The Meaning of Life
by writer D.M. THOMAS

Sometimes it is difficult to avoid the conviction that life is just a two-dimensional cinema screen, hung amid blackness and nothingness, upon which a random and meaningless narrative is being enacted. We drift into the narrative briefly and then vanish from it. There is no director or screenwriter or even a projector. But more usually I have intimations of meaning. I know that, as an artist, I make minuscule patterns out of chaos; and by analogy, since the universe is so harmoniously organized, I have to see a mysterious creative impulse behind it. One might as well call this impulse God as anything else.

Darwinists argue that natural selection is a sufficient explanation of organic life. Yet it seems common sense that if an organism moves toward greater complexity, self-consciousness and intelligence, then it is because those qualities are desired. Astronomer Fred Hoyle observed that it was no more likely that our world has evolved out of chaos than that a hurricane, blowing through a junkyard, should create a Boeing.

Looking at certain people who have or had strong religious feeling, I am often impressed by a depth of spirituality that "the good atheist" very rarely has. I am thinking of people like Mother Teresa, Carl Jung, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak. The last two are great poets; and it is not easy to find poets who have no religious concept. If in doubt, I have always felt, trust the poets.

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Next: The meaning of life according to Social Psychologist, Kenneth Ring.
 
 

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