In a recent feature on WEVO, Robbie Harris interviewed a philosophy professor about a talk he'd given on the question, "Why, of all possible people, was I born?" What was interesting about his explanation was that he barely mentioned genetics, physics, or even science in general. He missed a far more provocative answer than his musings about available souls and the movements of spirits, stuff that would certainly be on the front page of the Enquirer were it not coming from a Ph.D.'s lips.
I can understand his impulse to want to find some larger purpose to the daily comings and goings of the human race, but the fact is, as far as anybody can tell, any one person is here solely because of the multiple recombinings of DNA that have occurred since the primordial soup. It's that simple, and that complex. It seems as if life in this universe has no discernible purpose, or at least if it does, it's simply to create more life in whatever form that life can take. Life does have pattern, order, energy, and its share of mysteries, but the force that moves it along is wholly and indivisibly material, not divine.
The professor's admittedly religious way of thinking is really not very helpful when it comes to figuring out the why's of life. Religions are essentially a "No" to the question, "Is this all there is?" because many people simply don't want to face that we're only dealt one go around apiece. By focusing on that "No", religion tries to ignore our DNA, to put it one way, or attributes our DNA to something called God that has no DNA at all. Wrong on both counts. Most likely, this is is all there is.
Joseph Campbell, in his six interviews with Bill Moyers, explains that humans have created myths to explain the reality around them and illuminate how things in life connect to each other to make meaning. In its own way, science is a mythology. What makes it different from other mythologies is that what it posits as facts, or at least as conditional understandings, can be tested and, if need be, refined or repealed. Religions, with their mythologies geared toward the vaporous, can't do this.
In fact, the odd thing is, the closer religions come to the material, either by advocating social commitment, like liberation theology, or talking less and less about God and more about "A Supreme Energy", the more cumbersome and less explanatory the religious mythologies become. Eventually, as even the Greeks learned, religious adherents will understand that lightning comes from electricity, not Zeus.
What an extraordinary is this "all there is" is! We should honor it because it's what gave us the ability to know it. We should honor it by knowing it fully.
Nest-Making
Robert Mapplethorpe