Read the Article Here
This position has obvious attractions for religiously-minded people. It's easy for atheists to become impatient with this approach, and to claim that God doesn't exist and that life is devoid of purpose. However, this would invite the retort that God does exist, and result in a well-worn sequence of fruitless assertions and counter-assertions concerning God's existence. So, let's start from a different position—a position that theists can wholeheartedly accept. Let's suppose, for the sake of the argument, that God does exist, and that he imbued his creations with purposes.
Now, if this is the case, does it make sense to claim that the purpose of life is whatever God had in mind when he created it?
No, it doesn't. Even if God exists, it can't be the case that life has a purpose. Here's why.
A god who performs acts of creation is an agent, and to be an agent one must, minimally, be alive. So, if God exists, he must be a living god (unsurprisingly, he is described as such in the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). But if God is a living god, then we are confronted with the same kind of problem that we encountered when asking whether life has a biological purpose. God can't have created life, because God must already be alive in order to create anything at all. As it's conceptually impossible that God created life, it's impossible that he created life with a purpose in mind
It can't be that life has a biological purpose, and it can't be that it has an instrumental purpose. Because these are the only two options, it can't be that life has a purpose.
1 comment:
The sole purpose of human life is to procreate. But that was only needed back in the day when there were few humans. Now that we have over populated and ruined the planet, humans have no purpose other than to continue to make a mess of things.
Post a Comment