Chariots of Iron is doing a contest to see who can come up with the best answers to any three of the 85 questions from Roger Nygard’s The Nature of Existence. Last weekend Eli informed me that I was disqualified, which wasn’t a big deal since I was just about to disqualify myself. So if you want to participate in the contest, then you’ll have to listen to the episode for the details. The grand prize wins an autographed copy of the companion set, so you should definitely go for it.
Even though I’m disqualified, I’m going to answer some of the questions, but don’t steel my answers. I may not answer all 85, but over the next few months I’ll answer most of them.
I have a problem with this question. “Why do we exist” implies that there is a reason behind it. There isn’t. We exist because our universe has a set of physical laws that allows for our kind of life, our planet is in the “goldilocks” zone, Earth’s chemistry allowed for abiogenesis to take place, and so far there have been no events in the 3.5 to 4 billion year history of life on this earth that has wiped us all out. Thanks to random mutations and natural selection our species has evolved and thanks to certain people making babies with certain other people the right combination of genes have come together to make each and every one of us.
From a biological standpoint it would be to survive, reproduce, and ensure the survival of offspring. It shouldn’t be surprisng that doing this gives many people purpose and meaning in their lives. Fortunately our brains have evolved to the point where we can choose other reasons to live and we have developed tools that allow us to control reproduction without having to forgo having sex. This may be one reason why people with more education and wealth tend to have fewer children, they have found meaning beyond mass reproduction.
We should all apply the campsite rule to life. We’re only here for a little while, so we should spend our lives working to leave our society and the world around us a little better than we found it. If we do this, then we will have found sufficent purpose for a meaningful life.
The best thing we can do to improve humanity is to free it. Giving women access to education and birth control allows them to improve their standard of living, realize their potential as fully contributing members of society, and better care for their children. We need to ensure that all people, in all places, regardless of race, nationality, religion, gender, and sexual orientation enjoy equal rights, privilages, and legal protection. Finally, we need to free people’s minds. If people were free of the dogma of religion and political ideologies then we could utilize the best science and research to identify the world’s problems and find the best solutions to them, without people objecting based on something they believe. These solutions would certainly have the greatest chance of success.