Jamie_L

According to many, out lives are meaningless and purposesless without a creator God to give us meaning and purpose.

Well, if God has no creator to give Him meaning and purpose, doesn't it follow that God's existence has no meaning and no purpose?

On the other hand, if a creator isn't manditory for a being's existence to have meaning, can't we provide our own meaning just as well as some other being can provide it to us?

Maybe not a thread to inspire deep discussion, but something that popped into my head.

Jamie

braces_for_impact

I think a typical apologetic response might go something like "Well god is perfect so he is lacking nothing, including purpose." In other words, god either fulfills his own purpose simply by being god, or doesn't require one at all.

This doesn't make much sense to me though, because a perfect being is just that, perfect. It has no needs or wants. People do things for both good and ill because we are not perfect, we lack equilibrium. We have wants, needs, etc. that must be fulfilled. A perfect being such as god has no wants and desires, and therefore would have no reason to create humanity in the first place.

Stephen T-B

You’re right: Creation argues the case that god is not perfect.
Actually he’s bored.
This infinitely vast, infinitely powerful Force of Thought deliberately reduced its omnimaxity so it could while away a few billion years, playing a little game whose outcome it didn’t know.
This is what it did: it set the scene for the Big Bang and the coming into existence of a universe in which would occur an intelligent being whose progress it could observe, either to eventual self destruction or successful seeding of star systems in its own and other galaxies.
In which case, Star Trek provides better guidance than the Bible - not that Treckies didn’t know that already.

Carol Massey

Ohhhh! Stephen, that sounds very much like Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End ! I wonder about that too, and it would be a shame though if we are becoming self aware, and still allow ignorance to run free and destroy what has taken a very long time to evolve. I also wonder if we're up to the task.

g-train

Your right, God doesn't bring about purpose, it only elevates the question one level higher.


Whats the meaning of life?

Don't know

Instead we have:

Why do we exist?

God made us

Why did God make us?

Don't know

Why does God exist?

Don't know

Who/What made God?

Don't know

What is the purpose of existence?

Don't know

xoc

"Man is doomed to be free"~ this rather paradoxical notion (that "determination"(doomed) for man is "freedom") from Sartre related to the problem that we must find purpose in our life for ourselves.

The truth is, this is not just true for atheists as every religious believer has still had to find some meaning for themselves, even if it is an "other" (God). We find purpose in everything, and "purpose" things continually, the logical continuation of this process is to try and find a purpose for life.

A person may find purpose in himself or some "other" Outside being or ideal. To find it in ourselves is the process of self-determination. In Christianity, God is the only one who is truly "self-determined"; we are "determined" (purposed) by him for certain ends. True freedom is not one we are "doomed" to as being "doomed" obviously implies something else other than ourselves that has "doomed" us. If we were truly free, we could chose to be "determined" by something else exactly instead of face a life of dilemna and uncertainty, but this is to sacrifice the meaning of life as we know it (defined by it's "freedom" instead of absolute determinism). And of course it's impossible.

The question is why there has to be a singular "purpose" to life. A hammer is a simple tool and has several basic intended purposes, although infinite in possibilites. What's wrong with having "purposes" to life instead? A result of misapplied parsimony IMO has given us this bloody "Purpose" of life junk. One "Purpose" of life only makes sense in a monistic World, but then purpose would be meaningless as "purpose" is only relevent of objects in relation to other objects. Existence then would be it's own purpose.

Stephen T-B

I am an atheist, and accept as a matter of course that merely being alive fulfils the "purpose" of my existence..

The fact that I am content with this proposition is part of my take on Reality which crucially and fundamentally distinguishes me from Believers.

Darth Dane

The fact that I am content with this proposition is part of my take on Reality which crucially and fundamentally distinguishes me from Believers.

Do you not believe this?

Are you not yourself a believer if you believe that there is not a God?





All believe






DD - Love & Laughter

Stephen T-B

This is one of those endless arguments:

Mr A: “I don’t believe in fairies.”

Mr B: “So you believe there are no such things as fairies?”

Mr A: “I can’t believe in something which isn’t there.”

Mr B: “But you only believe it isn’t there.”

Mr A: “I can believe something exists. If I don’t think it exists, that is not a belief. It is a conclusion.”

Mr B: “But your conclusion is the same thing as a belief.”

Mr A: “Not true. My conclusion is based on a lack of evidence. Belief only exists where there is a lack of evidence."

Mr B: “But evidence of the fairies is all around us, and the reason you refuse to see it is because you believe it doesn’t exist.”

Mr A; “No I don’t.”

Mr B: “Yes you do.

Mr A: “No I don’t.”
(and so on ad infinitum.)

Darth Dane

Mr A: “I can believe something exists. If I don’t think it exists, that is not a belief. It is a conclusion.”


Have you been everywhere in teh universe so you can say that fairies don't exist?

Can you objectively conclude that because you haven't seen fairies on earth that they don't exist?

As long as you can't see them they don't exist, but if you haven't seen everywhere how can you KNOW?


Belief it seems is a core item of humans.







DD - Love & Laughter