These are his beliefs and not rational propositions.
Flawed logic number one.
If one wants to earn money because of poverty, then the logical conclusion would be that he will or should stop earning when he has earned or earns enough to take care of his needs. But this is not true, quite the contrary.
Similarly, there has to be something giving hope to a person, so they name it purpose or soul and run towards something unreal.
Flawed logic number two.
If this is true, then those who do not believe in the Soul which is the majority, must be feeling hopeless or purposeless!
People are born due to the need of parents, and the cycle just continues whether you are evolving or not.
Flawed logic number three.
Parents don’t philosophise about continuing the cycle, etc., before having a child. They want a child because driven by maternal instinct and the joy of having a child.
As long as you live and help people, you have the satisfaction of living and just die like how the dinosaurs perished.
Flawed logic number four.
Most people do not turn to help others. They are rather selfish and seeking help to satisfy their desires. Nor did Dinosaurs help or perished just like that. They had become a menace to the earth and Nature eliminated them through the Asteroid. At least we should have the facts right.
He just believes everything is out of either random chaos or nothing.
So now you can ask him these two questions.
1) What is randomness? How do random incidents lead to the evolution of more and more complex forms that grow more and more conscious in intent and capacities?
2) What ‘need’ drives the virus to replicate?
3) Why and wherefrom ‘needs’ spring from? Need implies a secret truth within trying to express itself in the form of need.
4) How does order emerge out of chaos? Chance? But that again implies a power within Nature that organises random events and seeming Chance to push creation towards higher and higher forms embodying a greater and greater consciousness.
I am not saying you should ask him these questions, as he seems to be very superficial in his inquiry. In fact, there is no search or seeking but just the usual arrogant belief that whatever thoughts he has are right because he thinks so. These are opinions and he is entitled to them. One begins to know when one seeks with humility and keeps going deeper and deeper in his inquiry until one finds the complete truth. What he is doing instead is using terms as euphemisms for covering ignorance.
I tried explaining that since one doesn’t know something exists, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and gave examples of realized masters, but he isn’t satisfied. I don’t want to prove, but the question was genuine and wasn’t put for the sake of an argument.
It doesn’t seem to be the spirit of inquiry that would express itself as open-ended questions rather than fixed answers. Maybe he has picked up these ideas from somewhere and accepted them. But if one is satisfied with such superficial answers and believes them to be true, then it is difficult for new knowledge to come in.
Of course, as I said, he has the right to his opinions and I would neither judge him nor give my views to him unless he seeks. I am only pointing at the illogical and superficial logic, if logic at all, behind this belief. To say that stars and atoms are driven by a necessity to move and organise into constellations and molecules is to stretch the idea of need too far. What one sees in creation is a vast cosmic Intelligence and a Conscious Force adapting means towards an apparently intuitive prefigured end. Since we don’t understand the logic, purpose and the process of this Creatrix Intelligence, we use terms like randomness, chance, necessity to cover up our ignorance. But the problem is that it leads the inquiry to a dead-end with more questions unanswered and the riddle unsolved. It only pushes the question into an absurd loop. But we need to ask further as to what determines necessity, what organises Chance into meaningful creations, what builds order out of chaos and the question of questions, what is existence and consciousness. To put it bluntly, ‘why there is something instead of nothing in the universe?
Affectionately,
Alok Da
