Yuval Noah Harari recently went viral for announcing, with the solemnity of a priest pronouncing last rites, that human life has "absolutely no meaning." From the "purely scientific viewpoint," he assures us, humans are the products of blind evolutionary processes, the universe doesn't care about us, and any meaning we experience is therefore a "delusion."
This claim is now so familiar it barely registers as controversial. It functions less as a philosophical thesis than as a kind of cultural background radiation: the assumption that science is the final court of appeal on all questions whatsoever, including those that science is structurally incapable of answering. Meaning doesn't show up on a spectrometer. Purpose can't be weighed on a scale. Therefore, says the new metaphysics, they are not real.
This is not science. It is scientism — the philosophical doctrine that only scientific statements count as knowledge — and it collapses under its own weight almost instantly.
The Category Error at the Heart of the Claim
Let's begin with the obvious but curiously neglected point: science does not traffic in meaning at all. It deals in description, prediction, and explanation of physical processes. It tells us how neurons fire, how stars form, how genomes mutate. It does not tell us whether Beethoven is better than elevator music, whether loyalty is preferable to betrayal, or whether loving your child is a worthwhile way to spend a life. These are not scientific failures. They are category boundaries.
To say "science finds no meaning in life" is like saying "microscopes find no irony in Shakespeare." True — and irrelevant.
Harari's move depends on quietly redefining "real" to mean "physically measurable," and then announcing triumphantly that everything else is imaginary. But that definition is not itself a scientific discovery. It is a metaphysical stipulation — one that science cannot justify using its own methods. No experiment could ever establish that only experimentally detectable things exist. The doctrine refutes itself before it gets out of bed.
The Strange Vanishing Act of Consciousness
Even more strangely, Harari's argument requires him to treat human subjectivity — the one thing we know more directly than anything else — as somehow ontologically suspect. Quarks and black holes are real; love, grief, hope, terror, awe, moral obligation, beauty, loyalty, obligation, and regret are "delusions."
This is upside-down epistemology.
The external world is known through experience; experience is not known through the external world. Consciousness is not a theoretical posit inferred from equations. It is the datum upon which all data depend. If anything is real, experience is. To say that meaning is an illusion because it occurs in consciousness is like saying pain is unreal because it occurs in nerves.
No one, including Harari, actually lives as though this is true. If his house were on fire, he would not consult evolutionary theory to determine whether his terror was illusory before running for the exit. If someone insulted his family, he would not shrug serenely and say, "Blind evolutionary processes again." He would feel anger — meaning-laden, normatively charged, action-guiding anger — and he would treat it as real.
Scientism survives only by pretending that human life can be lived as if human life were irrelevant.
"The Universe Doesn't Care" — And Why That's a Non-Sequitur
Harari leans heavily on the now ritualistic incantation: the universe doesn't care about us. True enough — assuming "the universe" here means the totality of physical matter and energy. But why on earth should cosmic indifference entail existential insignificance?
The fact that Saturn does not weep when your daughter is born does not mean her birth is meaningless. The fact that black holes will not mourn your death does not mean your life is worthless. Meaning is not something bestowed by nebulae. It is something that exists within forms of life — embedded in practices, relationships, commitments, narratives, projects, loves, sacrifices, loyalties, and aspirations.
Demanding that meaning be ratified by galaxies is like demanding that justice be approved by volcanoes.
Evolution Explains Origins, Not Significance
Harari also appeals to evolution: humans are the result of blind processes without purpose, therefore human purposes are illusions. This is another non sequitur — the genetic fallacy in textbook form. Explaining how something arose does not explain away what it is.
My capacity to reason evolved; that does not mean my reasoning is invalid. My visual system evolved; that does not mean chairs are hallucinations. My moral intuitions evolved; that does not mean murder is a social construct like fashion trends. My ability to love evolved; that does not make love a chemical prank played by neurotransmitters.
Evolution explains why we have minds, not why minds can't know anything. Yet scientistic rhetoric routinely deploys evolutionary origins as a solvent to dissolve whatever human phenomena it dislikes — consciousness, morality, meaning — while oddly leaving untouched its own claim to rational authority.
The Performative Contradiction
There is also something faintly comic about writing bestselling books, delivering TED talks, shaping public discourse, and then announcing that meaning is a delusion. If Harari truly believed this, he would have no reason to persuade anyone of anything. Persuasion presupposes truth, relevance, importance, reasons, stakes — in short, meaning.
The act of arguing that meaning is illusory presupposes meaning so deeply that the argument collapses into performance art. "Nothing matters," shouted earnestly, to millions, in hopes of changing minds, improving understanding, and influencing the future.
One almost admires the audacity.
Meaning is Not a Hypothesis — It is a Condition of Life
Meaning is not a ghostly add-on to an otherwise complete physical description of the universe. It is the internal grammar of agency itself. To act at all is to act for reasons. To deliberate is to weigh goods. To love is to value. To regret is to judge that something mattered. To hope is to orient oneself toward futures worth having. To raise a child is not merely to rearrange molecules in a bipedal organism, but to stand inside a web of obligations, aspirations, fears, commitments, joys, sacrifices, and irreducible significance.
These are not decorative illusions pasted onto mechanistic reality. They are the lived structure of human existence. A universe containing conscious agents is not the same universe as one containing only rocks, even if the laws of physics are identical. Meaning is not located in quarks, but neither are laws, probabilities, explanations, or truth-values — yet no one calls those "delusions."
Meaning is not missing from science because it is unreal. It is missing because science is the wrong tool.
The Hidden Theology of Scientism
Ironically, scientism smuggles in a theology while claiming to abolish one. It imagines an Archimedean standpoint — a view from nowhere — from which the universe can be described as "really" real, with human experience reduced to a side-effect of chemistry. But no such standpoint exists. Every description is from somewhere. Every explanation presupposes a subject who understands it. Every theory lives inside a cognitive life-world thick with norms, meanings, purposes, values, and commitments.
Scientism pretends to speak from outside the human condition while remaining entirely trapped inside it — like a fish delivering lectures on the unreality of water.
What Science Actually Does — And Does Beautifully
None of this diminishes science. On the contrary, it rescues science from metaphysical overreach. Science is one of humanity's greatest achievements: a disciplined method for discovering how the physical world works. It gives us electricity, MRI scanners, spaceflight, antibiotics, semiconductors, and the capacity to peer billions of years into the cosmic past. It tells us how stars form and how DNA replicates. It explains why eclipses occur and how tectonic plates move.
But it does not tell us whether curing disease is better than causing it, whether truth is preferable to deception, whether justice is superior to tyranny, whether love is better than cruelty, or whether raising one's daughter is a worthwhile way to live. Those are not empirical questions. They are existential, ethical, aesthetic, and normative ones — and pretending otherwise does not make them disappear. It just makes us stupider about them.
The Real Delusion
The real delusion is not believing that human life has meaning. The real delusion is believing that meaning needs permission from physics.
Meaning is not a cosmic annotation scribbled in the margins of spacetime. It is the organising principle of conscious life itself. Remove it, and you don't get a colder but still coherent picture of humanity — you get nothing intelligible at all. No reasons, no values, no truth, no knowledge, no inquiry, no argument, no science.
Which makes Harari's thesis curiously self-consuming: if meaning is an illusion, then so is the meaning of his claim that meaning is an illusion — and we are free to discard it without loss.
Raising Children, Writing Books, Living Lives
The man who believes that raising his daughter gives his life meaning is not deluded. He is sane. He is responding appropriately to the kind of creature he is — a rational, social, loving, temporally extended agent embedded in networks of dependence, obligation, affection, hope, fear, and aspiration.
The truly delusional position is the one that insists none of this is real because it cannot be graphed.
Meaning is not disproved by science. It is presupposed by it. Science itself is a meaning-saturated human practice, pursued for reasons, guided by norms, justified by values, and embedded in aims that cannot be derived from equations. The laboratory does not float above human life; it sits inside it.
The universe may not care about us — but we care about each other, and God cares for us all. And that, inconveniently for the cosmic nihilists, is where meaning lives.