study that says not to wait up for extraterrestrials
and
Researchers: We have dissolved the Fermi Paradox!
What should make us feel special is not that we are alone in this universe, but the fact that our gracious Creator made us in IMAGO DEI. Sadly many people reject that, therefore they rightly feel there’s nothing special about us. Let’s pray for them.
I have long been intrigued by the populace’s gradual indoctrination into the current worldview of human insignificance.
Being a cynical old bugger I can’t help wondering if there’s an agenda behind it.
“Hey guys, here’s the deal:
“You’re just worthless specks of matter on a tiny rock orbiting a humdrum star in the arse-end of a mediocre galaxy, lost amongst billions of other galaxies in a mediocre universe, lost amongst infinite gazillions of of other universes in a multiverse that came into existence for no particular reason…..
“What’s that? You’re feeling worthless and depressed?
“Never fear! We have the answer! Our Corporation has lots and lots of toys you can buy, to distract you from your desperate plight, and we loads of nicotine/antidepressants/alcohol/porn/computer games/TV shows to give you a feel good fix for a couple of hours a day. Make your cheque payable to….”
This is the more puzzling because the reality of the situation is …..
If humanity didn’t exist (and let’s assume we are unique in our level of consciousness), what would the universe be like? Most people imagine it would go on looking just as it does now.
But…it would look like nothing, because there would be no eyes to see it. It would feel, sound, and taste like nothing.
Without a human brain to decode incoming signals into conscious inner experience, the universe would be nothing more than a mass of mathematical probability distributions, and for all practical purposes, would have no existence whatsoever.
WE bring the universe into existence through our consciousness!
That seems a pretty big deal to me, and about as far away from the gospel of human insignificance as it’s possible to get.
Atheists will often try to claim that our lives have no real meaning or purpose because of the Copernican Principle and/or the Principle of Mediocrity. Specifically, the ‘principle of mediocrity’ assumes that nothing is special about humanity’s situation
Stephen Hawking, via the Copernican Principle and/or The Principle of Mediocrity, once stated “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.,,,”
And yet, despite the fact that practically everybody, including the vast majority of Christians, hold that the Copernican principle, and by default “The Principle of Mediocrity’, are unquestionably true, the plain fact of the matter is that the Copernican Principle has now been overturned by both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Which happen to be two of our very best, most precisely tested, theories ever in the history of science:
Einstein himself stated that, The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS [coordinate systems].”
Fred Hoyle and George Ellis add their considerable weight here, in regards to General Relativity overturning the Copernican Principle, in these following two quotes:
As Einstein himself noted, there simply is no experimental test that can be performed that can prove that the earth is not the center of the universe:
Even Stephen Hawking himself, who claimed that we are just chemical scum on an insignificant planet, stated that it is not true that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong,,, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.”
In fact, in the 4-Dimensional space-time of Einstein’s General Relativity, it is left completely open for whomever is making a model of the universe to decide for themselves what is to be considered central in the universe:
Even individual people can be considered central in the universe in the four-dimensional space-time of General Relativity,,,
,,, Moreover, when Einstein first formulated both Special and General relativity, he gave a hypothetical observer a privileged frame of reference in which to make measurements in the universe.
Whereas, on the other hand, in Quantum Mechanics it is the measurement itself that gives each observer a privileged frame of reference in the universe. As the following researcher commented, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
Moreover Steven Weinberg himself, an atheist, noted that in quantum mechanics, in what is termed ‘the instrumentalist approach’, humans are brought into the laws of physics at the most fundamental level instead of humans being a result of the laws of physics as Darwinists had falsely imagined us to be.
Needless to say, Atheists don’t like the “instrumentalist approach” of quantum mechanics since it, by letting free will into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level., directly undermines the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, the “instrumentalist approach”, in spite of how atheists may personally feel about it, is experimentally confirmed to be true by contextuality and/or by the Kochen-Speckter Theorem.
In regards to contextuality we find that In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation.,,, and,,, Measurement outcomes depend on all the other measurements that are performed – the full context of the experiment.
Contextuality means that quantum measurements can not be thought of as simply revealing some pre-existing properties of the system under study.
And as Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Because of such evidence as this in quantum mechanics, Richard Conn Henry, who is Professor of Physics at John Hopkins University, stated this “It is more than 80 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics gave us the most fundamental insight ever into our nature: the overturning of the Copernican Revolution, and the restoration of us human beings to centrality in the Universe.”
Moreover, on top of the overturning of the Copernican principle by both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, in the following video physicist Neil Turok states that we live in the middle, or at the geometric mean, between the largest scale in physics and the smallest scale in physics:
And here is a picture that gets his point across very clearly:
Thus, besides both Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity overturning of the Copernican principle, the centrality of life in the universe is also established by yet another fairly impressive angle in physics in which life is found to be at ‘the geometric mean’ or quote unquote ‘the middle’ of the universe.
Moreover besides this fairly compelling evidence from physics, in molecular biology we find that every molecule in our bodies is literally screaming to us that we have objective meaning, value, and purpose for our lives.
As Professor of physiology Denis Noble notes in the following article, “it is virtually impossible to speak of living beings for any length of time without using teleological and normative language—words like “goal,” “purpose,” “meaning,” “correct/incorrect,” “success/failure,” etc.”
And in the following article Stephen Talbott challenges scientists and philosophers to “pose a single topic for biological research, doing so in language that avoids all implication of agency, cognition, and purposiveness”
This working biologist agrees with Talbott’s assessment and states, ‘we biologists use words that imply intentionality, functionality, strategy, and design in biology–we simply cannot avoid them.’
Thus, since it is impossible for molecular biologists to speak of molecular biology for any length of time without using language that directly implies goal directed purposes, and/or teleology,
,,, then it is hardly fair for Darwinian atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and William Provine to falsely claim, as they do in these following quotes, that there is no ultimate meaning in life and that we live in a universe of ‘nothing but pitiless indifference’
In fact, given the the fact that teleology, i.e. goal directed purpose, is so intricately infused into life at such a fundamental molecular level, I would hold that it takes a rather large amount of willful intellectual blindness on the part of evolutionary biologists for them to say that life gives no indication of purpose or meaning.
The plain fact of the matter, despite what leading evolutionary biologists, and Atheists in general, may claim, is that every one of the billion, trillion protein molecules in our bodies screams that we have a intrinsic meaning and purpose for our lives.
As Stephen Talbott goes on to state in the following article which happens to be entitled “How Biologists Lost Sight Of The Meaning Of Life And Are Now Staring It In The Face”, “A given cell, typically contains more than a billion protein molecules at any one time. ,,, “The human body is formed by trillions of individual cells.,,, And then we hear that all this meaningful activity is, somehow, meaningless or a product of meaninglessness. This, I believe, is the real issue troubling the majority of the American populace when they are asked about their belief in evolution. They see one thing and then are told, more or less directly, that they are really seeing its denial. Yet no one has ever explained to them how you get meaning from meaninglessness — a difficult enough task once you realize that we cannot articulate any knowledge of the world at all except in the language of meaning.,,,”
In the following article, Talbott goes even further and reveals that this overwhelming impression of meaning and purpose that is found in life is closely associated with there being information in life while an organism is alive.
Specifically, Talbott states that at the moment of a organism’s death “Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary.”
And yet this immaterial information, that Talbott refers to, that is keeping an organism alive “precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer” also provides empirical evidence for a transcendent soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our temporal, material, bodies.
These following two videos go over some of that evidence.
Simply put, quantum information, (which is now found to be pervasive within molecular biology and of which classical information is now found to be a subset), is ‘conserved’. Which means, unlike classical information, that quantum information cannot be destroyed,,,
The implication of this is fairly straightforward, as Stuart Hameroff states in the following video, ‘But the quantum information,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul’.
Thus ‘immaterial quantum information’, that is now found to be pervasive within molecular biology, provides empirical evidence strongly suggesting that each of us do indeed have a immortal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our temporal, material, bodies.
And thus also provides empirical evidence strongly supporting Dr. Craig’s philosophical claim that belief in a immortal soul is required for us to live our life happily and consistently in this present world:
Another way that Atheists try to argue that man has no objective meaning and purpose to his life is by trying to undermine the Judeo-Christian belief in Human Exceptionalism. That is to say, Atheists try to undermine the belief that we, of all the creatures on Earth, are alone uniquely made in the image of God:
Charles Darwin himself argued that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.”
Yet this following paleoanthropologist strongly disagrees with Darwin’s assessment.
Specifically he states, “We are unique and alone now in the world. There is no other animal species that truly resembles our own. A physical and mental chasm separates us from all other living creatures.,, This is not a question of degree. It is all or nothing: there is no semi-bipedal animal, none that makes only small fires, writes only short sentences, builds only rudimentary spaceships, draws just a little bit, or prays only occasionally.”
And indeed, as the following video series shows, the purported evidence for human evolution is far weaker than many Darwinists have falsely portrayed it to be.
Moreover, in 2014 a group of leading evolutionary scientists also strongly disagreed with Charles Darwin’s assessment of the human situation and stated that, after 4 decades of intense research, they have “essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,,”
Best selling author Tom Wolfe was so taken aback by this honest confession by leading Darwinists that he wrote a book on the subject. Wolfe summed up his main argument in his book in the following quote: “In hand-to-paw, hand-to-claw, or hand-to-incisor combat, any animal his size would have him for lunch. Yet man owns or controls them all, every animal that exists, thanks to his superpower: speech.”
Simply put, although humans are fairly defenseless creatures in the wild compared to other creatures, such as bears, lions and sharks, etc.., nonetheless, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to somehow become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and, more specifically, by our ability infuse information into material substrates in order to create tools and objects that are extremely useful for our defense, our shelter, and for growing and hunting food, etc.. etc..
What is more interesting still, besides the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information and have come to ‘master the planet’ through this ‘top-down’ infusion of information into material substrates,
,,, is the fact that, due to advances in science, both the universe and life itself are now found to be ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis.
Renowned physicist John Wheeler stated “in short all matter and all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe”.
In the following article, Anton Zeilinger, a leading expert in quantum mechanics, stated that ‘it may very well be said that information is the irreducible kernel from which everything else flows.’
And in the following video at the 48:24 mark, Anton Zeilinger states that “It is operationally impossible to separate Reality and Information” and he goes on to note, at the 49:45 mark, the Theological significance of John 1:1 “In the Beginning was the Word”
Dr. Vedral, who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and who is also a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics, states, “The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena.”
Moreover, besides being foundational to physical reality, information, as Intelligent Design advocates have been pointing out to Darwinists for years, is also found to be ‘infused’ into biological life at a very fundamental level.
It is hard to imagine a more convincing scientific proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’, and that our lives therefore have meaning and purpose, than finding both the universe, and life itself, are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and, moreover, have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our unique ability infuse information into material substrates.
Verses
Perhaps a more convincing proof that we are made in the image of God, and that our lives truly do have meaning and purpose, could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was indeed God.
And that is precisely the claim of Christianity:
As Dr. Craig stated at the end of his ‘Is There Meaning to Life?’ video, “If Christianity is true then each one of us is here for a reason. And life does not end at the grave. And God is the absolute standard of goodness. He knows you. He loves you. And He intentionally created you. So your life does have objective meaning, value and purpose. That means you can live a life that is both happy and consistent.”
And here a few videos that, IMHO, provide fairly compelling evidence that Christianity is indeed true:
Verses:
Thus in conclusion, on top of Dr. Craig’s very persuasive philosophical argument, we can now add a fairly impressive amount of empirical evidence that, in over the top fashion, confirms Dr. Craig’s philosophical argument that our lives do indeed have objective meaning, value and purpose and we can thus live out lives happily and consistently because nihilism is not true and life does not end at the grave.