Meaning of Life
Quotations
1.
“If we present a man with a concept of man which
is not true, we may well corrupt him.
When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a
bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of
instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man
is, in any case prone. I became
acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration
camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers
of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing
but the product of heredity and environment—or, as the Nazi liked to say, of
‘Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely
convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were
ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the
desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”[1] --Viktor Frankl
2.
“That man is the product of causes which had no
prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his
hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and
feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors
of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness
of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar
system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be
buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite
beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them
can hope to stand. Only within the
scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair,
can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”[2] --Bertrand Russell
3.
“We’re just a bit of pollution. If you got rid of us, and all the stars
and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then
the universe would be largely the same.
We’re completely irrelevant.”[3] --Lawrence Krauss (Arizona State
University cosmologist)
4.
“It is almost irresistible for humans to believe
that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just
a more or less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the
first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning…. It
is very hard to realize that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly
hostile universe. It is even
harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar
early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable
heat. The more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”[4] --Steven Weinberg (Harvard
cosmologist)
5.
“We were created not by a supernatural
intelligence but by chance and necessity as one species out of millions of
species in Earth’s biosphere. Hope
and wish for otherwise as we will, there is no evidence of an external grace
shining down upon us, no demonstrable destiny or purpose assigned to us, no
second life vouchsafed us for the end of the present one. We are, it seems, completely
alone. And that in my opinion is a
very good thing. It means we are
completely free.”[5] --E. O. Wilson (Harvard
biologist)
6.
“’You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your
memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are
in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their
associated molecules. As Lewis
Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’”[6] --Francis Crick
7.
“The universe we observe has precisely the
properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no
evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”[7] --Richard Dawkins
8.
“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences
that Charles Darwin understood perfectly.
1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exist; 3) no
ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists;
and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”[8] --William Provine (Cornell evolutionary
biologist)
9.
“The universe doesn’t seem to me to be like the
kind of entity that could have a higher purpose.”[9] --John Maynard Smith (evolutionary
biologist)
10. “Living
creatures capable of reflecting on their own existence are a freak accident,
existing for one brief moment in the history of the universe…. There is no God,
no Intelligent Designer, no higher purpose to our lives.”[10] --Keith Devlin (Stanford
mathematician)
11. “As
evolutionists, we see that no traditional justification of the kind is
possible. Morality, or more
strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to
further our reproductive ends.
Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will—or in the metaphorical
roots of evolution or any other part of the framework of the Universe. In an important sense, ethics as we
understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to
cooperate. It is without external
grounding.”[11] --Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson
12. “The
Darwinian argues that morality simply does not work (from a biological
perspective), unless we believe that it is objective. Darwinian theory shows that, in fact, morality is a function
of (subjective) feelings; but it shows also that we have (and must have) the
illusion of objectivity…. In a sense, therefore, morality is a collective
illusion foisted upon us by our genes.”[12] --Michael Ruse
13. “Darwinism
thus puts the capstone on a process which since Newton’s time has driven teleology to the explanatory sidelines. In short it
has made Darwinians into metaphysical Nihilists denying that there is any meaning or
purpose to the universe, its contents and its cosmic history. But in making
Darwinians into metaphysical nihilists, the solvent algorithm should have made them into
ethical nihilists too. For intrinsic values and obligations make sense only against the
background of purposes, goals, and ends which are not
merely instrumental.”[13] --Tamler Sommers & Alex Rosenberg
14.
“Nihilism is not a prescription or
proscription of any conduct. The
nihilist may well admit that accepting categorical and hypothetical imperatives
may often serve the parochial interests of oneself and others. To be an ethical nihilist commits one
to nothing more than the denial of objective or intrinsic moral values and
categorical imperatives.” [14] --Tamler Sommers and Alex Rosenberg
