THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

               Ronald J. Glossop
1st Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, 7 April 2002

  I.  Introduction
     A.  If you are expecting some kind of authoritative answer to this question of the purpose of life, you are going to be disappointed.  Philosophers and Unitarians don't operate in that way.
           1.  First of all, we believe that all persons must work out their own answers and not just accept what some others say tell them to believe--about the purpose of life or anything else.
                2.  Secondly, the best answer to this question may not be the same for everyone and at all times.  A good answer for one person at one time may not be a good answer for others or even for that person at other times in their life.
           3.  Thirdly, having an answer to a question is not as important as how one arrives at the answer.  We must examine various alternative answers and reasons for accepting or rejecting these various alternatives.  What one believes is less important than why it is believed.
B.  For many persons, this issue of the purpose of life is one of the most basic of all religious questions.  It is the kind of question people are likely to ask of themselves when confronting death.  Why are we here?  What should we be doing with our lives?  Is there some purpose given to us by God or nature, or do we choose what our purpose will be.
       C.  This topic, the purpose of life, can be approached in various ways.

II.  One possible way of looking at this issue, a very abstract metaphysical one, is to ask Why does life exist?  What is the reason that living things exist rather than just non-living things?  What purpose is being served by having life in the universe?  Similarly, and even more profoundly, one could ask, Why does anything exist at all?  Why is there something rather than nothing?  What is the goal or purpose for the cosmos?  Some would put it this way:  "What is the purpose of the creation?"
      A.  To ask these questions in this manner, however, especially when one uses that word "creation," reveals a presupposition that some conscious, intelligent being (or beings) created living things and even the whole cosmos in order to fulfill some goal or purpose.  These questions unconsciously presuppose that the whole cosmos is similar to a humanly created object, that some conscious being has created it as a means to fulfilling or achieving some end.
       B.  Another way of putting it is that these questions presuppose or assume the metaphysical view called supernaturalism, the view that there must be a special realm of existence above or beyond nature which in some sense accounts for or explains the existence of the natural realm.  Furthermore, it is generally supposed that this higher realm must in some sense be a "spiritual" or "mental" realm which is able to explain the "natural" or "physical" realm.  Also it is still popularly assumed that this supernatural realm is "up" above us, somehow out there above the Earth and even beyond space and time.  In many religious traditions, but especially in the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim view, Yahweh or God or Allah is a supernatural being and the Earth (and with the adoption of modern astronomy, the whole physical universe) is the creation of that divine being.
           1.  In philosophy and theology this unconscious presupposition provides the foundation for the cosmological argument for the existence of God.  The cosmos exists.  It seems possible that it might not exist.  There must be some reason to explain why the cosmos exists rather than there being nothing.  The usual reason given is that God wanted to create it.

                2.  But then one must still answer this question of why God wanted to create it.  What was God's purpose for doing that?

                3.  The traditional believer's standard answer is that God is love and that a being of love will want to have something other than itself towards which its love can be manifested.  That explains why God not only created the cosmos but also why God created living things in general and human beings in particular.  Human beings alone are capable of loving and understanding the meaning of being loved.  Note how this answer to the puzzle of existence claims to explain not only why there is something rather than nothing but also why there is life rather than no life as well as why are there are humans rather than no humans.

                        a.  One standard counter-argument to this answer is that it does not seem from observation that God greatly loves humans.  Is there really more happiness than misery among humans?  Why does God allow things like the suffering of innocent children or catastrophes such as the Holocaust?  If God loves humans so much, why are there so many horrible diseases and why are there so many natural disasters?  Why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?  In other words, we encounter that very common counter-argument to the theistic view, the Problem of Evil.
                        b.  Another counter-argument to the theistic view is that it seems strange that God should have created such a vast and long-lasting universe if the goal of the whole thing was just the very limited short-term existence of humans.  Why did the age of the dinosaurs last 160 million years while humans have been around for only a million or so years at the most?  Why did the universe exist at least 7 billion years after the Big Bang before our solar system took shape and another 2 billion years or so before there was any life in that solar system?  Why did it take God so long to get to that which was the real purpose of the whole enterprise?
                  c.  In fact, this whole anthropocentric approach seems extremely egotistical.  Why was the whole vast cosmos created?  In order to have wonderful beings like us.  Not only the other plants and animals on Earth exist only as a means of getting to us but even the other solar systems and nebulae!  The whole vast universe exists for the sake of humans like us, even though we have lived only briefly on one speck of dust in the huge universe.  Thank God for us humans!  Without us, what would the universe be?  It would lack any purpose.  The collective egotism is a little sickening, isn't it?

        C.  But nevertheless, let us return to the cosmological argument itself, that there must be some reason, namely a supernatural God, to explain why something exists rather than nothing.  Is this a good argument?
              1.  The 17th-century philosopher Spinoza noted that one could view the cosmos itself as the being whose existence cannot and does not need to be explained.
             2.  If you want to reserve the word "God" to describe the necessarily existent being whose existence does not need to be explained, why not just call the cosmos itself  "God"?  This is essentally what the 17th century philosopher Spinoza did.  In his view, God = the universe and the universe = God.  This philosophy is known as pantheism.  It allows one to continue to use the term "God" while affirming naturalism (that is, the view that the physical universe is all there is) rather than supernaturalism.
             3.  As already noted, the cosmological argument also assumes that the natural universe must be explained by reference to a supernatural being, that the observable physical reality must be explained by some non-perceivable mental reality.
                   a.  An alternative to the cosmological argument for the existence of God would be to believe that the physical cosmos just exists, with no reason or goal or purpose for its existence.  From a logical point of view this outlook is just as satisfactory as assuming that God simply exists, with no reason or goal or purpose being provided for why that should be so.
                      b.  With regard to the view that the existence of a  physical cosmos must be explained by reference to something mental or spiritual, 18th-century philosopher David Hume argued that on the basis of our human experience it would be more appropriate to explain mental or spiritual realities as being caused by something physical.  In our experience, have we ever encountered a mind which was not dependent on a physical brain?  Experience suggests that the mental depends on the physical, not the other way around.

III.  Another argument used to prove the existence of God related to the issue of purpose in the universe is the argument from design based on the watch-maker view of the universe.  Philosophers and theologicans call this the teleological argument (from the Greek word "telos" meaning goal or purpose) to prove the existence of God.

        A.  This teleological argument moves in the opposite direction from the cosmological argument.  It starts from the observed instances of apparent intelligent design in the universe and claims that these instances show that there must be an intelligent Designer or God at work in the universe.  Nowadays Intelligent Design is referred to as "I.D."
      B.  Just two weeks ago this philosophical/theological argument was even addressed by columnist George Will, whose title for that column was "The Universe:  Intelligent design or consequential accident?"  It was stimulated by NASA's Next Generation Space Telescope to be launched near the end of this decade and a book by Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, titled Our Cosmic Habitat.  Will notes that Rees maintains that our universe is "biophilic," that is, friendly to life.  At one time defenders of the teleological argument pointed to the wonderful adaptations of living organisms such as the eyes and the immune system.  It is, after all, quite amazing that something as complex as the human brain should develop from a single cell smaller than a pin-head.  But Darwin's theory of evolution took a lot of the steam out of these biological arguments just as the acceptance of Copernicus's sun-centered solar system had earlier undercut the notion that humans and the Earth on which we live are the center of the universe.  Nowadays the new theme among some scientists is that the basic make-up of the physical universe such as the nature of carbon atoms and the somewhat unanticipated features of water (like expanding when it goes from liquid to solid state while almost all substances contract during this change of state) is just what it had to be to result in a universe which sustains living organisms.  It is not just an accident that life exists.  Even at the time of the Big Bang there had to be a Designer who creates a universe in which life can exist.
    C.  To his credit Will also gives the other side of the picture.  As he puts it, "the end of our universe--long after our sun has died 5 billion years from now--is certain to be disagreeable."  He notes that another scientist, Steven Weinberg, in his recent book The First Three Minutes, concludes that "there is not much of comfort" in cosmology.  He notes that Earth is "a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe," which is headed for extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat," that is in a universe forever expanding or one that eventually collapses in a Big Crunch."  At the end of the column Will quotes Weinberg again: "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."  For many skeptical intellectuals today, if there is a purpose to life, that is it.

IV.  Getting away from the theological arguments to a more naturalistic view of the world based on what is actually observed, one can argue that the purpose of life is to preserve itself, to produce offspring, which can be seen as either preserving the species or even merely preserving the genes.  From this point of view, those who do not have children and grandchildren are cosmic failures, and the successful animals of all kinds are those who have many children and grandchildren.
       A.  In this view many of the other species are much more successful than humans.

V.  At this point, one might be ready to conclude that nature or the cosmos does not provide a purpose for our lives.  The cosmos just exists and we just exist in it, and there is no built-in purpose for the existence of the cosmos or for us humans either collectively or individually.
   A.  Does this mean that our lives have no purpose at all?  I think that it means rather that our lives have no purpose imposed on us by something external to ourselves, but that does not mean that we cannot commit our lives to some purpose beyond ourselves.
       B.  When an existentialist like Nietzsche says "God is dead," he is in essence making this point.  There is no purpose imposed on us by some authority outside of us.  The notion that there is a God whose self-appointed agents have the authority to tell us what to believe and what to do and what to be is no longer acceptable.

        C.  When an existentialist like Sartre says that we are condemned to be free, he is essentially making this same point.  People can no longer depend on priests or ministers or theologians or philosophers or psychiatrists to tell them what they ought to do, what some hypothetical God or the Church or the Bible or even a particular view of nature says they ought to believe or do or be.  All persons must decide for themselves what they are going to believe and do and be, and even where to turn for guidance.
   D.  So here we are, each one free to formulate his or her own purpose in life, free to decide what we should believe and what we will do and what we will be.  There is no need for uniformity.  In fact, we should expect diversity not only from person to person but also from one time of life to another.  If we are continually growing, it is to be expected that our goals, our view of our purpose, will change as we find ourselves in new situations or as we gain new knowledge and insights.

VI.  So what kind of purpose might we adopt for our lives?
     A.  Though our lives as a whole might have one over-all purpose, as already noted we might have different goals at different stages of our lives.  We might also have several different specific goals along with or instead of an over-all goal.
       B.  This matter of different goals at different stages of life is found in different religious and philosophical traditions, but it gets special attention in Hinduism.
        1.  In Hinduism's four stages, the first stage is being a student where the goal is to learn about life, to develop useful habits and skills and good character.  At this stage one must be prepared and preparing for what comes later.
                2.  The second stage is maturity which typically involves developing one's family, one's occupation or vocation, and one's contributions to the wider community.
                3.  The third stage is retirement from the energetic pursuits of adulthood and focus-ing on the development of one's understanding and appreciation of existence.
               4.  The fourth stage is total self-lessness and letting go of one's individuality and becoming totally free from all personal attachments.  As Huston Smith puts it in The Religions of Man (p. 65), "Far from wanting to 'be somebody,' the sannyasin's wish is the exact reverse:  to remain a complete nonentity on the surface that he may be joined to all in his depths."
B.  But Hinduism is but one possible view, and especially its fourth stage depends very much on accepting its basic outlook about the need to escape the wheel of rebirth.
      C.  With regard to our purpose in general throughout life as a whole, one could express it in very typical religious terms such as "to do the will of God" or in philosophical terms as "to keep growing in our understanding of what is true and to keep working for what we believe is good and to keep appreciating and advancing what we believe to be of value."  These general formulations of the purpose of life allow one to adopt different specific goals at different periods of life and in changing circumstances.

VII.  Often when people talk about the purpose of life, they are really concerned about the issue of finding "meaning" in life.
A.  It seems that one way we find meaning in life is by being part of something which we regard as good and something that we believe will continue to exist even when we personally are no longer around.  We want to belong, to be part of a team or community or institution which is working for what we regard as desirable goals.
B.  Consequently, people find meaning in life by identifying with a country (patriotism) or some religious community (the communion of saints) or some ethnic group (ethnic nationalism) or the whole human community (humatriotism) or a movement for some good cause (global civic organizations).
    C.  If you feel that your life lacks "meaning," that it has no purpose, I recommend that you find some institution or community or organization whose aims really inspire you, and then get involved.  Become a part, an active part, of that institution or community or organization that will allow you to expand your "self" in new directions.

        D.  I think that this church provides just such meaning for many of us--and when I say "this church" I mean not only this congregation but also the whole historical Unitarian-Universalist movement, the Unitarian-Universalist Association (UUA), the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF), the Partner Church Council (PCC) for Unitarian Churches in Transylvania, the  World Council for Religion and Peace (WCRP), and the world-wide International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (ICUU).  One of the ways we find meaning in our lives is by being part of this ongoing liberal religious community which has established a tradition of free thought, especially in the area of religion, and which we expect to continue after we as individuals are no longer around.