“What is the chief end of man?” Shorter Westminster Catechism
“For brevity, we shall again use the convention of thinking of the individual as though it had a conscious purpose. As before, we shall hold in the back of our mind that this is just a figure of speech. A body is really a machine blindly programmed by its selfish genes.” (Richard Dawkins)
Once meaning is gone, it goes without saying that there can be no purpose. Purpose is meaning in motion. In a way, it is meaning fleshed out in thought, belief, action and existence. Purpose can be understood as the reason, or end, “for which something exists or for which it has been done or made.”[i] But, even as some attempt to live out meaninglessness, they are anxiously drawn by a deep conviction to find their particular purpose in life or mourn its obscurity in existential boredom and depression. Humans find it impossible to live out the lie that we are just random, temporary matter flickering to oblivion on a tiny speck in the universe. We instinctively need and search for purpose. We are, in fact, born with a spiritual (psychologists might use a word like “psychic”- doctors might say “mental” or “biochemical”- philosophers might say “metaphysical”) hunger for purpose that is both restless and relentless. And even though an objective divorce with meaning necessarily orphans purpose, those arguing against objective and supernatural meaning continue to speak as if there is a purpose for it all. This is how we live regardless of whether or not we want to acknowledge the coherently created reality that allows us the foundation to disbelieve. Dr. Paul Wong, a leading psychological researcher, puts it succinctly: “The human brain cannot sustain purposeless living. It was not designed for that. Its systems are designed for purposive action.”[ii] This is how we were designed to live: for purposes and with purpose. It is downright unhealthy to attempt otherwise!
Neurologist and psychologist Victor Frankl lost his family, including his pregnant wife, and almost died himself in Nazi death camps but he saw the loss of meaning and purpose as the real danger in the camps: “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”[iii] Frankl goes on, in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, to reference a survey by Johns Hopkins University:
“Another statistical survey, of 7,948 students at forty-eight colleges, was conducted by social scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Their preliminary report is part of a two-year study sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. Asked what they considered ‘very important’ to them now, 16 percent of the students checked ‘making a lot of money’; 78 percent said their first goal was ‘finding a purpose and meaning to my life.'”[iv]
From Dr. Frankl’s experience and work to isolate the relationship between purpose and health, doctors Crumbaugh and Maholick designed the PIL (Purpose In Life Test) to scan for noogenic neurosis warning signs in patients.[v] The word “noogenic” is a code word for “spiritual” and this semantic camouflage has been forced on these doctors by a scientific community that automatically dismisses, without the dignity of rational thought, anything rising above their naturalistic world views. The successful correlation between the test results and neurosis can’t be denied, however, and the test is now widely accepted as a proven resource for health care professionals worldwide. Jung saw our need for meaning and purpose in life as truths so innate as to be “in the blood” and that abandoning them necessarily leads to “a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend.”[vi] Or, in the words of a 4th century theologian, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.”[vii]
As meaning is required for the idea of purpose to exist, so must a real, underlying purpose for the entire universe if any smaller purposes are to be meaningful. In other words, if everything means nothing then what I’m doing can’t mean something. Many people argue vehemently that this isn’t true- that smaller purpose can exist in a random and meaningless universe- but they are fighting an uphill battle. Their argument usually goes like this: “My smaller purposes have meaning because they mean something to me!” In this way purpose is turned inward and made entirely relative and dependent on the individual. It becomes as fragile and disconnected as a child’s soap bubble floating down to the grass only to pop and disappear, leaving no trace of its existence, once the thin, translucent membrane is pierced.
One spring when I was eight or nine years old, I was wandering around the apartments where we lived looking for trouble when I noticed a patch of clover. I decided to just look through them for some lucky ones and to my utter shock I found that each one I examined was lucky! The entire patch of clover had the magic number of leaves! I immediately began carefully picking each one and imagining ways to turn this unbelievable harvest into quarters for the Ms. Pacman machine when one of my friends came around the corner. I yelled to him, “Chad! Look at this! Every single one of these clovers has three leaves!” He replied dryly, “It’s four leaf clovers that are lucky. All clovers have three leaves.” I can still remember the hollow revelation that all the clovers I had collected were worthless. I dropped them immediately and didn’t have the heart to continue looking for lucky clovers. This is the situation that we find ourselves in when the larger framework of purpose is dissolved. All the “clovers” we’ve spent our life picking and carefully saving are worthless. All the “important” things in our lives are nothing more than the illusion of colorful spheres powered by our dead breath. Soap bubbles.
For the idea of any smaller purpose to be meaningful, then there must be a real, underlying, overarching and intermingled purpose for the entire universe. If, however, you don’t require any deeper purpose than the day to day routine of eating, sleeping and working, then this will not matter to you. But who are we kidding? We all yearn to be a part of something greater than ourselves; something of eternal significance. The idea of purposeless existence is like the pain of a broken heart and the emptiness of abandonment. It leaves us depressed and weak with suicidal sloth. Am I being too dramatic here? I don’t think so…
Without a super-intelligent creator, the random chaos of the universe defies any concept of purpose outside of immediate, utilitarian contexts. This means that without God, things (people become “things” just like everything else in this scenario) only become guided or useful in relation to other things. A spare tire only finds purpose when another goes flat and its only reason for existence is in anticipation of another tire bursting. Using this view, the intelligent atheists of our age have concluded that humanity’s purpose for existence is survival and reproduction. Or, as Dawkins views it, we are simply gene replicators in a haphazard, accidental soup of existence that just happened to perfectly land in a biological bowl surrounded by empty space and “the true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less.”[viii] Because we are just organic accidents driven to reproduce, our purpose is no greater than that of a virus. In fact, Agent Smith’s opinion about humanity in the movie The Matrix could be a reasonable assessment: “I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.” Some who do not believe in a Creator who has invested supernatural value in humanity actually hold this view. It does add to our purpose however, as an intelligent virus we exist to survive, reproduce and destroy. While this view is fairly depressing, it would help to explain our self-destructive tendencies without invoking an intellectual dirty word like “sin”.
If it is true that our purpose as a whole is reduced to a biological functions, then our individual purposes cannot rise above that terrible truth. To say something like “I feel my purpose in this world is to climb mountains” is merely a delusion. Anything that doesn’t directly or indirectly support survival (which includes reproduction as survival of the species) is the fictional construction of a mind that is out of touch with reality. In other words, it is a mental illness. And the construction of this insane-individual-purpose dies with the person and is inconsequential as far as anyone else is concerned if it doesn’t directly affect their own self-defined purposes. Yes, interpreting every individual purpose solely within the realm of survival and reproduction can be done but we automatically bristle at the thought. It simply doesn’t ring true to us that art, love and laughter- first kisses and illogical wishes- can be explained away as necessary biological functions or side-effects of survival mechanisms. Can I accept that my melancholy memories at the sound of an old, familiar song are nothing more than the effect ocean currents have on tuna? Pause for a moment and think of a song you hardly ever hear anymore. Why does more than just the melody appear in your heart and mind? And you haven’t even heard it with your ears.
Because the existentialist philosophers could clearly see the insanity of purpose delusions without God, they were gripped with the despair of irrelevance. Carl Marx tried to fill this void with society but that falls apart as we have seen. Nietzche, again, was honest in his philosophical appraisal with the purpose of humanity reduced to the ability to cause change (and it did not matter what kind of change since there is no such thing as good or bad; better or worse).
The internal, hollow ache of irrelevance is real no matter how much anyone wants to deny its existence. It is the monster under our beds at night that whispers nothing: “All is nothing. You are nothing.” We fight against it to make ourselves relevant within the setting that seems most significant to us only to find, ultimately, that nothing in this world lasts and all our purposes are in vain. This tension is eloquently worded in Solomon’s book of Ecclesiastes. It’s a short book and well worth reading. Solomon was ahead of Sartre and Camus. “For the wise and the foolish both die. The wise will not be remembered any longer than the fool. In the days to come, both will be forgotten. So I came to hate life because everything done here under the sun is so troubling. Everything is meaningless—like chasing the wind.” (Ecclesiastes 2:16-17 NLT)
[i] Microsoft, ed., Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 1176.
[ii] Paul T. P. Wong, ed., The Human Quest for Meaning: Theories, Research, and Applications (Personality and Clinical Psychology), 2 ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 10.
[iii] Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Salt Lake City, UT: Beacon Press, 2006), 96.
[iv] Ibid., 150.
[v] editors, Marilyn Frank-Stromborg, and Sharon J. Olsen, Instruments for Clinical Health-Care Research, 3rd ed. (Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2004), 233.
[vi] C. G. Jung, Jung On Synchronicity and the Paranormal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 145.
[vii] Saint Augustine, The Confessions (New York: Vintage, 1998), 1.
[viii] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 45.