Page 62 - Liberating Liberals V2

The God-shaped Hole in the Soul
The idea of “celebrating life in all its meaninglessness” is a shocking paradox. Meaninglessness is usually thought of in very negative terms, as even one step away from suicide. Why even think about meaninglessness when all its possible conclusions are so negative? And anyway, Nietzsche is practicing his own form of fundamentalism here. He can’t prove there’s nothing else, no religion, morality or philosophy. But, he’s willing to investigate the possibility of nothing else extensively.
It’s about as hard to conceive of a meaningless universe as it is to conceive of pre-Big Bang space
— the total absence of matter and consciousness. Thus meaninglessness is hard to define. One angle
is that it means humanity arrived from a scientifically inevitable Big Bang that made billions of random galaxies including the one with our own unexceptional sun. The sun’s distance from Earth was accidently
the right length to nourish amino acids, proteins and DNA which accidently assembled in our primordial soup. Then the random law of evolution insured
this DNA would eventually make an animal that thought all the time because that was a good strategy for survival. The thinking eventually got around to why the thinking animal was here, and it became as industrious at finding reasons for existence as it had at finding ways to survive. Hence religion, morality and philosophy were just inevitable manifestations of a big brain — but not necessarily that meaningful.
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