It sounds as if philosophy drove me to nonbelief. That’s your decision.” That’s something that has stayed with me. So at the age of twenty, when my faith started to fade, no one said, “You’re condemned to eternal damnation if you disbelieve.” They just said, “A lot of people do feel that way, and some come back. Quakers are very good at leading you through things but in the end, it’s your decision. They don’t need to be very good at talking about what God is (it’s an apophatic theology – which means you define God by what he is not). I went to a Quaker boarding school as well, and this was tremendously influential on me – although I do joke that having had one headmaster in this life, I’m damned if I want another in the next! The Quaker attitude was always interested in mysticism. It’s not that you make it up yourself but you do have to think it through yourself. We were very firmly Christian, but Quakers don’t have ministers or steeplehouses. You have to start at the beginning, in my childhood as a Quaker, which I talk about in the book. You give three ways to find this subjective meaning: (1) Family (2) Morality and (3) Promoting the life of the mind. You ultimately say you cannot find an objective meaning to life, but you say there is a subjective meaning, which is grounded in our nature as evolved beings. That leads naturally into my next question. With the sort of ego I have, I replied, “You know, that suits me just fine! As I get to this stage of life, I’m getting sick of talking about other people!” There’s a little more to it than that, but that’s basically why it’s a meaning rather than the meaning. Where do you come out on it?” With a meaning, you’re not pretending to speak for everyone, you’re just speaking for yourself. Peter continued, “You worked on Darwin and religion and science for over sixty years. It was my editor at Oxford University Press, Peter Ohlin, who pushed that one: he said, “Mike, you’re not writing a scholarly monograph.” For a scholarly monograph the first two chapters would be devoted to what other people have said on the topic, a little bit like what you’d do in a PhD dissertation. Why is it called A Meaning to Life rather than The Meaning of Life ? I notice that you chose the indefinite A for your title rather than The. My first question is about the title of your new book.
His latest book is A Meaning to Life (OUP). He has written extensively on the relationship between science and religion. SUBSCRIBE NOW Interview Michael Ruse Michael Ruse is a well known philosopher of biology.