Some questions may not be asked without severe repercussions. Such a question was asked by William Schockley, who was immediately driven out of his professional status for having asked it. The question is one of statistics: is the mean I.Q of {X} really the same as the mean I.Q of {Y}? The problem is that X was white people, and Y was black people. The question itself was too odious to be allowed to be asked, much less answered. It is Unaskable.
Another category of question is unasked, at least in certain quarters, because the answer is presupposed, as if it were a First Principle. Here I am talking about the question of whether there is a non-material existence. In a recent article posted to the rationally speaking blog, Julia Galef tackles the question, "What is the meaning of life?" Interestingly, Galef attributes much of her philosophical education to Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", and she quotes Adams' famous computerized reply: "42". (I personally think that 39 is a funnier number...). In fact a good half of her article is about HHG2G.
Finally she gets beyond HHG2G, and starts to discuss purpose. Galef says, "But using the word "purpose" carries the implied premise that some entity created us intentionally to serve some end. Reject that premise, and the question no longer makes sense." Rejecting the premise is so natural to Galef that no discussion is required or given. Thus, the entire article is based on Atheist Philosophical Materialism as a First Principle, a presupposition without proof or qualification.
And, of course, within that environment there is no meaning to be had, anywhere. Everything is where it is, how it is, by sheer accident. There is no meaning to a rock, she compares. So there is also no meaning to life, including human life. Even the very question itself is without meaning, a meaningless, unsolvable question which, rather, should be dissolved than resolved: unasked.
She is correct. That is indeed the necessary logical outcome of Philosophical Materialism. Life, including human life, has no purpose, no meaning, and therefore no value. This has been the position of Atheism and Humanism for a very long time. Humans have no value except as cogs in the evolutionary process, a process which intellectuals could design and control if they were only allowed. It is in fact the intellectual's responsibility, because they are so smart and know so much more than anyone else. So first they must convince the rest of us of our meaninglessness.
But intellectual and ethicist Peter Singer now asks a different question: "Why don't we humans just stop breeding altogether and totally depopulate the earth of humans?" This has some advantages, he quickly points out, including the release from guilt that he presumes we all share concerning the rotten mess we will leave our progeny: there won't be any progeny: guilt removed. And, he asserts, children are not promised a happy life, and thus probably won't and can't have one, so why have children if they won't be assured of happiness? Presumably the earth would be happy to be rid us meaningless, valueless parasites.
After all, human lives have no meaning. No purpose. No value. Singer knows just what Galef is talking about. Of course Singer and Galef have purpose in their lives. Their purpose is to convince us that we have no purpose, meaning or value.
Singer's question is one that I presume will remain unanswered. Few people are so cynical as are the Nietzschean nihilists that populate the Philosophical Materialist sphere. Fewer still voluntarily take their marching orders from the likes of Singer and Galef. And the intellectual's persistent predictions of impending crises, doom and gloom are virtually always unwarranted. So I don't expect to see the entire human population suddenly ceasing to procreate.
1 comment:
I'm often amazed by the assertion that human life has no meaning. To assert that we are nothing more than meat machines who procreate and then die in order to serve some evolutionary purpose, a purpose which ultimately will be defeated by the death of the universe itself.
This implies that the existence of the universe itself has no meaning. If the universe has no meaning, why does it exist at all? Or in the words of Leibniz: "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
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