Is Life Meaningless?

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless."       -- Dr. Steven Weinberg, Ph.D., The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe.

Dr. Weinberg is exactly right.  The universe, taken in itself, does seem pointless.

Despite this appearance, though, life and the universe are not actually pointless.

There are probably very few people who would reasonably deny the principle of sufficient reason.  This says that everything that happens (or that comes into being) does so for a reason, for a purpose.

At the level of man-made things, you can convince yourself of this pretty easily.  It is actually not possible for us to create something without a reason for creating it, or without it's having a purpose for its creation.

Just try to create something pointless.  You can't.  The "pointless" thing you create will still have a purpose: that of proving an argument, or entertaining, etc.

This is another way of talking about the law of cause and effect.  You cannot have an effect without a cause.

Ok, good.  Everything we create has a purpose.  But we didn't create life, the universe and everything.   So, so what?

It is not possible for anything to sufficiently explain its own reason for existence.  Something cannot be both the cause and the effect -- because you would have an infinite regression.  The thing could never bring itself into existence.

Another way of looking at it is that you cannot discern a thing's purpose merely by looking at how it is put together and how it works.  To find a thing's meaning, you have to look at its context.

You might, in some cases, be able to infer some idea, but the ability to infer is always enabled by knowledge of the thing's context.

Studying a pencil, for example, will leave you entirely perplexed if you lack all knowledge of paper and writing.  Even with such knowledge, you might still be confounded without sufficient knowledge of the inventor's intent.  This says something about knowledge itself, and about sentient minds.

I don't think anyone would dare deny that we are inside the universe. And we cannot observe the context of the universe.  Therefore, you cannot expect to discern the reason for the universe solely on the bases of the mathematics that describe the growth, development and behavior of the universe.

This is a long way of saying that physics tells us the "how," not the "why."  One of my physics professors used to say that "if you want to know why, you're in the wrong classroom.  The philosophy department is in the building over there..."

Thus, trying to find the purpose of the universe by studying how it works is an utter waste of time.  You couldn't possibly discover the reason for the universe that way.

Drawing conclusions along those lines is like declaring the sun does not exists because you couldn't find it under that rock over there.  It's literal nonsense!

So yes, the universe seems pointless, but that's because it cannot seem any other way when you only look at physics.  

Since we cannot say much of anything about the reason for the universe, and we have a strong and logically valid argument that it must have a reason, we would be pretty irrational to conclude that it doesn't have one.

To put it succinctly.  Cosmology has shown that the universe had a beginning.  Therefore, the universe and everything in it has meaning.