Where Meanings Come From

M 106: A House Like Ours

For conservatives who do not believe in evolution, and there are an appalling number of them--perhaps a majority of them--science is not about science.  It is about life having a meaning.

Never mind that science is just the best way we have to know things, to know what the sky is, to know what makes dirt, to begin to understand what came before us, and what will probably happen if we mess things up; conservatives want to know that all of this means something.  And for huge numbers of conservatives, meaning is found religiously.

Perhaps that is what religion does best.  It provides a network of meanings.  The meanings are provided.  They have been hammered out over the last few decades, or centuries; perhaps as long as two or three thousand years.  Abraham probably lived about 4000 years ago; Moses about 3500, Jesus 2000, Mohammed 1400 years ago (roughly dated).  The universe, we know, is billions of years old.  Life on earth is about four billion years old.  Human life is millions of years old.  Most of the religions we know are recent:  a blink or two in a very long story, because human minds are a recent blink in a very long story, too.

It is the case that the way we know things--all those astoundingly long things--does not talk about meanings of stars and black holes and gamma rays and dinosaurs long gone.  Science just tries to understand what it is studying; not to invest it with soul-satisfying meanings.  Science describes chance and necessity.

We are the meaning-making critters.  "What does all of this mean?", we ask ourselves.  "Should we be afraid?  Should we love what we see?  What does it mean to be born, to marry, to have children, to die?"  Scientists can talk about what happens, what happened, what likely will happen, but as scientists they do not talk about the meaning of spiders and galaxies:  they try to understand what it is they are looking at.

Meanings are not found lying around somewhere.  They are the work of critters with brains.  We make them.  We massage and rehearse them.  We scratch them on stone and scribble them on paper.  We convert them to digital signals, and draw pictures on cave walls and canvas.

There are meanings!  Of course there are!  We make them, and memorize them, and take comfort in them.  But they are not found floating around in space.  They are recent ideas.

Here is the catch:  if meanings are something we make, they are not eternal and undebateable.  They are ideas:  our ideas.  They might be our best ideas, but that means that they might be some of our worse ideas, too.

The idea that there is a chosen people, more to be treasured than other people, is a perverse idea.  If we find being light-skinned to be inherently more valuable than to be brown-skinned, then we have a really idiotic idea, however much it means to us.  If our systems of the meaning of things says men are more valuable than women, it is perverse, not good.  Believing that there are gods in the river, or up in the sky, who want us to sacrifice human lives to please them might mean something, but what it means is that we have a really rotten idea, best rejected.

But, oddly enough, science and religion are not proper alternatives, either.  A scientific theory about how planets were formed, and a religious theory about a cosmic potter shaping planets and moons, are not about the same thing.  One is an attempt to explain what happened, and the other is a story intended to evoke what it means to be sitting here, singing hymns and wondering whether life is worth living.  They only seem to be about the same thing.

What are alternatives might be to ask where meanings come from.  If you say they were given to us from an alternative universe, and if someone else says they are the musings of human minds, then we have alternatives.  It isn't a choice between two cosmic origin theories:  it is a choice between where meanings come from.