A naturalistic spirituality fable is built around a single question: What does life want? In the most literal terms, to which science is necessarily limited, only humans, or at the very least, living things with brains, can “want” things. But freed from literalistic confines we can permit such anthropomorphization.
We answer the question “What does life want?” by observing how life has behaved and from that inducing what life wants – this teleological view of events also places us outside of a strictly scientific framework.
Teleology occurs when we look at an outcome and describe the preceding events in the context of how they inevitably led to that outcome, as if the outcome had been the goal all along. Teleology involves understanding phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than in terms of the cause by which they arise. Although there are some in the scientific community who use literary tools like anthropomorphization and teleology to communicate scientific ideas, particularly in the field of biology, generally such use is rejected as it can lead to erroneous explanations. A simple example would be assuming that the reason the sun shines is so that plants will grow. While plants do derive nutrition from the sun, that process does not explain the nuclear fusion that causes the sun to shine.
For our naturalistic spirituality fable however anthropomorphization and teleology are useful literary devices.
So back to our question — what does life want? Based on the way it behaves, it seems fairly obvious that what life wants most is permanence.
Humankind spent most of its existence trying to dominate and conquer the natural world but in the end our journey brings us back to nature as its best hope for achieving the permanence it seeks. Rather than thinking of our role as the conservators of life and intelligence as a subjectively determined endeavor, we could instead regard it an opportunity to heroically fulfill life’s paramount agenda.