The meaning of life

When I was a boy Life magazine came out with its marvelous dinosaur issue, or issues, in which stupendous foldouts depicted a world filled with amazing animals unlike any I had even heard of before. Here be Dragons. Following up on that revelation I read all I could find about the ancient creatures that had once roamed the earth. My interest in the subject regressed back in time from dinosaurs to the age of amphibians, to the age of fishes and further and when I exhausted all the literature in that direction I skipped forward in time to the eocene and the age of mammals. Eventually I came to the primates and the emergence of human beings. Just like any boy I was most interested in the lurid details and not that concerned with accuracy and so I read lots of boys novels about dinosaurs and cavemen. In one novel I recall the hero progressed from spear to atlatl and at last the bow and arrow in one lifetime, helping his tribe withstand a race of savages. That wasn't quite as far removed from reality as the movie "One Million BC," where cave men battled dinosaurs. I couldn't see that movie often enough.
It wasn't until I was older that I began to think about the theory behind evolution and when I did learn about Darwinism it didn't occur to me to question what was presented in the texts. But then one day I was listening to my anthropology lecturer outlining the theory and I thought of the human ear. It's a complicated arrangement of tubes, fluids and tiny bones. The exact anatomy doesn't matter in this instance, only that each component by itself is useless for hearing and so I could think of no intermediate stage that would confer an advantage on the organism. The thought didn't cause me to doubt the theory but I was bothered enough to ask the teacher. Well. It was as if I had asked if he had ever done the nasty with his mother. The chill in the air was palpable. And he didn't answer my question, he dismissed it. I felt kind of stupid.
Although I just assumed at the time that I didn't understand the deeper aspects of the theory, the seeds of doubt were planted and over the years they have grown into a pretty vigorous tree. Not that I doubt the fact of evolution. There's no question in my mind at all that the ancestry of all living things on this planet can be traced back to one source but I no longer believe that random mutation and natural selection are reasonable explanations for how that one source branched out and diversified into the myriads of variations that exist now and have existed in the past.
I don't really buy the intelligent design theory either. Associated with fundamentalist Christians, that scenario envisions God on the outside manipulating us on the inside as in a diorama or some kind of doll house. Nevertheless, some good arguments for that theory have been made. For instance, there is the watchmaker thought experiment. If you were from an alien civilization exploring an earth where human beings had long been extinct and you found a Rolex watch then you would naturally take it as evidence that it was made by an intelligent being. It would be difficult to think of any other way it could come into existence and if he had a colleague who proposed that it might have come about through a random accumulation of bits of metal and glass that colleague would probably be recommended for stress leave. Considering how vastly more complex even the simplest of life forms are compared to a watch it's a little hard to understand how anyone in his right mind could think for an instant that random mutation and natural selection could account for zebras and butterflies and orchids and hummingbirds. Nevertheless, that's the conventional view of evolutionary scientists, and for all their wriggling and special pleading and attempts to fit the evidence to the theory it just doesn't add up. And I think they know it, which is why they are so panicky about having an alternate theory presented in the classroom. To my way of thinking these scientists are holding back progress in the field. New thinking is needed if we are to ever understand how evolution really came about, and even more importantly, how life originated.
I have another thought experiment shamelessly using those innocent aliens to illustrate what I think is wrong with materialistic science. These aliens are radically different than humans. Since they communicate via a pheromonal, chemical system they have never had any need for writing or books. All their cultural knowledge is contained in some gigantic telepathic queen bee on their home planet. So when they come to earth and find the remains of libraries filled with books and magazines they don't have any idea what they can be for. However, they are resourceful and persistant. They can see they are the artifacts of an intelligent race and they have been searching fruitlessly for thousands of years for evidence of another intelligent race. So they analyze the paper. They analyze the ink. They learn about the chemistry and the materials and figure out how they were manufactured. They learn everything possible to know about these books. But it never occurs to them that the marks on the paper are coded messages and so they are unable to learn anything about human beings, their history, their culture, and their way of living. In other words, the meaning in the books has nothing at all to do with what they are made of. That's why they can be converted into digits and pixels or put on parchment or strings of knots. Writing is already abstracted from spoken language and is not required for the needs of a simple cultural organization. But without it advanced civilization would be impossible. Even the spoken sounds of language are abstracted from the thoughts being communicated. Whether you say this is a word or a mot or a wort is of no consequence. One phoneme will work as well as any other as long as it is known among the communicants. And this is the mistake that scientists make. They confuse the material of creation with its meaning. Living and existing have some meaning over and above the material constituents which give it shape and form. Science has nothing to say about this greater meaning and scientific atheism denies there can be any such greater meaning.
Because this controversy is important on an intellectual level doesn't mean it isn't important in our everyday lives. Science is a religion for some but it does not take the place of religion. It takes the place of magic. It performs miracles. It cures the sick. But it does not help us understand why we should go to the trouble of raising a family and working all our lives only to die in the end. It doesn't explain why we need to love and be loved. It doesn't explain (although it tries feebly) our love of beauty. It can't. And so it leaves us twisting in the wind.