The Purpose of Life
Richard Dawkins and others maintain that the world did not come into existence according to a preconceived design in the mind of a creator, in the way, for example, a person builds a house or makes a table. In other words, there was no ultimate image of the object which the creator had in his mind and then set about putting the pieces together until the image he’d had in his mind came into existence.
According to Dawkins (listen to his lecture https://youtu.be/ONevAx1Nic?si=W5kiaGM8ByvRg_pf) the world
and everything in it came into existence because a single cell divided and built and joined on to other cells according to certain natural phenomena, until a living object evolved.
If he is right, and I believe he is, then the question “what is the purpose of life?” has no meaning. Life happened without purpose.
This doesn’t mean that we have no purpose. It means that we must find a purpose for our lives. One can compare this situation to a child finding his father’s hammer and not knowing what it’s used for; he begins waving it around, trying to find a use for it. He discovers that dropping it on his toe causes pain and makes him cry. His father tries taking it away from him, and in the struggle he knocks his father on the head and gets to keep the hammer, concluding that the hammer is used for hitting people on the head, attacking them, or defending himself and his possessions.
We evolved into much more complex instruments than the hammer, which means we have a complicated task of finding our purpose.
We mustn’t ask why God created us. God is never going to tell us because He didn’t create us according to a preconceived plan. He created a cell with physical characteristics that caused it to build other cells, and eventually we evolved.
We have the opportunity to be whatever our physical constitutions permit, but each of us must find a purpose, or else life will have no purpose.
Comments