Meaning

I spoke to my Dad the night before he died. I knew that he was very ill and I'd called him because I thought that there might not be another opportunity. At that time he was living, in near-penury, in a shack in the garden of friends in South Africa. Dad's landlady answered the phone. "He's in the garden, enjoying the last of the sunshine." She said.  "I'll get him." Before I could object she put the phone down. As it turned out, I interrupted Dad's last sunset. He was dead before the source of all our power set again. Dad and I had had our ups and downs but, at the time of his death, I loved him very much and, although he was an old man by then, I was devastated when my sister Wendy called to say his life was over.

My brother Ed and I wrote a eulogy, which we delivered jointly at Dad's funeral. Ed and I have different perspectives on Dad 's life and separate memories but we both, I think, wanted to convey to our audience the sense that it had meant something. What can I say about him here? He escaped a suffocatingly religious family (his six sisters were all devout to the point of insanity); he fought voluntarily in a world war; he overcame with grace and courage the loss of a leg in an Italian minefield; he traveled more widely that anyone I've met, in a era when travel was genuinely adventurous and held fast to convictions that never wavered, no matter how unfashionable or unvoiceable they became. There is a bench in the Outeniqua Mountains, bearing an inscription in Dad's memory, staring inscrutably at his favourite view. When everyone who knew Dad is gone, that inscription, etched into a brass plaque, may well be the only surviving reminder of his existence.

Cut to a wedding I attended as a guest many year ago. I cannot remember the name of the bride or groom, nor can I remember whom I accompanied to the party. I do remember, very clearly, a fascinating conversation with the woman sat to my right at dinner. Because I am deaf in one ear I find it difficult to follow a conversation in a noisy room unless I pay exclusive attention to my interlocutor. Strangers who are unlucky enough to be placed next to me at a table are therefore either ignored entirely or forced to endure my unbroken and unfeigned attention for hours on end. This girl had studied biology at university and was currently training to become a Church-of-England priest. This surprised me. Physicists - frustrated by the inadequacy of their equations - occasionally subscribe to some form of theism but biologists do so rarely enough for it to be remarkable (see here). I could understand, I said to her, how someone ignorant of evolutionary biology could subscribe to palaeolithic creation myths but how on earth could anyone conversant with Darwin be suckered in this way? I might have put it more politely than that but probably not.

Her answer fascinates me to this day. She did not give a positive reason for embracing belief in god, let alone for selecting a specific and testable hypothesis like the Christian God. Instead, she gave a metaphysical reason for rejecting scientific materialism. How could I, she asked, live in a universe without meaning? How could I bear to drag myself out of bed knowing that I was running a program encoded in genes  and enacted in a nervous system that was entirely mechanical. Surely there must be more to it than this? Her adoption of Christianity was part of her search for meaning. She went on to say that she would be unable to live with the belief that there was no purpose to her life; she would commit suicide rather than live with such a nihilistic view of the world. I suppose that pudding must have arrived and rescued her from my response for I recall that the conversation ended unsatisfactorily and, since I can't dance, there was no opportunity to resurrect it.

What is going on here? The naturalistic fallacy (falsely inferring that what is the case ought to be the case, or vice versa) is so easy to spot once you are alerted to it's presence that I cannot understand how any intelligent person can fall for it. To say: "I wish that life were meaningful, therefore it must be meaningful", is obviously fallacious and yet that is what my dinner companion was implying. In fact she was basing her career choice on the false intuition that you can derive an ought from an is (for an alternative view see here). Other than the gambler's fallacy (going back to Dad for a moment, he would very occasionally have a flutter at the roulette wheel, where his method, infallible he claimed, was to wait until black had come up so many times in a row that red was almost certain to be next), the naturalistic fallacy is the most pernicious species of logical error to which humans are vulnerable. It is responsible for most forms of prejudice (Dad again: "AIDS is god's punishment for homosexuals") and many forms of wishful thinking ("I deserve a very large bonus, therefore I will receive one"). It also facilitates a belief in heaven and hell ("Hitler ought to be in hell, therefore there must be a hell") and hence reinforces absurd and monstrous doctrines, such as Catholicism (see here for the most chilling description of hell ever written and a wonderful example of a blogger lost up his own naturalistic fallacy).

Moving on from the dead and the mentally deficient, let's consider a much more appropriate response to the cosmic cold shoulder. Recently, a friend found himself in a Japanese simulacrum of a wealthy eighteenth century gentleman's library. The shelves had been filled with original imprints of novels written by the popular authors of the era being represented. My friend is fascinated by literature and is well and widely read, yet there were authors on the shelves whose names he didn't recognise, much less whose novels he'd read. This experience caused him to reflect on the futility of writing about his own experiences. Nihilism is a very tempting destination indeed for us materialists.

There seem to be three categories of response to the question "what's it all about?"

1. I would rather be dead than alive in a world without meaning.

2. Life is essentially meaningless but we can create little bubbles of meaningfulness that persist during our  lifetimes and occasionally for a brief period after we die.

3. Life has no meaning. What's the big deal?

So here's the point. I have been thinking a great deal lately about suicide. The proximate cause was unbelievably banal (is there such a thing as a non-banal suicide?). I came home from a long trip abroad to find that many of the plants I had been nurturing were dead. What had I expected? Yet still, I had my little moment of being overwhelmed with the futility of it all. Would it make sense, I wondered, to kill myself and dispense terminally with the need to worry about these things? I went so far as to consume a cocktail of drugs (all prescribed legally, lest the authorities are watching) in the hope that fate would decide. It did, I'm still here. And here I intend to remain, for the time being, meaningless or otherwise. I'm glad, on reflection, that my flirtation with the idea of dying didn't become a full-blown affair. I like this messy, pointless, fascinating world and the bubble that I inhabit. I'm going gardening.

This is still the best answer to the meaning of life question.