What is the purpose of life?

What a question! People have been asking this since the very beginning of history, and all sorts of answers have surfaced.

– To create a better society
– To pass down our genes.
– To be moral.
– To be happy.
– To have a happy family.
– To love others.
– To love yourself.
– To be yourself.
– To prepare yourself for the afterlife.

And on and on. Ramble time.

Recently I’ve been noticing something. All of these purposes are decided by the very people who are to live these purposes. So what? Well, is that okay? I think that perhaps the worst person to decide a purpose for one’s life would be the very person who would be living that purpose, because that very person would have the strongest bias in the matter.

Would you leave it to a student to calculate his grades to assemble a transcript? Would you leave it to a defendant to be the judge of his trial? Of course not. They would be extremely biased. In the same way, it would be ridiculous to allow ourselves to choose our own purposes.

“Wait a moment,” people might say, “those illustrations are very different. Students cannot assemble their own transcripts, and defendants cannot judge their own trials, because these are official matters, and they have official rules and regulations, and they have official consequences. It’s a right-and-wrong issue. However, the purpose of life is more up to the individual, and there really isn’t anything official about it. There is no purpose that is right, and there is no purpose that is wrong.”

Is that so? Who decides morality?

The “I will choose whatever purpose suits me best” attitude is set on a huge presupposition, and that presupposition is that we have the final say.

Where does that presupposition come from? I think that if you really break it down, it falls into one of two categories. Either 1) God does not exist, or 2) God does not care about my purpose.

That’s really what it comes down to. “I think the purpose of life is to create a better society” rests on either “God does not exist” or “God does not care about my purpose.” “I think the purpose of life is to love others” rests on either “God does not exist” or “God does not care about my purpose.” If God exists, and if God cares about our purpose, then what he says about our purpose goes, because he is God, and we are not. If God exists, and if God cares about our purpose, then we cannot choose our purpose. We cannot say “I think the purpose of life is this or that.” We can only say “God says that it is this. Therefore, it is as true as gravity.”

Perhaps someone would say, “What’s the deal with free will then? A clock has to fulfill its purpose of telling time because it doesn’t have free will, but we have free will. We’re different. Free will means that we can choose to have a different purpose.” I would say, no, we will always have one true and correct purpose of life. Free will does not mean that we can choose another purpose. It only means that we can choose to not comply with that purpose of life.

We can choose to disregard gravity, but we cannot choose to disregard the reality, or the consequences, of gravity. We can choose to disregard our purpose, but we cannot choose to disregard the consequences of our purpose.

Of course, all of this rests on presuppositions as well, that 1) God exists, and 2) God cares about my purpose. So it seems that everybody is in the same boat. And with this, I will leave a William James quote, from his essay The Will to Believe.

“We cannot escape the issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married someone else? Skepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk less of truth than chance of error—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. To preach skepticism to us as a duty until “sufficient evidence” for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true.”

– Larry