I'm a 'something more' person. I wouldn't want to say exactly what that more is, and give the impression of certainty and concreteness where there is not. But the pointlessness of this 'nothing but' crowd just amuses me now. They used to anger me. But I can see how they are so insistent on their impersonalism, inhumanism, and indifference as if they are trying to persuade themselves.
My view is that the split between God and Nature, ethics and science, value and fact breaks up what properly belongs together, replaces the old concern with redemption with explanation of the physical universe, supplants the whole meaning and point of existence with statements of meaninglessness within a purposeless materialism and valueless world - and then tells us to 'save the planet.' It's a dead-end. Joel Kovel doesn't blame science for this. The bulk of scientists over the centuries saw not contradiction with God, religion, or, at least ethics. Kovel associates the rise of this disenchanting science with the rise of capitalism and its monetarist devaluation of the real world.
It interests me. Only yesterday I was reading an article by Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist whose work I quite like. But his paper was insistent that biological emergence does not imply conscious moral agency. They are absolutely adamant on driving out purpose, consciousness, agency, etc, for the reason that they suspect - rightly - it will let God back in. So they carry on trying to make sense of the world without the very qualities that, well, make sense of the world. The result is repetition and reassertion of 'nothing buttery.' To which all that can be said that if life is indeed meaningless and pointless, then nothing is more meaningless and pointless than the philosophy and science that says it is so.
In the main, I move past this now. I remember being assailed in the most vehement terms by someone who insisted that free will is an illusion, the self also. I pointed out how many who insist on making those assertions make free use of free will to give us all the benefit of their very personal take on life and its meaning(lessness).
To people who say it is all determined and unfree and pointless I say stop breaking your dismal premises and proving the contrary and just go away to a silent and unfree pointlessness.
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