Why does life have to have a meaning? Why can't we be simple unreasoning animals driven by instinct to feed, fight and fuck?
Out of necessity to avoid predators, our ancestors learned to use rocks to bash in the skull of a predator. Then one day a clever primate realised that getting close enough to use a rock was still dangerous and hit upon the idea of using a big stick so he could bash in skulls from a greater distance. Then one especially clever primate came up with the equation that changed everything "Stick + Rock = AWESOME!"
After a while, these stone axe makers came across other primates who hadn't discovered the equation of awesome. To these primates they said "you're still using rocks and sticks seperately? Thats SO Cretaceous era! Let us show you how to put rocks and sticks together". In the spirit of helping their fellow primate, they taught them how to make the first stone axes. Well actually more than likely they used their advanced weapons to kill the dominant males and absorb the weaker tribe but even in that they helped keep the majority of them safe from predators.
The primates were safer and lived long enough to come up with incredible new advances like a stick combined with a rock combined with some sort of vine to stop the rock falling off the end of the stick. As these primates bred and evolved towards humanity, they kept figuring out how best to protect themselves against predators and then abused those discoveries to kill each other over resources and mates.
Eventually they were powerful and safe enough to stay in one place and not be nomadic, they saw the way plants grew and eventually figured out that they came from seeds and what the seeds needed to grow which was the beginnings of agriculture. Eventually someone got sick of carrying buckets of water up from the river every day and set to work inventing the pipe and pump system and the foundation of the eventual glory that is the toilet was born. Also it helped their crops grow so eventually they were able to feed more than just themselves. Once one person was able to feed himself and another, they were able to start doing more than just farming and could explore the land.
The explorers eventually discover another tribe doing something similar but instead of potatoes, this tribe was growing sweet delicious carrots. Our heroes decide that they want carrots too but if they went to fight the other tribe, there wouldn't be enough people to tend to the potatoes. They realised that if the other tribe don't have potatoes, maybe they could do a swap, some potatoes for some carrots and bam, trade and the merchant was born.
After a few years of peaceful contact with this other tribe, the primates realise that its not so bad working together instead of killing each other and understand that they get more done when they're not in fear for their lives so they start to teach their people not to kill each other. New technology completed: Code Of Laws and the foundations of modern society are born.
Now all that is coming from a person overflowing with cynicism but I think that's far more majestic and noble than anything I ever read in the bible. Our ancestors rose from simple beasts, conqering predators, technical challenges and their very instincts to become an evolved and at least occasionally intellectual people. They've largely agreed on a basic set of rules to stop us becoming the very thing we came from, unreasoning animals that feed, fight and fuck.
I've always suspected that the reason people believe in the religio-centric creation myth is because they have a deeply rooted need to feel special. Fair enough, I've got no problem with that but isn't it better to take pride in the fact that you come from a long line of brave and intelligent simians who overcame all that rather than thinking you're the result of some ill-defined entity playing with his biological lego set?
DarrkPhoenix: Speaking as a scientist, this is on the right track, but doesn't fully give scientific theories their due. A scientific theory is a hypothesis that has survived numerous challenges to its predictive value, providing not only an explanation that fits the available evidence, but which has also managed to make accurate predictions regarding phenomenon the theory applies to. This doesn't mean it's fully accurate, it just means it's a highly accurate model (as an instructor of mine was fond of saying, "All models are wrong... but some are useful"). Later hypotheses (which become theories) may prove more accurate and thus supplant the original theory (as Relativity proved more accurate than Newtonian mechanics), although even in such cases the original theory still usually remains a useful predictive tool as long as the constraints within which it is accurate are kept in mind.
It seems to me that the major difference between science and theology is that science actually wants to be proven wrong because that leads to a deeper understanding of things, would you concur with that
hypothesis?