[What follows was sent as an email to me and is posted with Sean's permission.]
Your brief discussion of Marcelo Gleiser brought to mind a quote from the tremulous opening of Fear and Trembling, whose rapturous gloom sustained my Catholic late-adolescence:
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
I date my own religious scepticism - like many - from around this time, and something about this line always struck me as especially marvellous: for even without God, how could one not exalt an emptiness that could produce such a grandiloquent, vaulting, beautiful sentence? Even without God, there was lyricism - Shakespeare and Yeats and A Love Supreme. And girlfriends, and ice-cream, and sport and everything else. Subsequently, for me, there was a sudden death in the family; I discovered Camus; lost my faith and became a philosophy undergarduate trying to get it back. I then thoroughly divested myself of any kind of religious attachment altogether. (I remember saying to a religious friend, in high dudgeon, that the whole thing was a 'massive superstructure of fraud and superstition' - I actually spoke just like that).
Later, when I returned, circuitously, to religion, it was with a halting version of the title of your post: that even without a plan, there was a point. But I supplied an addendum that, despite this, I believed that there was a 'plan' - frankly, an otherworldly rationale, a higher supernatural meaning to existence, revealed in Christianity. This is the normal stuff of Church doctrine. And yet for the Church and its apologists to so often turn and remonstrate that, in terms of metaphysics, the obverse is the case - that without God, there is nothing but despair, no 'point' - is a disgrace to humanity and an affront to me. For surely (I argue to religious folk) there is an intrinsic goodness in the blues, in ice-cream, in friendship, that requires no higher ethereal ratification, no teleological purpose?
Simply put - there is no need for any kind of dichotomy here between secular and religious mindsets. Everyone can enjoy, and recognize, the intrinsic value of a sonata, or a sentence, or a game of beach football. Therefore, as someone who does think that there is some preordained metaphysical purpose to existence, I would nevertheless endorse wholeheartedly your view that it is plain nonsense to think that 'there can only be a point in being alive if there's some preordained metaphysical purpose'! (Sean Coleman)
