Wisdom and the meaning of life, part 1

This is a version of a talk I've given to freshmen honor students....

Philosophy - gets to ask Big questions: where the universe come from? Does God exist? Who and what am I? And, the biggie - what’s the Meaning of Life?

1 Recursive pun-ishment - the meaning of life in a meta-language is `life; not exactly what we want, though ...

2 Then - perhaps we want a definition of life as that which uses energy for homeostasis, has a cellular structure and organization based on DNA, and reproduces itself.
Still no? ...

3 Then perhaps existentialism: the meaning of life is whatever we give it - it has no prior meaning, but the ‘meaning’ in life is what is given it by persons.

4 Or: the meaning of life is to fulfill our purpose or destiny - doing what we, as persons, ought to be doing, fulfilling our role excellently (an attitude common to both theism and virtue ethics).

5 So what is a person? Animals are alive, but their lives have (as far as we know) no intrinsic meaning - so meaning requires a particular kind of consciousness involving self-awareness and rationality.

6 Agency - the capacity for rational exercise of free will - and hence autonomy - being a law unto oneself - are the key.

7 So how does one successfully give meaning to life? Is there a right answer? Existentialism - no, it’s our free choice - this bs, as there are clearly lives more and less worth living, as every existentialist actually believes.

8 So God? Meaning derived from relationship to transcendent being, a Creator and Sustainer? But unclear answer at best - and only works if it’s really true. Finding out the God you believed in doesn’t exist/ doesn’t work or act as promised is deflating, and through our natural inclination to disregard negative evidence (confirmation bias), often causes war and irrationality over human history - and lots of unclear thinking, re ambiguity and vagueness.

9 Re the problems of argument about God(s) from religious experience - at most one interpretation can be correct, and hence logic dictates that everyone else has been fundamentally mistaken about the true nature of their experience – at most one of the tens of thousands of religions in world history can be entirely right about God. If there’s no way to choose between them, we have an overwhelming inductive argument that everyone is thus mistaken, and hence there is no God.

10 To argue otherwise first demands clarity of terms: First, what is (one’s concept of) God? It makes no sense to argue about whether or not something exists if you have no clear idea of what one is arguing about. Discussing the existence of horses is a different topic than the existence of unicorns, and if you're not sure which you're discussing, not much profitable will ensue. Further (and to return to our topic), even if God exists, why should Its Will determine the meaning of our lives - re the fallacy of Divine Command Theory - the good is what it is not because of god’s will, but god’s will is good, if it is, because it follows the Good? (Compare Moral order argument for God - we discover a moral order to things, and best explanation is to postulate a god creating a preexisting moral order in universe, as designer - but did piss-poor job, as crappy history of life on earth and evolution suggests.)

If these choices don't work to explain the meaning of life, what does? My answer comes in Part 2 - stay tuned....