What about a human being?  Without a functional utility, without some final cause (beyond the material, formal, and efficient causes), your life has less meaning.  You need an aim, with clearly defined goals, frequently updated long and short term plans, and a direction you are moving (hopefully, one that helps you become your ideal future self).

Is your life descriptive only?  ..just a declarative or exclamatory and patience-testing long self-sympathetic rant?  ..is it a self-righteous imperative, going around with an authoritative air, preaching a comprehensive, sufficient, and interrogative one-size-fits-all solution?

Obviously, the material, formal, and efficient causes for an object or event, provide little functional meaning which is relatively important.  To give your life the most meaning, it should have a functional purpose, aimed at precisely targeted goals, clearly defined objectives, in other words, a final cause and aim.  In fact, you might as well write up a detailed plan, if that helps, with long and short term progress markers, leading up to your vision of success in your mission, although, the best missions have no end (eg., success is in the how, the process = the means, not the end).

You do not need to have “utility” for your life to be meaningful. You do not need happiness for your life to be meaningful. You do not need approval, for your life to be meaningful. If your heart and mind are resolutely committed to the chosen purpose of your life, and you live every day faithful to that purpose, intentionally and with vigor, then your life will be meaningful to you.

If the purpose you choose is noble, virtuous, or altruistic, then you are likely to have deep inner happiness (self-approval, self-acceptance, self-contentment), as well as a good chance of living a life that is meaningful to others, and more likely to live a life that is of great utility.

The most important truth about a human life, is that it needs a purpose, in order to be meaningful.  The second most important truth is that one should intentionally, carefully, wisely CHOOSE how to live one’s life.  The process, methods, and course one takes, in the pursuit of your purpose and mission, will determine not only the degree of success in that purpose (and thusly, the value or meaning of one’s life), but this will also greatly impact the effects upon your own character development — in other words, WHO you are becoming.  By choosing each day, the principles and values by which you will hold yourself accountable to, with great self-discipline, vigor, determination, and fierce persistence, will define the details of your true nature, the essence and substance of your humanity, and whether you are progressing toward your own ideal future self.  These two truths are so inter-dependent upon each other, that they cannot be separated or fully discriminated, when deconstructing the historical record and impact of a human life.

That my friend, is the meaning of life.

Geneticists (in the last 2 years) have discovered several genes and cofactors which are believed to strongly correlate to intelligence.  Instantly, all the “educated racists” rejoiced, because they felt they would finally be vindicated.  They love to make claims about the validity (now in doubt), about intelligence measures between the races.  They are prone to make claims about how African American slaves were bread to be not-too-smart (politically and philosophically at least), strong, and obedient.

However, no person not mentally ill would believe that children (or persons with mental disability) are morally inferior simply because they are less intelligent.  Even if there are differences in certain types of intelligence between certain races, this is not an argument in favor of moral racism.  Although some atheistic (or even some ignorant religious racists) believe that intellectual differences between races, constitutes a significant case for whole race inferiority, most philosophers (and scientists for that matter) would not accept such a value statement.  Although in practice, natural (or material) value is placed on such shallow and temporary variations, the very definition of value throughout history has been a matter of determination of what is most important, and that has always been the moral good.

In fact, many atheists do believe in a system of ethics which is pro-social and altruistic in nature.  All such mature people would naturally (if they are enlightened even slightly) have a tendency to judge others based on the quality of their character and whatever virtues they live by, rather than on superficial (and largely accidental) characteristics such as skin tone, body shape, financial net worth, intelligence.  Thus, it is of no consequence if the new intelligence genes and cofactors are being found to exist unequally in persons of different ethnic (actually geographic) descent.  As we all know, smart people are just as likely to be morally repugnant and evil as stupid people.  Intelligence (just like body shape, hair color, etc.) has very little to do with morality, I personally think.

But what if scientists are able to locate genes and cofactors related to altruism?  I think the average scientist will agree that aggression can be expressed in positive or negative ways — such as high contact sports, or in certain professions meant to protect others, etc..  We have known for decades now (for instance, by extrapolating from large subject samples of identical twins raised apart) that many of the aspects of a human personality (the big 5) are genetically determined to some degree.  But again, those personality factors (like intelligence) have been assumed to have little to do with moral character, and this is especially true if you have reserved some hope or faith in a “free will”.  However, if there is a gene for altruism (or some related construct) would that somehow confer moral superiority?  Isn’t that racist?  For that matter, what need have we anymore for a belief in “free will” if our moral inclinations are largely determined by genetics?

A close friend of mine made me curious about this very question by claiming that the 7 day week was support for the evangelical protestant theological position, so I decided to look it up.  I thought surely God would have a better reason (like cosmological balance, or some other feature of nature).  Well, after a bit of searching, it seems that there is not very much agreement about the origin of the 7 day week.  The disagreements mostly revolve around which civilization had it first, but there is also pretty clear evidence it may have also just popped up simultaneously in several places.  Note here, that there have been and continue to be many different formulations of “the week”.   Not only is it possibly quite arbitrary indeed, but it seems that God gave this arbitrary number to numerous civilizations via their religion, rather than nature alone.

First, realize that we do NOT use the same 7 day week that the ancient Israelites did (they used some kind of ‘isolunar system’, whatever that is).  Second, most scholars agree that what they developed derived from earlier civilizations such as the Persians, Babylonians, or Sumerians (there is even one theory that it came from Egyptians).  The point is that culture almost never originates entirely from scratch. It comes from PEOPLE who came from other people, who came from people before them, moving around at times, migrating, or staying in one place for a while, but always coming from other people who also had culture.  If you find some very solid, very well preserved cultural ‘thing’ in a group of people, there’s a strong chance it derived in large part from various other peoples who came before them.  As you go further back to the most primitive original specimens of “modern human”, there’s a lot less of that culture, and fewer cultural “things”.  Not that morphology actually does recapitulate phylogeny (mostly disproven, but useful at times), however, a good analogy here is moving down mentally from adult to baby.  Encoding becomes less and less symbolic, vocabulary smaller and smaller, until eventually you wind up with literal encoding of basic drives.

With that said, there is almost no doubt that most calendars were based at least partly on changes in the seasons and stars, which was often the province of religion all the way up until science began to split from religion.  So, if we only consider the question “when did the Hebrew first develop their religion, and by consequence, their particular 7-day week”, then there is at least some kind of answer.  Orthodox Jews agree that the oldest portions of their scripture were not written before 1500 BC.  In fact, the oldest known small “fragment” we still have in physical existence of Hebrew scripture is dated to about 600 BC, and the oldest complete or nearly complete text (Dead Sea Scrolls) date to about 150 BC.  Now, consider for a moment that “Modern Humans” were first created about 200,000 years ago.  Certainly, that’s a whole lot of time to come up with theories as to why and how things work.  One of the biggest concerns of those early humans must have been the powerful natural elements, which seemed to have cycles.

It is logical to suspect people began to notice that there were big annual cycles, with cold and hot, but also smaller ones like night and day.  A next logical step would be to ask if there were cycles between these two?  Eventually people started to try and count things to know in advance when the cycle was going to repeat to thereby avoid death from not being prepared.  People create our own artificial categories in order to identify them and discriminate patterns, but nature seems to have some groupings too.  Together they combine into the ‘kinds’ we use in language which usually drift in meaning over time.  For most of history, religion was the ONLY means possible to understand the natural world, and many other things too, which involved super powerful forces over life and death.  Science was only a minor component integrated into most of the major religions as man started to organize into proto-states about 6,000 years ago.

As organization grew complex, consolidation or functional collaboration of religions became a key factor of success or failure to a civilization.  If there were incompatibilities, and no clear winner was possible, the civilization stagnated (or even deteriorated), and meaning sharing was difficult.. making progress such as in technology and social endeavors slower or even distracted towards the conflict.  The Christian religion is a direct descendant (and has surpassed in many regards) the older Hebrew religion, and some others which it absorbed to lesser degrees. This supreme dominance has had some influence on the adoption of the Christian calendar by the many other civilizations which previously used other ones (or which continue to use them, with less and less prevalence), although to what degree cannot be segregated from the impact of imperialism and other factors.  Today, I would argue that economics and technology drive this more than religion.