One way of measuring something is to subtract it from its surrounding context, and see what's left. For example, if we have a kitchen scale and we want to measure out a kilogram of sugar (because we're making a kilogram cake) we can put some sugar in a bowl and put the bowl on the scale. But to know how much the sugars weighs, we have to zero out the scale with the bowl empty. Likewise, in search of the meaning of life, we can imagine the Universe without life. So consider the Grand Canyon, or the Himalayan Mountains, or the stars in the night sky, or the deep blue sea, but without any people there to appreciate them. They would be meaningless — like plays without audiences, or magazines without subscribers.

 

So we bring meaning to the Universe. With us here, it makes sense that there is a Universe, and it makes sense that it is so richly complex that we will never run out of things to learn about it. God is reality, while we are the realizers. Without us, God would exist, but nobody would know Him, and then all of this would have been for naught.

The meaning of life is to give life meaning.

— Viktor E. Frankl

To put it more precisely, qualia are the primary universal substances, which taken in their entirety constitute God, of which the material world is the conscious subset. So it isn't that there is the physical world, and then there is the mental world, where God is just lurking, waiting to be known — that would be a demotion for God. If God is all things, God is all qualia, while we are the sense organs of God. He is not a separate being, asking to be appeased — He is the entirety, of which we are a part, and we play our part in animating Him. He did not give us life — we give Him the ability to experience. God is natural law. But God doesn't know that God is natural law, because natural law doesn't have a way of knowing itself. (Does an isosceles triangle know that it's a triangle?) But natural law permits the evolution of conscious beings who can know natural law. So we are the aspect of God that knows.

 

From this we can derive a basic guidance system for life. Consciousness is the jewel of the Universe, which introduces sense to an otherwise arbitrary and meaningless collection of primitive interactions. Our purpose in life is to protect the jewel. All else can be derived from that. Protecting consciousness necessitates preserving life, and by extension, the quality of life that gives us the free time to appreciate the delicacies of existence. And we must protect the civilization that has accumulated all of this knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. It took homo sapiens (i.e., "wise humans") 200,000 years to get to the point that we realized we were capable of wisdom. Clearly, the intellectual wealth of any individual is mostly legacy inherited from previous generations, and we cannot allow this legacy to go to waste. So it is our duty to preserve and protect knowledge, and to pursue cultural wisdom.

 

Moving forward, the remainder of EBS uses a somewhat less abstract definition of God, namely that God is natural law, which can be personified as a teacher, and where the purpose of life is to seek the favor of said teacher by proving that we have learned our lessons. This is simpler, and as long as the question isn't metaphysical, the lossy reduction doesn't cause any problems. So in daily life, we think of God as a person who speaks to us in times of need, even if the derivation of that personification is considerably more complex, and with a difference in kind.