This is The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.
Like any good American boy, I freaking love science.
Once upon a time, I asked my high school biology teacher how plants make sunlight into energy. She told me about chlorophyl and photosynthesis, which I already knew about. I was asking how photosynthesis worked -- how did those little plant organelles actually convert photons and carbon dioxide into energy?
She didn’t know.
Thankfully, though, some people had done some science to figure it out, and eventually I was able to do my own research (aka Google) to find out.
But what even is science?
If your brain is anything like mine, it probably conjures images of microscopes, test tubes, people in white lab coats, and possibly rockets.
This is stupid.
Not because it’s false, but because it’s so absurdly, uselessly narrow. “Science” isn’t a person, or a group of people, or even a codified set of beliefs or axioms. It certainly isn’t a rocket.
Science is just a way of asking questions and getting answers about how the material world works.
That’s it.
And that’s what I love.
But no matter how rigorously we observe the scientific method, we can never use it to answer why.
No, I’m not talking about causal chains, I’m talking about meaning.
For a long time, the high priests of materialism (who claimed to be the keepers of sacred science) had most of us convinced that asking that kind of “why” was meaningless. That “meaning” itself was just a weird bug in human cognition.
Strange position to take, though, considering the only way to take it at all is to grapple with the question itself. Or, in other words, to argue against the necessity of meaning is a concession to its fundamental existence. The argument isn’t, indeed cannot be about whether or not there is meaning in our lives, but is instead entirely about the nature of the meaning that fills them.
The truth is we are gods in this universe of materials. We seek meaning out, we hold it close, we forge it, we share it, we change it, we discard and rediscover it.
Meaning is the substance of our lives. Without it, our peculiar, holy brand of life ends. Meaninglessness is, for us, pseudonymous with death.
Let us acknowledge and celebrate our age of astonishing material transformation and transcendence, and give the credit due to all those who dedicate their lives to the practice of science.
But let’s not be fooled by the people whose love for science has slipped into worship. There’s no such thing as a scientific approach to morality, or love.
For those things, for the meaningful substance of human life, I’m very sorry, but you’re going to need religion.
Good luck!
Science versus religion