Answers to Life's 3 Big Questions

Answers to Life’s 3 Big Questions

Where did we come from?

Is there life after death?

What is the meaning of life?

By Steven Knapp

Answers to Life’s 3 Big Questions:

Where did we come from?

Is there life after death?

What is the meaning of life?

First Edition. Copyright 2012 by Steven Knapp.

Published by Pickled Weasel Publishing, Inc. at Smashwords

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Carr for his design of the cover and much of the graphic content included in this book. www.artmonkeyworld.com

Thanks to Dianna Graveman for her patient consideration and skillful editing of my original manuscript. www.2riverscommunications.com.

Library on Congress Control Number 2012907526

ISBN: 978-0-9855357-3-5

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife and best friend Colleen, my two children Mark and Beth, and the rest of my extended family both living and deceased from which I have learned so much about the meaning of life.

I also want to acknowledge all of the Omegas but especially Sharone and Vladimir from which I have learned the value of long term friendship.

This book is also dedicated to the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR). Special thanks to local PBS stations KETC in St Louis, Missouri, and WSIU in Carbondale, Illinois, as well as NPR station KWMU in St. Louis. Many of the ideas that I have adopted for this book originated from one or more of the many hundreds of TV and radio shows that were first aired on either PBS or NPR over the past thirty years. My view of the world would be much different today if PBS and NPR had not provided me with much of the factual foundation from which I was able to start my personal search for the meaning of life.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Section 1

Where Did We Come From?

Chapter 1 Did the universe bank or unfold?

Chapter 2 Our solar system forms after a star explodes

Chapter 3 Did life on Earth evolve or arrive?

Chapter 4 Against all odds human beings finally emerge

Section 2

Is there life after death?

Chapter 5 Who came first God or man?

Chpater 6 Do all religions believe in an afterlife?

Chpater 7 My personal experiences with death

Chapter 8 Can there be an afterlife without religion

Chapter 9 The question can be answered but not proved

Section 3

What is the meaning of life?

Chapter 10 Are traditional answers still valid

Chapter 11 Race, sex, religion, and the MOL

Chapter 12 Will the future be any better?

Chpater 13 My personal answer to the question

For More Information

Introduction

Answers to Life’s 3 Big Questions

"In pushing the rock up the mountain, we undertake the most exquisite and noble of tasks: to unveil this place we call home, to revel in the wonders we discover, and to hand off our knowledge to those who follow." Brian Greene

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." Winston Churchill

Since the beginning of recorded history about 5,000 years ago, and probably many tens of thousands of years before that, human beings have been searching for answers to the same three big questions:

Where did we come from?

Is there life after death?

What is the meaning of life?

Given the length of time humans have sought answers to these questions, one might think we would have arrived at some sort of consensus by now, but we haven’t. Public opinion polls seem to indicate about a three-way split on the question of where we came from. About 25% of us believe we were created by a higher being. About 40% of us believe humans are the product of evolution. Surprisingly, about 35% of us have no opinion about where we came from (Gallup poll 2/9/2009).

But if you were born before April 23, 1992, you can tell your children and perhaps your grandchildren that it was during your lifetime that human beings finally accumulated sufficient scientific evidence to determine with great certainty how the universe began. If you stop and think about it, that is an extraordinary claim. After all, human beings who were virtually identical to the men and women of today were living on our planet for at least the last 40,000 years. To be members of the first generation of humans to make such a discovery is in the words of my daughter truly awesome.

With the possible exception of the earliest years of our lives when most of us believe we are immortal, sooner or later we begin to inquire about what happens to us after we die. Perhaps this curiosity is triggered by the loss of a close relative or friend. Under such circumstances, most of us want to believe our separation from a loved one is only temporary and at some time in the future we will be reunited.

Polling data on the subject of what happens to us after we die is also mixed. About 75% of us say we believe in heaven, while only about 60% indicate we believe in hell. This means approximately 25% of us do not believe in heaven and about 40% do not believe in hell. The poll did not ask if anyone believed in an afterlife that consists of something other than heaven or hell.

Surveys that discuss the meaning of life are harder to find. The lack of any consistent polling data on the subject could mean there is either little interest in the question or that most people have become so absorbed with just trying to survive from one day to the next that they simply cannot provide an answer even if they are asked.

Two possible approaches to answering questions

There are at least two ways to approach the task of seeking answers to these three questions. One way is to explore each question separately with each answer standing on its own merits. This is the approach most scientists take.

Another approach is to treat the questions as if the answers are connected. Those who rely primarily on their religious beliefs to help answer one or more of these questions are probably more likely to assume the answers are connected. For these persons the process may start with a belief in not only an afterlife, but an afterlife that has been arranged by a higher being. For many of these persons, the opportunity to participate in such an afterlife is viewed as a reward that is contingent upon compliance with a long list of rules decreed by the higher being. To further encourage compliance with the higher being’s rules, not only does a failure to comply deny one admission to heaven, but it may condemn him to spend his afterlife in hell.

Many of those who believe an afterlife is a reward for complying with the higher being’s rules also believe their individual lives can have meaning by simply agreeing to go through the process of trying to qualify for their eternal reward. Since human life generally lasts no longer than about 80 years and eternity can last forever, it probably makes sense to spend your relatively short earthly life doing whatever it takes to assure an afterlife. Most certainly, for those 60% who believe in hell, it would seem very important to at least make certain they did not engage in any behaviors that would earn them an eternal pass to a much warmer place.

Similarly, for those who believe in heaven and who also indicate that just striving to get there gives their individual lives meaning, the answer to our first big question, Where did we come from?, may become easier to answer as well. If a higher being has provided them with a heaven and perhaps even a hell, and this same being has decreed a set of rules that will determine where they will spend eternity, then it seems quite logical that this same higher being was probably responsible for their creation in the first place. Such correlations obviously don’t work for everyone. For example, they do not explain why even though 75% of people indicate they believe in heaven, 40% indicate they subscribe to the theory of evolution. Apparently a significant number of those who believe in heaven also believe that humans evolved without the direct intervention of a higher being.

For those willing to embrace the scientific approach, the good news is science has now provided us with definitive answers to the question of where we came from. Unfortunately, science will always have more difficulty in attempting to answer the question of what happens to us when we die. The difficulty arises simply because science is not very good at proving that something does not exist. This means even though there presently is no scientific evidence to indicate there is an afterlife, neither has there been an experiment that conclusively demonstrates an afterlife does not exist. However, this does not mean scientists should not still evaluate the plausibility of any hypothesis others may propose.

This leaves us with our search for an answer to the question about the meaning of one’s life. Perhaps this is a good time to clarify the scope of this question. There is a big difference between the questions of Does life in general have meaning? vs. Does my individual life have meaning? Later I will suggest why I believe life in general does have meaning. I will also suggest why I believe your life can have meaning for others, whether you believe your own life has meaning or not.

It should also be noted that meaning is different from purpose or happiness. Mother Nature seems to have already provided our lives with a purpose. That purpose is simply to survive long enough to reproduce and therefore perpetuate the species. I believe it is also possible to be happy without necessarily acknowledging life has any meaning. This is because the word happy seems to be more suitable in helping us define our relationships with others than in helping us define personal meaning. If you are not getting along with at least some of your fellow human beings, you probably are not going to be happy. I do not want to imply that, at least for some of us, spending a large part of life being happy doesn’t also provide some meaning. It is possible the answer is just that simple. But for many of us, it will not be that easy.

If you believe that you already know what gives your own life meaning, then there is no reason for you to read any further. But just to make certain, I would urge you to take a few minutes to write your answer down and then read it back to yourself aloud to see if what you wrote actually describes the way you feel. If it doesn’t, or if you decide you still need to search a little more, then maybe this book will be able to provide a few suggestions about where to look. But I give you fair warning, based upon my own experience: you will find no clear map to guide you to your destination. And even if you are convinced you know what makes your own life meaningful but you decide to read the rest of this book anyway, I would be very surprised if you don’t change your mind, at least a little.

Unfortunately there are many of us who have no intention of searching for answers to any of these questions. Those who maintain the belief that a higher being placed us on Earth, provided us with strict rules that prescribe how we should behave, and also prepared for us a place to spend eternity, may find it very difficult to accept any scientific discovery that contradicts those convictions. From the time Galileo was forced by the Catholic Church to recant his discovery that the earth revolves around the sun; to the more recent discoveries in the fields of particle physics, astronomy, and genetics, humans have often found it difficult to change their religious beliefs in light of new scientific discoveries.

So what’s the big deal?

As long as you are able to answer these three questions to your own satisfaction, is there any legitimate reason for you to be concerned about what others believe? The unfortunate answer to this question may be yes. An extreme example of why you may need to be worried is there appears to be a growing number of persons willing to resort to acts of violence as part of their efforts to advance causes in which they believe. The most infamous example of this is the actions of those who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. On that day, a small number of persons seemed perfectly willing to sacrifice their own lives as part of an effort to inflict as much death and destruction as possible on others. What makes such action so disturbing is there is evidence that some who carried out the 9/11 attacks may have believed part of their reward for inflicting death and destruction upon others would be an afterlife filled with comfort and luxury. Absent that assurance, we can only wonder how willing at least some of those persons might have been to sacrifice their own lives. Although in the instance of 9/11, those committing the atrocities were followers of a small but radical branch of Islam, history is full of examples where members of many of the world’s other great religions have committed atrocities in the name of their deities while probably believing they would be similarly rewarded.

To a much lesser extreme but also of concern are the attempts by some to either suppress the teaching of evolution in our public schools or to promote the teaching of the unscientifically confirmed doctrines of Creation Science or Intelligent Design. At least for now, the courts have ruled such efforts are no more than unconstitutional attempts to inject purely religious views into the classrooms of our public schools. But there is little doubt that once theses advocates come up with a new way to re-package the same information, they will make yet another attempt to impose their personal religious views on our children. Should you be inclined to believe there is little harm in accommodating the whims of such persons, I would suggest that there is a larger danger. The teaching of unproven theories such as Intelligent Design or Creation Science detracts from the ability of our public schools to adequately train our country’s future scientists and other leaders. The current attempts to inject such distractions into our classrooms are perhaps an even greater concern now because they are coming at a time when the math and science skills of our students have already fallen far behind those of many of our major global competitors.

Unfortunately those who advocate the virtues of ignorance also extol a lot of hypocrisy as they selectively determine which scientific discoveries they believe society should adopt and which ones should be rejected. While all of us acknowledge it takes sex to make a baby, many of us continue to reject any understanding that it has taken billions of years for the DNA found in individual egg and sperm cells to evolve. While enjoying the benefits of modern conveniences such as cell phones, TVs, microwave ovens, radios and computers that could only have been provided through an understanding of the laws of physics, many continue to reject the validity of the same physical laws that also help us better understand the origin of the universe.

Similarly, almost all of us benefit from the many scientific discoveries that provide us with the ability to warm our homes in the winter, cool them in the summer, use automobiles for transportation, and enjoy the daily use of dozens of household appliances powered by electricity. Yet in a recent Gallup poll, almost half of all Americans rejected the scientific research that indicates carbon emissions from the excessive use of fossil fuels are causing our climate to change. In the same Gallup poll taken as recently as 2010, almost 2/3 of all Americans indicated they do not believe they will experience the adverse effects of climate change in their own lifetimes. But should any of the dire predictions climatologists are now making come true, we may all end up paying a very high price for agreeing to quickly adopt the science that has provided most of us with a comfortable lifestyle while at the same time rejecting the almost unanimous body of scientific research that is warning us of the consequences of doing so.

Summary of each section of this book

In the first section of this book, I will attempt to summarize some of the more significant scientific discoveries which I believe help answer the first big question of where we came from. I am not suggesting that you should adopt every theory presented here as the final word. You must, of course, always use your own judgment. But the greatest difference between science and religion is that a good scientist is always willing to change or alter a theory no matter how long it has been around or how widely it has been accepted, if the discovery of new facts warrants the revision. On the other hand, members of religious groups are generally very reluctant to change their beliefs, regardless of how many newly-discovered facts cast doubt on the validity of their convictions.

The second section of this book does not rely on science for answers as much as the first. What I attempt to do in that section is to provide a brief description of how humans came to believe in a single God. I also attempt to summarize the history of many of the world’s largest religions. In doing so, the reader must be aware that many of the religions that will be analyzed have been around for so long that the historical record that describes their origin is incomplete at best. The primary reason for summarizing the history of these world religions, as well as the history of God, is to place within some kind of context any discussion about how and why humans have come to believe in the possibility of an afterlife.

The third section of this book is intended to provide a few ideas that may help you clarify any existing thoughts you have about what gives meaning to your own individual life. It may also help introduce a few new ideas that you may have never before considered. However, it is this third section of the book that may end up being the most daunting for many readers, because there are no easy prepackaged answers to this final question. If the question does in fact have an answer, you will have to discover it for yourself. At some point I will indicate my own answer to the question, but I would never expect any other individual to necessarily agree with any of my own personal conclusions.

Before we move on, I will provide this one final thought. Over a period of thousands of years, human beings slowly acquired the knowledge that allowed us to discover an answer to our first big question and perhaps even suggest a possible answer to our second question. Arriving at these answers was not easy. We did so by overcoming 40,000 years of ignorance that has been constantly nurtured by a steady diet of mythology, superstition, and even fear. In what is now, perhaps arguably, a more enlightened era, the challenge that still lies before many of us is to see if we can find answers to our third big question before a few of those who chose to continue to live within the shadows of ignorance and superstition are able to figure out a way to blow up the world or otherwise make it uninhabitable.

How this book was written

The reader should be aware that this book is not intended to be the final word on any of the many subjects it attempts to cover. Although I have taken great care to make certain the information provided is accurate, I acknowledge any attempt to discuss scientific theories or religious doctrine will always be met with alternate arguments and conclusions. Although some of the information reported here has been obtained from a large number of books and countless numbers of Internet articles, I believe most readers will recognize much of what I have written as generally accepted common knowledge. In fact, for anyone who has taken classes in physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology and comparative religion, most of what you read here will be very familiar.

If I have done anything original by writing this book, it is that I have attempted to place what can be considered common knowledge within the context of a broader desire to help answer what I have described as life’s three big questions. In an effort to make the material in this book more readable, I have intentionally shied away from including complicated mathematical equations or terminology that would be considered by many to be too technical for the average reader to easily comprehend. I would therefore encourage any reader to do his or her own research before adopting any of the ideas I have expressed here as one’s own. To help the reader locate additional information, I have indicated in the back of this work some of the many books that have influenced my thinking over the past several years.

Question 1

Where did we come from?

Chapter 1 Did the universe bang of unfold?

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Genesis 1:1

"What continues to amaze me is that human beings have had the audacity to conceive a theory and that now we are able to test that theory." George Smoot

If you were born before April 23, 1992, you can tell your children and perhaps your grandchildren that it was during your life time that human beings finally accumulated sufficient scientific evidence to determine how the universe began. If you stop and think about it, that is a very remarkable claim. After all, human beings that are virtually identical to the men and women of today have been living on our planet for about the last 40,000 years. Over the course of those 40,000 years, our ancestors often peered into the night sky and observed the moon and the stars just as we do now. But even though we consider ourselves more educated than those distant relatives, they knew much more about the night sky than most of us know today. By tracking the different positions of the rising and setting sun as it moved back and forth across the eastern and western horizons, they learned how to predict the arrival of the different seasons of the year. They also knew when the moon would change its shape and position through the course of a twenty-nine day cycle. The certainty of that cycle allowed them to accurately predict when the moon would be full and when it would be completely dark. Shortly after every sunset, in accordance with the current season, the exact same stars, in precisely the same relative positions as the night before, would reappear and once again begin their slow journey across the darkening sky.

Up until the dawn of the industrial revolution about 150 years ago, there was very little man-made pollution or artificial light to obscure the view of celestial bodies. This absence of both pollution and artificial light provided our ancestors far better conditions for star gazing than most of us are likely to ever experience today. For most of my younger life, I spent a lot of time in a rural area that was at least 100 miles from the nearest major city. On those nights when there was no moon or clouds, it was easy to track a narrow band of light that stretched from one end of the sky to the other as it slowly moved from east to west across the night sky. Although we now know this narrow band of light contains billions of stars that comprise most of our own Milky Way galaxy, before the first telescope was invented about 400 years ago, there was no way for our ancestors to know that this ribbon of light was comprised of so many individual objects. Sadly, those of us who live in today’s urban areas can see only a small fraction of the stars that our ancestors were able to view. And unless you have been fortunate enough to travel to one of the remaining few locations on our planet where the sky is still clear and dark, it is doubtful that you have ever viewed the stars, and especially the narrow band that comprises the Milky Way, in the same splendor as your ancestors once did.

But for most of those 40,000 years of star gazing, the night was also fraught with danger. Predators often lurked just beyond the shadows of any fire that was built to provide safety and warmth during the cold night. In the early evening hours, small clans of our ancestors probably sat around a fire and reminisced about the day’s activities, just as we might do today during happy hour at our favorite bar or restaurant. As they observed the stars moving across the night sky, they no doubt wondered aloud as to what the stars were made of, what held them in the sky, and what their real purpose was. They of course understood that the sun provided both light and heat during the day. And that at least when it was full, the moon also provided enough light to help locate a lurking predator before it could attack. But on those nights when there was no moon and even the faint glow of the stars was blocked by clouds, the darkness was complete. It would be difficult for us to imagine today just how foreboding such absolute darkness must have been.

Did The Universe Bang Or Unfold?

There is little doubt some of those same campfire conversations included speculation about the origin of life. Early humans certainly understood where babies come from. They also understood the roles that males play in that process. But they likely questioned, just as many still do today, just how and when a new life actually begins.

As our ancestors slept and dreamed during the night, they were probably perplexed and maybe even a little scared about the content of some of their dreams. We know today that regardless of how real a dream may seem at the time, it has very little actual meaning. But since our ancestors had not yet acquired the same knowledge we have today, there is no way for us to know how they attempted to interpret their dreams.

Since it would seem natural to occasionally dream about a recently departed member of the family or clan, just as many of us do now when we lose a loved one, it is easy to understand how early humans could have confused a dream about a deceased friend or relative with a perception that the departed loved one was visiting them from a mystical location where they continued to exist in another form. As the content of these dreams and other life experiences were discussed around the evening campfire, individual clans—and later on, even larger tribes of our early ancestors—likely began to arrive at some common agreement as to when life began and what would happen to them after they died. With the advent of a spoken language, many of those early conclusions could be passed down from generation to generation in the form of stories, poems, or even songs. To this extent, even the earliest of our ancestors had answers to the big questions, Where did I come from? and What happens to me when I die?

In their own way, they also likely had answers to our third big question, What is the meaning of life? Later on I will suggest some possible ways for us to answer this question, but I would suspect that those ancient ancestors may have answered the question in the same way many of us attempt to answer it today. One major difference may be that our relatives from long ago probably placed far more significance on just being able to survive from one day to the next than we do now.

As we carry on our search for answers to these three big questions, there is one difference between those of us who are alive today and our ancestors. That difference is that we can say today with great certainty that we now know where we came from. Not only do we understand the human reproductive process in great detail, but we also now have an understanding of how most of the different life forms on our planet got their start. Since the births of many of our grandparents, we have been able to propose increasingly detailed theories on just how the entire universe began. But even though it has taken many thousands of years to assemble all of the information, it has only been since 1992 that we have been able to confirm those theories with a variety of successful experiments. As a result, we not only know how the universe began but also approximately when it began.

If what was stated in the preceding paragraph hasn’t hit you yet, let me put this into perspective one more time. Over the past 40,000 years, more than 2,000 generations of humans have inhabited our