Science is less comforting. It doesn't pander to human self-importance by offering fanciful narratives of our special place in nature; instead, it describes a seemingly pointless reality, devoid of intrinsic meaning.

I was reminded of this during a trip to Florida, watching creatures called love bugs. These insects spend most of their remarkably short adult life glued to the business end of their mate, having sex with reckless abandon.

On their special days, these bugs dominate the area. They fly, while copulating, in ubiquitous black swarms, coating the beach, car windshields and pretty much everything else. The male, illustrating the Darwinian "point to life," dies when he's finished copulating, the insect equivalent of rolling over and going to sleep. The female, still lugging his securely attached corpse, finds a suitable location to lay eggs and then dies, too.

Love bugs demonstrate the only evidence-based "purpose" to life: biological reproduction. All living things, from bacteria to human beings, are replication machines. DNA is in the business of making copies and all life represents their latest unwitting device.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins dispassionately summarized this reality: "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference … DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music."

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg similarly noted, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

Scientific worldviews can be psychologically unsettling. For many, the suggestion that there is no objective purpose in life, immortal soul or ultimate point is simply too much realism to endure.

Even traditional concepts of free will are rapidly evaporating under the lens of scientific inquiry. As Albert Einstein noted, "Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people."

Not surprisingly, many have difficulty accepting reality as depicted by an evidence-based approach to understanding and will happily endure any absurd, religious scenario or irrational belief if it helps soothe their psyche.

Our world is an inherently frightening and distressing place. We all have knowledge of our own mortality and will experience traumatic life events, like the loss of a child or cherished family member.

In difficult times, belief in a "better place" or "grand plan" can be an extremely powerful and welcome emotional analgesic.

Abusing this coping mechanism, as with alcohol and narcotics, comes at a price. Irrational beliefs are accompanied by a multiplicity of potential negative effects, not the least of which is a decreased capacity to acknowledge important scientific realities.

The American author Upton Sinclair once observed, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The same holds true when a person's emotional tranquility depends on not understanding. It's no coincidence, for example, that those who deny evolution are predictably and exceedingly religious.

Any society that fosters a pervasive and willful ignorance of fundamental biological science, as ours does, jeopardizes its future standing in the world.

It's a pity that religious belief can't function solely as a private opiate, soothing the existential angst of those in need. I wish that were the case. Regrettably, however, as the history of religious intolerance, ignorance and bloodshed definitively demonstrates, addiction to this opiate has many horrendous, public consequences.

John Bice is an MSU staff member and a State News columnist. Reach him at bice@msu.edu.