The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

What is it? An age-old question asked by everyone from Adam to Charlie Brown. When asked,  Albert Einstein answered: “What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion.” Well, yes and no. What he should have said is “Do you mean the meaning or the purpose of life?”

The “meaning” of life in the commonly accepted sense of the word pretty well restricts the question to those who can ask it. Don’t get many ants, or elephants, or chimpanzees worrying about it. And when you discuss the “purpose” of life, you have to be careful not to individualize it, as in “What’s my purpose in life.”

En fond, the “meaning” of life varies with every person to whom the question is put, because “to me” is inherent in it. So it’s unanswerable universally.

Didn’t used to be. I don’t think Moses, or Noah, or any of those old testament stars would have had any trouble answering the question if anyone had asked it, which is an astronomically remote possibility. In their case, of course, both “purpose” and “meaning” would have prompted the same answer: to obey and serve God. So in that context, of course, Albert was right.

And if you are a religious person who believes in God, you would probably answer the question the same way, whether your God is Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Rastafarian, Mbuti, or the central figure in some other religion. As my old Catholic catechism taught us: God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.

I’m pretty sure if you asked any religious person, no matter what faith, the answer would be similar.

But that’s the meaning of their lives, not of life itself. The real question, it seems to me, is “Does life have any meaning?” That depends, of course, on the meaning of “meaning,” which the dictionary describes as “the end, purpose, or significance of something,” which definition exactly suits the question, which becomes “does life have any end, purpose, or significance?”

It would seem that Bill Maher, the poster boy for atheism, and his ilk, would be forced to answer “No. Life has no end, purpose, or significance.”  Maybe I’m being too harsh on old Bill. Perhaps his answer would be “the purpose of my life is to ridicule and degrade those I don’t like for the enjoyment of those I do.”

How would I respond? Doesn’t matter. How would you respond. Doesn’t matter. We don’t care about you, or me, or Bill, or Moses. We care about the universal meaning of life itself – by definition, its purpose. Not your version of it, or mine, or Bill’s, or the Pope’s.

And the answer to that is, in my opinion, to perpetuate itself.

Why is an ant afraid of dying? Why does it try to scramble away from danger? How does it perceive danger? What does it know of life and death? Why doesn’t it just sit there and let you smack it? Why does it care? Why do plants like Arabidopsis thaliana warn other plants of danger when they are injured? Why does a common housefly try so hard to evade the swatter?

Why is reproduction one of the most important activities of any species – only slightly less important than breathing, eating, and drinking? And why is it such an integral part of our beings, whether we’re flora or fauna?

Why? Because perpetuation of the species is our DNA’s prime goal, the most important motivator in every living thing, which means perpetuation of the individual is only slightly less important. It is why we breathe, and eat, and drink, and reproduce.

Imagine the beginning of life. It all started, evidently, with the first “live” creature: our Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. Imagine, if you will, a microscopic one-celled animal coming to life some four billion years ago in the hot soup of the sea, appearing like Athena, complete with DNA and a full set of 355 genes. Bingo bango bongo, all of a sudden there’s life, and a set of building blocks that will create every animal and plant on the planet for the next four billion years.

No one seems to know how that happened. In fact, scientists, biologists, and such don’t seem to care very much about how or why a tiny single cell organism should suddenly pop up with an immensely complicated and sophisticated set of world building blocks.

But let’s dismiss the how for a moment, and imagine what would have happened if perpetuation was not the singular goal of that creature’s DNA, and the DNA of all that came after it. Life itself might well have died with that first infinitesimal creature: the LUCA.

With its DNA commanding it to do so, however, LUCA was impelled to do those things necessary to stay alive, and to reproduce. But the perpetuation in LUCA’s DNA was not as simple as eat, drink, breathe, reproduce. It also included the only element that would guarantee survival: the necessity to evolve, to adapt to the environment and its surroundings.

Okay, let’s get technical for a moment. DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid) is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA, located in the cell nucleus. The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences. Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people.

For simplicity’s sake, think of it as code, the kind used to write computer programs. Binary code has only two building blocks, or bases: one and zero. The way they are arranged tells the computer what to do. Human DNA is a very long and intricate “code,” with, as mentioned, more than 3 billion bases.

Probably the biggest advance in computers today is the study of artificial intelligence. Basically this means the computer inputs data, analyzes it, and makes choices based on probabilities. The key, of course, is the parameters set at the start. Asimov’s laws, for example.

Which fits perfectly with the goal of DNA – to perpetuate the species by keeping the individual alive at least long enough to reproduce, and by evolving to meet the challenges and opportunities of a changing environment. The same way today’s computer programs do it: by gathering information and using it to improve and/or adapt future individuals – making changes based on empirical evidence.

Which also fits perfectly with the meaning/purpose of life: to perpetuate itself.