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How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves.
As I have mentioned, there was not much time for consciously thinking about the meaning of life, but every day I was feeling the meaning of life.
There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a “tale told by an idiot,” a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive species that we call Homo sapiens—the “evolutionary goof.” Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.” In other words, a plan, a purpose to it all.
With language we can ask, as can no other living being, those questions about who we are and why we are here. And this highly developed intellect means, surely, that we have a responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behavior of our own human species—quite regardless of whether or not we believe in God.
Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the “global village” we would propagate prejudice and ignorance.
