(October 18, 2010 at 7:07 am)KvdM Wrote: But ultimately why do we even question why the universe came to exist? We humans are here due to pure chance. Does it matter, for other reasons that pure curiosity that we evolved from the apes, which in turn evolved from a ball of slime millions of years ago? Our importance here on this planet is no more than an animal or plants’. We have no special place in the universe. There is no higher purpose to our existence ...
It seems to me that once you ask questions like, "What is our purpose or why do we exist," you have already jumped to the assumption that there is a higher reason and that it's up to us to figure it out, neither of which I think is true. Humans specifically nor the planet and all in it are here due to pure chance. Natural selection isn't random. Neither is it chance that something came from nothing. There is a scientific reason, even if we can't fathom what that might be yet. I think people often ask what our purpose is because they can't mentally process that there is no purpose or they aren't willing to accept that there is none. In fact, if there were some purpose in life (procreate, get married, leave ample resources for your children), the people who have not done these things by the time they die would have failed, so the idea of having purpose in life seems unpleasant and limiting to me. As Camus has said, "the point is to live." And there's nothing more under the sun.
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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