Meaning Without Magic

Consider the following three questions:

• How did the universe come to exist?
• Why is there suffering in the world?
• What happens after we die?

Think about those questions.

What are your responses?  How did you arrive at those responses?

As I have often noted here, religions provide wonderfully comforting frameworks that address the existential questions. 

[Religious] practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.  

The faithful find soothing answers to those three troubling questions.  To the ultimate believer, perhaps the three questions do not even arise.

Those of us who live without god(s) and religions find value and meaning otherwise.  We try to, at least.  Is it comforting?

Could answers to these questions "offer existential comfort without appeal to God(s)"? To put it differently, "Is it really possible to have meaning without magic?"

Consider two paths to meaning without magic: "the humanists’ path, where meaning comes from belief in claims without supernatural commitments, and the theist’s path, where meaning comes from “belief” in the value of supernatural claims without “belief” in their truth."

The author, with whose essay I began this post, is a professor at Princeton; he concludes: "Humanist beliefs can offer a sense of existential meaning, but it can take a little work to get there."

It takes a LOT of work to get there.  And that work to get there itself is valuable and meaningful.

All these provide yet another reason for me to present the wonderful lines from the late Steven Weinberg:

Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God.