Why Materialism Can’t Offer the Kind of “Meaning” You Want
The quickest shorthand with which to understand the meaning crisis that so many face is that “meaning” (as in, what does my existence mean? What am I here for?) is inherently a forward-looking concept, whereas the scientific/materialistic frame with which we understand ourselves and the universe is backward-looking. You can’t get the former out of the latter. Let’s unpack that.
Whether you ask it of a planet, a pond, or a person, if you pose the question, “why is that there?” the scientific explanation looks backwards at the cause-and-effect chain (beginning with the cosmic origins) that has apparently led to its current state. In this frame, the “meaning” of anything, including ourselves, is anchored behind us. It has nothing to say about any higher, grander, transcendent purpose toward which we may be progressing. This frame does not include any end-purpose; there is no telos. There is only the record of how we got here, and that is taken to be absolute – there is nothing else to tell.
This does not prevent us from speaking as if our lives do have some meaning in the forward-looking sense. It is unbearable to imagine that there is no ultimate difference whether we commit suicide tomorrow or decide to work responsibly toward some bright imagined future, that all is just an outplaying of material pre-conditions. No, we deeply sense that that cannot be the case, and give in to the irresistible imaginings of what future state our lives may realize, for only that can lend meaning to present suffering. The kind of meaning we yearn for is necessarily anchored in the future.
But we fail to realize that when we begin to imagine a future-anchored meaning to our lives, we have subtly shifted gears away from the scientific/materialist framework. We have changed tracks without knowing. It matters a great deal if your answer to the question “why are you here?” begins with “Well, it all started with the Big Bang…” or rather, “Because there is some future purpose for which exist, some role I must play in the universe.” The first is the scientific frame, the second is the frame that offers hope, staves off despair. We like to imagine that we can have both, but I don’t think we can. Whichever one is primary subverts the significance of the other.
The trouble is that, between the two, we tend to view the scientific frame as the one that’s definitely true, or even capital-T True, so much so that we readily mock anyone who would cast aspersions on its explanatory power. But if the scientific frame truly is the deepest reality, then existence itself is unavoidably absurd, as the existentialists feared. We are all fundamentally nothing more than the tail-end manifestation of a chain of cause and effect. This would not prevent us from having hopes and dreams of the future, and we might hope that those dreams could endow our lives with meaning…of a sort. But given the bedrock surety of the scientific frame, any discussion of future meaning could not avoid a fatal tinge of superficiality. Thus we tend to shrink ideas of meaning down to size. There can be no transcendent telos, but one can say “I find such-and-such meaningful to me.”
It is this latter “to me” that betrays what I am calling “meaning collapse.” What we are trying to do is superimpose a kind of future-oriented meaning, a hint of telos into our lives – despite our belief that our life, and all life, is only an arbitrary end-product of unguided material movement. The point is that, if the scientific account of how we ended up here is true, then we cannot have the sort of telos that we yearn for. Whatever goal we may have in mind, however noble or ignoble, collapses back into that same scientific account of mere material movement.
Here is the collapse: Our striving for a future vision is really only part of a complex set of pro-social behavior, which is really rooted in simpler sensations of pleasure or pain, which are really rooted in biological urges for sustenance and reproduction, which are really the result of the evolutionary process of survival of the fittest, which is really the natural result of immense quantities of inorganic material being shuffled about for immense quantities of time, which is really the inevitable outcome given the set of natural laws and initial state of the universe. Thus our goals only have the appearance of a link to the transcendent, only offer a false hope of culmination in some higher or deeper purpose. But really, on the scientific view, any perceived meaning in our suffering or our striving collapses into the same arbitrary material movement that defines the furthest reaches of the past. Our bright imagined future cannot be interwoven into a cosmic, transcendent purpose toward which we all progress – it is only meaningful “for me.” Which is as much to say that it is, in the final analysis, arbitrary, dictated by the same physical process that has always guided matter.
“But why should it collapse?” someone might object. “Why cannot there be some ‘cosmic, transcendent purpose toward which we all progress’?” Well, I answer, by all appearances there truly is – but do you not see that this would fatally undermine the scientific materialist account?
If the cosmos is on some meaningful forward trajectory, if there is some purpose to be unveiled, then we can no longer find the ultimate explanation of things by looking at our past, as the scientist does. For if there is truly some transcendent telos, then the past is only of secondary importance. It was only ever the path, the necessary pretext, on the way to that bright and future day – only ever a means to that end. The capital-T Truth is not to be found behind us; it is ahead. Meaning is not in the material world below but the transcendence above. And if we want to understand our own existence, the proper science is not physics but the study of “purpose” writ large: Theology.
If we make such a change of tracks – from backward-looking to forward-looking meaning, from material causation to telos, from physics to theology – that doesn’t mean we must reject all that the scientist might teach us. We of course have much to learn, but the difference is how we prioritize what they teach. For instance, a biologist might note a correspondence between pro-social behavior of chimpanzees and that of humans – that they sacrifice short-term interest for the sake of a long-term communal interest. But how we make sense of this similarity again comes down to a question of directionality.
The backward-looking scientist would say that pro-social behavior of humans is explained by that behavior lower down and further back in the evolutionary chain. We sacrifice short-term interests because that has proven to be an effective survival strategy – specimens that sacrifice are predominantly the ones that survive. Once we trace this pattern back to its evolutionary origins, we have then “explained” the significance of sacrifice.
The forward-looking view can also appreciate the evident similarities pointed out by the biologist. But the significance of sacrifice is not to be found in its origins, but rather its telos. For both the chimpanzee and the human, sacrifice does not manifest because of its evolutionary benefit but because it reflects the shape of the cosmos in some fundamental way. Thus its significance transcends the material/scientific sphere, and we can perceive it as a fractal shape that reverberates through all of history, all of Life, all of Being.
The sacrifice that humans engage in is not explained by the sacrifice further back in the evolutionary chain, but rather the opposite. The sacrifice of simpler species was only a lower resolution picture of the transcendent shape brought to fuller expression in humanity. And we in turn look forward to a form higher yet in our religious orientation. The meaning of sacrifice thus culminates in the sacrifice of Christ, for it is in this expression that we perceive its role in Being: that all Life passes first through Death. This is the pattern by which we understand the cosmic drama of history and the agonizing mystery of our own lives. It is in this light that we in turn make sense of the sacrifices asked of us.
To come again to the question of meaning – Why am I here? Why do I suffer, sacrifice, and strive? – the fullest answer to the question, and the one that we are really looking for, cannot be found in our origins but in a hope that lies ahead. That is to say, to suffer, sacrifice, and strive is to participate in the Life of the cosmos, to abide by the shape of Being, to be grafted into the Tree of Life. And if such future hope holds, if meaning can be placed in some transcendent culmination, then the chain of causation in which we find ourselves finds its truest explanation there as well.
On the other hand, those who would deny the reality of any such transcendence, those who regard the scientific/material account of ourselves as ultimate, should likewise deny the possibility of finding any forward-looking meaning to justify present suffering. Again, they might put forth a personalized justification – this suffering is meaningful to me – but another minute of consideration reveals that “meaning” used in this way is only window dressing for a psychological experience that collapses into mere material explanation. The “meaning” that we hope to endow upon our actions has no external validation; they are only ever the result of preexisting internal drives and instincts. We titillate ourselves with a flavor of “cosmic” meaning in our lives (to keep despair at bay), but this meaning cannot be squared with or sustained by the more fundamental belief in a mechanistic material universe. A meaning crisis is unavoidable, and it’s just below the surface whether we acknowledge it or not.