THERE is a prevailing attitude among many in the University and throughout the world that life without religion is meaningless, filled with anxiety and suffering, and devoid of all hope. Some people are appalled and frightened by the possibility that humans are nothing more than complex machines in the world with no prospect of afterlife or otherworldly redemption. This is perhaps religion's greatest strength. But it also is a serious misperception that constantly hampers clear thought in the pursuit of truth regarding religious matters.
A person who believes that hope and meaning are impossible without religion practically is incapable of objectively examining religious claims. Indeed if religion were the only way for hope and meaning to exist, it would be insane to be irreligious. But religion does not hold a monopoly on hope and meaning.
Religion unquestionably holds an enormous amount of virtue. It provides security and peace of mind when people need these things most, as the religious surge in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks has shown. It has served as a unifying force in the formation of nations and cultures, including our own. Many think that to attack religion is to attack these virtues and to rob humanity of hope and meaning.
But if the creators of religion who lived thousands of years ago and thought the sun revolved around the Earth somehow made a mistake in explaining the mysteries of the universe, we need not despair. Hope, meaning and virtue can be found outside the weak hypotheses of our ignorant ancestors, in the beautiful reality that we inhabit.
The past explanations used by religions to explain how humans came about pales in comparison to what we know now. We were not simply created in the image of a benevolent deity in a swift day's work. Rather we have been chiseled by a combination of random and deterministic factors over a series of billions of years. From simple self-replicating entities, we have fought and survived through an epic journey of evolution. Out of primordial pools of raw molecular material we have morphed at a painstakingly slow rate into the custodians of culture and knowledge that we are today. The odds of creatures like us emerging from an evolutionary path again are almost nonexistent. But here we are, human beings in the flesh.
As humans we are by all indications alone in a universe too vast for some to even comprehend. The spatial ratio of our entire solar system compared to all that surrounds us is next to zero. If news of any events in our recorded history had left our planet traveling at the speed of light - the fastest possible rate of travel - then they would only have reached a few thousand light years away from Earth. This means that any of the Earthly ideologies some hold to be universally true could not yet possibly have covered even one fraction of a trillionth of the universe. Sandwiched between the many billions of years that came before us and the many billion more that likely are to follow, we seemingly are swept up in a massive gale of our own insignificance.
Humans probably are not, however, a redundant phenomenon in the universe. After exploring the nature of the planets and stars that surround us, we know that we are at least rare and probably unique in our own local section of the galaxy. The fact that we ourselves are the culmination of billions of years of arduous step-by-step modifications of genetic material gives us value. That our planet has maintained conditions able to harbor complex life makes us lucky. That we have the power to think, feel, love, hate, explore and survive amid a hostile, raging cosmos makes us special.
As for hope, it is with our power of autonomy that we must work to create and fulfill our own dreams. To do this we have to stand and face the world as it is, and realize that we have the power to control our own lives. We cannot devalue our time on Earth by anticipating an afterlife promised to us in the ill-conceived fables of our ancestors. Instead we must work together to better this time and hope to improve our existence through our own efforts.
Hope for humanity lies in reality, not in superficial speculations of self-delusion. One glance through a biologist's microscope or one gaze into an astronomer's telescope provides infinitely more truth, hope and meaning than any simple religion has ever been able to offer.
Our purpose is in taking advantage of the arduous evolution that precedes us. For all we know our lives are all that we will ever have. That this is perhaps a scary thought is proof of our need to further improve the quality of our lives on Earth. With religion as our guide we have failed to do so sufficiently in the past. We now have a responsibility to continue this improvement, to be kind to each other, and to safeguard ourselves as nature's triumphant works still in progress. That's the truth, and it gives us all the hope and meaning we ever will need.
(Anthony Dick's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.)
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