ok, just to zoom out here and kind of re-orient on this whole religion is not science thing, I would like to propose a question -
- child is adopted from china, has needs met by other parents, goes back to china and meets other parents, feels x and y and z things about the experience. What does science say?
- child had evidence the parents abandoned her and didn't want her, turns out the father never wanted to let the girl go but the mother thought she would be better off in a family in another town rather than starving along with the rest of the family. Evidence would clearly say, had she never found out, that both parents wanted to ditch her so they could get a boy.
If girl is pissed off at birth parent, what does science have to say about it, that her genes got mad for being helped through to the sexual phase of the genetic purpose cycle by someone other than biological parent? If girl loves birth parents as well, what does science have to say about it? If adoptive parents love adopted girl, i suppose that is just them fulfilling the biological purpose of sustaining the human race as a whole, and nothing more?
There is so much going on in that one story, much less on this planet, that can't be covered by pure science. The story isn't even about only justice, or only love, or only national pride, or altruism, or sensitivity, or pragmatism, or imagination, or rationality, or the lack of truthfulness of some of the assumed information - it is all those elements feeding back into each other in such an incredibly complex way that the story can't even get labeled with "positive" or "negative". Anyone who thinks they can run a tester over that story and filter it through the science machinery we have available today is deeply out of touch with reality. You can talk all day long describing the events down to the last protein ingested in each meal of each person over 14 years, but you won't be talking about what the story means or what the feelings mean. You can talk all day about what feelings look like chemically, but you can't talk about what they mean until you apply meta-analysis. You MUST apply philosophy somewhere to make sense out of that story and our lives. That is what i mean by mechanistic "denigration", lack of meta-analysis and lack of meaning... nice, deep, powerful, untestable meaning.
You seem to be asking about the biological origins of human emotions, and the way emotions integrate with the intellect to produce subjective meaning (e.g.,
why is this happening to me?) as opposed to the objective meaning (e.g.,
why is this happening?). The facts of chemistry address the question of the matrix upon which all experience lies. And without a doubt it is chemical, since, by reducing it chemically, such as in a bullet wound or stroke, the ideation completely disappears. I greatly oversimplified the actual chemistry, but that serves as a general backdrop.
The search for meaning is evident in the Bible, if that's your anchor, but the findings are all wrong. People are not experiencing a quest for meaning because of a divine matrix, but because of the chemical one. To understand how behavior is imbued in the DNA, consider the imprinting of ducklings to the mother. By simply replicating her actions, they can learn to walk, swim, eat and avoid getting killed. On first blush you may say ducks have no emotion as we think of it. But if you've ever tangled with one, you would "sense" their anger upon being provoked.
Darwin wrote of the mother gorilla who will defend her child to the death, rescue it and gently cradle it from a position of safety. (They also are known to adopt, in parallel with your story.) He even said he would prefer to think he had evolved from the gentleness of the gorillas rather than the "savage" nature of the Fuegian people (Argentina).
The connection between a gentle nature and a savage one, to the chemical matrix, gets very complicated, because it involves understanding a lot of technical esoterica about the brain. In the evolution of our own species we see a gradual increase in the volume of the cranium over successive forms, and the most plausible explanation for this is that increased brain tissue confers higher levels of thinking, needed to survive. Invariably this also confers lower levels of thinking, since we are quite certain neither a duck nor a gorilla can attribute their existence to an ancient myth or superstition held by humans.
Empathy is a fundamental behavior among animals. It's necessary to maintain a cooperative existence so that the species may survive. It's therefore an evolved behavior, meaning it tends to be favorably selected over the alternatives.
Note, none of this remotely engages any supernatural cause, or any craven interpretation of the jumble of artifacts that led to the Bible and its later absurd fundamentalist incarnations.
