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E.O. Wilson: Science, Not Philosophy, Will Explain the Meaning of Existence
The Social Conquest of Earth | Edward O. Wilson
Edward O. Wilson The Meaning of Human Existence Audiobook
Harvard University Professor E.O. Wilson in his office at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. USACredit: Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty.
| Francis A. Schaeffer |
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| Founder of the L’Abri community |
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Francis Schaeffer mentioned Edward O. Wilson in his book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? co-authored by C.Everett Koop on pages 289-291 (ft note 6 0n page 504). That was when I was first introduced to Dr. Wilson’s work. Wikipedia notes, Edward Osborne Wilson (June 10, 1929 – December 26, 2021) was an American biologist, naturalist, and writer. His specialty was myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he was called the world’s leading expert,[3][4] and he was nicknamed Ant Man.[5][6][7][8]
I was honored to correspond with Dr. Wilson from 1994 to 2021!!
Review of 6 L words
In Ecclesiastes 2:2 he starts this quest but he concludes it is not productive to be laughing the whole time and not considering the serious issues of life. “I said of laughter, “It is foolishness;” and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” (2:2). Then Solomon asserted the nihilistic statement in Ecclesiastes 2:17: “So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
Woody Allen the comedian said, “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.”
Eccl 12 Conclusion,
Telephone call to Madrid and Old Testament prophecies Jesus fulfilled
SONG: Yours will be
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The sermon WHO IS JESUS? was preached by Adrian Rogers (pictured below) and my good friend Larry Speaks (pictured above) gave out hundreds of CD copies of it before he died on April 7, 2017 at the age of 69.
Dr Keith Krell and his family pictured below:
Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway pictured below:
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The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon’, oil on canvas painting by Edward Poynter, 1890
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On the left are David and Kelly Rogers and their sons Jonathan and Stephen Rogers. During the sermon illustration in WHO IS JESUS? Adrian Rogers told of calling little Jonathan when his family was missionaries in Madrid, Spain.
The band Big Daddy Weave pictured below:
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Your friend Richard Dawkins with comedian Ricky Gervais
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May 28, 2017
Dr. Edward O. Wilson, Museum of Comparative Zoology Faculty Emeritus
Pellegrino University Professor, Emeritus c/o Museum of Comparative Zoology
Harvard University
26 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Dear Dr. Wilson,
I have had some time to reflect on Larry Speaks’ funeral service and I wanted to share a few thoughts with you.
When I think of the 34 years I knew Larry it reminds me of all the laughs we had together. Larry’s funeral was a happy occasion as we laughed at the many stories about Larry’s life.
There was the occasion that Larry gave a neighbor of his a chance to work at Larry’s SOUTHERN FRUIT AND GROCERY STORE because his neighbor had nothing to do and that would keep him busy. We will call him Barry. Barry was a little strange but tried to be very helpful. There was the time Barry was trying to kill a fly with a fly swatter and accidentally busted the electric OPEN sign near the front window. Also Barry would ignore Larry’s instructions not to talk politics with the customers and get into arguments with the customers. Eventually Larry had to tell Barry that his help was no longer needed after a while. Larry said probably the first hint he got that Barry couldn’t handle the job was when Barry filled up his car tank with gas and he shook his car because Barry said that allowed more gas to get into the tank!!!
As you know I am writing you a series of letters on Solomon’s efforts to find a meaning and purpose to life. In the Book of Ecclesiastes what are all of the 6 “L” words that Solomon looked into? He looked into learning (1:16-18), laughter,ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20).
Probing the area of LAUGHTER was one of Solomon’s first places to start. In Ecclesiastes 2:2 he starts this quest but he concludes it is not productive to be laughing the whole time and not considering the serious issues of life. “I said of laughter, “It is foolishness;” and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” (2:2). Then Solomon asserted the nihilistic statement in Ecclesiastes 2:17: “So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
Keith Krell in his article, “3. Trivial Pursuits (Ecclesiastes 1:12-2:26),“ notes:
What would it take to make you happy? What if you had the wealth of Bill Gates or Donald Trump? Would this make you happy? What if you had the success of Oprah or Martha Stewart? Do you think you could be happy? What if you had the brains of Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking? Do you think you could be happy? Let me guess. Your answer is, “I don’t know, but I’d sure like to give it a try.”
A few people have been able to possess wealth, success, and intelligence just as I described. Solomon, the third king of Israel, was one of them. In some ways he had everything. He had a thousand wives and concubines, enormous wealth, international respect, and unparalleled wisdom. What he didn’t always have, however, was a reason for living. He didn’t always have happiness. He fits the pattern of the highly gifted, extremely ambitious person who climbs the ladder of success—only to contemplate jumping off once he’s reached the top.39
In the first eleven verses of Ecclesiastes chapter one, Solomon examined three broad categories in his search for the key to life: human history, physical nature, and human nature. Now in 1:12-2:26, he narrows his search to his own personal experience.40 In a sense he takes us on his own spiritual sojourn as he searches for satisfaction in life. In the memoirs that follow Solomon informs us that he sought satisfaction in four broad categories, but wound up empty-handed.
- Humor (2:2). Solomon writes, “I said to myself, ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure. So enjoy yourself.’ And behold, it too was futility. I said of laughter, ‘It is madness,’ and of pleasure, ‘What does it accomplish?’”57 Solomon mocks “laughter” as “madness.” I’m not surprised he labeled it “madness.” Do you really think the leading comedians of our day are sincerely satisfied with life? Has humor given them an inside track on human happiness? Hardly.58It is easy to seek to lose ourselves in comedy and entertainment whether it is in a theater, in front of our TV, or on-line. Although it can seem like a great escape, it leaves us empty in the end.
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Francis Schaeffer quoted Woody Allen in his book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? (co-authored by Dr. C. Everett Koop):
…One of the most striking developments in the last half-century is the growth of a profound pessimism among both the well-educated and less-educated people. The thinkers in our society have been admitting for a long time that they have no final answers at all.
Take Woody Allen, for example. Most people know his as a comedian, but he has thought through where mankind stands after the “religious answers” have been abandoned. In an article in Esquire (May 1977), he says that man is left with:
… alienation, loneliness [and] emptiness verging on madness…. The fundamental thing behind all motivation and all activity is the constant struggle against annihilation and against death. It’s absolutely stupefying in its terror, and it renders anyone’s accomplishments meaningless.
Allen sums up his view in his film Annie Hall with these words: “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.”
Many would like to dismiss this sort of statement as coming from one who is merely a pessimist by temperament, one who sees life without the benefit of a sense of humor. Woody Allen does not allow us that luxury. He speaks as a human being who has simply looked life in the face and has the courage to say what he sees. If there is no personal God, nothing beyond what our eyes can see and our hands can touch, then Woody Allen is right: life is both meaningless and terrifying.
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Solomon’s experiment was a search for meaning to life “under the sun.” Then in last few words in the Book of Ecclesiastes he looks above the sun and brings God back into the picture: “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: Fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.”
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In your book you noted:
The ENLIGHTENMENT quest was driven by the belief that entirely on their own, human beings can know all that needs to be known, and in knowing understand and in understanding gain the power to choose more wisely than ever before. By the early 1800s, however, the dream faltered… (THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, p. 38.
Francis Schaeffer in his film series HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? (Episode 7) seems to agree with this assessment of yours:
The history of the nonchristian Philosophers up until the 18th century went like this:
Here is a circle which stands for what the unified and true knowledge of the universe is. The next man would say “No,” and cross out the circle. He then would say “Here is the circle.” Then the next man would say “No,”and cross out that circle. Then he would make his circle and the next man would cross it out and make his circle. This continued through the centuries. They never found the circle, but they optimistically thought someone would beginning with man himself and on the basis of man’s reasoning alone.
Then the endless rows of circles through the and the crossing out were broken and a drastic shift came because the humanist ideal had failed. Humanist man gave up his optimism for pessimism. He gave up the hope of an unified answer and this makes modern man who he is….Humanist man beginning only from himself has concluded that he is only a machine. Humanist man has no place for a personal God, but there is also no place for man’s significance as man and no place for love, no place for freedom.
Man is only a machine, but the men who hold this position could not and can not live like machines. If they could then modern man would not have his tensions either in his intellectual position or in his life, but he can’t. So they must leap away from reason to try to find something that gives meaning to their lives, to life itself, even though to do so they deny their reason.
Once this is done any type of thing could be put there. Because in the area of nonreason, reason gives no basis for a choice. This is the hallmark of modern man. How did it happen? It happened because proud humanist man, though he was finite, insisted in beginning only from himself and only from what he could learn and not from other knowledge, he did not succeed. Perhaps the best known of existentialist philosophers was Jean Paul Sartre. He used to spend much of his time here in Paris at the Les Deux Magots.
Sartre’s position is in the area of reason everything is absurd, but one can authenticate himself, that is give validity to his existence by an act of the will. WithSartre’s position one could equally help an old woman across the street or run her down.
Reason was not involved, and there was nothing to show the direction this authentication by an act of the will should take. But Sartre himself could live consistently with his own position. At a certain point he signed the Algerian Manifestowhich declared that the Algerian war was a dirty war. This action meant that man could use his reason to decide that some things were right and some things were wrong and so he destroyed his own system.
Karl Jaspers, German existentialist, tended to have the greatest impact on the thought and life form which followed existential thought. According to him we may have some huge experience which gives us the hope that perhaps there is a meaning to life even though our reason tells us that life is absurd. He calls this a final experience. Martin Heidegger, was another existential philosopher who said the answer was in the area of nonreason. The German philosopher said there is something he called“Angst,” a general feeling of anxiety one feels in the universe, this feeling, this mood of anxiety revealed existence and this imposes on us a call for decision out of this mood comes meaning to life and to choice even against one’s reason, meaning which rests on nothing more than this vague feeling of anxiety so nebulous it doesn’t have a specific object. As Martin Heidegger grew older this view became too weak for him so he changed his position.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
Existentialism as a form of philosophy has all but disappeared but more and more people are thinking this way even if they don’t know the name Existentialism. To them reason leads to pessimism so they try to find an answer in something totally separated from reason.
Aldous Huxley the English philosopher and writer proposed drugs as a solution. We should, he said, give healthy people drugs and they can then find truth inside their own heads. All that was left for Aldous Huxley and those who followed him was truth inside a person’s own head. With Huxley’s idea, what began with the existential philosophers – man’s individual subjectivity attempting to give order as well as meaning, in contrast to order being shaped by what is objective or external to oneself – came to its logical conclusion. Truth is in one’s own head. The ideal of objective truth was gone.
Aldous Huxley featured on cover of Beatles’ album SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
The drug culture and the mentality that went with it had it’s own vehicle that crossed the frontiers of the world which were otherwise almost impassible by other means of communication. This record, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings. Later came psychedelic rock an attempt to find this experience without drugs. The younger people and the older ones tried drug taking but then turned to the eastern religions. Both drugs and the eastern religions seek truth inside one’s own head, a negation of reason. The central reason of the popularity of eastern religions in the west is a hope for a non-rational meaning to life and values. The reason the young people turn to eastern religions is simply the fact as we have said and that is that man having moved into the area of non-reason could put anything up there and the heart of the eastern religions is a denial of reason just exactly as the idealistic drug taking was. So the turning to the eastern religions today fits exactly into the modern existential methodology, the existential thinking of modern man, of trying to find some optimistic hope in the area of nonreason when he has given up hope on a humanistic basis of finding any kind of unifying answer to life, any meaning to life in the answer of reason.
Beatles in India
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The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. Just two days ago I attended a U2 concert in Dallas and I heard them sing the song I STILL HAVEN’T FOUND WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR. That song was perplexing to me because in the song they claim to be believers in Christ, but they are still looking for satisfaction and meaning to their lives outside of Christ. This morning in his sermon, Brandon Barnard, one of our teaching pastors at FELLOWSHIP BIBLE CHURCH noted concerning Hebrews 12:1-3:
We have to look to Jesus , the Founder and Perfecter of our faith. Jesus is the one who completes us. The problem is that many of us are looking to other things to give us joy, peace, hope, meaning and purpose in life. We are looking to relationships, leisure, hobbies and all these other places to fulfill us, but we should look to Jesus.
Thanks for your time.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221
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WANT SHOW EVIDENCE?
The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt)
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FEATURED ARTIST IS ERNST
MAX ERNST (1891-1976)
Halfway between Surrealism and Dadaism appears Max Ernst, important in both movements. Ernst was a brave artistic explorer thanks in part to the support of his wife and patron, Peggy Guggenheim.
Edward O Wilson has passed away 💔|| his last moment before death so touc…
Remembering the life of renowned biologist and Alabama native E.O. Wilson
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The Daily Hatch 
