Indeed, why was life created? It’s such a complex and mysterious thing, one of those few out there that go against the universal law of entropy, that it must’ve been created by some higher intelligence. And intelligence acts reasonably, so there must be some reason to the existence of life, and thus to our human lives as well. What could be that reason? Who was the creator?

We must be here for some great reason, some purpose that makes living our lives not only meaningful, but a noble and epic adventure as well. The mysterious creator who turned a pile of chemicals into a living organism, and then breathed sentience into the first humans, must have done so for a higher purpose, something along the lines of making the world bloom into its full beauty, or overflowing it with happiness and joy. Indeed we must be here to make the world a better place and make sure that every single one of us lives their life happily and without misery.

Oh give me a break. Show some humility, you pile of flesh and bone. Just because you have a nervous center complex to the point that it generates a self, you’re not more than a grain of sand in the desert. Life was created? For a reason? Stop pressing your limited ideas on the universe. This brain of ours might be complex, but it hates to consider the fact that we’re not special. News at seven: we’re not.

The determination to find reason in everything is rooted in the inability to even comprehend what infinity (or at least, something very close to it) is in the universe. No, life doesn’t have to be there for a reason, and especially not for some higher purpose set by a creator, who for some reason shares the human sense of morality and logic. There are stars and planets in the universe in numbers with so many zeroes that you’d mess up counting them. Those are the numbers that counterbalance the extremely low chances of certain chemical reactions, that are the first forerunners of life, occurring randomly.

Looking for some higher purpose or a creator to blame everything on is just running from the responsibility of making decisions. I don’t need a reason or a purpose in life, living every day the best I can is enough for me. Just considering that I set some goal for my life and then I reached it… Then what? But setting it myself is still the better (since I can just set a new one and admit that it wasn’t a meaning to life, just something I wanted to achieve), since what if it was imposed on me by some higher (divine?) being?

Having no imposed purpose doesn’t mean that everyone should just go on a rampage and turn Earth into a Cthulhian world of madness and revelry. It only takes accepting that the values we see around us aren’t absolute, but produced by individuals and societies over the millenia of humanity. They are neither absolute nor fixed, and that’s good, otherwise I might get burned for witchcraft (after all, I’m causing changes in a magical machinery on another continent by pressing keys on another piece of magical machinery made out of a magical material).

I have no issues with accepting that I’m just a willful bunch of chemical reactions, and even more chemical reactions generating a human self. It’s not like making it all the result of some creator building us from sand and breathing sense into us would be any different. I’ll just wait patiently until some divine decides to reach me (and I’m gonna have a hard time not to laugh at you if you say ancient creation myths by Middle-East herdsmen count as “reaching”), and in the meanwhile live my life by setting my own short-, mid- and long-term goals and striving to achieve them without sacrificing the small joys and happiness of everyday life.

Of course for some (most) people it’s easier not to think and just go with the flow, accepting what’s written in religious texts or internet blogs as absolute truths. This on the other hand results in quite amusing scenes, such as people in the 21th century ritually apologizing to some divine being for the grave sin that once upon a time a mythological pair of humans ate a magical fruit. I’d recommend you first go and apologize to your neighbor you offended the other day. Though that might not go as simply as eating a cracker and following it with a gulp of wine.

It all comes down to humility.