The Purposeless Driven Life
Since its publication in 2002, Rick Warren’s book The Purpose Driven Life has sold over 30 million copies. Thousands of churches around the world have declared themselves to be “Purpose Driven churches” and at least one country has been designated a “Purpose Driven nation”. Clearly people like having a sense of purpose and feeling like their lives have a cosmic significance. This is one of the reasons I suspect the following argument against purpose will get slightly less than 30 million views. Purposelessness is a really hard sell.
Here By Chance
Right now as you read this, in every corner of the internet, there are multitudes of skeptics and creationists engaged in arguments about evolution. Pretty much all of these conversations will go around in circles with plenty of insults until one party gets tired or eventually realises the futility of continuing the argument. Amongst the skeptics there are a valiant few rising above the usual “OMG you’re so dumb” line of attack and earnestly trying to explain, in the simplest terms they can muster, the overwhelming evidence for evolution. But for the most part, even they are failing to convince their creationist opponents.
I suspect there is a straightforward reason for that: it’s 2015 and if you still believe in creationism it is not because of logical arguments.
Support for creationism is still terrifyingly high in the US but elsewhere it seems to be on the wane. In most of Europe, declaring that you are creationist is almost a universal way of letting people know that you’re a religious fanatic. There isn’t much poll data to go on for the UK, but I would suspect that theistic evolution rather than Biblical creationism is the dominant view amongst religious people there. Pope Francis’ comments last year were a reminder that the official stance of the Catholic Church for the last six decades has been theistic evolution.
Despite its popularity, theistic evolution is hard to define precisely — mostly due to it not being an actual scientific theory. For its adherents who haven’t given it much thought it is a belief that evolution is true… but that God was somehow involved. For the few who have pondered on it a little more, it is an acceptance of evolution as “change over time”, but a rejection of random mutation and natural selection as the driving forces behind that change [1].
Why are people so afraid of a bit of random mutation? Because if changes to organisms are the accumulation of random mutations, then there is no sense in which we can say that those changes were guided or conform to any master plan. Theistic evolution thus exists as a refuge for those who have read just enough to reluctantly accept that evolution is a reality, but aren’t yet ready to dispense with their belief in a higher purpose to life.
But what if the mutations aren’t actually random and instead God carefully causes each mutation according to his master plan? Then God doesn’t appear to have a clue about what he is doing. Mutations can be beneficial, neutral or harmful. Occasionally they are fatal. Should we give God the credit for just the good ones or all of them?
The tree of life certainly doesn’t look planned. For a start — if the end goal of God’s master plan was to create humans, why did he devote a whole 135 million years to dinosaurs? Did a conversation like this once happen in heaven:
Jesus: I’ve just formed the earth, let’s make some humans!
God: Not so quick son… first let’s cover the earth in giant reptiles, do nothing for ages, and then kill them all with a big space rock.
Jesus: ok…
And let’s talk about whales. If the plan was for whales to swim in the sea, why did their ancestors first evolve from sea-dwelling to land-dwelling, and then back to sea-dwelling? Why do some whales still have remnants of hind limbs from their land-dwelling days if the plan says they are sea-dwelling creatures?
Then there’s the violence. A significant portion of organisms survive by eating other organisms. They have all sorts of horrific ways to kill each other including good ole mauling, poisoning, constriction, electrocution and drowning. Other organisms survive by continually eating other organisms whilst keeping them alive. There is a particularly nasty parasite called Cymothoa exigua which eats a fish’s tongue and then lives in its mouth as a sort of prosthetic tongue.
What of sea otters who sometimes rape baby seals to death? What of male dolphins whose idea of romance is murdering a mother’s existing babies and then raping her?
If someone planned all of nature’s savagery, then they clearly have a taste for death and suffering. A famous naturalist once wrote:
“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” — Charles Darwin
The creationist can at least make the excuse that death supposedly only entered the world after humans sinned, and prior to that tigers ate grass and sharks ate seaweed. The theistic evolutionist sanely rejects grass eating tigers but then is left with the impossible task of reconciling whatever theological ideas they have about the loving character of God, with the indifferent cruelty of nature.
So in the end we are left with a choice between evolution guided by a sadistic divine power determined to make the whole thing look unguided, and… it simply being unguided. I find the latter much more plausible but it brings one to a conclusion which is at first hard to swallow: we are here by chance. It’s not just that there is no higher purpose for our careers and big life choices such as who to marry and how many children to have — there is no higher purpose to the fact that you and I have two arms and two legs. It just worked out that way.
Goodbye Purpose
Purposelessness is not an easy thing to accept if you’ve spent years believing that there is a divine plan for your life and that a man-god called Jesus actually cares what cereal you eat for breakfast. I was a devout Christian for much of my life and when I finally came to the conclusion that there was no cosmic significance to my existence… frankly I was depressed. But if I still felt that way, I wouldn’t be writing this. I have no desire to make people feel hopeless. I believe now that relinquishing our need for purpose sets us free in a way that no religion can.
Humans have always looked for explanations for the things that happen to them. It’s part of the reason we’ve been so successful as a species. The first farmers 10,000 years ago were people who looked for reasons as to why one patch of crops grew well and another didn’t. Figuring out reasons like the amount of sunshine, rainfall and manure allowed them to replicate good harvests and minimise bad ones. Unfortunately when we’ve failed to find real explanations, we’ve usually filled in the gaps with our imagination. When droughts or floods came, those same farmers invented reasons such as “the sky-god is angry” rather than accept the limits of their knowledge. Having a reason gave them a sense of control — if the sky-god was angry maybe they could appease him.
Ancient man had no way of figuring out the real answer to the ultimate question of human origins so he used his imagination. We shouldn’t judge them too harshly for that — it is impossible to imagine any tribe has ever existed whose creation story was “we have no idea”. Any story, no matter how far fetched, could at least give people an idea about where they belonged in the universe. It could give them a sense of purpose.
Those creation stories developed into complex mythologies and eventually into the religions we have today. On the whole it has worked out well for us. Shared mythologies have enabled humans to cooperate in vast numbers and build great civilisations. Our beliefs have given us comfort in the face of danger or uncertainty — allowing individuals to take risks that they would not have otherwise taken.
So if belief in purpose is helpful and truth has no intrinsic value in a purposeless universe, why can’t we all agree to stick to the delusion? Couldn’t we all just pretend like there is a profound divine plan for every human life and leave this world with satisfied smiles on our faces?
Because belief in a purpose can be dangerous when there isn’t actually a purpose.
Take for example the belief that the world and everything in it was created for humans. If we believe that, then naturally we think that the earth’s resources were put there for us — that’s their purpose. Why shouldn’t we keep pigs in gestation crates if their purpose is to become bacon and sausages for humans to eat? Why shouldn’t we shoot lions, giraffes and other wild animals for the thrill if they are only here to entertain us?
Besides making many of us act like assholes toward other species, such a deluded belief distracts us from the real fragility of our own existence on this planet. Why shouldn’t we extract every last drop of oil and lump of coal if the earth and everything in it was made for us? Because we might one day have finally released so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we fundamentally change the climate of the planet. We might start a nuclear war that renders much of the earth inhabitable to humans. Of course, in both scenarios, the earth itself will survive just fine and evolution will march on producing all sorts of new creatures, but we’ll be gone.
Belief in purpose leads us to “shoulds” that have no basis in science. Suppose we believe that God created men and women with distinct purposes. We will say men should be like this and women should be like this. When someone decides that they’d like to be different, we will feel like they are doing something wrong — that they are rebelling against their cosmic gender role. There are countless religious books written to tell men and women how to live in their gender role, and they inflict all sorts of damage on susceptible readers. Why? Because there are no cosmic gender roles. If a woman wants to have a career, have short hair, ask a guy out on a date, or play football — she isn’t doing anything wrong.
Suppose we believe that human sexuality has divine purpose — that men were made to desire women and vice-versa. We will say that a man should be with a woman and that anything else is wrong. We will have to reject the reality of people born gay because that would mean that God is responsible for something which is wrong. I suspect that this is why believers have devoted so much time and energy into trying to make gay people disappear — by killing them, trying to “cure” them or denying their existence by pretending that sexual attraction is a choice.
But perhaps the greatest benefit of purposelessness is that it spares us the philosophical torture of searching for meaning in tragedy. When disaster strikes we don’t have to speculate on how it fits into the divine plan. When someone dies before their time, God is not teaching us a moral lesson or calling someone to Heaven because he really needs the extra pair of hands. Shit just happens.
What Remains
A popular idea in the world’s major religions is that people are inherently bad, and left to their own devices they will do all sorts of evil to each other. It seems reasonable to wonder how people who derive their morality from their belief in purpose, will behave when they cease to believe in that purpose. If a man says “I love my neighbour because we’re all children of God”, then what should we expect from that man when he realises that we’re actually all just a product of survival of the fittest? It sounds like the sort of doomsday scenario that the Bible warns us about.
One only has to look around the world to see that this is an unfounded fear. The Western world is steadily becoming less religious whilst also becoming much less violent. Many countries like the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands now have non-religious majorities, and they are also some of the most peaceful countries on earth. The evidence would suggest that given a strong democratic nation state, most people are quite capable of getting along without an inflated sense of where they belong in the universe. From my own experience, I can assure the reader that when I gave up on religion — I felt absolutely no desire to go out to murder, rape and pillage. None.
Purposelessness frees us from the “shoulds” to let our morality evolve based on rationality. We can ask questions like “is anyone being harmed by this?” We can come up with better reasons to not do horrible things to each other than the fear of a fiery hell. We can trust consenting adults to make their own choices about sex and what they want to do with their own bodies.
The very idea of an evolving morality will sound frightening to those who kid themselves that they adhere to an absolute and unchanging morality. Most believers like to think that their preferred ancient religious text contains the one true universal morality. But although scriptures don’t change — interpretations do. Can anyone on the planet can claim to live exactly as the Bible commands? Most people pick and choose the parts that fit within their cultural context — and of course culture evolves. Even within the Bible morality is not constant. We can chart the Bible’s moral evolution from its beginnings with the Iron Age tribes of Israel to its end with Paul living in relatively civilised and progressive Rome. If you’re the kind of believer who hasn’t joined ISIS to stone adulterers, then your morality has already evolved beyond that of the earliest books in the Bible. If you’re the kind of believer who doesn’t insist on women covering their heads in church, then your morality has evolved past that of Paul.
All that to say that I’m fairly confident that a wider acceptance of our purposeless reality won’t lead to a collapse of civilisation. Of course it’s not an easy thing to accept if you’ve spent your life believing otherwise, but if our children can cope with discovering that there is no tooth-fairy, I think the rest of us can cope with losing our own fairytales. We can do this.
Purposelessness doesn’t imply meaningless and I’d like to wrap this up with a profound observation about the meaning of life… except in the purposeless universe, you find your own meaning to life. There are no spiritual gurus or ancient scriptures to do that for you.
Or I could just quote Carl Sagan:
“The hard truth seems to be this: We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We would prefer it to be otherwise, of course, but there is no compelling evidence for a cosmic Parent who will care for us and save us from ourselves. It is up to us.”
Notes
[1] Mutations are not random in the strict mathematical sense, but they are definitely not guided. See this article for an explanation.
[2] For more mind-bendingly amazing Bible paintings look here.
