A reading of modern scientific and philosophical thought can be unnverving. Human beings, goes this materialistic scientific view, are the product of causes that are accidental and purposeless. All individual achievements are destined to extinction in the vast entropy of a universe relentlessly bound for ruin.
We are nothing but gigantic lumbering robots built by our genes as survival machines, asserts Richard Dawkins, a leading proponent of this modernist stance.
And I'm not exaggerating the bleakness. Reading Dawkins or geneticist Steve Jones (no relation) or philosopher Bertrand Russell is a depressing journey that reduces Man's greatest imaginings to the garbage heap of cold, unforgiving material forces that care not a whit for such romantic notions as hopes and ideals.
It's all so very modern. No good and evil, no confusing purpose, just relentless survival over incomprehensible time periods.
Maybe there's something missing in it.
Losing our Religion, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
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