Science and Meaning

Science starts off with a dogma “that all that can exist is the material world of matter” running by cause and effects. Its philosophy is to look at the material world and describe what it “is”. But in explaining what “is” the scientist is not telling us “why” things work like they do and for what purpose or reason they exist. For the scientist is interested only with casual effects. While science claims to provide as complete and comprehensive a description as it can of the universe, no matter how successful and unified the theory it ends up with, it cannot explain why there should be a universe there to be explained. We collide with the ancient philosophical question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ and it seems clear on reflection that nothing within the observable universe could really answer this. If there is a solution to the riddle of life in space and time, it would have to lie outside space and time. This world implies a Transcendent Creator (God) who has created all reality according to a plan and purpose full of design.

But Science with it reductionism, believes that the world as a whole is meaningless, irrational, but is committed in discovering knowledge about its invisible structure. Science is committed to observation only of the material world with it imposed theories. By seeking to explain every event by its simplest material causes one has reduced the universe to a law like machine. If the universe exists by chance and is evolving by random chance then the whole machine of reality is determined by chance. Man in the end is reduced to irrational forces. Mind is reduced to chemical reaction and the neutralizing solvent of a wholly materialistic physics. Along with mind, of course, the scientific mind also dissolved free will, moral values, motivations, ideologies, politics, the soul, and meaningful ends, as each was in turn reduced to indifferent mechanistic causes.
The great truth about this theory is that the more humankind gained the ability to predict and control nature, to understand its causes and to separate from its necessities, the more it was submerged into nature and became a determinant product of its meaningless mechanistic forces.

So how are we to find meaning in a world that is indifferent, a purposeless universe of material causes that operate according to the machine like laws of nature, and that is alien to human values and aspirations? How do we make meaningful choices when choice is reduced to biological chance acts. For in this world there is no objective standard to follow or even judge our choices by.
Science can describe what it “sees”, but it cant tell us why and for what aim or purpose the act is for as reality as a whole has no meaning. One example could be, we see suffering, it just “is”. Its not a problem, its not wrong or right, the world hasn’t fallen from a universal standard (God’s law). It just is and the question of “should” we help people who suffer is a meaningless question for science? It can only describe material causes not reasons why. The universe has no intrinsic meaning, direction, end or purpose.

Bertrand Russell; That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the out come of accidental collocations of atoms that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave. That all the labors of the ages, all the devotion all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must be inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. Only within the scaffolding of these truth, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Friedrich Nietzsche; reason is a tool for desire, a tool that can only clarify the stark choices facing all humans. Reason cannot be objective and that in the end all morality and truth are arbitrary. Since every argument must begin with premises that cannot be supported. The original foundation of every argument is merely suspended in air. First principles are simply and only arbitrary choices, if they are indeed the principles upon which all other principles stand. In this regard, first principles cannot be reasonable or rational, if they are genuine first principles. For there would be no principles prior to first principles by which to judge whether the first principles satisfied them as reasonable…It is the intuition that man creates the world, rather than discovers a world in which meaning is fixed. Humans do not find truth but make truth.

Sam Harris; We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. Parents lose their children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the last time. This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss…Only the atheist realizes…how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all…many human beings suffer needlessly while alive.”
Science does not solve the problem of the meaning of life…

Talking about what "is" based on what? and for what purpose or reason, of which there is none, does not help us find meaning to our lives.