*related=http://videosift.com/video/Monty-Python-Meaning-of-life-galaxy-song

I really hate when people pull stats like this out of their asses because it downplays and belittles the difficulties of living in poverty.

There is so much vagueness in your statement that I shouldn't even bother with it, but it is upsetting me, so here we go:

What is the First World? The best current definition is probably the group of countries which have the highest Human Development Index, generally meaning that life there is pretty damn good. That would include countries you might not expect (like Chile, Argentina, Bahrain, and Singapore) but it is a better definition than the historical meaning of First World (basically, US, Canada, and Western Europe).

Combined population of First World countries: 1.136 billion people

Let's assume that poverty is the bottom 10 percent of that population, so you are looking at a non-impoverished First World population of 1.022 billion

Account for China's middle and affluent classes, who are surely better off than poor people in Croatia or Latvia, by adding 350 million

Do the same for India and let's call that 70 million people

Then assume that the top 1% of the rest of the world is probably better off than the bottom 10% of the First World, and you can add a further 33 million people ((World population - First World - China - India) x .01)

So then, the total number of people living better than poverty stricken First Worlders is ...... 1.77 billion people or about 25% of humankind.

So, yes, you are "richer" than 75% of humankind even if you are poor in the First World, but even that is relative if you consider purchasing power.

All of this isn't to say that I am sick of hearing about "first world problems" especially when I am from there but don't live there. I walk out my door everyday and see the very real problems of abject poverty, malnutrition, lack of access to clean water, and on and on. But I also understand how difficult it is to be poor in the US and European countries, and I think we should never downplay that struggle. Telling people to stop complaining because it could always be worse has never been a very convincing argument for me.

>> ^Locque:

blocked


Maybe this version works for you.

This video has been declared a duplicate by the original submitter; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof declared by Fletch.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Sean-Carroll-on-laws-of-physics-and-the-meaning-of-life

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Sean-Carroll-on-laws-of-physics-and-the-meaning-of-life

Well, yeah, that's essentially what he said. There's no meaning to life apart from what we meaning we give it. Some people find that depressing. Some, like myself, do not. Let's just have a bit of craic!>> ^shinyblurry:

You'll notice he never actually gave a reason why one particular version of reality should be preferred to another. He gave an example of choosing to support gay marriage to create a fair and just society, which of course are value judgments about the ideal way to live. There is no reasoning as to why we should make those judgments in the first place. All he said was, if you realize that we are the final arbiters of right and wrong (which isn't true, but for the sake of argument I'll concede this), "chances are" that you would be more apt to choose gay marriage than not. That is simply another unsubstantiated value judgment, and does not provide a foundation of reasoning to support the conclusion; namely, that we can derive meaning and purpose from telling stories about molecules in motion. That this idea of extracting meaning from cold, dead matter will ever be anything more than a morass of personal preferences arbitrarily defined by a group consensus, the definition being subject to change at any time according to the whims of its members. I advance that if meaning itself is subject to our whims, then there is no actual meaning to anything after all, and the only solution left is nihilism.

Hey @shinyblurry,

I've had this bookmarked since it came out and finally watched it today. Thanks for this video. I found it quite interesting, and it brought me face-to-face with something I've been kinda half thinking about lately -- the meaninglessness of life.

I read some of the comments, but skipped most, so I may be repeating. Lemme know if that's the case.

About the video itself. To get this out of the way, many of Keller's individual arguments were made in intellectually dishonest ways, like using two meanings of the same word (e.g. "meaningless") to create false logic, and using philosophers' quotes as fact without challenging their validity or pertinence to the argument at hand. Keller isn't the topic though, so that's all I'm going to say about that.

About all the meaninglessness. I agree with the overall point, that if there's no god, then there's really no meaning to life in the grand scheme of things since we're here for a meaningless slice of infinite time. That's hard to face sometimes. That discomfort tends to drive me towards other people. Sharing that feeling with others feels really good. Helping them feel better about it makes me feel good. I might even say it gives me a purpose, gives my life meaning.

I don't see any contradictions in my philosophy yet though. Or, at least, I didn't agree with any of the ones that Keller brought up. For example, about love and about evil. I found those arguments fatuous. I believe there's love because I feel it, just like I feel pain. Also, I don't believe that evil exists as part of reality. There are certainly actions I've done, seen and heard of that I judge as horrible things to do, and which some would see as "evil", but that's my judgement or someone else's, a label, something external both to myself and the person who did the action. Conceiving of it as "evil" is either a metaphysical statement, or an internal reaction to the thought of you doing that action yourself. Good and bad? Yes. Virtue and Evil? No.

So let's go with good and bad. You and I have already spent many screenfulls talking about morality, but to reiterate my belief, I think that people have an instinct for which actions are good and which are bad based on how they affect other people. We instinctively know that torturing babies is bad. We also instinctively know that doing something to ease another's problems or enhance their life is good. The more we try and connect with those feelings of what's good and what's bad, the better we feel about our actions and the happier we are overall. I believe that following that sheer bliss wherever it leads us is the best thing we can do. Specifically, anything the Bible promotes against following your bliss and knowingly causing pain in others should be snipped out.

When I think of my own depression, how it might relate to a lack of reason for my life, and how I might feel better if I were able to believe in God, it makes me feel better when I think of other people I know who are genuinely happy people without a whiff of religion in their lives, and I ask myself what makes them happy, and try and emulate that. The answer is always following their bliss, which is always helping other people find their bliss. Wonderful how that works. FWIW, I don't know any happy, fulfilled people who actively judge any other people as right or wrong, good or bad.

i have to agree with @xxovercastxx
while this video brings up questions i have always found interesting.the speaker does cherry pick to build an argument for a pre-determined conclusion.
a conclusion which promotes his view of the world.

to suggest that an atheist or agnostic has no meaning,or can never find meaning in their lives due to an absence of religion,is not only intellectual dishonesty but lacks imagination.

the reason why this confounds or eludes many religious folk is because religion is externalized.
they derive meaning through submission to a higher power ie:god,jesus,allah,(fill in deity here).
they adhere to a doctrine and dogma that the atheist/agnostic does not.so both parties view/experience their worlds in very different manners.so it should be no surprise that there would be a disconnect between these two parties,because they approach the "meaning of life" question from very different perspectives.

>> ^shinyblurry:

I'm not talking about technicalities, though. If atheists are really so incensed about the evils of religion, they would be concentrating on religions, countries and cultures that had the most egregious examples of perceived evils. Instead, 99 percent of it concentrates on the God of the bible.

I'm only speaking for myself, not for The Atheists™. I do not generally go around condemning religions, individually or as a whole; I condemn when it is called for or when my opinion on something is requested. When Catholics rape children, I condemn. When Muslims throw acid in the faces of "immodestly" dressed women, I condemn. When Catholics deny their employees access to healthcare, I condemn. When Scientologists destroy the lives of people who want to leave their organization, I condemn. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say, and there are no Buddhists or Hindus lecturing me on the meaninglessness of my life. I tend to argue mostly with Christians and so I tend to argue mostly against Christianity.

>> ^shinyblurry:
That is not what he was arguing, by any stretch of the imagination. He argued that to be free = meaningless, and that no one can live that way, on top of all of the logical, emotional, psychological and philosophical convolutions that this truth entails. He proposed Christianity as a solution to this problem, but he did not make it the thrust of his argument.

Nay, he proposed Jesus as the solution to this problem, a problem that I don't even necessarily accept is a problem as defined. It is entirely the thrust of his argument. Let me quote...

Nobody can live that way. To really believe that life is meaningless gets you into convolutions that are emotional, convolutions that are psychological, convolutions that are logical, convolutions that are philosophical, and you can't even live that way because life does have meaning and both freedom and meaning are found in Jesus Christ. That's the argument.

>> ^shinyblurry:
The argument is, though, that if you're free to make up your own meaning, then there is no actual meaning.

Agree. There is no inherent meaning in life; we find meaning as we go.

>> ^shinyblurry:
No, he is saying that there is no way to live that way and be logically consistent with your own knowledge and experience.

That's an even worse argument. I would argue that, at some level, every person who has ever lived has/had logical inconsistencies if you dig far enough. They're on the surface for some and deeply buried for others but we all have elements of contradiction in us.

>> ^shinyblurry:
Give a specific example.

Well there's a half-hour video at the top of this page. Will that do?

>> ^shinyblurry:
I think you might need to rewatch the video because I don't think you understood the point to these sections, or how they were supported by his overall argument.

I've watched it 3x now. If his argument is so poorly constructed/stated that it cannot be understood after 3 listens, that is his fault.

I'm guessing that's probably because you generally deal with English-speaking atheists. Technically we are arguing against Allah when we argue against God but why would we use an Arab word? Allah is not the name of the God of Islam and, even if it were, it would be the same God anyway. "Allah" means "the one God". It's what Arab Christians call God as well.

Krishna... well, I would argue against Krishna in much the same way as I argue against Yahweh if it ever came up, but it doesn't. There is no significant number of Hindus trying to force their beliefs on us, fighting societal advancement, or passing laws based on their holy book. Where I live these are the actions of Christians and so, merely out of priority, these are the people I argue against most frequently.

I'm not talking about technicalities, though. If atheists are really so incensed about the evils of religion, they would be concentrating on religions, countries and cultures that had the most egregious examples of perceived evils. Instead, 99 percent of it concentrates on the God of the bible. The fact is, Christianity has played a very positive role in shaping our civilization. If you want to read about it:

http://www.amazon.com/Book-that-Made-Your-World/dp/1595553223/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343535302&sr=1-1&keywords=the+book+that+made+your+world

Yes, an entertaining speaker and an entertaining, and funny, presentation, which is why I'm so disappointed that he gradually took it off the rails over the course of it.

The meaning of life
He's arguing that the meaning he finds in his own life, living for Jesus, is the only valid meaning and therefore non-Christians must have no meaning in their lives.

What? That is not what he was arguing, by any stretch of the imagination. He argued that to be free = meaningless, and that no one can live that way, on top of all of the logical, emotional, psychological and philosophical convolutions that this truth entails. He proposed Christianity as a solution to this problem, but he did not make it the thrust of his argument. He asked at the end, what is your alternative? What is your reason for life?

Few, if any, people have the luxury of never struggling with this question and yet most of us, religious positions aside, find meaning in our lives eventually. Many of us recognize that, in the grand scheme, our lives, even our entire species, will have no impact; Nothing any of us does will ultimately affect the outcome of the universe or existence, but that does not make life meaningless. We find meaning in many things in life. We find meaning in our relationships with others. We find meaning in our work. We find meaning in religion, both Christianity and others. It's different for each of us and there's nothing wrong with that.

The argument is, though, that if you're free to make up your own meaning, then there is no actual meaning.

Unfortunately for him, he builds his entire argument on this false premise. Even more unfortunate (for him), he makes an excellent point about what to do with conclusions that are based on a false premise.

I could stop here since I've destroyed his premise, but I'll continue below.

You do not appear to have understood the basic premise of his argument..

Freedom
There's no such thing as absolute freedom, God or not, except maybe in non-existence.

You're splitting hairs here..he is talking about what it means to be truly be free, in the sense of not having any meaning imposed upon you from the outside.

Nobody can live without meaning
I think people who live without any meaning in life are few and far between but I do not see why they could not live that way. They may be miserable, depressed, suicidal even, but they will not cease to exist in any way that is different from how the rest of us will cease to exist.

No, he is saying that there is no way to live that way and be logically consistent with your own knowledge and experience.

The Straw Frankenstein Monster
Over the course of the video he constructs a straw man out of pieces of ideas from various philosophers and thinkers, assembling them like Frankenstein's Monster and then, fittingly, being destroyed by his own creation.

Give a specific example.

Scientific Theories
This whole section is fucked and was pointless to bring up in the first place. His argument has nothing to do with scientific theory.

CS Lewis
In the case of this quote, at least, Lewis is a damn fool. Love is no less real because it is a chemical process. Music is no less enjoyable, art no less beautiful because they are biological reacitons.

Flowers and Love
"The only way to enjoy flowers and love is to not think." This is a typical (and baffling, for me) anti-knowledge argument that I see so often from fundamentalist Christians. I don't get it. Flowers smell as good and look as beautiful after you learn how your senses function as they did when you were ignorant. There is no reason to avoid learning. The world is just as amazing when you understand it.

I think you might need to rewatch the video because I don't think you understood the point to these sections, or how they were supported by his overall argument.

>> ^xxovercastxx

Freedom
There's no such thing as absolute freedom, God or not, except maybe in non-existence.

Nobody can live without meaning
I think people who live without any meaning in life are few and far between but I do not see why they could not live that way. They may be miserable, depressed, suicidal even, but they will not cease to exist in any way that is different from how the rest of us will cease to exist.

Scientific Theories
This whole section is fucked and was pointless to bring up in the first place. His argument has nothing to do with scientific theory.

The Straw Frankenstein Monster
Over the course of the video he constructs a straw man out of pieces of ideas from various philosophers and thinkers, assembling them like Frankenstein's Monster and then, fittingly, being destroyed by his own creation.

CS Lewis
In the case of this quote, at least, Lewis is a damn fool. Love is no less real because it is a chemical process. Music is no less enjoyable, art no less beautiful because they are biological reactions.

Flowers and Love
"The only way to enjoy flowers and love is to not think." This is a typical (and baffling, for me) anti-knowledge argument that I see so often from fundamentalist Christians. I don't get it. Flowers smell as good and look as beautiful after you learn how your senses function as they did when you were ignorant. There is no reason to avoid learning. The world is just as amazing when you understand it.

Yes, an entertaining speaker and an entertaining, and funny, presentation, which is why I'm so disappointed that he gradually took it off the rails over the course of it.

The meaning of life
He's arguing that the meaning he finds in his own life, living for Jesus, is the only valid meaning and therefore non-Christians must have no meaning in their lives.

Few, if any, people have the luxury of never struggling with this question and yet most of us, religious positions aside, find meaning in our lives eventually. Many of us recognize that, in the grand scheme, our lives, even our entire species, will have no impact; Nothing any of us does will ultimately affect the outcome of the universe or existence, but that does not make life meaningless. We find meaning in many things in life. We find meaning in our relationships with others. We find meaning in our work. We find meaning in religion, both Christianity and others. It's different for each of us and there's nothing wrong with that.

Unfortunately for him, he builds his entire argument on this false premise. Even more unfortunate (for him), he makes an excellent point about what to do with conclusions that are based on a false premise.

I could stop here since I've destroyed his premise, but I'll continue below.

Aww I was hoping they did a spin off of Superman where he became a crab fisher and Mike Rowe voiced over his adventures. And then he later went on to be an ice road trucker and cheated using his super powers.

I said that jokingly, but you know......we mere humans could understand that crap. Sure he could still save people and be all heroic, but journalism is the opposite of interesting. Got some dude who can bench press cars and he's writing articles instead of doing the work of 10 guys labor in a day in one hour and running around rescuing people the rest of the day.

He could be both the common man (manual labor) and a super hero.

I always liked when Superman was not all super-positive....when he was getting into fights in restaurants and stuff. I mean your life as a secret super hero would be pretty damn stressful, and being continually upbeat is annoying.

Similarly, we can instantiate in enough physical rules to get the "chance" universe you describe going, and its rules could get it to the current state either determinalistically or with some element of randomness. I guess I understand how you're using "chance" here... but I don't know that it's terribly useful. Why should "what humans can predict" be of any relevance philosophically? And if we're using it that way, couldn't we similarly describe God's actions as chance? I mean, surely humans (or angels) can't predict everything he's going to do. Chance seems like a pejorative when applied to God.. and to me it seems like a pejorative when applied to the operations of the universe (except where, again, that operation is actually random).

However, again, I don't think this difference is terribly important. I think I understand what you're getting at, I just see things very differently.

The difference between chance and design is the most important distinction there is. If you don't like the word chance, I will use the word "unplanned", or "mindless". An unplanned Universe has no actual purpose; it is just happenstance. Meaning, your life is just a product of mindless processes, and concepts like morality, justice, and truth have no essential meaning. It means you are just some blip on a grid and there is no rhyme or reason to anything. It also means you will never find out what happened or why it happened because no one knows what is going on or ever will. This will *always* lead you to nihilism.

A designed Universe, on the other hand, does have a purpose. A purposeful Universe means that life was created for a reason. It means that there is a truth, a truth that only the Creator knows. Which means that all lines of inquiry will lead to the Creators doorstep, and that trying to understand the Universe without the Creator is completely futile. It is like looking at a painting with three marks on it..you could endlessly speculate on what the painter was thinking when he painted it. However, no matter how clever you were, you don't have enough information to be sure about anything. To refuse to seek the Creator would be to stare at that painting your whole life trying to figure it out when you have the painters business card with his phone number on it in your pocket.

I don't think you're phrasing this in a terribly fair way. Yes, many people assume there's a natural explanation for abiogenesis. This is partly because having another explanation introduces arbitrariness into the system. Say I'm a geologist and I discover Devil's Tower. It's really weird, but my inclination from the very start is that it was formed by similar processes to ones that have explained weird things in the past. Even if I can't postulate even a guess as to why it has those weird columns, I'm not crazy to guess that eventually we'll figure out an explanation that doesn't involve, say, new physical laws or aliens. (And it's certainly not helpful to say "maybe it was made in the flood").

The whole thing is arbitrary to begin with. Naturalistic explanations are assumed apriori, and then the evidence is interpreted through the conclusion. That isn't how science works. You come to the conclusion because of the evidence, not the other way around. I would also note that you would never accept this kind of reasoning from a creationist. Neither does a mountain of circumstantial evidence prove anything.

Abiogenesis is a bigger problem and it's also one that's "lost to time" a bit. It almost certainly requires a mechanism we have yet to identify (or a mechanism someone has guessed at, but hasn't provided good details or evidence for). But, like Devil's Tower, there's no reason to expect that mechanism won't be identified - or that it will require significant changes to our understanding of the rest of science. Again, there's plausible ideas already floating around, and I think we'll probably recreate the process (though likely not with the same actual process) within the next 30 years or so.

Anything sounds plausible, apparently, when you have billions of years to play with. As the earlier quote said, time itself performs the miracles for you. How do you know that the mechanism hasn't already been identified but you have rejected it?

http://creation.com/devils-tower-explained

No... that, I think, is probably our strongest point of disagreement. I'm very much OK with "I don't know", and literally everything I believe has a bit of "I don't know" attached (kind of similar to how everything you believe in has a bit of God attached).

I'm not worshipping ignorance or something - knowing IS better than not knowing. But I'm also not scared of not knowing things - and I'm certainly not just going to pick something and believe in it because I don't like having some of my answer pages blank.

For you, is Scientology better than "I don't know"?

The point I'm trying to make is, I don't know isn't a theory. What most atheists mean when they say "I don't know" is "I know it isn't the Christian God, but otherwise I don't know". The next thing they say is, you believe in God because you're afraid. That I "chose" God because I am scared of death, or because the Universe is too big and scary for my mind to handle the uncertainty of not knowing.

I have to say that this idea of a bunch of hokey. The Christians I know believe in God because they have a personal relationship with Him. It has nothing to do with making a choice..God chose us. He would chose you too, if you were open to Him.

Neither was I afraid of death when I was an agnostic, and I wasn't afraid of saying I don't know (that's why I was an agnostic, because I didn't know). I believe in God because He revealed Himself to me, and that is the only reason. If He hadn't, I would still be an agnostic.

It is credible to believe that the Universe was designed and created by God. We can see that whomever made the Universe is unimaginably powerful, intelligent, exists outside of space and time, etc. Scientology isn't credible and explains nothing. God can explain everything.

Also, thanks for using the big boy version of the Bible. I quite like the Bible artistically, but I can't stand some of the new translations (despite whatever benefits some parts may have in terms of clarity).

Most of the new translations butcher the scriptures. They remove entire verses, words, water down meanings, or just flat out mislead. I can't stand them either. The KJV is the best word for word translation that we have, and although the language is archaic, it is comprehensible with a little research.

>> ^jmzero